Lecture: "Fight for Birth Control" (HIUS157)

1. The Fight for Birth Control
HIUS157/Prof. Rebecca Jo Plant

2. Key questions
• Why did society’s general attitude toward
birth control change?
– From associating contraception with obscenity,
to viewing it as a legitimate need
• Why did women’s rights advocates alter
their stance on birth control?
– From seeing contraception as a threat, to
viewing it as a central goal
• How did authorities police the practice of
abortion in the late 19th
/early 20th
centuries?

3. Falling birth rates
• Average number of births per woman
– 1800: 7.04
– 1900: 3.56
– 1920: 3.17
– 1940: 2.22
• Numbers mask considerable differences
– Higher birth rates among immigrants and
African Americans
• But evened out over time
– Ex: Birthrates for African-American women
» 1900: 5.61; 1940: 2.87

4. What were people doing?
• Periodic abstinence
– BUT: Only in 1924 do people come to understand
when women are fertile
• Abortion
– Incidence rose sharply in the 1840-1850s, esp.
among married, MC women
– AMA pursued campaign to criminalize abortion
• But the practice remained common
• Contraception
– Information circulated widely until the 1870s
• Condoms, sponges, “womb veils”

5. Anthony Comstock
(1844-1915)
• Victorian moralist
• Founded NY Society for the
Suppression for Vice in 1873
• Lobbied for Comstock Law
(1873)
– Banned “obscene” materials from
being sent in the US mails
– Defined contraceptive devices
and information about
contraception and abortion as
“obscene”
• Saw himself as protecting
women

6. “Voluntary motherhood”
• Supported by suffragists and other reformers
in the 1870s and 1880s
– Goal was to grant wives the right to refuse sex,
not to sever the connection between sexuality
and reproduction
– Advocates opposed mechanical birth control;
associated it with prostitution
• Notion that birth control was “unnatural”
• Underlying fear of male lust, promiscuity

7. Margaret Sanger
A very different
philosophy:
“Romantic love is one
thing; procreation is
another. As long as the
two are entangled
together in an
inextricable and
inexplicable mess, it is
not likely that any great
success can be made of
either.”

8. Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
• Most influential crusader for legal and safe
contraception, 1910s-1950s
• Personal history:
– Irish Catholic, working-class family
– Mother endured 18 pregnancies; 11 live births;
died at age 49
– Studied nursing; married William Sanger, bore
three children
– Moved to NY in 1910 and began working as a
visiting nurse on the Lower East Side
• Story of Sadie Sachs

9. Early Sanger (pre 1917)
• Immersed in radical politics
– Influenced by Emma Goldman
– Became active in radical labor movement
– Gradually came to see birth control as the key
to alleviating women’s oppression
• 1914: Published Family Limitation
– Explicit information on birth control
techniques; some inaccurate
– Birth control as a weapon in class warfare; the
WC should go on a “birth strike”

10. Woman Rebel (1914)
• Also published a radical paper
– Slogan: “No Gods, No Masters.”
• Aimed to raise consciousness among working
women
– “to stimulate working women to think of
themselves and to build up a conscious fighting
character”
– To help girls “know just what to do or really what
constitutes clean living without prudishness”
• Reached out to prostitutes

11. Early Sanger, cont.
• Facing arrest, Sanger fled to Europe
• Influenced by European sex reformers,
especially Havelock Ellis
• Impressed by clinics in the Netherlands
• 1916: Returned to US; opened birth control
clinic in Brooklyn
– Arrested, convicted and spent 30 days in jail
– Trial led to NY federal court ruling that doctors could
prescribe contraceptives to married patients for health
reasons

12. Carrie Chapman Catt (1921)
“Your reform is too narrow to appeal to me and
too sordid. When the advocacy of contraception
is combined with as strong a propaganda for
continence (…in the interest of common
decency), it will find me a more willing sponsor.
That is, a million years of male control over the
sustenance of women has made them sex slaves,
which has produced two results: an
oversexualizing of women and an oversexualizing
of men.”

13. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Primary objection:
– Birth control would force women to wholly
conform to male sexual desires; it would
transform marriage in “unromantic, dutiful
submission to male dominance.”
• Eventually, though, she shifted from hostile
stance to qualified support of legal birth
– In the 1930s, she allied with Sanger

14. Later Sanger (after 1917)
• Allied with doctors; wealthy benefactors
– Birth control transformed into a medical issue
• Should be dispensed by doctors/nurses
– Helped secure funding for research on the Pill
• Allied with eugenicists
– Need to prevent the “unfit” from reproducing
– Proposed a “civil service” exam for
prospective parents
• Increasingly active overseas
– Growing interest in “population control”

15. Woman of a New Race
• What is “woman’s error,” according to Sanger, and
what is her “debt”?
• What does Sanger mean when she talks about the
“feminine spirit”?
• What are her views on “continence”?
• How does she view immigrants, the disabled, non-
white races?
• How did her book reflect postwar political
concerns?
• How does Sanger view abortion?

16. Assessing Sanger
•Was she a sell out?
•Or even worse, as the pro-life
movement now argues on countless
websites?
•Or was she a Woman of Valor, as
biographer Ellen Chesler argues?

17. References to birth control in
popular culture, 1920-30s
• Thinly veiled ads promised that BC would
– Help wives stay “young” and “vital”
– Help wives enjoy “companionate marriages” and
sustain hubands’ interest in them
– Allow women to be better, more energetic
mothers
• Ads portrayed BC as women’s responsibility
– Often played on women’s anxieties

18. Ad for Lysol
McCall’s, July 1928
“When they were first married, five
years ago, they liked to dance
together, go motoring together, play
golf together. They still like to do those
things together today. During years
following her marriage she has
protected her zest for living, her health
and youthfulness, and ‘stayed young
with him’ by the correct practice of
feminine hygiene.”

19. Ad for Lysol
Pictorial Review, 1926
“Always you find in these
households a woman who
has charm, gentleness, poise,
and a certain untiring vitality
which comes from knowing
how to take care of herself.”

20. Growing acceptance in the 1930s
• 1936: AMA endorsed BC
– Finally began to support research, teaching in medical
schools, etc.
– Urged states to legalize
• U.S. v. One Package (1936)
– Overturned Comstock Law
– Importation of contraceptives to the US ruled legal
• By end of the 1930s, hundreds of BC clinics
operating in the US

21. 1930s, cont.
• Greater public acceptance and increased availability
of birth control
– Government reversed course
• Anxious about swelling welfare rolls
– Contraception widely available by mail
• Even Sears Roebuck advertised “preventives”
• Birth rate fell below replacement level for first time
in American history
• By 1940, only two states (MA and CT) still
prohibited the dissemination of birth control to
married couples

22. Evolution of public views
• Ladies’ Home Journal survey (1938)
– 79% women in favor of BC; 21% opposed
– Catholics: 51% in favor; 49% opposed
• “What do you regard as the most important
reasons for birth control?”
– 76% “Family income”
– 24% “Birth of Defectives”
– 1% “Happier Sex Relations”

23. Conclusions
• Debates over BC/abortion have always been
about women’s role in society
– Significance of motherhood to women’s lives
• Acceptance of BC rose when it was seen as
improving motherhood/family life
– Remained deeply controversial when associated
with sex outside of marriage
• Politics surrounding BC/abortion have always
been connected to the politics of race and
class; who should reproduce