A History of the Wife (46 page)

The most common justification for limiting reproduction was that it was good for both the mother and the child. Dr. Napheys, for one, decried the disastrous effects of “
overproduction
—having
too many
chil- dren.” In language worthy of an evangelical preacher, he spoke of “the evils of a too rapid succession of pregnancies,” which resulted in “weakly infants.” Similarly, Dr. W. R. D. Blackwood voiced a compas- sionate plea on behalf of needy wives: “Is it proper, is it human, is it desirable that the lot of a married female should be a continual round of impregnation, delivery, and lactation?... I do not hesitate for an instant to say NO! And I look with more than suspicion on the fulmi- nations of those who, assuming superior virtue, condemn any and all attempts to control conception.”
14

In her highly popular
What Women Should Know
(1873), Eliza Duffey criticized “enforced child-bearing” and argued for “a limitation of the number of offspring” in the interest of the mother. Sounding a “pro- choice” note a hundred years before that term was invented, she insisted: “Surely, if there is any personal question which an individual has a right to decide, the woman should have a voice in the matter of childbearing. She has to endure the pains, penalties and responsibili- ties, both before and afterward, and she can best judge of her fitness and her powers of endurance.”
15

ABORTION

Duffey’s support of a woman’s right to choose did not, however, countenance abortion, which she unequivocally opposed. Like many of her generation, she had come to question the previously accepted view that human life begins at “quickening,” that is, when a pregnant woman first feels fetal movement. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this was the official position of the medical profession and the common law; consequently, abortions prior to quickening (around the fourth month of pregnancy) were not considered criminal offenses. If an early pregnancy ended, it was spoken of without reference to pos- sible induction: it had simply “slipped away.”
16

Home remedies for abortion were passed on from one generation to the next, some brought from Europe, some learned from midwives, others from Native American healers. Brews mixed from the root of rue or leaves of the tansy plant were commonly ingested to produce abor- tion, as well as cathartics and potentially poisonous substances like calomel, aloes, ergot, prussic acid, iodine, and strychnine. Southern women wanting to miscarry were known to drink cottonseed tea. Home medical manuals characteristically contained information for unblocking “obstructed menses,” such as bloodletting, bathing, iron and quinine concoctions, and other purgatives.
17
Physicians were often willing to help women “restore their periods,” and Americans generally looked the other way when single women, anxious to avoid the dis- grace of an illegitimate child, resorted to abortion. Only abortions after quickening were legally punishable, and even such cases were always difficult to prosecute.

But from the 1830s and 1840s onward, some states—for example, New York, Connecticut, Missouri, Illinois—began to enact more strin- gent antiabortion legislation and to question the distinction between the prequickening and the postquickening fetus. Did life begin at con- ception or at the moment of quickening? If life began at conception, then it was a crime for a woman to voluntarily abort at any time during her pregnancy. But if life began only at quickening, then it was not a crime to induce abortion before fetal movement was felt. As late as 1888, a Boston physician concluded that there was considerable confu- sion over whether “destruction of the infant” before quickening was a common law offense.
18

Between 1860 and 1880, more than forty antiabortion laws were passed, some in states that had no prior ban on abortion. The antiabor- tion legislation relied on the support of medical doctors concerned with the increased incidence of abortion and the dangerous presence of quacks in the field. But there was another, equally pressing concern. After 1840, it became increasingly apparent that abortion was no longer confined to desperate single women. A high proportion of those obtaining abortions were “married, native-born, Protestant women, fre- quently of middle- or upper-class status.”
19
As legal historian Lawrence

M. Friedman has pointed out, it went against the ideology of sacred motherhood to countenance abortion for married women, especially if they were white and middle class.
20
Antiabortion activists condemned the “unnatural” woman who got rid of her offspring and blamed abor- tion for the decreasing birthrate of American-born, white children.

