The total white fertility rate in the United States decreased by half between 1800 and 1900, the number of children born per married woman falling from 7.04 to 3.56. Demographers have established that this decline began "at least as early as 1810" and that three-quarters of the pre-1940 decline (among whites) occurred before 1900 and much of it before the
Civil War.17 Because this trend was well under way when much of the population was still living in rural areas, it cannot be attributed simply to urbanization and industrialization or declining mortality in the wake of improved living standards. Rather, the immediate cause of the decline was a drop in marital fertility (as measured by the changing ratio of young children to women of childrearing age) due to the widespread practice of abstinence, contraception, and abortion in the decades before the Civil War.18 We thus have to look at the changing conditions of families and the position of women within families to explain the growing use of measures to limit births.
The conditions determining declining national fertility in mid-nineteenth-century America were material and ideological, but on both counts they had to do with changing definitions of motherhood. It is true that the decline was related in some general way to the growth of capitalist production and its separation from the home, changes in the standards of consumption, and a rise in urban employment along with a shrinkage in available land.19 But these "background" conditions tell us only that changes in fertility had to do with broad changes in the society; they do not tell us about the processes and social relations through which smaller family size becomes a response to those conditions. There is the further problem that fertility declined not only among the Urban bourgeoisie most affected by an industrial economy but among rural and frontier populations. In the previous chapter I suggested that smaller family size coincided with bourgeois class interests, thus enlisting the cooperation of husbands. In regard to rural fertility declines in the nineteenth century, some demographers point to an explanation that relates to property relations and patrilineal inheritance: the increasing scarcity of cultivable land in older, more settled areas.20 Still, these class and sectoral conditions translated into conscious decisions about childbearing through processes that directly involved the perceptions of women, both urban and rural, about their identities and responsibilities as mothers. More than anything else, smaller family size accommodated the new definition of women as primarily mothers, under a cultural mandate that more and more defined motherhood in terms of the care and socialization of children, as opposed to the physical bearing of them.
Social historians have revealed the many levels on which the nineteenth century came to veil womanhood in the "cult of domesticity" and to crown her the "mother of civilization." It would charge her with forming "the moral and intellectual character of the young," and make "home" her "appropriate and appointed sphere of action."21 "The ’empire of the mother/ as defined by nineteenth-century writers, was more than a feminine mystique. It conferred upon women the function of socialization. . . ,"22 As such, it organized a distinctly economic as well as a cultural, or "moral," reality. For poor women, especially those without dependable men to support them, children were always first and foremost an economic problem. In the nineteenth century, motherhood and domestic management became the central economic functions of bourgeois wives as well, circumscribing their work, as industrialization increasingly removed productive tasks from the home and segregated/differentiated its purposes. This fact more than any other—that motherhood was now their central social as well as moral end—shaped women’s needs and desires regarding fertility.
What is important for a theoretical account of the decline in fertility and the rise in abortion during the nineteenth century is the means by which and the people to whom that ideology got transmitted. For I suggest that the ideology itself may have had a decisive impact on women’s fertility control practices. We may assume that declining rates of national (white) fertility, both urban and rural, were related in a fundamental way to the changing consciousness of white women. That consciousness was shaped by changing conditions of motherhood and a dominant ideology of motherhood that had come to pervade the "national culture." The "cult of motherhood" in antebellum America was propagated and transmitted through a newly created "national cultural industry," burgeoning out of the invention of inexpensive printing machinery and based in the Northeast. The major products of this industry were sentimental novels and ladies’ magazines, such as the famous Godey ‘$ Lady s Book, which represented the ideal woman as maternalism personified. Although addressed to and imaging the urban bourgeois "lady," these magazines and books were distributed all over the country, to women of different classes. Pioneer women took the new ideas about femininity and motherhood with them to the West, and a new "transportation network" of turnpikes, canals, and railroads carried them not only westward but to rural areas.23
Now, to argue that nineteenth-century motherhood ideology was a major influence on decisions to limit fertility is not to say that it was the most important influence for all women or that the conditions it addressed even pertained to the lives of some women. Particularly among blacks and immigrants, and among segments of the rural population, conditions of poverty and the continued reliance on child labor (and sometimes that of wives as well) made idealized maternal devotion and restricted childbearing beside the point. For these women, the dominant ideology may have seemed a standard beyond their reach, thus reinforcing a sense of their personal and moral failure. (Devotion to the home and to "fewer and better" children was now considered a divine as well as a natural prescription.)
