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

4. Voluntary Motherhood

4 Voluntary Motherhood By the 1870s the women’s rights movement in the United States, although divided among different organizations, ideologies, and strategic choices, had developed a remarkably coherent credo on some major questions —marriage, suffrage, education, employment opportunity, for example. On no question did the feminists agree so clearly as on birth control. The slogan they used—“voluntary motherhood”—was an exact expression of their ideology, incorporating both a political critique of the status quo, as involuntary motherhood, and a solution. The feminists who advocated voluntary motherhood fell into three general groups: suffragists (divided among two national organizations and many local groups), moral reformers (in causes such as temperance, social purity, church auxiliaries, and women’s professional and service clubs), and members of small free-love groups. The political distance between some of these was so great—as between the socially conservative churchwomen and the usually atheistic and anarchistic free-lovers—that their relative unity as voluntary motherhood advocates was the more remarkable. Free-love groups in the 1870s were the closest successors to the perfectionist reform groups of the first half of the nineteenth century. The free-love movement was always closely related to free thought, or agnosticism, and was characterized by a passionate resentment of the Christian established churches , especially of their power to dictate laws and create restrictive social and cultural norms in a supposedly secular state. Advocates called themselves free04 .53-71/Gord 9/25/02, 10:43 AM 55 56 / the moral property of women lovers as a means of describing their opposition to legal and clerical marriage, which, they believed, stifled love. Free-love groups were small, sectarian, and usually male dominated, despite their ideological feminism. They never coalesced into a large or national organization. They were, in some ways, radical modernists but in other ways conservatives, the dying remnants of preindustrial utopian reform. Because their self-definition was built around their iconoclasm and isolation from the masses, they were able to offer intellectual leadership in formulating the shocking arguments that birth control in the nineteenth century required.1 The suffragists and moral reformers, by contrast, concerned with winning mass support, became increasingly committed to social respectability; as a result, they did not generally stray far beyond prevalent standards of propriety in discussing sexual matters publicly. Indeed, as the century progressed the social gap between respectable reformers and the free-lovers grew. Whereas in the 1860s and 1870s the great feminist theoreticians, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were intellectually close to the free-lovers, and at least one notorious feminist, Victoria Woodhull, was for several years a member of both the suffragist and the free-love camps, the leading suffragists of the 1890s and the early twentieth century increasingly narrowed their platform. But even the quest for legitimacy did not stifle these feminists completely, and many of them said in private writings—in letters and diaries—what they were unwilling to utter in public. Free-lovers and suffragists represented, on sexual issues such as birth control, the left and right wings of feminism. The similarities between free-lovers and suffragists on the question of voluntary motherhood should be understood, then, not as minimizing the political distance between them but as showing how their analyses of the social meaning of reproduction for women were converging. The sources of that convergence, the common ground of their feminism, were their contradictory attractions to modernism and tradition. Most were educated Yankees from professional, farm, or commercial families responding to severe threats to the stability, if not dominance , of their class positions. Both groups were alarmed at the consequences of rapid industrialization—the emergence of great capitalists and a clearly defined financial oligarchy, the increased immigration that provided cheap labor and further threatened the dignity and economic security of the white elite. They feared and resented the loss of their independence, and many would have undone the wage-labor system entirely had they been able. Both free-lovers and suffragists welcomed the decline in patriarchal power within families that followed industrialization, but they worried, too, about the possible disintegration of the family and the loosening of sexual morality. They saw reproduction in the context of these larger social changes and in the context of a movement for women’s emancipation; and they saw that movement as an answer to some of 04.53-71/Gord 9/25/02, 10:43 AM 56 Voluntary Motherhood / 57 these...