Misogyny, Sexism, and Shaming the Female Body: Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America by Janet Farrell Brodie

This week we read Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America by Janet Farrell Brodie.  Although the book is only partially focused on the syllabus’s broader topic of “Misogyny, Sexism, and Shaming the Female Body,” I wanted to read it for specific, personal reasons: Professor Brodie was my advisor while I was working on my master’s degree, yet I had never read this book.  While its focus may be a more distant past than several of the books we have read thus far, I believe it still offers us insights into important issues facing out country today.

Brodie’s thesis connects the reader to debates surrounding control of women’s bodies, observing that contraception and abortion had been an important yet discrete part of family planning for the first 200 years of the country’s history. However, during the nineteenth century its increasing presence in advertisements and public forums made social purity advocates uncomfortable, and as a result they worked to reframe birth control and abortion as illegitimate and dangerous. Brodie is able to make these arguments by examining an extensive range of sources including advice booklets and pamphlets, medical journals of the era, middle-class women’s personal papers, and corporate records for medical supply companies (for a copy of my notes, see here). These sources allow Brodie to conclude that middle-class families did not use abstinence as a method of birth control, and instead tried a variety of methods to control reproductive health.

Having heard discussions about the book in the past I know that many readers find the book’s first chapter particularly enlightening.  While conducting research, Brodie came across Mary Poor’s diary in which Poor marked every day she had intercourse with her husband. Brodie then examined Poor’s letters and other diary entries to explore her attitudes towards reproductive control, arguing that the family relied on several strategies including the rhythm method, douching, and even self-induced miscarriage in an effort to achieve control over pregnancies. While these are impressive individual findings, Brodie goes further to analyze the reasons why Poor wanted to control her fertility – at various points Mary’s health, the family’s economic standing, and the existing size of her family factored into her decision-making. While Mary Poor provides an important individual source, Brodie also observes that other women would have faced these same dilemmas and found alternative conclusions for a variety of reasons since health, economic, and family considerations touched on larger financial, psychological, moral, and medical dilemmas of the time.

Women like Mary Poor learned about birth control and abortion through a growing mass media.  During the 1830s and 1840s, American marketing techniques and the popular press expanded rapidly.  This led to a marked increase in pamphlets that explained new medical science surrounding douching and the rhythm method.  Although these authors did not truly understand human biology and many of the methods they proposed are seen as ineffective today, by the standards of the era these pamphlets did actually provide better birth control advice than alternatives.  For example, these pamphlets briefly discussed the practice of coitus interruptus, which was widely practiced but began to fall off when doctors of the era worried about potential brain problems and women found it difficult to trust their partner to perform it correctly.  However, pamphlets and lectures also discussed douching as a contraceptive technique, which many women embraced as an opportunity to claim control over their reproductive health for themselves.  By the 1850s, newspapers advertised additional options including vaginal sponges and abortion clinics that further expanded women’s ability to control their pregnancy and health.

Traveling lecturers sold contraceptive products after their speeches in towns across the country, while local drugstores also sold these goods long after the speakers had left. For those unable or unwilling to discuss such personal purchases in public, advertisements encouraged readers to purchase birth control and abortion products by mail to remain discreet.  As nineteenth-century marketers grew increasingly savvy, they realized that their customers were often women who seemed more comfortable discussing reproductive health with other women, opening a space for women to serve as lecturers and salespeople. Lecturers often connected a variety of ideas together – they wanted to sell their products but they also attempted to spread medical knowledge, both of which they often connected to a broader message of empowering women and raising healthier and happier children.

In response to this disruptive message doctors and social purity reformers worked to restrict control over reproduction in the second half of the nineteenth century. A small group of doctors sought to improve the professionalization of medicine and argued that abortions and contraception were medically dangerous since men and women with professional training but without a formal medical degree often administered them. These reformers used a language that framed women as easily corruptible, innocent, and naïve; while demeaning this language fit the many people’s sensibilities during the era and allowed these reformers to argue that women should not have access to something so dangerous.  Although abortions prior to any period of fetal movement had been legal across the United States since the colonial era, states began to make these procedures illegal in the 1860s.  In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Law despite its vagueness, making it illegal to send “obscene” literature through the mail.  The law defined contraceptive literature and products as obscene, so it effectively eliminated their major distribution network. By the end of the century, the limited amount of literature that was available was unreliable and abortion’s illegal nature meant it was expensive and far more dangerous than it had been decades earlier, essentially fulfilling the faulty ideas medical doctors had built their arguments on decades earlier.

Although focusing our attention more than 100 years in the past, Brodie’s work seems increasingly relevant today.  Her research demonstrates that abstinence-based sexual education programs proposed by the Trump administration would not even fit an era many Americans imagine as restrictively prudish. It also suggests that women have always sought some form of birth control (even when they were reluctant to speak on it), and that efforts to limit access to it are out of touch with the needs of the broader public.  Brodie’s research also suggests that the idea women should face “some form of punishment” for having an abortion is particularly problematic (and far outside mainstream opinion); even making abortion illegal would not eliminate demand, which history has shown to be strong. Ultimately, the distant nineteenth century provides ample evidence that there are many reasons why women seek control over their reproductive health, and thus why the Trump administration’s policies undermine broader efforts to secure equality for women in American society.