Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T01:27:09.432Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Right to Ourselves: Women's Suffrage and the Birth Control Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

Heather Munro Prescott  and
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women's rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women's rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the vote for white women), would then grapple with competing goals of restrictive racist and eugenic arguments for contraception alongside the emphasis on achieving emancipation for all women.

Keywords

Birth controlreproductionsuffragewomen's rights
Type
Special Issue: The Nineteenth Amendment at 100
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 542 - 558
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

In the original online version of this article, the authors' affiliation headings were omitted. They have been added above and an erratum has been published.

References

Notes

1 Quoted in Klepp, Susan E., Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions, 91, 97.

3 Morris, Celia, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Ginzberg, Lori D., “‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder’: Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought,” American Quarterly 46 (June 1994): 195–226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Wright, Frances, Course of Popular Lectures, as Delivered by Frances Wright (New York: Free Enquirer, 1829)Google Scholar.

5 Owen, Robert Dale, Moral Physiology; or, A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question (New York, 1830)Google Scholar.

6 Quoted in Ginzberg, “‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder,’” 196, 208.

7 For more on the connections between abolitionism and women's rights, and the leadership of Black women abolitionists, see Faulkner, Carol, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isenberg, Nancy, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Jeffrey, Julie Roy, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Pierson, Michael D., Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Sinha, Manisha, “The Woman Question,” in The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 266–98Google Scholar; Yee, Shirley J., Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Yellin, Jean Fagan and Van Horne, John C., eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 121Google Scholar. See also Passet, Joanne E., Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Quoted in Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L., Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 7Google Scholar.

10 Gove, Mary S., Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology (Boston: Saxton & Peirce, 1842), 271Google Scholar.

11 Quoted in Leach, William, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 83Google Scholar.

12 Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 11–44.

13 Nichols, Mary Gove, Mary Lyndon; or, Revelations of a Life (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855), 382Google Scholar.

14 Quoted in Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless, 185–86.

15 Quoted in Cohen, Patricia Cline, “The ‘Anti-Marriage Theory’ of Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols: A Radical Critique of Monogamy in the 1850s,” Journal of the Early Republic 34 (Spring 2014), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Leach, William, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 82Google Scholar.

17 Proceedings of the National Women's Rights Convention, held at Cleveland, Ohio, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, October 5th, 6th, and 7th, 1853 (Cleveland, OH: Gray, Beardsley, Spear & Co., 1854), 41, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbnawsa.n8288/?sp=40 (accessed June 25, 2020).

18 Frisken, Amanda, Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 28–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Woodhull, Victoria C., “And the Truth Shall Make You Free, speech, Steinway Hall, November 20, 1871” in The Women's Suffrage Movement, ed. Wagner, Sally Roesch (New York: Penguin Books, 2019), 269–71Google Scholar.

20 Frisken, Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution, 20.

21 Frisken, Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution, 47–49, 66.

22 Susan Marie Rensing, “Feminist Eugenics in America: From Free Love to Birth Control, 1880—1930” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2006), 44. See also Spurlock, John C., Free Love: Marriage and Middle Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York: New York University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

23 For more on how African American activists reshaped understandings of rights and citizenship in the nineteenth century, see Jones, Martha S., Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foner, Eric, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)Google Scholar; Liette Gidlow, “The Sequel: The Fifteenth Amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment, and Southern Black Women's Struggle to Vote, 1890s–1920s,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (July 2018); and Rosen, Hannah, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 On the specific demands of the women's movement beyond the vote, including labor rights, see DuBois, Ellen Carol, Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Hartog, Hendrik, Mrs. Packard on Dependency (Madison, WI: Legal History Program, Institute for Legal Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, 1988)Google Scholar; Kerber, Linda K., No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998)Google Scholar; Stanley, Amy Dru, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stanley, Amy Dru, “Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation,” The Journal of American History 75 (Sept. 1988): 471–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Woloch, Nancy, A Class By Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s–1990s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As these historians note, many of these reformers were focused on emphasizing sexual difference and the value of the female sex in marriage and society in order to gain more rights.

