Immediately following the campaign against abortion in the 1860s and 1870s, a profusion of hereditarian and biological determinist theories emerged that would lay the groundwork for the eugenics movement. Rooted in social Darwinism, Italian criminal anthropology, phrenology, and genealogical studies of "degenerate" families, such theories were widely accepted by American penal and social reformers, as […]

If abortion "came out" in the 1860s and 1870s, it was the doing not of the women who practiced it so much as of the medical authorities who exposed and indicted it. Falling birthrates and rising abortion in the United States—and the greater sexual autonomy of middle-class women they seemed to denote—generated a two-sided political […]

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 […]

1 rivacy, like individualism, is a historical product; it emerges only when there is a public domain, that is, in relation to the state. The concept of a private, personal realm encompassing family, sexuality, and childbear­ing did not exist among hunters and gatherers nor in the medieval world. In ancient and modem states in the […]

The concept of "cultural diffusion" begs all the important questions of how ideas and practices get transmitted from one class or group to another and how those ideas get accommodated and transformed under different circumstances. "Cultural" theorists of fertility trends assume that techniques get introduced among elite groups and then, by means never quite specified, […]

In the course of the eighteenth century in France, the tendency to send infants off to wet nurses, the high incidence of child neglect and abandonment, and the declining fertility rate and increasing use of contra­ception were trends that cut across classes, occupational groups, and rural — urban distinctions.70 But they clearly had different meanings […]

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 […]

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, […]

Many people think that birth control is the "modern" invention of industrial societies, associated with techniques or methods that preindus­trial peoples could not have known. This belief echoes in everyday usage, which links birth control to methods (e. g., the pill) that require medical intervention and commercial distribution. But such belief stems from the intellectual […]

Conscious activity to control human fertility is as intrinsic to the social being of human groups as the activity to control and organize the produc­tion of food. What changes over time and from one social context to another is who controls fertility, under what conditions, through what means, and for what purposes. The techniques of […]