If not new techniques, what is specifically modern about a "contraceptive society"? Until the twentieth century, statistical data regarding contraception and abortion did not exist. Historical demographers infer patterns and practices indirectly, either from data on age-specific fertility or from literary evidence. But since we know that contraceptives and abortion have nearly always been used, "modernity" here cannot be simply the use of fertility control or even its enlarged scale, but must lie in the attitudes, reasons, or circumstances surrounding that use.31 Moreover, since no essentially new methods of fertility control were developed from ancient times until the twentieth century (unless we count the introduction of antiseptics in the mid-nineteenth century, which made abortions a good deal safer), "technology" obviously is not an explanation. In order to explain a rising incidence of deliberate fertility control, demography must go outside its usual circular reasoning (new methods are adopted because they exist, fertility declines because it is "adaptive" that fertility should decline) and begin to look at the social, economic, and ideological changes that may affect fertility practices in a particular historical context.
Not surprisingly, Thomas Malthus was merely the codifier of a mode of thought about fertility that predated his work and the industrializing context surrounding it by two hundred years. Both Noonan and Aries trace the roots of the "economic ethic," or the idea that one should limit one’s children to only so many as one could support, to the rise of a market in land, labor, and goods—to early capitalism. At least since the sixteenth century, French landowners practiced inheritance customs and marriage patterns designed to restrict numbers of heirs and thus preserve the patrimony. These included packing off surplus daughters to convents and sons to monasteries or military service, as well as delaying their own marriages. They were the traditional fertility control methods of preindustrial patriarchs, who controlled not only land but households, wives, servants, and children.32 Women too, especially those of the artisan and laboring classes, had economic motives for postponing marriage and thereby limiting fertility. Many such women in Western Europe, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries—during the rise of capitalism— were obliged to work to save money for a dowry or acquire a craft or skills before marriage.33
Moreover, the bourgeois ethic was rapidly imposed on the poor in preindustrial programs of population control. The enforcement of the Act of Settlement by English Poor Law overseers throughout the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries was infused with the notion that young couples should be prevented from marrying "before they have provided themselves with a settling," lest they become a burden on the parish.34 The application of a "moral economy" of fertility control to the poor probably has much older roots. Noonan finds its traces among the medieval church fathers as early as the eleventh century; Bede justified an exception to the church’s prohibition on contraception and abortion for paupercula (poor women), whom he distinguished from "fornicators" (women who don’t have poverty as an excuse).35 While one case has to do with coercion and the other with permissiveness, the point is that, where the poor are concerned, the relation between fertility control and economic necessity was taken for granted. In the early modern period landowners throughout much of continental Europe began to impose this idea on their daughters and younger sons, who were pressured to delay or forsake marriage in order to avoid "diluting the inheritance."36 Having too many children was a definite economic liability; family limitation was a way of thinking that arose in a particular economic and social setting.
Yet the practice of birth control (contraception and abortion), as distinct from delayed marriage, acquired its own ideology in a bourgeois patriarchal culture. Aries describes this new ideology in Weberian terms, as a "spirit" of family planning, an ethic that dictates that births should be "calculated" in accordance with one’s "means" ("la notion de ‘calcul,’ de politique’ et de niveau de vie"), that families should plan ahead for children and not have more children than they can "afford."37 While this ethic may have its prototype in the behavior of the preindustrial noble or peasant landholder—absolute in his patriarchal authority over household and kin, calculating the value of his property for purposes of succession— it is different in one fundamental respect. Here, the value being cultivated is not land but children; the purpose of controlling fertility is to make children into assets, not merely to prevent them from becoming liabilities. This objective coincides with a mode of fertility control that is different from the earlier forms of delayed marriage (also economically motivated), a mode that is particular in both the methods it entails and the values those methods reflect.
One element of the "demographic transition" that seems to be verified by family reconstitution studies is a dramatic shift, in various countries at different times, in the average married woman’s age at last birth. What occurs is "a new and different type of fertility control" involving "stopping behavior" or the projection and achievement of a "target family size" and the deliberate cessation of childbearing once that size is reached.38 This behavior is not a function of industrialization, as evidenced by the fact that France experienced a major fertility decline in most regions during the eighteenth century, when it was mainly a country of peasants.39 But the ideology that elevates the behavior to a "moral economy" is particular to the rising bourgeoisie.
