The Moral Property of Women

A History of Birth Control Politics in America

Linda Gordon

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780252095276
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books for 2004 The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history Woman's Body, Woman's Right, originally published in 1976.Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, The Moral Property of Women shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values.

Gordon puts today's reproduction control controversies--foreign aid for family planning, the abortion debates, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, stem-cell research--into historical perspective and shows how the campaign to legalize abortion is part of a 150-year-old struggle over reproductive rights, a struggle that has followed a circuitous path. Beginning with the "folk medicine" of birth control, Gordon discusses how the backlash against the first women's rights movement of the 1800s prohibited both abortion and contraception about 130 years ago. She traces the campaign for legal reproduction control from the 1870s to the present and argues that attitudes toward birth control have been inseparable from family values, especially standards about sexuality and gender equality.

Highlighting both leaders and followers in the struggle, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of well-known reproduction control pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, as well as lesser- known campaigners including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the three doctors Foote--Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote--the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and the daring Jane project of the 1970s, in which Chicago women's liberation activists performed illegal abortions.

PART 1

From Folk Medicine to Prohibition
to Resistance

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, too, on the role of women. Women’s status cannot be correlated on a one-to-one 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, women, gender, and motherhood had a powerful hold. The three modern Western religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all condemned at least some aspects of reproduction control, and these condemnations reinforced, and were reinforced by, their subordination of women. All three excluded women from core aspects of religious practice and status, and Christianity in particular distrusted sexual pleasure. So anti–birth control standards outlived whatever economic function they once had. When these standards began to weaken, they did so not only because a high birth rate was no longer necessary but also because of transformations of sexual and gender norms through the emancipation and employment of women and the development of a more individualist culture with a more positive appraisal of sexual pleasure.

As often happens with large-scale social change, however, these transformations produced reaction as well as accommodation. The resultant “Victorian” political culture of sex and gender, named for the queen who ruled the British Empire through much of the nineteenth century, dominated the industrial world. This was the particular form of sexual repression that pro–birth control campaigners had to contend with, and it had complex meanings for reproduction control. Far from relaxing the Christian suspicion of sex, it intensified and secularized these norms and applied them more stringently to women than to men. Physicians and other secular moral authorities joined men of the cloth in preaching maternity and domesticity as women’s destiny and true desire, thus labeling those with different or additional aspirations as unwomanly. But the same culture gave rise to a powerful feminist movement, a movement ironically the strongest in the United States where Victorian prudery was also the most intense. So hegemonic was this ideology that it framed even the arguments of the opposition: Victorian radicals and conservatives alike typically acceded to the notion that women were purer than men and that the only worthy purpose of sexual activity was reproduction. Many feminists agreed.

Yet the essence of Victorian sexual respectability was hypocrisy. Victorian sexual norms preached the debilitating effects of sexual activity and the bracing effects of self-denial and chastity, but the Victorians simultaneously created a gigantic prostitution industry, and it was not unusual for “respectable” men to patronize it. The typical directive of prudery was to hide sex, that is, never to speak of what was widely practiced and to impose silence even about readily observable human experiences such as pregnancy. Birth control was one of these unmentionables. As a system of sexual politics, prudery forced birth control knowledge underground and may even have produced a decline in knowledge of reproduction control methods.

This hypocrisy operated a double standard: the “fair sex” was to be protected from dirty matters such as money, politics, and sex. Delicacy, fragility, paleness, softness were the official feminine qualities. But this conception of femininity—of the female gender—was a class and a race phenomenon. Women who worked at housework or on farms or in factories could not (and often would not) be delicate, fragile, pale, or soft. The Victorian normative emphasis on female respectability, accessible only to privileged women, expelled from “true” womanliness the majority of women, namely, slaves, peasants, farmers, the working class, and the colonized.

With respect to birth control, these gender norms are puzzling, since the physical processes of reproductive sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and breast-feeding are hardly dainty and require considerable strength and stamina. Their integration into this new gender system was accomplished through a mystification of “motherhood,” which, like prudery itself, was produced both by opponents and advocates of women’s rights. Commercial and industrial production undermined fathers’ authority by making individuals economically “independent” in the wage-labor market, and conservatives began to exhibit anxiety that women would forsake their maternal destiny. The Victorian romance with the self-sacrificing mother was in part a public relations campaign to confine women. Simultaneously, relationships outside the family, especially for city dwellers, became less permanent and less reliable, unlike the community patterns of mutual dependency that had prevailed in precapitalist society. Motherhood came symbolically to represent loyalty, community, solidity in a world in which “all that is solid melts into air.”

