Birth Control

BIRTH CONTROL. Although birth control is an ancient practice, political movements for birth control are modern, originating in the early nineteenth century. Among the several campaigns for birth control—secular and religious, reformist and radical, racist and anti-racist, imperial and anti-imperial--only some of them were part of the Left. Indeed, for many decades the organized Left was ambivalent about birth control, at best confused about its political significance, and at worst opposed to its association with autonomous women’s organization and feminist goals.

The phrase “birth control” has been attributed to Margaret Sanger, but it has since become a generic term for reproduction control. In some ways this usage is unfortunate, since the phrase encourages grouping together distinct methods and political perspectives. The first “birth control” advocates were the British Neo-Malthusians in the early nineteenth century. Some, including working-class radical Francis Place, supporter of labor unions and the Chartists, believed that smaller families could strengthen working class power. This “bottom-up” Neo-Malthusianism was soon joined by middle- and upper-class reformers who sought to placate the working class by reducing poverty without redistribution of wealth. By the late nineteenth century, British imperialists were advocating population control as a means of pacifying subject peoples.

At the same time, “Utopian” socialists, both secular and religious, began advocating birth control for additional progressive goals: preventing hereditary disease, liberating women from drudgery through smaller families, improving women’s health by lowering rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, and, sometimes, permitting greater sexual freedom. In the United States in the 1820s, Neo-Malthusian ideas were integrated into the experimental, non-class-conscious communitarian socialism associated with Robert Dale Owen (whose father, Robert Owen, had been directly influenced by Place) and Frances Wright, a socialist feminist.

These secular socialists were soon joined in the US by religious radicals who also promoted birth control. The Second Great Awakening had given rise to a “perfectionist” mode of thought, which was heretical in relation to orthodox forms of Protestantism because it emphasized perfecting earthly life rather than accepting earthly suffering that would be relieved in heaven. Also committed to improving women’s wellbeing and public health generally, these religious socialists sought means of birth control other than contraception, which they condemned as an immoral indulgence. They sought to achieve birth control through changing the nature of sexual activity itself. For example, the Oneida Community in the 1840s, ruled by the radical perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes, practiced male continence, a regimen in which men refrained from ejaculation altogether. Noyes and his supporters believed that the practice not only built self-discipline but actually heightened sexual pleasure. (Only Noyes and a few select Oneida men were deemed to have the skill and self-control to practice this continence.) In the second half of the century, “free lovers” further developed these noncontraceptive forms of birth control, recommending withdrawal or sexual activity other than intercourse. Feminist socialist physician Alice Stockham designed a sexual system called “Karezza” that required both men and women to avoid orgasm and resulted, she believed, in the intensification and prolongation of pleasure.

Some mainstream nineteenth-century feminists shared the view that the discipline and self-control required by these sexual practices were liberating in themselves. By the 1870s, a flourishing women’s-rights movement transformed this tradition of thought into a radical political demand, with the slogan “voluntary motherhood.” These feminists, like some of their socialist predecessors, opposed contraception because they feared it would provide impunity for predatory male sexual aggression. Like most radicals until the twentieth century, they opposed abortion, which, they believed, would further disadvantage women by freeing men from the responsibility for offspring. Instead they proposed sexual abstinence except when reproduction was the goal. Their proposals and rhetoric seemed prudish to later generations, and there is truth in this characterization, which expressed women’s often negative experiences of sex as oppressive and pleasureless; yet in their historic context, they were advocating women’s sexual liberation. They understood that women could not find and defend their own sexual desires until they gained the power to reject men’s. These arguments for abstinence as birth control thus had two meanings: voluntary motherhood as opposed to coercive childbearing; and voluntary sex, in rejection of wives’ “duty” to submit to husbands’ sexual demands.

At the sex-radical fringes of the feminist movement, some openly advocated greater sexual experience and pleasure for women. Elmina Slenker, “free love” and voluntary-motherhood advocate, wanted “the sexes to love more than they do; we want them to love openly, frankly, earnestly; to enjoy the caress, the embrace, the glance, the voice.... We oppose no form or act of love between any man & woman.” Moreover, some voluntary-motherhood advocates advanced a critique of male sexuality, prefiguring what some late-twentieth-century feminists perceived as the obsessiveness and dominance embedded in much of what men experience as sexual desire. Unlike their Neo-Malthusian predecessors, voluntary-motherhood advocates were concerned neither with population size nor with working-class power; they were resolutely pro-motherhood and, far from challenging the Victorian romanticization of motherhood, they manipulated it to increase women’s power.

Meanwhile conservative fears that contraception would license women’s sexual independence, and an intensification of American prudery, led to the first federal legislation against birth control. The Comstock Act of 1873 made it a crime to distribute indecent materials across state lines and included contraceptive devices, and even arguments for birth control, among the banned items. From this point on, then, advocates had to focus on changing the law as well as promoting birth control itself.
Throughout the nineteenth century class-conscious socialists were typically hostile to Neo-Malthusianist, perfectionist, and feminist birth control programs. Most trade unionists and members of socialist parties saw birth control as a conspiracy to weaken the working class, and autonomous women’s movements as divisive and thus weakening working-class activism. As a result, many on the Left implicitly supported the “race suicide” panic of the first decade of the twentieth century. Sparked by no less a figure than President Theodore Roosevelt, race-suicide moralists propagandized against the “selfishness” of women who refused their maternal duties by using birth control. Some even echoed the eugenical, racist alarmism that WASP dominance would be undermined, by the high birthrates among people of “inferior stock”—a label applied to people of color and Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish immigrants.