It is not easy to disentangle "moral" from "economic" elements in this ideology. For one thing, economic interests and strategies are invariably legitimated by moral dicta, with which they easily become confused; the classic example in capitalist culture is the work ethic and high productivity. Ultimately, as Marxist theory shows, economic conditions determine moral values, but the relation between them is complicated and enmeshed. Second, the social consequences of moral values may be different depending on the people to whom they are applied; the idea that one ought not have more children than one can support has a different content when applied to/by the upper class than when applied to/by the poor.
Nowhere are the moralistic implications of Malthusian ideology clearer than in the writings of Malthus himself (whose first Essay on the Principle of Population appeared in 1798), particularly in his application of his ideas to the working class. Malthusianism, it must be understood, is not a scientific analysis but a moral ideology and prescription for action that would gradually become part of bourgeois consciousness. The core of Malthus’ doctrine was "a new moral economy," rationalized as science, whose central thrust was to exhort the poor to restrain from sexual "excess" and early marriage.40 In his first essay Malthus evoked a tone of dire fatalism, suggesting that "misery and vice," "vices. . . continually involving both sexes," were the inevitable price of checking exorbitant population growth.41 The "vices" Malthus had in mind were presumably various forms of nonprocreative sex, including the use of abortion and birth control. In later versions of the essay, however, "moral restraint" is added as a major form of "preventive check," especially in regard to the English poor. Yet Malthus continues to condemn birth control (still a "vice") while admonishing the laboring man to delay marriage and "not to bring beings into the world for whom he cannot find the means of support. "42 Hence is the working class blamed for its misery and the "solution" to poverty and hunger seen to lie in abstinence from childbearing and sex.43 With time, this moralistic core would be leavened with the assumptions of bourgeois economics concerning the "rationality" of market behavior and the appropriateness of economic planning and calculation in the production of children as of everything else. But, from its origins, bourgeois population theory, like bourgeois economics, is primarily a moral code: Too many children, like too little money (or too much sex), are an evil.
Turned inward, on the upper and middle classes, Malthusian moral precepts become a prescription for action, a strategy to secure personal wealth and class cohesion. Aries argues that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts, especially those critical of the new "family planning" ethos, economic motives were "much more powerful" than ideas about sexual freedom. In the second half of the eighteenth century in France, contraception was so common among respectable married couples, convinced of its propriety in achieving respectable worldly ends, that it was no longer confessed.44 A study by Andre Burgiere correlates the areas of greatest fertility decline and contraceptive practice in France in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the influence of Jansenism and religious asceticism. "Family limitation," in this view, emerges as the operating principle of a new family type for which children are no longer the instruments to forge alliances or perpetuate the lineage but become both the content and the emblems whereby the household establishes its independence and "[improves] its social status. . . . Sexual asceticism [delayed marriage as well as abstinence and withdrawal] plays the same role in this spirit of matrimonial enterprise that the sense of thrift played in the spirit of capitalist enterprise."45
While "fewer and better" would become a practical strategy for bourgeois self-improvement, it was also perceived by the eighteenth century in France as a "badge of identity" certifying upper-class moral superiority. One of the authors in the Encyclopedic cites "luxury, the love of pleasure, the idea of conserving one’s beauty, the embarrassment of pregnancy, the even greater embarrassment of a numerous family" as common reasons why upper-class women were thought to use contraception.46 What this quote reveals is not only an upper bourgeoisie attempting to demarcate its identity through smaller families but also the link, for bourgeois male republicans, between "luxury," rebellious women, and birth control and between patriotism, domestic order, and procreation. By the nineteenth century, the "embarrassment of a numerous family" had become firmly entrenched in the bourgeoisie’s sense of its status and respectability— including that of the bourgeois woman. A character in an 1858 novel, queried about whether he might have twelve children, replies: "Never in the wise and enlightened bourgeoisie. Twelve children, maitre Pierre! This unrestrained multiplication of the human species occurs only in the lower classes. . . ,"47
As a bourgeois ideology, Malthusian thought is thus multidimensional. It is a moral prescription that is at once about capitalist values and about sexual values; the means toward family limitation are forms of sexual restraint (in themselves a "thrift" or "economy"), whereas its rewards are material prosperity and well-educated (male) children. It is also a signifier through which the bourgeois class identifies itself as against an expanding proletariat and, especially in the towns, les classes dangereuses. Finally, it is a set of practices that reflects capitalist values (saving, investment, individual achievement) and the objective material conditions of a rising bourgeoisie.48
To describe an ideology is not to explain its social origins, however. The new definition of the value of children contained in early "family planning" doctrine arises out of a market society in which command of both commerce and the state required increasing literacy and scientific knowledge. These requirements entailed a new emphasis on educating children (mainly sons), which in turn resulted in a new relationship between parents and children. With the development of schools and "childhood" in its modern meaning, upper — and middle-class parents in Western Europe became responsible for their children in new ways and for a longer period of time: for their food and clothing, for the costs of their education, and most of all for their "future."49 Hence, the bourgeois model of "the family"—the nuclear family "concentrated on the child," individual achievement, and well-being—is inseparable from the bourgeois model of fertility—the admonition to have a certain number of children of a certain quality, who, like "fruit trees," are articles of investment, cultivation, and long-term growth. The rise of a "Malthusian mentality" is connected to the historical development of this family form.
