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

Preface

Preface In 1988 the French minister of health overruled a large pharmaceutical company and ordered the abortion drug RU-486 (mifepristone) placed on the market, declaring that it was “the moral property of women.” When I heard the phrase, I realized that it was an exact statement of the ethical premise of this book and a much better title for it than the one I used in 1976, which has become rather hackneyed. When I began this book in the early 1970s, I had the advantage of Norman E. Himes’s exhaustive medical history of contraception published in 1936 (extensively cited in the early part of this book). But the basic arguments of my book—that birth control history was a fundamental part of the history of industrial and postindustrial society and specifically of women’s emancipation and radical transformations of gender systems—came from the newly developing women’s history. That birth control is women’s “moral property” is not a given of God or nature but a creation of historical conflict, of politics, and specifically of feminism. This “property,” like all property and like rights, has been and remains the object of political conflict. This is a work of longue durée history, that is, an interpretation of several centuries of the politics of reproduction control. In creating this revised and updated edition, I have not tried to detail the extensive and intricate conflicts over reproductive rights that swirled around us in the United States in 2002. I stuck instead to my original purpose: to put contemporary reproduction control issues in a 200-year-long historical context. My goal is to enable readers of this book to relate “voluntary motherhood” advocates of the 1870s to “pro-choice” activists of the 1970s, to compare today’s “right-to-life” advocates to abortion opponents of a century ago, and to connect the impact of the oral contraceptive pill to that of the diaphragm. Most important, I want to contin00 .FM.i-xvi/Gord 9/25/02, 10:42 AM 7 viii / Preface ue the story of the changing meanings and political significance of birth control into the twenty-first century. I did not think it would work simply to add more chapters, as I had done for the 1990 edition. New developments do not simply attach to an old story, they change the way we understand the old story. Furthermore, I wanted to keep this book at a reasonable length. So I determined to add only the broadest of generalizations about the developments of the past three decades. This approach seemed appropriate because, while there have been excellent new studies of aspects of birth control history and contemporary reproductive rights conflicts, no new work has attempted to place the politics of birth control as a whole in the longer historical context with which this book is concerned. So The Moral Property of Women involved much rethinking and rewriting . I added new material, subtracted some old material, revised previous interpretations, and appraised how new studies have changed our understanding of the past. Since I finished the first edition of this book—in the mid1970s —I have gone on to other topics and many excellent scholars have focused on recent reproduction control issues. I have used this new scholarship only sparingly. I did not wish to give the appearance of trying to improve my imperfect book on the basis of other people’s work. The fundamental arguments of this book remain what they were when the first edition appeared in 1976: that conflicts about reproductive rights are political conflicts; that even what appear to be technological developments and neutral social scientific surveys must always be understood in political context; and that political contexts include particularly prominently the gender system as well as class and race structures. In the first edition of Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right I identified three major moments in the development of modern U.S. reproduction control politics: “voluntary motherhood,” the first political claim that control over reproduction and sexual activity was a woman’s right; “birth control,” at first the slogan for a radical reform movement, a movement powerful enough that its slogan became generic; and “family planning ,” which captured the integration of reproduction control into a new family norm. I situated these in relation to three more conservative perspectives on reproduction control—neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, and population control. Organizing the book around these changing programs rested on a theoretical premise that was almost as important as...