Doctors contributing to the midcentury repression of abortion fired off numerous salvos to their medical journals, expressing dismay that abortions were sought after by “married women, who have no apology for concealment, and who only desire to rid themselves of the prospec- tive cares of maternity” (
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
, 1854).
21
During the mid-1850s, the leading antiabortion crusader, Dr. Horatio Storer, went about gathering data on abortion, stillbirths, and maternal deaths from his medical colleagues. One of them wrote from the Min- nesota Territory that “the practice of producing abortion is frequently resorted to in our vicinity and it is not infrequent for married women of high social position to apply for medicines which will produce abor- tion”—medicines they often obtained from “Regular physicians.”
22
Armed with this information, Storer succeeded in persuading the American Medical Association to condemn abortion on the grounds that it was medically dangerous.

Despite the condemnation of abortion by the AMA, numerous physi- cians around the country continued to perform them, even after they were made illegal. In 1888, the
Chicago Times
exposé of abortion in the Windy City, home of the American Medical Association, documented the willingness of many doctors to help both married and unmarried women terminate a pregnancy.
23
The
Times
investigative report was a great embarrassment to the AMA, which had initiated the campaign to criminalize abortion, yet could not prevent its own members from making them available to women.

One of the findings of the
Times
report was that the abortion trade was not limited to the unwed. Wives from the middle and upper classes patronized abortionists more than lower-class single women, facts con- firmed by the physicians themselves. One of them, Dr. Odelia Blinn, recalled that the vast majority of women who had asked her for an abortion were married. Unlike those who criticized such women for avoiding their wifely duties and for shamelessly committing a great evil, Dr. Blinn turned her criticism to the husband, the one who shared equal, if not greater, responsibility for the wife’s pregnancy in the first place.

The use of abortion as a means of family limitation was, by the turn of the century, what one historian has called “an open secret.”
24
That it was not confined to wealthy “society women” was apparent from the case of Frances Collins. As Leslie Reagan tells the story in
When Abor- tion Was a Crime,
Mrs. Collins was a working-class, married mother of two children. In April 1920, at the age of thirty-four, she went to a cer- tain Dr. Warner’s office in Chicago to have “her womb opened up.” The doctor inserted an instrument into her womb, and she returned home, where she complained to her husband that she was “unwell.” Later she became sick with vaginal bleeding, chills, and vomiting, and failed to improve, despite the ministrations of Dr. Warner, who treated her at home. By the end of April, Mrs. Collins was hospitalized by another doctor, the one who had delivered her two children and had advised her against procuring abortions. Shortly thereafter she died. Mr. and Mrs. Collins, like many other working-class families, had simply accepted abortion as a matter-of-fact method of preventing the birth of another child, the last time with tragic results.
25

MARGARET SANGER AND

THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT

In 1869, a twenty-one-year old woman named Anne Purcell married Michael Higgins in the state of New York. Both came from working- class, Irish-immigrant families, and though they were both nominally Catholic, only Anne was a believer. This may have accounted for her refusal to use any form of contraception, which was obtainable in her day, but specifically banned by Catholic doctrine. Anne Purcell was to have eleven children and to die, exhausted and consumptive, in 1899.

One of these children was Margaret Sanger.
26

The memory of her mother was undoubtedly a major factor in Mar- garet Sanger’s work to make contraception legal and available to mar- ried women. Trained as a nurse and married in 1902 at the age of twenty-three to a young architect, Sanger limited her own progeny to three children during a period of eight years. When her family moved from Hastings, New York, to the city in 1910, she took up work as a part-time nurse in the immigrant districts of New York’s Lower East Side. The plight of women who, like her mother, wore themselves out with continuous childbirth awakened her social conscience.

She was particularly moved at the sight of women with shawls over their heads lining up outside the office of a five-dollar abortionist, and even more so at the sight of the patients she nursed after the complica- tions of an illegal abortion. One in particular, Sadie Sachs, remained in her memory for half a century as the archetypal immigrant wife who died from septicemia following a self-induced abortion. This woman had been told by her physician that the only reliable contraceptive was to have her husband “sleep on the roof.”