But there is a fourth dimension of Malthusianism. Although it often remains implicit rather than explicit, it is the foundation of the whole edifice: the precept that "quality children" are produced by "good mothers." On one level, this precept is an ideological construct that gets advanced most strenuously as a pronatalist dogma. In eighteenth-century France, political writers articulated it in the most virulent terms, binding women to home and motherhood and excoriating those who ventured out of this sphere. Rousseau and Moheau (one a Calvinist, the other a Catholic) railed against such "unnatural" and "perverse" practices as abortion, contraception, and wet nursing, accusing women who indulged in them of betraying their duty (procreation) to their husbands and the state for hedonistic ends.50 Now, these writers are well-known anti-hial — thusians, the Cassandras of "depopulation" in France. But what is important is that the same basic ideological premise they invoked underlay both pronatalist and antinatalist strategies: the necessity of woman’s domestication, her confinement to nurturance and maternal duty. The new dogma of maternal duty and the abominable "selfishness" of women who abandon that duty was addressed to all women but particularly those of the upper and middle classes. For the new bourgeois ethic of family planning, "quality" must supersede "quantity"; but it is through the ministrations of Mother that "quality children" are planned and produced. Thus the interconnected strands of the bourgeois family form include not only the legal and moral power of the father and "fewer and better" children but also the subordination of women’s sexuality to maternity.
Given the changing situation of bourgeois women as mothers, it is not difficult to understand why these women became principal supporters of the new Malthusian ideology, as well as its practitioners. The increasing dependency of children requires the increasing responsibility of mothers, now not only as breeders but also as caretakers. Ironically, the emphasis on limiting the family’s number of children entails an expansion and intensification of maternal "duties," as the idea of "quality"—education, manners, a "better standard of living," good character, piety, and so forth—attains finer and finer ramifications. In fact, the two notions, fewer children and better mothering, reinforce one another; expanded childrearing responsibilities stimulate women’s interest in limiting births. The motor force driving the (bourgeois) "family economy" is "les soucis du calcul de I’avenir des enfantsthe family member most caught up in these concerns is Mother. She is "more confined to the domestic economy, closer to children," and thus more attuned to the values of birth control and school, as vehicles toward economic security and social betterment.51 The economic security and social betterment of her children are in fact her job. The rise of schooling and the decline in fertility are interconnected developments in capitalist society not only because schooling costs money but because it leaves mothers isolated in child care, without the aid of older children to mind younger ones. For Aries, the function of bourgeois housewives within the "family economy," though it is outside the market, clearly has economic as well as cultural and sexual dimensions; the two are different aspects of the same social relationship. Thus his analysis points to the interconnections between a bourgeois culture of fertility (including a particular family form, which is the locus of the family planning ethos) and bourgeois economic interests.
