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2 / “Six Sons at Eton”: Birth Control and the Medical Model in Joyce and Woolf “Hold, flay, grill, fire that laney feeling for kosenkissing disgenically within the proscribed limits like Population Peg . . . It may all be topping fun but its tip and run and touch and flow for every whack when Marie stopes Phil fluther’s game to go.” —james joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 436.9–10, 444.7–8 These lines from Shaun/Juan’s sermon in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) remind readers that as birth control took shape in the public imagination of the twentieth century, the voices of Margaret Sanger (“Population Peg”) and Marie [S]topes rose above the clamor of neo-Malthusian, feminist, and eugenic discussion of contraception, and the two emerged as figures whose very names were metonyms for a new reproductive ethic. At the same time, Joyce reminds us that birth control politics as represented by Sanger and Stopes were characterized not only by calls for reproductive freedom but also by the discourse of limitation and correction . “Dysgenically,” “proscribed limits,” “it all may be topping fun but”: these phrases connote the responsibilities and cautions that the birth control movement imparted to potential parents. In supposedly decoupling sex from reproduction, birth control imparted not just increased reproductive choice but a new responsibility to reproduce “within the proscribed limits” of social, economic, and physical well-being, often as determined by medical and social authorities. Literary responses to the birth control movement as it transitioned from rebellious outlier to accepted social practice often picked up on its double-edged nature: contraception could be figured simultaneously as an agent of liberation and as a catalyst for increased policing of sexual behavior. The question that birth control movement literature began to ask more openly in the early 1920s was “Who should reproduce?” Charlotte Perkins Gilman anticipated this question in her consultations with doctors prior to her own “kosenkissing” marriage to Houghton Gilman, 48 / birth control and the medical model ultimately deciding her health and close biological relationship to Houghton disqualified the couple from reproduction. Marie Stopes tied perspectives like Gilman’s to birth control politics in a chapter in her 1920 book, Radiant Motherhood, called “Creation of a New and Irradiated Race,” in which she claimed, “The power of parenthood ought no longer to be exercised by all, however inferior, as an ‘individual right.’ It is profoundly a duty and a privilege.”1 Stopes’s phrase “no longer” suggests that her own work in the field of fertility control has altered (she would say, heightened) expectations for reproduction and parenthood in the twentieth century. Stopes suggests that hers and Sanger’s work informing the public of its ability to control reproduction necessarily conferred on her readers a responsibility to do so, for their own good and the good of the “race.” Joyce’s phrase “proscribed limits” also connotes the ambivalence some felt toward the birth control model of sexuality. While Virginia Woolf’s young friends, in the excerpt that opens this book, used Stopes’s advice to facilitate intercourse outside the limitations of marriage, other members of this generation looked upon contraception skeptically, as a harbinger not of freedom and rebellion, but of caution and a mechanical approach to romance. For example, writing to an ex-lover in 1921, author Dorothy Sayers stated, “I have become impatient of the beastly restrictions which ‘free love’ imposes. . . . But there again—precautionary measures cramp the style, Bah! If you had chosen I would have given you three sons by this time.”2 Sayers’s dismissal of birth control as “cramping the style” of her own sexual expression demonstrates that as institutional rather than revolutionary figures, Sanger and Stopes came to represent (at least to some) not just “control” over unplanned pregnancy, but “control” over the spontaneous and sometimes joyfully serendipitous aspects of sex and reproduction. Sanger and Stopes went from advocating to distributing contraception when they began establishing legal birth control clinics in the early 1920s.3 While early birth control activists like Mary Ware Dennett and Emma Goldman, as well as Margaret Sanger in her 1914 Family Limitation pamphlet, advocated for a network of women who shared contraceptive advice outside the purview of the conservative medical establishment, in the late 1910s Sanger began collaborating with medical professionals to create doctor-staffed clinics to serve as the primary means of distribution of contraceptives. She opened her first legal birth control clinic in New York in 1923, following a 1918 ruling...

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