The Improper Arts
Moral considerations ruled other ways of reducing fertility out of order, such as a ‘‘promiscuous intercourse which prevents the birth of children’’.28 Malthus tacitly conceded that delayed marriage might encourage prostitu- tion.29 But he held the ‘‘vicious practices’’ and ‘‘improper arts’’ of contraception to be economically undesirable as well as immoral, tantamount to prostitution.30 Like Mandeville, Malthus asserted that God had imbued men with lust to protect them from sloth, and any human effort to subvert this causality was doomed to failure.
Other political economists like McCulloch agreed; the law of population was part of a divine plan to encourage economic growth.31 In an appendix to the 1817 edition of the Essay, Malthus re-stated his concerns:I should always particularly reprobate any artificial or unnatural modes of checking population, both on account of their immorality and their tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry. If it were possible for each married couple to limit by a wish the number of their children, there is certainly reason to fear that the indolence of the human race would be very greatly increased, and that neither the population of individual countries nor of the whole earth would ever reach its natural and full extent. But the restraints I have recommended are quite of a different character. They are not only pointed out by reason and sanctioned by religion, but tend in the most marked manner to stimulate industry.32
Greed alone was insufficient to keep workers motivated. Lust was another necessary evil.
J. R. McCulloch seconded this opinion.33 But at least some of Malthus's contemporaries contested his reluctance to condone the improper arts. Bentham, who had long advocated contraception, became a fountainhead of support for it.34 Bentham's good friend, James Mill, circumspectly endorsed it as well.
In an article on ‘‘Colonies'' which he wrote for the supplement to the eighth edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, he alluded to the problem of population growth and commented that ‘‘If the superstitions of the nursery were discarded, and the principles of utility kept steadily in view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found.''35 In Elements of Political Economy, published in 1821, Mill grew slightly bolder, describing the salutory effects of prudence, ‘‘by which either marriages are sparingly contracted or care is taken that children, beyond a certain number, shall not be the fruit.''36 Apparently, this was considered a racy turn of phrase; David Ricardo felt that the allusions to procreation in Mill's Elements made it unsuitable for the schoolroom.37The most daring and, in retrospect, the most effective rebuttal to Malthus directly advocated contraception. In 1822, Frances Place, a successful tailor and autodidact committed to utilitarian principles, published Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population. A passionate advocate of social reform, he also believed, like James Mill, that rapid population growth was problematic. In a section of the Illustrations entitled ‘‘Means of Preventing the Numbers of Mankind from Increasing” he advocated political and contraceptive reforms in virtually the same breath. He called for a repeal of all laws against combinations of working men, restraining emigration, or restricting trade, commerce, and manufactures. He also called on married couples to prevent unwanted conceptions, a process that would reduce the supply of labor and drive wages up.
Those who really understand the cause of a redundant, unhappy, miserable, and considerably vicious population, and the means of preventing the redundancy, should clearly, freely, openly and fearlessly point out the means. It is ‘‘childish” to shrink from proposing or developing any means, however repugnant they may at first appear to be.38
Place conceded that such means might tempt a breach of chastity, but insisted that the problems arising from unwanted births would be worse.
A year later he followed through on his own exhortations, boldly publishing three versions of a handbill entitled ‘‘To the Married of Both Sexes”, describing the use of a vaginal sponge. These handbills were considered illegal as well as obscene. Among the men quietly arrested for distributing them was James Mill's son, the seventeen-year-old John Stuart Mill. The sins of youth were easily forgiven; Place himself suffered serious ostracism. Sadly, the advice he offered was neither effective nor safe. Natural sponge tends to fall apart, making it difficult to retrieve and conducive to infection. But the battle had been joined. Place became the mainspring of the contraceptive movement. Proponents of birth control came to be known as Neo-Malthusians.In the early nineteenth century virtually anyone willing to allude to birth control celebrated its implications for women. Wives could not practice moral restraint alone, especially since they lacked a legal right to refuse their husbands. Prevailing medical theories held that abstinence for women was unhealthy—they needed periodic doses of male seminal fluid. Francis Place penned a letter to Harriet Martineau warning that delayed marriages would injure women's health.39 Martineau herself, who never married and suffered long periods of invalidism, may have wondered at the possible connection.
The more radical enthusiasts of birth control proclaimed that it would end the sexual double standard, contributing to a paranoid fear that it would threaten chastity and motherhood itself. Even in France, a country tolerant of the improper arts, an early catechism for married people instructed husbands to ignore their wives' distaste for childbearing, condemning premature ejaculation, noncoital positions, and onanism as sins of lust.40 In the 1840s, some doctors praised the rhythm method over coitus interruptus because husbands could employ it without revealing its secrets to their 41 wives.
More commonly, birth control was maligned as a selfish indulgence. Godwin himself dismissed it in his long-awaited reply to Malthus, published in 1820. With his knack for describing women as mere auxiliaries to men he wrote:
It is one of the clearest duties of a citizen to give birth to his like, and bring offspring to the state. Without this he is hardly a citizen: his children and his wife are pledges he gives to the public for good behavior; they are his securities, that he will truly enter into the feeling of a common interest, and be desirous of perpetuating and increasing the immunities of his country from generation to generation.42
If men were always benevolent and dutiful, how could population growth ever be too fast or slow? Malthus was even more irritated than before, referring to Godwin's book as ‘‘the poorest and most old-womanish performance that has fallen from the pen of any writer of name.''43