I have been suggesting that Malthusian (and neo-Malthusian) doctrine developed historically within an ideological framework that assumed patriarchal control over women and women’s confinement to motherhood. It was this framework, as well as its repressive application to the poor, that gave the doctrine its conservative thrust, even though it contained an unmistakably progressive element as well. One group of historians interprets the cultural origins and implications of the new family/fertility ideology very differently, however, associating both with the rise of sexual "egalitarianism" and female "power" within the "modern family." Jean — Louis Flandrin argues that contraception (by which he means primarily coitus interruptus) arose in eighteenth-century France on a large scale because of the "construction of a new family morality." This morality involves an increase of sentiment and reciprocity in the relations between parents and children as well as husbands and wives, but its center is the introduction of a "courtly" tradition into conjugal relations beginning in the late seventeenth century, which effectively enhanced women’s power within marriage. As a result, women’s physical and health needs became a matter of greater common concern; the assumption of painful labor and death in childbirth as woman’s fate gave way to a desire to avert the risks of constant childbearing. Moreover, it became increasingly possible for women to avoid the iron dictum of the "conjugal due" (woman’s duty, according to church doctrine, not to deny her husband his sexual "rights"), either through feigned headaches or simply through the growing assumption that mutual consent ought to be the basis of sexuality between married couples as it was between lovers.60 The Enlightenment idea that sexual pleasure and procreation could be separated, that this was a specifically human capacity, became the basis for both women’s sexual autonomy and contraception in marriage. Hence the increase in abstinence and coitus interruptus as methods for controlling fertility. According to Flandrin’s reasoning, these methods involve a reduction of male sexual pleasure and therefore can only be "practiced when women were in a position to persuade men to practice [them]"; they necessarily involve an element of reciprocity and even female power in heterosexual relations.61
There is an important strength in Flandrin’s argument in that, unlike many of the more economically oriented theories of fertility change, it understands the situation and needs of women as central in constructing patterns of fertility behavior. It assumes that major declines in fertility based on conscious planning, while involving the cooperation of men, are probably initiated by women. Even coitus interruptus, which has conventionally been considered a "male method," can in this view be due as much to female "quick-mindedness" or self-assertion as to male courtesy.62 In an argument similar to Flandrin’s, Daniel Scott-Smith explains the declining birthrate throughout the nineteenth century in the United States in terms of what he calls "domestic feminism," a historical change whereby "the average woman experienced a great increase in power and autonomy within the family." This "new autonomy of women within the family" made possible "the power of the wife to persuade or coerce her husband into practicing birth control," mainly abstinence and withdrawal, and even gave her "sexual control" over her husband.63
Apart from their failure to cite any evidence of what women thought about birth control and sexuality (rather than the fragmentary literary voices of male authors of advice manuals and moral tracts), these arguments suffer from two major problems. First, to the extent that they describe a partial reality in women’s family and marital conditions, it is a reality that pertains almost exclusively to bourgeois or upper-class families, although they claim to be accounting for declines in fertility that were general rather than class specific. Second, even with regard to women of the bourgeoisie, the argument that their status and power increased within the family ignores their restriction to the family within bourgeois culture and the emergent capitalist economy, and the moral imperatives with which that status was hedged. Thus maternal duty becomes "power," sexual abstinence becomes "sexual control," and domestic confinement becomes "domestic feminism." Indeed, these authors ignore that a feminist ideology and movement arose in the first place because upper — and middle — class women had so little power, within the state and the economy and within the domestic sphere, and that their subordination in one was directly related to their subordination in the other. The glorification of maternity and domesticity that would become part of the culture and of the new republic had to do not so much with women’s empowerment as with their social control by church, state, and husbands. To understand that "feminism itself grew from the upward mobility that made small families more economical"64 is to say that feminism had a particular class base in the rising bourgeoisie. It is not to argue that the women of that class were "rising" in the same way as the men. The imperative toward smaller families was not only a sign of "upward mobility" of the class as a whole but a necessity dictated by the specific conditions of women.
Feminist scholarship shows that women’s position within the family, for women of all classes in early industrial France, England, and America, became increasingly defined by the primary and exclusive responsibilities of motherhood—not only the bearing but also the care and rearing of children 65 This fact more than any other would shape women’s needs and desires regarding fertility and the "demographic transition" that resulted—but differently for middle-class and for poor women. For neither group, however, does it make sense to draw a sharp distinction between "economic" and "cultural," or "moral," motives for limiting children. Rather, motherhood and domestic management were the economic functions of bourgeois wives, as industrialization increasingly removed productive tasks from the home and segregated housewives. For poor women, especially those without dependable men to support them, children were first and foremost an economic problem and motherhood an economic task. But for women of all classes, historically as today, their objective relationship to pregnancy and children has necessarily made their motives for limiting fertility different from and more immediate than men’s.
Feminist thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to rest in an uneasy tension between the notion of fertility control as woman’s moral duty (to "enlightened motherhood" or to "the race"), rooted in eugenics, and the notion of fertility control as woman’s fundamental right to control over her body. But even the idea of woman’s right to control fertility, or "voluntary motherhood," had complicated layers of meaning. On the broadest level, that principle involved a " ‘right of self-defense’ . . . against venereal disease, male sexual demands or pregnancy"; it represented a resistance of Victorian bourgeois women to sexuality as such, which they perceived to be riddled with danger, contamination (through prostitution), and the perpetual double standard.66 While "voluntary motherhood" rested on a "false consciousness" that subscribed to the "cult of motherhood,"67 even this dimension contained a radical edge. For its proponents were not only proclaiming motherhood as woman’s highest function but also demanding complete control and autonomy for women over motherhood—over when, whether, and how it would be undertaken.
The opposition of nineteenth-century feminists to abortion must be seen in this light. Apparently many feminists, including Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, saw abortion as a necessary evil prompted by men’s sexual oppression of women and their refusal to accord their wives proper respect, "to check their sensualism, and leave their wives free to choose their periods of maternity."68 Because of this association of abortion with the degradation and exploitation of women, many feminists responded positively to the physician-led political campaign in the post-Civil War period to outlaw abortion (see pp. 78-84). But, read carefully, these feminist protests were aimed, not at abortion per se, but at the one-sided and exploitative sexual relations that often made abortion necessary; they were aimed at the causes, not the consequences, of abortion. Mohr quotes the wife of a Christian physician, writing to a leader of the physicians’ antiabortion campaign in 1866: "(T]he greatest cause of abortion is one hidden from the world, viz.: unhappiness and want of consideration towards wives in the marriage relation, the more refined education of girls, and their subsequent revolting from the degradation of being a mere thing—an appendage."69
Yet there is also an element of class and race division and class and race identity in the idea of "voluntary motherhood" that cuts through its resistant feminist aspects and separates middle-class feminists from working-class, immigrant, and black women. The vision of a "womanhood" that transcends domesticity and a privileged maternity is unavailable to these nineteenth-century women, not because of an absence of feminist consciousness, but because of the hegemony of class consciousness. The new ideology of family limitation and responsible motherhood defined the superiority of bourgeois mothers; within the context of bourgeois material conditions and class privilege, it created a cultural armature through which the bourgeois lady could recognize and display the class content of her gender identity. "Fewer and better" children and sexual "purity" became dual badges of class and racial identity for white bourgeois women at the same time as they were being asserted as pledges of resistance to men’s domestic and sexual power. For women whose material conditions differed, the dominant ideology would be difficult if not impossible to realize.