On the other hand, while fewer than 5 percent of all white married women worked outside the home during most of the nineteenth century,24 the women who did work—factory workers, domestic servants, farm laborers—undoubtedly restricted their fertility not in order to be "better mothers" but in order to function as providers. Moreover, labor force participation rates were substantially higher among young unmarried women, causing at least some of the fertility decline by leading young working women to delay marriage.25 Also important, though we lack empirical data to verify it, may be the influence that having worked outside the home as single women had on the consciousness of married women. If the experience of wage earning gave young women "a greater sense of personal independence that they carried with them into their marriage," this may well have encouraged them to exercise independence in resorting to abstinence, contraception, and abortion to limit marital pregnancies.26
Women’s consciousness regarding not only motherhood and work but also sexuality affected their behavior in reducing fertility. Historians agree that abstinence was probably a major form of fertility control, although abortion and contraception were widely in use. Abstinence reflected and supported the orthodoxy, proclaimed most effectively by physicians, that the maternal nature of woman precluded sexual instincts:
The medical proponents of the sacred obligations of motherhood sought to free conception itself from unseemly passions, declaring that a child conceived in fits of lust was subject to all sorts of character disorders, especially the solitary vice of masturbation. In short, the suppression of the female sex drive and the use of abstinence as a mode of family limitation were additional byproducts of the cult of motherhood.27
But physicians were not simply arch-conspirators in a patriarchal plot to suppress women’s sexuality. Nineteenth-century feminists were among the strongest advocates of sexual abstinence for women—as a measure of female self-defense against sexual exploitation and in support of "voluntary motherhood." For the same reasons, feminists and free lovers opposed abortion and contraception, seeing them as symptoms of women’s sexual exploitation rather than means toward the "right to choose" motherhood, which they heartily endorsed.28 Abstinence, however, was not only a birth control tactic but the expression of an ideology of moral virtue, one that manifested woman’s nature as asexual and pure. In participating in and elaborating this ideology, Victorian feminists were at once asserting their procreative freedom and limiting their own sexuality, subscribing to the idea of sex as dangerous and taboo.29 Their reasons for doing so—for participating in a kind of sexual false consciousness— were probably tied to issues of class and race, particularly in a period of rising immigration and class division and agitation against slavery. For the connotation of asexual purity contained in the ideology of the "lady" was a distinguishing feature by which white middle-class women were defined, and defined themselves, in relation to poor, black, and immigrant women. Fewer children were evidence of a chaste and spiritual, hence "ladylike," life.
These conditions underlay the decline in fertility in the nineteenth century; they involve economic, social, and cultural/ideological elements that are complexly interwoven and cannot be pried apart. Similarly, in the absence of survey data or any evidence other than physicians’ observations, it is impossible to determine the weight of different methods— abstinence, contraception, or abortion—in determining the reduction in marital fertility. All we can know for sure is that all three approaches were used, and as is generally true in a period of fertility decline, they tend to coincide and reinforce one another (i. e., their use rises simultaneously). We might also apply McLaren’s argument, inferring a probable rise in abortions from the combination of (1) falling birthrates and (2) our knowledge that the contraceptive methods used were highly ineffective. Vaginal injections of carbolic acid; douches made of cold — or warm — water solutions, bicarbonate of soda, Borax, vinegar, Lysol, or other agents to remove or sterilize sperm; cotton or sponge tampons; vigorous exercising after intercourse—all were of dubious reliability. Even periodic abstinence was unreliable, since it was combined with mistaken notions about the fertile time in a woman’s reproductive cycle.30 Increased recourse by nineteenth-century women to faulty birth control methods undoubtedly reinforced their need for abortions.
Based on different kinds of historical evidence, Mohr estimates a "great upsurge of abortion" during the middle of the century. First, during the 1840s abortifacient preparations emerged as a "booming business," which reflected an existing market of women who were seeking abortions and in turn gave abortion greater visibility and legitimacy, thereby undoubtedly increasing its incidence.31 A proliferation of "female remedies" and emetics, advertised widely in newspapers and popular magazines, signaled the growth of a highly profitable drug industry that had, from its birth, targeted the "female market." In addition to drug companies, local apothecaries began an active over-the-counter trade in herbal and other substances thought to induce abortion, and various medical purveyors of the popular health movement—Thomsonians, botanies—became involved in prescribing home remedies, writing guidebooks, and setting up clinics to instruct women in the use of home techniques.32
We cannot know precisely what proportion of the advertised methods were effective and therefore their actual, or even approximate, impact on birthrates. What is important politically, however, is not the actual relation between abortion practices and fertility but the apparent relation; as in the present (when we do know something about this relation), it is the visibility of abortion rather than its incidence that arouses organized opposition. Thus it is for political even more than demographic reasons that we should find it significant to hear physicians in the late nineteenth century making estimates, based on clinical experience, about rising abortion rates. For example, Dr. Edwin M. Hale, a homeopathic leader writing in 1860, " ‘safely asserted that there is not one married female in ten who has not had an abortion, or at least attempted one!’ In the nation as a whole he believed that one in every five pregnancies ended in abortion. . . ."33
This may be evidence about upward trends, but if so, it reflects the reality of a specific class of women—those who sought the services of physicians and could pay for them. Mohr echoes the widely held view of nineteenth-century physicians when he claims that before 1840 abortion was a "recourse of the desperate"; after that time, it became the "systematic practice" of "respectable" women—those who were married, middle or upper-middle class, native-born Protestants.34 Despite the opposition of some feminists to abortion and birth control, then, in practice Victorian middle-class women were apparently relying on abortion with growing frequency in order to assert control over the spacing and number of their children and thus over the situation within "their sphere."
The shifting class base of abortion, even more than its overall rise, undoubtedly accounts for the severity of the political attack against it. Abortion in the mid-nineteenth century became the object of organized opposition, not because of the numbers of women practicing it, but because of who those women were and the sex-race-class implications of their conduct. For abortion, unlike abstinence, directly communicates that women who utilize it are engaging in sex without the intention to procreate, are having sex for its "own sake" (to satisfy "male lust" if not their own). Abortion brings the sexual aspect of fertility and its control into the open; and for this to occur among married "respectable" women was to shatter delicately established boundaries of class, race, and gender.