In antebellum America, nothing was more celebrated in popular discourse than the role of mothers. In the nineteenth-century equivalent of the “mommy blog,” ladies’ magazine ran articles that extolled the moral virtues of the large family, the daily and weekly routines of housework and childcare, and the responsibilities of True Womanhood. “How entire and perfect is this dominion over the unformed character of your infant” crowed Ladies Magazine to its female readers in 1838. Writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child declared that it was mothers “on whose intelligence and discretion the safety and prosperity of our nation so much depend.”
But for all the praise heaped on Civil War-era women for their roles as mothers, they also spent an awful lot of time trying to not become one.
At first, the phrase “nineteenth-century birth control” may seem like an oxymoron. After all, “the Pill” wasn’t invented until the 1950s and not approved for use in the United States until 1960. And even then, it was still illegal. It’s only in the past thirty years or so that American women and their partners have such a wide choice in safe, legal contraceptive technologies. But as the present controversies over reproductive technology show no sign of abating, it’s worth taking a look back to see where we’ve come from to help frame and contextualize these debates going forward.
And rest assured – Victorian Americans, like us, spent a lot of time thinking about how to not get pregnant.
As one editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association put it later in the nineteenth century, “We do not exaggerate: everyone that knows anything of American society in cities (at least) knows that there are very few married people that do not or have not discussed methods of preventing conception, and the majority of physicians will have no difficulty in remembering instances in which they have been consulted on this subject.”
Despite the fact that religious, medical, and political organizations issued dire warnings to the public on the moral and physical dangers of contraceptives and abortion, the nineteenth century American public stubbornly insisted on implementing family planning methods – and in ways that were widespread enough to have both a significant impact on the population and on the public conversations surrounding the morality and social value of birth control.