Nevertheless, it was from within the Socialist Party and radical unions such as the IWW that a mass women’s movement for birth control arose between 1914 and 1916. As the main woman’s rights organizations had narrowed their focus to suffrage, many “social feminists,” as Left-leaning women reformers of the Progressive era were labeled, looked to socialist groups, especially the Socialist Party, in their concern for poor and working-class women. They discovered that contraceptives were available in Europe through labor and socialist-leaning clinics. Emma Goldman of the Industrial Workers of the World and Margaret Sanger of the Socialist Party visited clinics in Holland where women were fitted with vaginal diaphragms, a more user-friendly version of the pessaries available previously. (While diaphragms themselves may have been new to Sanger, for over 50 years they had been available as over-the-counter products of small manufacturers in the US.) Goldman and Sanger both, separately, used civil disobedience to dramatize and publicize birth control, distributing prohibited leaflets about contraception; while the Left leadership remained uninterested, women responded passionately and en masse. Sanger soon opened a clinic in Brooklyn; on its firs day women were lined up around the block waiting to get in. Within a few years there were birth control leagues in every major city and many large towns of the United States. When these activists offered contraceptive information and services, they were deluged with clients; when arrested, their political defenses let the public know the effective contraceptives were available and swelled the demand for them.

The leaders of the hundreds of birth control leagues in 1916–1917 were radicals—feminists and often socialists. They understood birth control as part of a broader vision of equality and freedom. That perspective came to seem unproductive, in part because male SP leaders did not see birth control as a core political issue, and in part because of the volume of women’s requests for help; as a result, birth control advocacy became a single-issue campaign. Birth control groups defied laws to spread birth-control information and to open clinics that could provide advice and diaphragms. Because the campaign required decriminalizing birth control, and clinics required funding and staff, birth controllers saw the advantage of support from professionals—notably physicians and eugenists, and maneuvered to make their movement acceptable to these elites, mainly male of course.

So during the 1920s and 1930s, birth control was becoming acceptable, even beneficial, to liberal groups and assimilated to mainstream charitable causes. The leadership of the national birth control organization, led by Sanger, curbed the rhetoric of woman’s rights and made two strategic compromises: First, acceding to limit access to diaphragms to medical prescription, thereby making physicians the gatekeepers to reproductive choice. Second, distinguishing contraception from abortion, and campaigning to legalize the former and agreeing not to challenge the ban on abortion. (Abortion and contraception had been closely associated in the 19th century and earlier, and the Comstock law treated them both, equally, as indecent.) At the same time birth controllers welcomed support for birth control from eugenists who were increasingly, openly racist, building fears that white Protestant dominance was threatened by high birthrates among immigrants and people of color. Some birth controllers even supported the forcible sterilization of those allegedly feeble-minded, degenerate, and/or mentally ill. By 1932 26 states had such forcible sterilization programs, which were upheld by the Supreme Court. These choices further alienated many African Americans, who often saw birth control as motivated by a genocidal hope to weaken the race, although black radicals generally continued to support birth control.

The World War II period gave birth to two new birth control emphases: family planning and population control. The former argued that planned reproduction would strengthen marriages and families. Unlike the Victorian prudish adversaries of birth control, these “family planning” advocates believed that marital “adjustment” should rest on a permissive attitude toward sex without fear of conception. Planned Parenthood, unlike the voluntary motherhood movement, endorsed regular marital sex and female domesticity as contributors to family health. (Planned Parenthood would not help unmarried women until at least the late 1960s.) It also joined in a renewed Neo-Malthusianism: it attributed Third World poverty to overpopulation, and advocated population control as a means of improving standards of living that did not challenge exploitation and inequality. It shed its feminist origins—not to mention its socialist origins—and de-emphasized the discourse about birth control as a human right. By 1960 “population control” had become such an unchallenged ideology in the United States that many used this phrase interchangeably with the earlier “birth control.”

Meanwhile the American economy was making it difficult to attain middle-class status with large families and was pulling ever more women into the wage labor force. These structural factors made birth control, already seen as a healthy marital aid, economically essential. In 1965 the last state law criminalizing contraception was struck down by the Supreme Court. But soon afterward, a renewed feminist movement once again changed the public understanding of the reproduction-control project. Second-wave feminism spread like wildfire, becoming the largest social movement in US history, and its adherents viewed birth control as an integral part of women’s self-determination as well as personal privacy. Meanwhile the socialist stream of the movement distinguished sharply between birth control as an individual right and population control as an imperial project, eroding the earlier association between the two.

A crusade for decriminalizing abortion soon followed. The campaign began not with feminists but with civil-libertarian physicians. But by the late 1960s the women’s movement had redefined the public meanings of legal abortion, associating it with feminism as it had done previously with birth control. In 1973 the Supreme Court overturned the remaining state bans on abortion. Meanwhile socialist feminists had been trying to make birth control part of a broader program of reproductive justice. Their efforts secured stringent safeguards against forced sterilization and stimulated the development of safer contraceptive methods. A feminist health movement won considerable victories -- exposing the dangers of early hormonal contraception (the “pill” entered the market in 1960), providing women with choice in childbirth arrangements, reducing unnecessary caesarian childbirths, insisting on respect for women, especially women of color, in medical matters, and radically expanding the numbers of women doctors.

The very strength of second-wave feminism gave rise to a well-funded attack on abortion as well as other progressive measures of the 1960s and 1970s, including sex education, school integration and civil rights laws. As this “New Right” gained ground, it succeeded in forcing many feminists and feminist organizations to concentrate on defending abortion rights at the expense of other causes.

Gordon, Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002, a revised and updated version of the original Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, New York: Penguin, 1976 and 1990.

McCann, Carole R. Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.

McCann, Carole R. Figuring the Population Bomb: Gender and Demography in the mid-Twentieth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.

Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.

Reagan, Leslie. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867–1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Tone, Andrea. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.