Grasping the breadth and complexity of Malthusian and neo-Malthu — sian ideology makes it easier to come to terms with its powerful hold, even among its critics. Marxists, trade unionists, radical birth controllers, and feminists in the nineteenth century were opposed to various aspects of Malthusian doctrine; yet their thinking became trapped in some of its basic assumptions. Marx’s critique of Malthus (whom he accused of gross plagiarism) struck directly at the naturalistic, mechanistic bias of a theory of population that claimed abstract, universal validity ("an abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals, and even then only in the absence of any historical intervention by man"). The critical point about Marx’s anti-Malthusian concept of a "relative surplus population" was not only that "overpopulation" is a product of the cyclical processes of capital accumulation (which create unemployment and deteriorated housing), but, more generally, that shifts in human population, presumably including fertility, are always the result of particular historical circumstances and social purposes.52 But since Marx did not see women as an integral part of the proletariat, as both reproducers and producers, he had no basis for theorizing a "law of population" whose dynamics included women’s need for fertility control, apart from the shifts in the capitalist demand for labor; he did not see fertility control as part of the class struggle, much less the gender struggle. Thus the Marxist critique of Malthus was partial rather than total. It recognized the social basis of population, but it ignored the progressive and potentially liberating dimension of human efforts to control reproduction as well as production.
Engels, writing in the 1840s and 1880s, expressed sympathy with the anti-birth-control sentiments that characterized many of the British male trade unionists throughout the nineteenth century. In 1844, for example, referring to Malthus’ doctrine as a "repulsive blasphemy against man and nature," he asserted that "children are like trees, returning abundantly the expenditure laid out on them, . . . that a large family would be a most desirable gift to the community. "53 The idea that controlling fertility is a "blasphemy against nature" and that large families, not small, are morally desirable clearly reflects a reversion to an ahistorical, naturalistic concept of fertility, not a transcendence of it. Though less explicitly, Engels here evokes the same Jacobin conception of a male-dominated patriarchal family expressed in William Godwin’s On Population (1820):
. . . 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.54
Reproduction through the male-dominated nuclear family is the tie that binds the proletarian male to the state; more children, not fewer, signal woman’s domestication within the working class. Thus, the radical attack on Malthus rests on the same bourgeois model of family relations and woman’s confinement to reproduction as does Malthusianism.
Historians of nineteenth-century feminism and birth control correctly distinguish both the radical birth control movement and the feminist movement (which were themselves distinct) from the neo — Malthusian movement, whose main practical goal was to curb the fertility of the working class.55 But they underestimate the extent to which both groups managed to incorporate or accommodate certain basic elements of neo — Malthusian ideology into their thinking. In particular, the emphasis on (1) economic, moral, or eugenic justifications for "fewer and better" children (as contrasted with justifications concerning women’s health and self-determination) and (2) motherhood as woman’s highest duty were embedded in feminist ideas about voluntary control over childbearing. Feminists who opposed mechanical means of birth control in favor of the practice of "voluntary motherhood" were committed to a policy of sexual restraint or abstinence that fitted well with Malthusian notions of sexual or "moral" economy. Let us recall that, at least from the seventeenth century, the bourgeois ethic of family limitation had been directed as much at the bourgeois class, its self-regulation and self-definition, as at the proliferating working class. The twin precepts of sexual prudence and smaller families were embraced by feminists, not only as a means toward women’s protection within marriage (although that was an important part of it), but also as an expression of female virtue—maternal duty to children, to class, to "the race."
In short, feminist thinking (in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) about fertility and its control embodied a basic contradiction, which reflects the influence of Malthusian and neo-Malthusian ideology. Along with the idea of the wife’s "right to be her own person, and her sacred right to deny her husband if need be and to decide how often and when she should become a mother,"56 was a firm belief in motherhood as "an exalted, sacred profession" that was woman’s main responsibility as well as her virtue. Later feminists, who believed fervently in birth control, alloyed their feminism with a neo-Malthusian commitment to "quality over quantity," and even eugenic arguments about "racial betterment." The South African feminist Olive Schreiner wrote in 1911 that the commitment of "modern" woman was not simply " ‘Thou shalt bear,’ but rather, ‘Thou shalt not bear in excess of thy power to rear and train satisfactorily/ " She argued that "to the family as well as to the state unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has already. . . become an irremediable evil. . . ."57 American feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Frances Willard aimed at the "professionalization" of motherhood, making childrearing rational and scientific—in the name of "race progress" and eugenics as well as emancipated womanhood.58 Even Emma Goldman, writing in 1914, opposed the "race suicide" propaganda of Roosevelt with an amalgam of feminist-libertarian and eugenic ideas:
Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who would have neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of poverty and slavery. Instead she desires fewer and better children, begotten and reared in love and through free choice; not by compulsion, as marriage imposes.59