By 1911 Sanger was offering public lectures on sexuality and repro- duction under the auspices of the Socialist Party, and in 1912 she began a weekly column called “What Every Girl Should Know” for the Socialist newspaper
The Call
. In it she discussed such daring subjects as menstruation, masturbation, pregnancy, contraception, and abor- tion— columns that provoked an outpouring of heated responses (both negative and positive) from
The Call
’s readership. Her article on vene- real disease brought her into direct confrontation with her antagonist and nemesis, Anthony Comstock, who outlawed her column in 1913. Comstock’s efforts to turn back the tide of freer sexual information and practices were destined to failure, but he and his like undeniably slowed its progress.

From this point on, Sanger was often in conflict with the law. Her arrests, flights from justice, trials, fines, and imprisonments were the subject of both public outrage and mounting support. When she was tried in 1917 for distributing birth control information and devices to immigrant women from a clinic she had established in a Brooklyn storefront, thirty of her clients were subpoenaed and came to the court- room with numerous babies in tow, presumably to indicate their need for family limitation. Found guilty and given the choice of a $5,000 fine

or thirty days in prison, Sanger chose the latter.

The saga of her trial continued into January 1918, when, in response to an appeal, her original conviction was upheld under the state’s obscenity law. However, the judge allowed that contraception could be used to prevent venereal disease, and for other broadly defined medical purposes. This interpretation would allow Sanger and other birth con- trol advocates some leeway in the decades to come.

Sanger’s marriage did not survive the turmoil of those early, strife- filled years. Unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the nineteenth century, Sanger was not about to raise a brood of children, support a financially failing husband from the revenues of her lectures and publications, and remain sexually “pure.” The times were different, and they were heady indeed for a perky woman of Irish extraction, drawn to left-wing poli- tics and the free-love circles of American and European bohemia. Suf- fice it to say that her lovers included such distinguished figures as the sexologist Havelock Ellis and the writer H. G. Wells, both of whom added to her intellectual capital. Ellis wrote an introduction to her first book,
Woman and the New Race,
and Wells, an introduction to the one that followed,
The Pivot of Civilization
. Together the two books sold more than a half million copies during the 1920s. In these and other works, Sanger argued not only for birth control as an indispensable right for married women, but also for the new sexual ethics that were gaining ground in the twenties. Free to control the number of her chil- dren, a wife would presumably be more able to enter into public life and help solve the pressing problems of war, poverty, and class conflict. While Sanger’s broad hopes for humankind are still to be realized, she left her personal mark on history as the founder of the birth control movement in America.

Despite ongoing opposition, the movement found many allies in unlikely places, including some of the more progressive religions. In 1930, the bishops of the Anglican church issued from London a care- fully worded statement condoning the use of artificial contraception within marriage when spouses felt a moral obligation to limit parent- hood. A year later, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, chaired by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and representing some 22 million Protestants, formally endorsed birth control on med- ical and economic grounds. Echoing words that had been penned fifty years earlier, birth control was seen as protection for the health of

women and children and as a deterrent to poverty and overpopulation. But this view was not accepted unanimously among all American Protestant sects; conservative members, including some Methodists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans, turned their backs on it and did not reverse their position until the 1950s.

The Catholic church continued to oppose all forms of contraception. In his 1930 encyclical
Casti Conubii
(Of Chaste Marriage), Pope Pius XI declared that any human effort that deprived marriage “of its natural power of procreating life, violates the law of God and nature, and those who do such a thing are stained by a grave and mortal flaw.” Yet in one way, the encyclical clarified centuries of confusion over intercourse between spouses; it stated explicitly that marital sex bears “no taint of evil.” While emphatically upholding procreation as the primary pur- pose of sex and emphatically condemning the use of contraception, the pope allowed for the “secondary ends” of marriage in “mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence.” In this vein, the pope also recognized the right of married couples to continue sexual relations after menopause.