The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America

5. Social Purity and Eugenics

5 Social Purity and Eugenics The social purity movement sought to abolish prostitution and other sexual philandering. That the movement also contributed to the acceptance of birth control in this country may, therefore, seem odd. Social purity really meant sexual purity (“social” was the standard Victorian euphemism for “sexual”) and that meant confining sex within marriage and moderating its indulgence even there. Contraception, by removing the “risk” of illegitimate pregnancies and even of venereal disease from nonmarital affairs, undermined some of the props of that sexual morality. Social purity advocates were unequivocally opposed to contraception. But so too, as we have seen, were most sex radicals—free-lovers, utopians, and feminists. Because few nineteenth-century reformers advocated or even accepted the separation of sexuality from reproduction, there was remarkable unity among sex radicals and sex conservatives on the issue of birth control. Indeed, the attempt to use categories such as “radical” and “conservative” with regard to sexual issues becomes questionable on close examination. Just as many interpreters of the sexual reform program of the nineteenth-century feminists focused on their “prudery,” applying twentieth-century attitudes to it and missing its political content, so the program of the social purity advocates has been shallowly interpreted. The birth control ideas of social purity advocates were remarkably feminist . Social purity was a direct continuation of one line of voluntary motherhood thought: the use of eugenic arguments to support women’s control over 05.72-85/Gord 9/25/02, 10:44 AM 72 Social Purity and Eugenics / 73 their reproductive capacities. The eugenic propaganda of the social purity movement is a neglected part of American intellectual history, inasmuch as two decades later eugenics became one of the most influential fads in American culture, both academic and popular. Social purity advocates began the attempt to use eugenic logic to increase women’s power and dignity; yet, ultimately , eugenic thought did more harm than good to feminism and voluntary motherhood. Social Purity The social purity agenda had intellectual roots in early temperance and moral reform, in abolitionism, in left-wing Protestantism, and in utopian radicalism . Like many of these earlier nineteenth-century causes, social purity had a double-edged political blade: liberal in its commitment to legal equality for all persons and to a single standard of morality, yet conservative in its desire to enforce rural, Calvinistic moral values on the whole society. Energized by the women entering organized reform activity and threatened by the specter of “regulated” prostitution, the movement first formed in opposition to the legalization of prostitution. That danger having been averted, in the 1880s social purity reformers began to campaign for lowering the age of consent, prosecuting customers of prostitutes as well as the prostitutes themselves, reforming prostitutes, providing police matrons, sexually segregating prisons, stopping abortion, censoring pornography, and spreading purity education.1 This list of issues suggests that the attraction of the social purity cause for women was not peripheral but fundamental. The closer we look, the harder it is to distinguish social purity groups from feminist ones. Feminists from very disparate groups were advocates of most major social purity issues—women committed to such varied causes as suffrage, free love, and temperance, for example.2 They had in common a current of fear and hostility toward sexuality. Their frequent attacks on “lust” and “sexual excess” have made them appear as sex haters to many twentieth-century readers, including historians. Here is Clara Cleghorne Hoffman of the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union (NWCTU) addressing the International Council of Women in 1888: In thousands of homes everything seems to be perfectly pure, perfectly moral . . . and yet . . . hundreds go forth from these homes to swell the ranks of recognized prostitution, while thousands more go forth into the ranks of legalized prostitution under the perfectly respectable mantle of marriage. The fires of passion and lust lurk in these homes like the covered fires of Lucknow, only needing the occasion, only needing the temptation, to burst forth into 05.72-85/Gord 9/25/02, 10:44 AM 73 74 / the moral property of women flame, carrying death and destruction to every pure, and true and lovely attribute of heart and soul.3 One historian has defined that view as “pansexual,” observing that sex drives seemed to sex haters to be omnipresent and ever present and that social progress depended upon sublimating these drives.4 That interpretation leaves many feminist social...