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

1. The Prehistory of Birth Control

1 The Prehistory of Birth Control Although birth control is very old, the movement for the right to control reproduction is young. About two centuries ago, when the movement began, birth control had been morally and religiously stigmatized in many parts of the world, so illicit that information on the subject was whispered, or written and distributed surreptitiously. Birth control advocates in the United States served jail terms for violation of obscenity laws. Moreover, reproductive rights advocates were often dissenters in other dimensions as well—trade unionists, socialists, feminists, for example. As a result, the modern birth control movement has at various times included campaigns for women’s rights, economic justice, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the extension of democracy . To understand these struggles we must first understand something about the nature and sources of the censoring ideology. People have tried to control reproduction in virtually all known societies, and not simply as private matters. These attempts were always acknowledged and socially regulated in some way. Although it is customary to speak of “natural ” birth control, as opposed to commercially manufactured methods, and although many long for the simplicity of what is conceived as “natural” sexual and family life, in fact there is no “natural” when it comes to human society. Social control—rules, prohibitions, stigma, and moral condemnation—has always characterized human sexuality. Birth control also has consequences, of course, for population size, a crucial issue for human communities. Birth control affects the size of families, also a matter crucial to well-being. And it bears, 01.5-21/Gord 9/25/02, 10:42 AM 7 8 / the moral property of women too, on the role of women. Women’s status cannot be correlated on a one-toone basis with any particular system of sexual or reproductive regulation. But if the connections between social patterns of sexual activity and female activity are complex, they are nonetheless close. Systems of sexual control change as women’s status changes; they both reflect and affect each other. There has been an especially strong connection between the subjection of women and the prohibition on birth control: the latter has been a means of enforcing the former. Inversely, there has been a strong connection between women’s emancipation and their ability to control reproduction. Still, birth control was widely practiced in pre-agricultural and nomadic societies (by means of methods examined below). Small families were particularly important to nomadic societies, where families and entire clans had to pack up their belongings and children and regularly travel long distances, often on foot. Not surprisingly, they practiced rudimentary forms of contraception as well as abortion and infanticide—always, of course, regulated by the community. The development of agriculture seems to have produced a revolutionary change in reproduction control practices. Sedentary farming life made it possible to accumulate personal property, the capacity of agriculture to absorb labor made larger families an asset, and the capacity of agriculture to produce a surplus made larger populations supportable. Among the peasant majorities throughout the world, children typically contributed more to the family economy than they cost. At the same time, high mortality, especially among infants, meant that women had to give birth to more children than the family needed . Thus agricultural societies often produced ideologies that entirely banned birth control. In the past five centuries further social changes made a lower birth rate economically advantageous in the more developed parts of the world. These changes included improved diet and sanitation, and thus a decline in the death rate, particularly the infant mortality rate. Even before medical progress, however, which was mainly a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon, economic developments radically undercut the value of large families. A money economy, the high costs of living for city dwellers, and the decreasing relative economic contribution of children reversed the traditional family economy and made children cost more than they could contribute. Some social groups were affected by these changes before others, perhaps the earliest being professionals living on salaries and coping with the high cost of education required to let their children inherit their status. Gradually, urbanization produced a decline in the birth rate among all classes. Nevertheless, the new small family standard did not immediately or thoroughly subvert the prohibition on birth control. Ideologies about sex, wom01 .5-21/Gord 9/25/02, 10:42 AM 8 The Prehistory of Birth Control / 9 en, gender...