These changes spelled greater freedom for many individuals, especially those once subordinated to a master, such as wives, children, unmarried women, apprentices—although not for slaves and colonized peoples. But even in the world of the free, these changes had a down side: they carried the potential for loneliness and disorientation among individuals and a resultant social instability that alarmed many nineteenth-century working people, especially those who had recently migrated or immigrated from nonindustrial areas.

The disintegration of the economic unity of family life in no way ended its function as a social institution. On the one hand, families remained the primary means of socializing children into adult personalities appropriate to the demands of industrial capitalism. Authoritarianism and willingness to accept external controls over basic life processes such as work, learning, and sex were among the lessons children learned in their families, and restriction of sexual activity to marriage was an important means of enforcing these controls. On the other hand, families were called upon to absorb the heavy strains that the economy placed upon individuals. The traditional sexual division of labor within the family meant that women had to carry the bulk of this new psychological burden.

Both these familial functions contributed to an intensification of the cult of motherhood, embedding motherliness into the very definition of femininity. Maternal virtues justified and idealized the restriction of sex within marriage. The maternal tenderings of wives were now expected to extend beyond their children to their husbands, to turn their homes into soothing, comforting, challengeless escapes¹ for men returning from exhausting workdays of cutthroat competition and constant vigilance to buy cheap and sell dear, or of grinding physical labor and rigid external control. Women provided compensatory services as against the hidden and not so hidden injuries of a capitalist economy. In this way, the cult of motherhood was not merely an intrafamily ideology but carried on important ideological work throughout the society. For many in the upper class, women’s tasks included supervising servants; wives’ services were thus subtle, often symbolic, both their subservience (to husbands) and their authority (over servants) strengthening their husbands’ class consciousness. In the working class, wives’ and daughters’ subordination helped construct a virile masculinity that created cross-class unity among men. It also provided real, not illusory or only symbolic, privileges for working-class men that many of them enthusiastically defended. Finally, it offered working-class women a sense of dignity that their forcible removal from access to productive labor threatened to erode.

In justifying this further specialization of the sexes in the division of labor, nineteenth-century ideologists of motherhood offered the view that the two sexes were not only different in all things but nearly opposite. It became unfashionable among the educated to say outright that women were inferior. (By contrast, a forthright male supremacist refrain had dominated most discussions of the sexes, both religious and secular, before the late eighteenth century.) Victorian ideology maintained that the spheres of men and women were separate but equal. Women, although allegedly inferior in intellectual, artistic, economic, and physical aptitude, were labeled morally superior as a result of their innate capacity for motherliness. This alleged superiority then justified narrow constraints on women’s choices lest they be sullied.

The theory of the oppositeness of the sexes was particularly marked in matters of sex. Sex drive became, supposedly, a uniquely masculine trait. Some authorities flatly denied that women had sex drives—the maternal instinct was the female analogue of sex drive, according to this theory. Female chastity was no longer just a man’s right but now also a woman’s destiny, as a naturally asexual being; men were asked merely to moderate the extremes of their powerful sexual urges. Although purity was raised to first place among women’s desired virtues, the virtues of a significant number of poor women were sacrificed, through prostitution, to the maintenance of male supremacy. The motherhood ideology also defined the context in which sexuality was allowable for women: the only justifiable purpose of sexual intercourse for “respectable” women was reproduction.² The label “prostitute” was sometimes applied to any women who engaged in sex outside of marriage.

A more complex matter is the degree of success of the ideologues in making their proposed norms work in practice. There is increasing historical evidence that many women were resistant to Victorian sexual indoctrination.³ Furthermore, the mask of prudery virtually required hypocrisy, and many men and women behaved and felt differently in private than in public. Still, few could remain unaffected by these powerful norms. The euphemistic avoidance of direct discussion of sexual matters made sex appear as a dirty fact of life, unavoidable but unpleasant, like excretion. Advice books urged excluding sex from consciousness as well as from behavior. Women’s purity of mind and body would determine not only their fate in the hereafter but also their marriageability on earth. Prudery was not merely an ideological system—the sanctions on women who deviated were material and often permanent, such as spinsterhood, desertion, economic ruin, disease, and death.

The repressio...