Birth control has been part of the folklore and folk culture of nearly all societies. It has primarily been a woman’s issue, and not one with which men were often much concerned. Since much of the knowledge of women never reached the printed page, it was passed on through the generations by what might be called an underground of midwives, wise women, and healers. Most of the herbal remedies mentioned in this topic were found by women and the authors of the medical tracts in which they have been recorded often received their knowledge from midwives and other women. Clearly some contraceptive remedies were more effective than others, and none of them were as effective as modern methods. Still the historical remedies are important because they document the efforts of women to have some control over their own bodies; even a method that has only a small percentage of effectiveness can have a great impact on the birth rate.
In many preliterate societies, and even in many literate ones, magic played a role in reproduction and women made sacrifices to the gods, recited incantations, took potions and philters, performed dances and pantomimes to get pregnant, to avoid pregnancy, and to abort. Probably many of these rituals had little practical effect but some did, and certainly there are psychogenic factors involved in pregnancy even today. There were both passive methods such as prayer and more active ones that might involve magic but that emphasized the importance of intervention.
Most cultures and periods have regarded women as having a sexuality, but it was not to be expressed as openly as that of men. In the Christian tradition in the West, a woman’s “place” was to become a wife and thereby bear children and satisfy her husband’s sexual desire. Not all theologians agreed entirely and even the most misogynistic had to agree that women were God’s children. Protestants in the sixteenth century followed traditional Catholic views on this although John Calvin and the Calvinists placed less emphasis on the child-bearing duty of women than did Martin Luther. Protestants in general had a far more favorable view of sex than did Catholics who found chastity ideal.
Traditional family units were considerably weakened by changes in work patterns brought about by industrialization beginning in the eighteenth century. Industrial production and commercial change increasingly took men out of their homes to workplaces, and husbands and wives often spent the greater part of their days separated from one another. Moreover, as industry began to produce outside the home what women had previously made by hand, the work at home came increasingly to emphasize cleaning, repairing, consuming, and child rearing. As men and women increasingly led separate lives, both sex and marriage was redefined to these changing needs. The double standard of sexuality, which probably had always existed, was more effectively institutionalized, and Victorian moralists even argued that sex should be indulged in only for purposes of procreation. In response, men of all classes often patronized brothels rather than seeking sex with their wives, and “proper” women were taught to regard sex as dirty, immoral, and undignified. Associated with this new emphasis on prudery was a cult of motherhood, a romanticization of women as mothers. While pregnancy has always been regarded as a more or less natural event in women’s lives, in nineteenth and twentieth century America, it was often called “confinement” and pregnant women were not supposed to be seen in public.
Margaret Sanger’s work directly benefited thousands of women, like these with her at a Tucson, Arizona clinic in 1936.
But motherhood itself was extended beyond the child raising functions to embrace maternal virtues in the family setting: soothing, comforting, and succoring their husbands and the men in their lives. Women, though perceived as inferior to men in most ways, were accepted as morally superior. People during the Victorian era believed that this greater holiness came from women’s innate capacity to nurture. Female chastity was accepted as a woman’s destiny as a “naturally” asexual being; men were merely asked to moderate the extremes of their powerful sexual urge. It was against this restrictive moral environment that the birth control campaigners of the nineteenth century had to struggle. Most of these early reformers were men since increasingly the “public” sphere belonged to men and the “private” sphere was the province of women.
Victorianism was a philosophy not only defined by the clergy and political philosophers of the day but also by the medical professionals, who not only embraced the idea of women’s special biological status (often described as “the weaker sex”), but used it to condemn midwifery and other women’s healing arts, which they associated with abortion. The doctors thereby justified excluding women from college and higher education because of their need for protection and “purity.” Women bought into the idea, in part because they had no real economic alternatives, but their status as “women on pedestals” became, ironically, a basis of their own growing power in this two-tiered world of males and females. They could campaign against alcohol, slavery, and child labor because they needed to “raise” the level of male morality to that of their own.
One of the reasons women persuaded the male-dominated society to give them the vote was a belief that it would raise the level of society. It was on the issues of abolition of slavery and woman suffrage that women in America first spoke out at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1849 and similar meetings (even though in some states it was illegal for women to speak in public), but then their concerns were extended to child labor, to education, and a whole host of other issues. The more radical women, many of them socialists and freethinkers, also began to make a full scale assault on the male-dominated institutions, even though they did not always receive support from their male colleagues.
Increasingly in the twentieth century, the ability to control the spacing of children and even the number of children became a feminist agenda, and whereas males had been the first strong advocates and speakers on the issue, once women gained their own voice, they became the leaders in social change. In the process birth control and family planning went public, and ultimately even open discussion of abortion became possible.