25 Quoted in DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women's Rights, 103.

26 Mathilda Joslyn Gage, “Woman, Church and State” in Wagner, The Women's Suffrage Movement, 17–18.

27 Gage, Matilda Joslyn, “On the Right Of Habeas Corpus,” National Citizen and Ballot Box, vol. 1, no. 8, Nov. 1876, 1–4Google Scholar (emphasis in original).

28 Matilda Joslyn Gage, “Is Woman Her Own?” The Revolution, Apr. 9, 1868, 215–16.

29 Besant, Annie, The Law of Population: Its Consequences and Its Bearing Upon Human Conduct and Morals (New York: Asa K. Butts, 1878)Google Scholar.

30 Mathilda Joslyn Gage, “Our Book Table,” National Citizen and Ballot Box, vol. 3, no. 8, Nov. 1878, pp. 1–4.

31 Both past and forthcoming scholarly work on the suffrage movement has emphasized the ways in which white suffragists shaped their demand for the vote based on racist and exclusionary arguments, and how Black suffragists and other suffragists of color responded to those challenges. See Cahill, Cathleen D., Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020)Google Scholar; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Feimster, Crystal N., Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Jones, Martha, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jones, Martha S., Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (New York: Basic Books, 2020)Google Scholar; Kern, Kathi, Mrs. Stanton's Bible (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Lange, Allison K., Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newman, Louise Michele, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Tetrault, Lisa, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

32 Brammer, Leila R., Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 16Google Scholar.

33 Woman's Journal, Nov. 24, 1888.

34 For a groundbreaking history on the relationship between evolutionary theory and late nineteenth-century feminism, see Hamlin, Kimberly A., From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Rensing, “Feminist Eugenics in America”; and Russett, Cynthia Eagle, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

35 Blatch, Harriot Stanton, “Lecture on Voluntary Motherhood” in Transactions of the National Council of Women of the United States, Assembled in Washington, D.C., February 22 to 25, 1891, ed. Avery, Rachel Foster (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1891), 280Google Scholar.

36 Blatch, “Lecture on Voluntary Motherhood,” 282–84. For more on the link between women's marital and financial independence, see DuBois, Ellen Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution; Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract; and VanBurkleo, Sandra F., Belonging to the World: Women's Rights and American Constitutional Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

37 Werbel, Amy, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 68–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Beisel, Nicola, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)Google Scholar; Puglionesi, Alicia, “‘Your Whole Effort Has Been to Create Desire: Reproducing Knowledge and Evading Censorship in the Nineteenth-Century Subscription Press,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89 (Fall 2015): 463–90CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Wheeler, Leigh Ann, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Tone, Andrea, “Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 87 (September 2000), 435–59CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. See also Tone, Andrea, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001)Google Scholar.

39 Stockham, Alice Bunker, Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (Chicago, IL: Alice B. Stockham & Co., 1888), 154Google Scholar.

40 Silberman, Marsha, “The Perfect Storm: Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago Sex Radicals: Moses Harman, Ida Craddock, Alice Stockham and the Comstock Obscenity Laws,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 102 (Fall–Winter 2009), 324–67Google Scholar.

41 “Letter of Support for Moses Harman by Alice Stone Blackwell, associate editor of the Woman's Journal, 1894” in Wagner, ed., The Women's Suffrage Movement, 373.

42 “The Post Office vs Free Speech,” Woman's Journal, Aug. 12, 1904, 126.

43 Alice Stone Blackwell, “Moses Harman,” Woman's Journal, Feb. 12, 1910, 28.

44 “‘Free Love’ Charge Held Ridiculous,” New York Times, Feb. 15, 1914. See also “Feminism and Suffrage,” clipping, box 5, folder 40, Madeline McDowell Breckinridge Papers, 1867–1923, no. 52M3, Special Collections, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY.

