Divorce and Reproductive Rights

Stanton and Anthony argued that existing family laws—even beyond prop­erty rights over labor—had harmful economic consequences for women. Restrictions on divorce left women vulnerable to physical abuse.

The incidence of marital separation (including desertion) increased over the course of the nineteenth century and Western states, magnets for many men who had left families behind, liberalized their divorce laws. While the overall divorce rate remained low, it increased dramatically after the Civil War, prompting many Eastern states to impose more restrictive rules. But as divorce became more common it also became less stigmatizing. Many pundits linked the rising divorce rate to the emancipation of women and some, at least, argued that the association between the two was a healthy one.⁵⁰

Divorce was a divisive issue for nineteenth-century feminists, however, because it hinted at female pursuit of selfish pleasure. The distinctive threat of female lust lay in the prospect of indulging romantic love. A woman who could not restrain her passionate impulses until they were sanctified by legal and religious approval could not be trusted to subordinate her own interests to those of others. Hence, a woman who would abandon her legal husband and his offspring to attach herself to another man was considered the bane of polite society. The slogan ‘‘free love'' has been described as the ‘‘single most odious epithet that one could attach to a respectable citizen of the post-Civil War era.''⁵¹ Even by the end of the twentieth century, it retained vulgar connotations, which may help explain why many historians have insisted that the free love melodrama remained peripheral to the larger women's movement.⁵²

In the eyes of moderates like Lucy Stone, advocating freedom to divorce was like calling turnabout fair play.

Victoria Woodhull, spiritualist, faith-healer, con-artist, and stockbroker represented the opposite extreme. With help from the wealthy Commodore Vanderbilt, also a spiritualist, Victoria and her sister Tennessee Claflin struck it rich on the stock market. They used the pages of their newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, to endorse the cause of women, workers, and free love. Victoria famously declared, ‘‘Free love will be the religion of the future. Yes! I am a free lover. I have an inalienable constitutional right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love everyday if I please!''⁵³ Karl Marx, reading press accounts in London, was sufficiently horrified to insist on Victoria's expulsion from the First International Workingman's Association.⁵⁴

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was, to all outward appearances, the embodi­ment of middle-class respectability. But she had a profound appreciation of the problem of domestic violence and a keen eye for the asymmetries of the marriage contract, which she interpreted in economic terms as a set of property rights and contractual restrictions. As early as i860, she wrote powerfully and persuasively on behalf of divorce law reform.⁵⁵ She observed that the liberalization of divorce laws had something in common with the liberalization of trade. ‘‘Laissez-faire with all my heart'', she wrote, explaining that unhappy marriages should be ended.⁵⁶

Stanton's advocacy of birth control within marriage—primarily in the form of abstinence, was also couched in political and economic language. Herself the mother of seven children, Stanton invoked the concept of self­ownership that John Locke had claimed for men: A woman's body should be her private property.

Marital abstinence, along with use of folk methods of contraception such as withdrawal and douching, contributed to a dramatic decline in completed fertility rates in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century, from eight to about three children per woman.⁵⁷ Many forces favored sexual self­control. The growth of public education, the declining value of young children’s labor, and the increasing independence of elder children—combined with a desire to ensure the prosperity of the next generation—increased awareness of the costs of large families. Late nineteenth-century medical literature compared the virtues of saving sperm to saving money—investments that would pay off at a future date.⁵⁸

Evangelical Protestantism found a ready audience among those shaken by the new economic order. Religious virtue was becoming harder to sell, in part because men were under less obligation to buy. Those marketing a new religious persuasion reached out to women. Evangelical preachers, uncom­fortable with doctrines emphasizing Eve’s original sin and women’s suscep­tibility to lust, began to suggest that women were actually more predisposed to virtue than men. The price of virtue for most women, however, was a kind of passionlessness that could explain their relative immunity from temptation.⁵⁹

Men, on the other hand, enjoyed new sexual freedoms. All the forces that drew youth away from home—urban migration, Westernization, and mili­tary conscription—expanded the market for paid sexual services. In 1858, the physician William Sanger published his History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes and Effects Throughout the World, with tantalizing descriptions of Greek and Roman practices.

The book also included the results of a survey of several thousand prostitutes in New York City, reporting that nearly half claimed to have been infected with syphilis.⁶⁰ Like most physicians, Sanger strongly favored French-style regula­tion. In the United States, however, regulatory efforts met especially concerted opposition. Women’s rights advocates linked arms both with religious groups who feared that Parisian values would undermine American morals and with civil libertarians who opposed unwarranted search and seizure. This rather unexpected alliance effectively blocked most efforts to regulate and medicalize prostitution (including campaigns in New York in 1867 and Chicago in 1871).⁶¹ The resulting uncertainties reduced customer demand.

A true libertarian would argue that women should have the right to freely sell their sexual services. Of course, he would also suggest that men and women should have the individual right to sell themselves into slavery. Stanton seized on the parallel, and used her opposition to prostitution to illustrate her larger concerns about gendered self-interest: ‘‘Just as slavery in the South, with its lessons of obedience, degraded every black man in the Northern States, so does an accepted system of prostitution, with its lessons of subjection and self-sacrifice, degrade the ideal of womanhood everywhere.”⁶²