The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue
484
The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue
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Overview
Originally published in 1984.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691612911 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #564 |
| Pages: | 484 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Birth Control Movement and American Society
From Private Vice to Public Virtue
By James Reed
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1983 James W. ReedAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09404-5
CHAPTER 1
Contraceptive Technology in the Nineteenth Century
A DEMOGRAPHIC revolution took place in the United States between 1800 and 1940. The high birth rates and high mortality characteristic of a pre-modern society were replaced by a new vital economy of fewer births and fewer deaths. The course of the demographic transition in the United States greatly differed, however, from the model developed by demographers intent on discovering the dynamics of economic development in the Third World. Americans began having fewer children before large-scale industrialization or urbanization took place, and dramatic declines in fertility preceded by at least a century the late nineteenth century advances in public health that gave the infant a good chance of surviving childhood. Thus, Americans began having smaller families in the absence of two factors that social scientists have often assumed to be determining — rapid industrialization and declining infant mortality.
In 1800, American white women were having many more children than the women of Western Europe; by 1900 they were relatively infertile compared with their European sisters. Although early nineteenth century birth rates must be constructed from inadequate sources, the projections available indicate that in 1800 American women were bearing an average of 7.04 children; 5.21 in i860; and 3.56 in 1900. This downward secular trend would continue until the 1930s, when the birth rate briefly fell below the level required to maintain the existing population. The low fertility of the 1930s is often viewed as a result of the Great Depression, but it should be seen as the culmination of a trend that had begun by 1800. More than half of the decline in fertility between 1800 and 1940 occurred during the nineteenth century, and a considerable part before i860.
The decline in fertility began before any large proportion of the population lived in urban areas or was engaged in nonagricultural work. Throughout the nineteenth century the drop in the birth rate of the rural population more than kept pace with that of the urban population. While fertility was generally higher in rural and more recently settled areas, the shifts in fertility in each region of the United States followed a similar downward pattern. A study of Indiana in 1820 found differences in fertility among villages when compared to farming areas and among agricultural as compared to nonagricultural households. Because of the pervasiveness of the fertility decline, however, it cannot be explained simply as a function of industrialization or of urbanization.
Richard D. Brown has argued that a "modern personality" emerged in the United States before industrialization got under way and that the prior existence of new attitudes was an important factor in the development of the American economy. Apparently the decline in fertility and economic development were both part of a larger process, the transition from a traditional to a modern society. Profound changes in social values were both cause and effect of that process. Maris Vinovskis, in a study of "socioeconomic determinants" of fertility in 1850 and i860, found that low levels of fertility at the state level were most highly correlated with such measures of education as literacy and school attendance. Although a majority of Americans still lived on farms or in rural towns during the first half of the nineteenth century, they were increasingly better educated, read more newspapers and books, participated more in the political process, had more faith in material progress, and were more confident than their fathers of the individual's ability to control nature and his own life.
Given that the decline in fertility was one result of changing attitudes toward human ability to manipulate the environment, we still need to know how the desire to have fewer children was realized. What birth control methods were available in the nineteenth century? What role did they play in the transition from the seven to the less-than-four-child family?
Many historians, noting a lack of "scientific" methods of family limitation, have concluded that contraceptive practice "could have made but a small contribution to the declining birth rate of the nineteenth century. The most eulogized method of birth limitation was indirect, sexual abstinence, enforced by a model of female asexuality." Late marriage was a form of abstinence, and one scholar, using sparse and scattered marriage records in five states, argued that later and fewer marriages were a significant cause of declining fertility, an hypothesis that has been cast in doubt by recent demographic studies. Nineteenth century observers blamed corsets, physical degeneracy caused by lack of proper nutrition and physical activity, the spread of venereal disease, and even female education for the trend toward smaller families. Arthur Calhoun recorded samples of this spectrum of complaint in his Social History of the American Family (1917–19), but rejected the idea that social change had made Americans less fecund. He thought that the trend toward fewer children had resulted from conscious decisions made by married couples who had used abortion and contraception to limit the size of their families.
Perhaps Calhoun erred in not giving more attention to the possible role of decreased frequency of coitus as a method of family limitation. Evaluation of the relative parts played by sexual repression, abortion, and contraception in the fertility decline depends on an understanding of the effectiveness and "psychological availability" of nineteenth century birth control methods. If the available methods did not significantly reduce the fertility of consistent users, they could not have made much difference. Even if effective contraceptive regimens were available, the problem remains of whether or not significant numbers of nineteenth century Americans used them rather than abstinence or abortion.
