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Quaker abolitionist and women's suffrage champion Susan B. Anthony supported needy women and children so formidably that a male friend once told her, "With your great head and heart, you, of all women I have met, ought to have been a wife and mother."

PROLIFE FEMINISM: Yesterday and Today by Mary Krane Derr, Rachel MacNair, Linda Naranjo-Huebl, eds. Xlibris 476 pp.; $24.99

"I thank you, sir," she answered. "But sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so that their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them."

This anthology (updated from the 1995 edition) offers about 70 profiles of feminists and excerpts from their impassioned writings. They're strange bedfellows, indeed: vegans and meat-eaters, Christians and atheists, homosexuals and proponents of traditional family values. Among them are Eastern Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Green; 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai; the first maternity clothes maker, Lane Bryant (yes, the one of the plus-size chain); the president of the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, Cecilia Brown; and the leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard.

They all share a belief that is heresy to some: that one cannot be pro-woman without being pro-child. To that, at least, Christian pro-lifers can say amen.

Copyright © 2006 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Prolife Feminism is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

More information about the book, including an excerpt, is available from Xlibris.

After Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts was nominated for the position, his wife Jane Sullivan Roberts drew scrutiny because of her involvement with Feminists for Life. CT then asked, "Where Does Feminists for Life Fit in the Pro-life Community?"

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July 2006, Vol. 50, No. 7