The Woman Rebel:
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Starting in the 1830s, a state-by-state drive to prohibit abortion developed and was largely successful by 1880. It was spurred by a backlash against the womens rights movement that reflected anxieties about women deserting their conventional position as mothers, and by professionalizing physicians eager to restrict their competition from “irregular” practitioners, many of them offering abortion services. Then in 1873 all birth-control information was specifically included within the definition of the obscene and was therefore barred from interstate commerce by the federal Comstock Act. Nevertheless the steady decline of the U.S. birthrate in the nineteenth century suggests that some traditional birth-control methods were widely used despite legal prohibition, notably, abortion, coitus interrupts, and douches.
Stronger in the United States were birth-control programs rooted in antebellum reform movements, both secular and religious. They advocated birth control to control population, to prevent the spread of hereditary disease, to improve the hereditary “stock” (early versions of eugenics), to liberate women from reproductive drudgery, and sometimes to permit greater sexual freedom. In the 1820s, neo-Malthusian ideas were integrated into the experimental socialism associated with Robert Dale Owen and feminist Frances Wright. These secular socialists were soon joined by religious radicals who also promoted birth control, but in different forms. The Second Great Awakening
had given rise to a “perfectionist” mode of thought–heretical in relation to orthodox forms of Protestantism because it emphasized the possibility of perfecting earthly life. Also committed to improving womens condition and public health generally, these religious socialists rejected contraception as artificial and instead tried to effect birth control by changing the nature of sexual activity itself. For example, the Oneida community in the 1840s, ruled autocratically by John Humphrey Noyes, practiced male continence, a regimen in which men refrained from ejaculation altogether, and reproductive sex was practiced only by couples appointed by Noyes for the purpose of breeding superior people. He and his supporters believed that male continence not only built self-discipline but heightened sexual pleasure. 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, she believed, intensified and prolonged pleasure.
In the first decades of the twentieth century a renewed birth-control movement arose among feminists associated particularly with the Socialist party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and took a militant turn in demanding the legalization of contraception. As urban radicals grew more daring sexually, they discovered the use of vaginal diaphragms in Europe. Emma Goldman of the IWW and Margaret Sanger of the Socialist party visited clinics in Holland where women were fitted with diaphragms. When these two women adopted civil disobedience as a means of dramatizing the issue in the United States, distributing prohibited leaflets about contraception and opening illegal
birth-control clinics, the Left leadership remained uninterested, but rank-and-file women responded with enthusiasm. Between 1914 and 1918 birth-control leagues developed in every major city of the United States. When these activists offered contraceptive information and services, they were deluged with clients. When they were arrested, their political defenses publicized contraception and created an even more avid demand for it.
In the late 1960s the renewed womens liberation movement again changed the terms of understanding of reproduction-control politics. The womens movement viewed birth control as part of an overall campaign for womens self-determination and began to distinguish that goal from those of family planning or population control. This orientation was influenced by the introduction of birth-control pills in 1960, which were mass-marketed so successfully that within a year 1 million women in the United States were using them. The “pill” had a twofold effect: its availability accustomed a generation of women to sex without fear of reproduction, and feminist exposure of its health dangers and discomforts, some of them hidden by the great pharmaceutical companies that were reaping vast profits from this new market, decreased womens trust in professionals and sparked a powerful womens health movement.
The feminist campaign coalesced around the issue of abortion. The campaign for legal abortion in the 1960s began not with feminists but with civil libertarians and physicians, and the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 continued the tradition of defending physicians discretion. The womens movement began to insist on a broader program, supporting reproductive self-determination and criticizing forced sterilization, unsafe contraception, and unnecessary hysterectomies and cesarean sections.
This movement had considerable impact, forcing governments to adopt regulations for informed consent in sterilization procedures, for example.
In response a widespread antiabortion movement arose, organized first by the Catholic hierarchy but soon becoming more ecumenical and receiving support notably from fundamentalist Protestants. It remains a largely religious movement. Unlike the nineteenth-century antiabortion movement, which spoke explicitly of prohibiting abortion in order to enforce womens domesticity, the late-twentieth-century movement, known by the slogan “right-to-life,” defined itself as defending the rights of fetuses?
Document 1
Margaret Sanger burst on the scene in 1914 with the publication of the first issue of The Woman Rebel. The tabloid described itself as “A Monthly Paper of Militant Thought.” Testimony to the editors radical political