Historians have often noted the sexually repressive tone of many of the marriage manuals written by nineteenth century physicians and have usually assumed that reliable contraceptive advice was not available. Advertisements for "electromagnetic prevention machines," a great variety of secret drugs, and other quackery were prominent in medical tracts. The rabid medical sectarianism of the time was especially virulent in the sex advice field, and most authors unfortunately spent more time denouncing their competitors' methods than explaining their own.
Not all of the advice was bad however. It could be argued that there were no fundamental advances in contraceptive technology from the middle of the nineteenth century until the marketing of the birth control pill in i960. By 1865 various physicians had publicly endorsed withdrawal (coitus interruptus ), spermicidal douches, the vaginal diaphragm or pessary, rubber condoms, and periodic abstinence. These birth control methods were effective by nineteenth century medical standards. Most nineteenth century birth control advocates intended their advice for married couples who sought only the means to limit their children to a manageable three or four. Sufficient contraceptive means were available to achieve that end. To dismiss these methods as "unscientific" is to apply modern and seldom achieved therapeutic standards to nineteenth century conditions.
English reformers inspired the first American tracts on birth control. During the early 1820s, Francis Place and a small band of freethinking radicals included family limitation among their proposals to improve the position of labor. At the age of seventeen, John Stuart Mill spent several days in jail for distributing Place's "diabolical handbills," which urged workers to practice coitus interruptus and described how to use a vaginal sponge as a contraceptive. For years it was believed that Robert Owen, the manufacturer, Utopian socialist, and chief theorist of the cooperative movement, had written the handbills; this belief was false, although it was true that Owen's son, Robert Dale Owen (1801–77), wrote the first important American tract on birth control.
Robert Owen spent his life in a vain effort to banish religious superstition and to reestablish the sense of community that he believed had been destroyed by the rise of capitalism. He lost most of his fortune in an attempt to build a working model of his ideals at New Harmony, Indiana. Robert Dale Owen labored in his father's experimental colony as superintendent of schools and as editor of the New Harmony Gazette. After the experiment failed he edited The Free Enquirer in New York, turning it into America's leading free-thought journal, in which the reform of everything from grammar to sexual morality received careful attention. When an employee printed an unauthorized prospectus for Every Woman's Book, an English tract that included contraceptive advice, on Owen's press, he felt compelled to explain his own view of the work, and he cautiously recommended it. Rivals for leadership of the New York labor movement accused Owen of immorality. This charge prodded Owen into writing a book on birth control.
Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question (1831) was an essay in social science, with a brief discussion of birth control methods included almost as an afterthought. In the first three American editions, all published in 1831, Owen recommended coitus interruptus, while arguing that the vaginal sponge was ineffective and the skin condom expensive and unaesthetic. Later the nonapproved methods were relegated to a footnote. The booklet caused Owen some embarrassment during his successful 1836 campaign for the Indiana assembly until it was distributed to voters so that they could see what Owen's opponents were talking about. Ironically, it won approval of the local clergy. The tract sold well for the rest of the century, but without further promotion by Owen.
Moral Physiology changed the life of Charles Knowlton (1800–50), a Yankee from the Berkshire country of western Massachusetts, who in 1832 published the first popular tract on birth control by a physician, Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Married People. Knowlton, an 1824 graduate of New Hampshire Medical Institution (now Dartmouth Medical School), a militant freethinker, and ne'er-do-well father of three, had hoped to win fame and fortune with the publication of Elements of Modern Materialism in 1829. His ponderous exposition of the principles of agnosticism did not sell, the cost of its publication left him heavily in debt, and clerical opposition to his religious views sabotaged several attempts to establish practice in rural towns. On a trip to promote Elements in the spring of 1830, Knowlton was invited by Owen to speak at the Hall of Science, the social center for Manhattan's freethinkers. Owen agreed to try to sell Elements, giving Knowlton his own books in return.