45 Margaret Sanger, “Dirt, Smell and Sweat,” New York Call, Dec. 24, 1911, 15.

46 Birth Control Review, Feb. 1917 (emphasis in original).

47 For more on Mary Ware Dennett, see Chen, Constance M., “The Sex Side of Life”: Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education (New York: The New Press, 1997)Google Scholar, Craig, John M., “‘The Sex Side of Life’: The Obscenity Case of Mary Ware Dennett,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 15 (Jan. 1995): 145–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, Lauren MacIvor, “The Politics of Female Pain: Women's Citizenship, Twilight Sleep and the Early Birth Control Movement,” Medical Humanities 45 (Mar. 2019): 67–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weinrib, Laura M., “The Sex Side of Civil Liberties: United States v. Dennett and the Changing Face of Free Speech,” Law and History Review 30 (May 2012): 325–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Mary Ware Dennett to Anna Howard Shaw, Sept. 1, 1914, folder 214, Mary Ware Dennett Papers, 1874–1944, collection MC 392, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Dennett Papers).

49 “An Endorsement of Birth Control,” National Birth Control League, microfilm M-138, part B, Dennett Papers.

50 Mary Ware Dennett to Lucy Burns, Nov. 17, 1917, folder 223, Dennett Papers (emphasis in original).

51 Ross, Loretta J., “African-American Women and Abortion” in Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000, ed. Solinger, Rickie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 4Google Scholar.

52 Quoted in Terborg-Penn, 70.

53 Birth Control Review, Jan. 1918, reprinted in Eastman, Crystal, On Women and Revolution, ed. Cook, Blanche Wiesen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 46–49Google Scholar. See also Law, Sylvia, “Crystal Eastman: Organizer for Women's Rights, Peace, and Civil Liberties in the 1910s,” Valparaiso University Law Review 28 (July 2011): 1305–26Google Scholar.

54 Cott, Nancy F., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 68Google Scholar.

55 “Feminism and birth control,” Equal Rights 14, no. 28, Aug. 20, 1927, 220.

56 Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 142.

57 Mary Ware Dennett to Nina D. Hess, Apr. 26, 1921, series 3, reel 15, Women's Studies Manuscript Collection, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

58 Undated report, Catharine Waugh McCulloch Papers, series VI of the Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, 1869–1945, collection A-68, microfilm M-133, reels E13–25, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

59 Quoted in Gordon, Linda, Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 162Google Scholar.

60 Quoted in McCann, Carole R., Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 117Google Scholar.

61 Mrs. Leonard D. Adkins to Mrs. Day, July 21, 1928, Annie Gertrude Webb Porritt Papers, collection SSC-MS-00123, Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History, Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, MA. Also quoted in Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 91.

62 Gordon, Moral Property of Women, 205. An extensive literature describes this transformation, illustrating how women's clubs and the ABCL, working alongside eugenicists, bundled birth control activism together with calls for restrictive social hygiene and eugenic measures. These groups lobbied for a successful and widespread legal program of state sterilization initiatives for “unfit” populations that lasted well into the late twentieth century. See Carlson, Elof Axel, “The Hoosier Connection: Compulsory Sterilization as Moral Hygiene” in A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, ed. Lombardo, Paul A. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Kline, Wendy, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Kluchin, Rebecca M., Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Larson, Edward J., “‘In The Finest, Most Womanly Way’: Women in the Southern Eugenics Movement,” American Journal of Legal History 39 (Apr. 1995): 119–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rensing, “Feminist Eugenics in America”; Schoen, Johanna, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Ziegler, Mary, “Eugenic Feminism: Mental Hygiene, the Women's Movement, and the Campaign for Eugenic Legal Reform, 1900–1935,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 36 (Winter 2008)Google Scholar.