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

6. Race Suicide

6 Race Suicide In March 1905 the president of the United States attacked birth control. Theodore Roosevelt condemned the tendency toward smaller families as decadent, a sign of moral disease. Like others who worried about “race suicide,” he specifically attacked women, branding those who avoided having children as “criminal against the race . . . the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.”1 Although Roosevelt did not invent the term “race suicide,” it quickly became the popular label for his ideas. The weight and publicity naturally given to the views of the president, and a president so newsworthy, made birth control a public national controversy, and Roosevelt became one of the chief spokesmen for the race-suicide alarm. This sharpened and broadened attack on birth control, coming from such high places, necessitated stronger defenses of it than ever before. Placed on the defensive, feminists and voluntary motherhood advocates revealed their motivations and ideology more openly than they had before. Roosevelt’s bombast led many hitherto cautious suffragists to speak out publicly for birth control for the first time. At the same time the race-suicide theorists expressed more clearly what they thought birth control threatened. The race-suicide controversy, which lasted from about 1905 to 1910, was not only illuminating but influential for the future of birth control. While it forced conservative feminists to incorporate the demand for birth control into their programs, it simultaneously narrowed the appeal of birth control to ed06 .86-104/Gord 9/25/02, 10:44 AM 86 Race Suicide / 87 ucated and prosperous women. The outspoken feminist defense of birth control and the narrow class terms in which it was argued were connected and mutually reinforcing. To show this connection we must consider both the arguments for birth control and the evidence about its use. The race-suicide alarm did not emerge out of the imagination of Roosevelt or any other social conservative but from the meanings they ascribed to actual changes in the birth rate, family structure, and sexual practice. Contemporary perceptions of these changes were not always accurate, of course. But both sides of the dispute recognized that fundamental changes were affecting a significant minority of the U.S. population and that small families and birth control use were not a temporary aberration but a secular trend, possibly even a new norm. The Threat to the Race By the early twentieth century several different reactions to demographic changes and birth control use had been subsumed under the loaded term “race suicide.” One was an objection to the practice of birth control because it was sinful. Another was an objection to family limitation on the grounds that the nation needed a steadily growing population and large, stable families. A third was the fear that the northern European stock, which displayed the lowest birth rates, would be overwhelmed, numerically and hence politically, by immigrants , nonwhites, and the poor. Fourth, there was the view that birth control represented a rebellion of women against their primary social duty—motherhood . These four strands were never entirely distinct and tended to reinforce one another. Sin and small families weakened social cohesiveness and moral fiber, which encouraged and enabled women to stray from their proper sphere—home and children. Women’s wanderings weakened the family, which in turn led women to stray further, in a vicious cycle of social degeneration. The upper classes, who believed themselves destined for political and economic leadership, saw this degeneration as weakening their position vis-à-vis those who continued to reproduce in larger numbers. The situation was culturally and morally fatal because, proportionately, the most valuable sectors of the citizenry were shrinking and the least valuable were expanding. The fear of race suicide was at least four decades old by the time of Roosevelt’s imprecations. Anxiety about immigrants and the poor reproducing faster than the elite had been current since before the Civil War.2 Physicians in particular noticed these demographic patterns. Nathan Allen, a New England doctor, reported with concern that in 1860 the foreign-born population of Massachusetts produced more children than the native-born inhabitants and that in 1877 a full 77 percent of the births in all New England were, ominously, Catholic.3 Another physician wrote that the birth rate was declin06 .86-104/Gord 9/25/02, 10:44 AM 87 88 / the moral property of women ing in “our most intelligent communities.”4 Medical journals carried many...