Birth Control
The decline in fertility that animated these policy debates was enlivened by melodramas of repression and dissent in which risk-takers and troublemakers played an important role.
Middle-class advocates of birth control within marriage like Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes demanded permission for women to pursue their own self-interest in bed. In doing so, they carried the banner of liberal individualism much further than their male predecessors had ever dared.45Scholars differ on the extent to which feminists advanced the cause of birth control in Britain and elsewhere.46 But it seems indisputable that new information about contraception offered greater gains to women than to men, by offering them techniques that did not require the successful cooperation and self-control of their male partner. French advocates of contraception were particularly eloquent on the redemptive possibilities for enhancing women's sexual pleasure. Social critics like the anarchist Paul Robin were thrilled by the possibility that women could go ‘‘on strike” against the state and refuse to bear children until social conditions had improved.47
These attitudes help explain the repression of both contraceptive information and technology that intensified in Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth century. Most of this repression came from the top down, enforced by male elites anxious to defend female morality. In Britain the popular demand for contraceptive information was so great that efforts to legally suppress it simply publicized it further. The London obscenity trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh became the talk of the town in 1877. They escaped conviction on a legal technicality (other free-thinkers were not so lucky) but sales of their publication skyrocketed.48 Most liberal feminists were horrified and many socialists were dismissive.
But Annie Besant soon became a spokesperson for socialist feminism, denouncing retrograde comrades who believed that the birth control problem would go away after the revolution. As women became more educated and more economically independent, she argued (contra Marshall), they would refuse to serve as ‘‘mere nurses of children throughout the whole of their active life.”49In the United States, the so-called Comstock Law passed in 1873 made it illegal to ship any information or devices that could be used for preventing conception, which were defined as obscene, on either public or private freight carriers. The first application of the law came with the incarceration of the feminist activist Victoria Woodhull. After she published an article denouncing the sexual hypocrisy of a famous preacher, other material in the same issue of her weekly magazine was deemed obscene, and all copies were seized. The prosecution effectively ended her political career in the United States.50 The Comstock law was later used against the anarchist Emma Goldman as well.