After reading Moral Physiology Knowlton decided that a better method than coitus interruptus, one that demanded less sacrifice of pleasure, would have to be invented if Owen's vision of fewer and better nurtured children was to be realized. Knowlton set out to release mankind from its shackles and to win wealth and fame by finding the ideal birth control method. In 1839, anxious to prove the originality of his contribution to contraceptive knowledge because of numerous works that recommended his method without giving him credit or royalty, he described the process by which he sought to discover "some sure, cheap, convenient, and harmless method, which should not in any way interfere with enjoyment."
Strange as it now seems to me, and must seem to others, I spent days and nights in close reflection on this point, before I arrived at my present mature idea. A first thought that glanced through my mind, was to wash out the semen with the syringe; but then it occurred to me, that this would not answer, because almost certainly there would be a trifle of semen lodged among the folds and ridges of the vagina that would not be washed away, and this trifle would be enough to cause conception. So this idea was dismissed; but it at length occurred to me, to add something to the water that should not hurt the woman, but yet kill the little tender animalcules, or in other words, destroy the fecundating property of the semen....
Knowlton was not absolutely sure of his method, and delayed publishing Fruits for four months, until an old friend "agreeably surprised me, by assuring me that my plan would 'carry,' as he well knew from ten years experience in his own family."
In the next five years, Knowlton sold 7,000 copies of Fruits at from fifty cents to one dollar, the price deliberately kept a little steep to keep it out of the hands of the immature. Though he complained that the success of his book was limited by plagiarized editions, the publication of Fruits marked a turning point in his medical career. Six months after he published the first edition, he settled permanently in the Berkshire village of Ashfield, where his practice began to prosper.
Despite his religious views and the hostility of the local clergy, Knowlton was not a social outcast. He always claimed that his enemies were inspired by his freethinking rather than by his proselytizing for birth control. Knowlton's sale of Fruits led to three prosecutions under the Massachusetts common law obscenity statute. The first time he was fined fifty dollars in Taunton, and his feelings were hurt when another physician testified, probably correctly, that there was nothing new in the book. According to Knowlton's account of the trial, one juror tried to console him. "Well, we brought you in guilty — we did not see how we could well get rid of it, still I like your book, and you must let me have one of them." The judge subscribed for the next edition, and the prosecuting attorney returned his share of the costs to Knowlton.
On the complaint of a Lowell physician, who had received only a prospectus of Fruits, Knowlton was prosecuted a second time, and, owing, he claimed, to a poorly managed defense, he did three months at hard labor in the East Cambridge jail. A third prosecution at Greenfield was nol pressed after two juries failed to reach a verdict.
It is significant that Knowlton's practice prospered after he published Fruits. The Congregationalist minister of Ashfield, who had inspired the Greenfield prosecution, was dismissed in July 1835, after his attacks on Knowlton had caused a bitter division in his congregation. Knowlton became a respected member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, published regularly in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (now New England Journal of Medicine), where his autobiography was published in 1851, and was a staunch defender of orthodox practice against quackery. Despite respectability Knowlton continued to sell Fruits and remained an outspoken freethinker. After Knowlton died of heart disease in 1850, his son Lorenzo, also a physician, was invited by a committee of leading citizens to take his father's place. When the English freethinkers Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were prosecuted for reprinting Fruits in 1877, their highly publicized trial did more than any other event in the nineteenth century to spread the good news that sex and procreation could be separated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Birth Control Movement and American Society by James Reed. Copyright © 1983 James W. Reed. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- Preface, pg. ix
- Preface to the Princeton Edition, pg. xv
- Acknowledgments, pg. xxiv
- PART I. BIRTH CONTROL BEFORE MARGARET SANGER, pg. 1
- PART II. THE WOMAN REBEL: MARGARET SANGER AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CLINICS, pg. 65
- PART III. ROBERT L. DICKINSON AND THE COMMITTEE ON MATERNAL HEALTH, pg. 141
- PART IV. THE PROSPECT OF DEPOPULATION, pg. 195
- PART V. BIRTH CONTROL ENTREPRENEUR: THE PHILANTHROPIC PATH FINDING OF CLARENCE J. GAMBLE, pg. 223
- PART VI. PROPAGANDISTS TURNED TO PROPHETS: BIRTH CONTROL IN A CROWDED WORLD, pg. 279
- PART VII. THE PILL, pg. 309
- PART VIII. THE TROUBLE WITH FAMILY PLANNING, pg. 367
- Abbreviations Used in the Notes, pg. 383
- Notes, pg. 385
- Bibliographical Essay, pg. 439
- Index, pg. 448