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

Notes

Notes Preface 1. See the reviews of Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right by Edward Shorter (Journal of Social History 11:2 [Fall 1977]: 269–73; and the replies by Sarah Elbert and Sander Kelman, ibid. 12:2 [Fall 1978]), David Kennedy (Journal of American History 64 [Dec. 1977]: 823–24), and J. Stanley Lemons (American Historical Review 82 [Oct. 1977]: 1095). These were so extreme in their red-baiting and hostility to feminism that an article about them by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was published in Signs 4:4 (Summer 1979): 804–8. See also Harriet B. Presser, “Birth-Control and the Control of Motherhood,” Family Planning Perspectives 10:6 (Nov.–Dec. 1978): 374–76. 2. A more bizarre example of shifting political connections is the use of a bit of my work by the New Right. In their attack on reproductive rights, Right-to-Lifers have used Margaret Sanger and her socialist feminist commitments as a particular target (illustrating, of course, how quickly they slide from opposition to abortion into opposition to all forms of birth control). Discovering Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, they discovered also my criticism of Sanger’s use of eugenic arguments for birth control and opportunistically condemned abortion as racist, citing my book as their documentation. Introduction 1. “Feminism” originally referred to a specific tendency and period within the women ’s rights movement. I use it more generically, however, since there is no other generic , all-encompassing word to describe women’s struggles for gender and sexual justice. The definition of “feminist” in this book is: sharing in an impulse to increase the power, equality, and autonomy of women in their families, communities, and/or society. Chapter 1: The Prehistory of Birth Control 1. By contrast with the typical workplace-home of the seventeenth century, crowded , hectic, and noisy. 2. “Respectable” had originally meant not working with one’s hands, which required, among other things, being able to keep servants. Thus, originally working-class people were not “respectable,” by definition, in the European usage of the term. In the 17.NOTES.367-430/Gord 9/25/02, 10:46 AM 367 United States, and in Europe in the nineteenth century, there emerged a new concept of respectability that included those of the working class who had adopted modern industrial social and moral standards, such as refraining from drunkenness and requiring female virginity until marriage. 3. Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 79 (Winter 1974): 1467–90. For other evidence of women’s resistance to prudery, see chapter 5. 4. I am, of course, well aware of the Foucauldian argument that Victorian prudery was not so much a silencing of sexual discourse but an alternative discourse. Within this discourse, however, there were elements that were simply and directly repressive, as when law or custom required that certain topics, such as birth control, not be discussed , and I am using “repression” in this narrower sense. 5. Nicola Kay Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 6. In addition to these deliberate birth control methods, all societies have social regulations that affect the birth rate. Late marriages, of course, produce a lower birth rate because there are more years between generations. Prestigious groups that require celibacy—such as monastics—are common in many societies. Preindustrial societies frequently have taboos on sexual intercourse for long periods after childbirth and sometimes even during lactation. There is no proof, however, that such customs are intended to have a population control function; and indeed they are usually described as having other purposes by the people who practice them. For the sake of clarity, therefore, I have omitted them from consideration in this survey, and I consider only methods with conscious birth control purpose. 7. Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (1936; rpt., New York: Gamut Press, 1963); and Linton letter to Himes, quoted in ibid., 52. 8. Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on Population (London: J. M. Dent, 1960–61), 1:141–42; William Graham Sumner, Folkways (1906; rpt., New York: New American Library, 1940), 272; Himes, Medical History of Contraception, 79. 9. W. E. H. Lecky, A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869; rpt., New York: Appleton, 1877), 2:27. 10. Malthus, Essay on Population 1:chaps. 13–14; John J. Noonan Jr., Contraception : A History of Its Treatment by Catholic...