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129 Q c h a p t e r 6 Modern Reproduction the fit and unfit mother As late as 1940, the most popular form of “contraceptive” in the United States was the antiseptic douche, a profoundly unreliable method. With the Comstock laws still in place, douches were covertly advertised, not labeled as contraceptives, and packaged by multiple companies in an unregulated marketplace. Some versions contained very little besides water and salt; others were unsafe, sometimes even deadly.1 Despite a century of declining birth rates and all the progress made in infant and child health and in the prevention of maternal mortality between the 1910s and the 1930s, most women still could not reliably control their fertility. Nevertheless , the historical record of the first decades of the twentieth century shows in rich detail women’s pleas for useful information and reliable reproductive choices. Over these decades, Americans debated about, experimented with, and legislated on the issue of reproductive control and its connection to modern motherhood. Nineteenth-century fears about women’s unwillingness to be mothers now combined with newer anxieties about their potential for sexual autonomy and about the reproduction of the American population by “fit” mothers. “Now what I Want to know,” insisted a married mother of three in Kansas in 1928, “is Why can’t We poor people be given Birth Control as well as Dr’s. & the Rich people. . . . We need help to prevent any more babies,” Mrs. E.S. insisted. “Don’t you think it better to be Parents of 3 which we are willing to work & do all we can for them, to raise & provide food for us all, then to hafto [sic] have 6 or more that would take us down into the grave & leave 6 or more for poverty to take & be Motherless?” She was even willing to consider sterilization to prevent more pregnancies. Nineteenth-century voluntary motherhood advocates, mostly middle class, had argued that putting women in charge of fertility would create better babies. This twentieth-century argument from a working-class woman emphasized the economic struggles of large families, as well as the risk to maternal health from repeated pregnancies and poverty. But, like others writing to the U.S. Children’s Bureau about contraception, Mrs. E.S. would not receive the information she sought because of legal restrictions on this information. Her demands represented 130 Modern Mothers an ongoing conflict between women desperate to control their childbearing and the laws and economic barriers that prevented them from doing so. In the twentieth century, more women were willing to take on the struggle publicly , especially by demanding access to effective contraceptive devices. At their most radical, these demands were nothing less than a call for reproductive freedom and even sexual freedom that had a much wider impact than the nineteenthcentury radicals had managed. As Margaret Sanger, founder of first birth control clinic in the United States, said:“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.”2 Limited birth control technology certainly presented its own barrier to reproductive possibilities for women and their male partners in the early twentieth century . But this problem was greatly compounded by the law. The Comstock laws proved so prohibitive that Sanger and her activist sister went to jail protesting them in the 1910s, and Children’s Bureau officials tacitly agreed to a contraceptive and abortion“gag rule”in their response to health and poverty concerns of women that it was their mission to address.3 In simple legal terms, circulation of birth control information and devices remained at least partially criminalized for a very long time. In 1936, the Supreme Court ruled that doctors, but only doctors, could acquire contraceptive information . Meanwhile, marketers of contraceptive products had to pretend their products had other medical uses, and consumers had little knowledge of product effectiveness. Not until 1972 did the Court effectively invalidate all the “Little Comstock ” laws of the states and finally allow even unmarried women access to openly advertised birth control. Abortion remained illegal via state laws until 1973. Between the 1900s and the 1970s, however, eugenic sterilization laws to promote “selective breeding” of the American population meant that state agencies took a remarkably active role in coercively sterilizing women whom authorities believed should not be mothers. Women’s actual access to reproductive choice is more complicated than this simple chronology suggests. By the 1960s, though perhaps not quite in the way Sanger imagined, the majority of married couples had access to safer...

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