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 error of technological determinism, since it confuses the activity of birth control (including abortion) with the techniques through which it is achieved. It is like thinking that steam-driven engines or computers inaugurated the industrial or "information" revolution, rather than the social relations that produced the machines. In this view, birthrates decline mainly because of "the diffusion of new contraceptive aspirations, techniques and information," an event associated conventionally with industrialization.5
In fact, historical and anthropological evidence weighs heavily against technological determinism in the analysis of fertility changes. Most human societies have attempted to control their fertility, whether this was a systematic aim or not. Not only through rules governing marriage patterns and taboos on sexual intercourse at certain times, but through the deliberate use of contraceptives, abortion, and infanticide, fertility control has been a constant of human life.6 From the Hutterites to the Kung San, the fertility of women fluctuates over a wide spectrum in which a woman’s "biological capacity" is defined in relation to a specific social and ecological context and intent. This intent has everything to do not only with scarce resources or the division of property but with the specific problems of women in their nearly universal assignment to the bearing and care of children.
Evidence concerning preindustrial hunting and gathering and pastoral societies calls into question the assumption that they normally suffered from population scarcity as a result of high mortality rates. Rather, high reproduction rates and limited resources often meant that such societies risked a population surplus, resulting in deliberate efforts to curb population growth.7 The "mode of life" among nomadic hunters and gatherers necessitated the reliance on deliberate means (e. g., postpartum abstinence or twin infanticide) of controlling and spacing births "because of the difficulty of transporting more than one baby at a time."8 But these concerns particularly affected women. For example, postpartum abstinence in precolonial East and West African societies was a fertility control method instigated and sustained by women. Not only was it based on a belief that pregnancy or sexual intercourse during lactation might be harmful to a nursing child; it also reflected the practical problems of transporting too many children under nomadic or tribal conditions.
The criteria of "too many" in this case grew, not out of the high economic "costs" of children, but out of the needs and perceptions of women as childtenders. Indeed, "too many" children is not an absolute but a historically specific desideratum. Himes describes in detail the numerous methods of contraception used among East and Central European peasant women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leaving no doubt that these methods were the product of a folklore and situation specific to women. Alongside the numerous herbal and magical remedies, methods such as a molded disk of melted beeswax inserted into the vagina to cover the cervix or a sponge soaked in lemon juice as a spermicide attest to the tenacity and ingenuity of women in their desire—often successful— to control pregnancies.9
Also, throughout history and to the present day, even when effective methods of contraception are known, women have continued to rely on abortion. Among all fertility control methods, abortion has been the most persistent and prevalent. Formulas for abortion in ancient Chinese medical texts date from nearly three thousand years before Christ; there are references to abortion throughout ancient Greek and Roman literature (e. g., in the writings of the physician Soranos of Ephesus) and among Islamic medical writers of the Middle Ages. Methods included not only herbal remedies but also abdominal massage, hot baths, and jumping or other "violent movements."10 George Devereux, who surveyed 350 primitive, ancient, and preindustrial societies in the Yale Human Relations Area Files, found a range of abortion methods including herbs, chemicals, mechanical means, violence, and magic. Customs and values related to abortion practices also vary enormously. Nevertheless, within this diversity, ‘There is every indication that abortion is an absolutely universal phenomenon, and that it is impossible even to construct an imaginary social system in which no woman would ever feel at least impelled to abort/’11 The historical demographer E. A. Wrigley echoes this conviction: "It is clear that abortions were attempted at times in all populations."12
It is important to ask why, even when effective methods of contraception are available, the practice of abortion persists. The answer has to do with the specific nature of abortion. An abortion intervenes after the fact, to end a particular pregnancy; its focus is the pregnancy itself, not sexuality, not a woman’s reproductive cycle or capacity. But more than anything else, abortion, however sordid and dangerous, has in most times and places been accessible to women. Abortion is a "uniquely female practice, which men could neither control nor prevent."13 While methods of contraception are known and practiced in "primitive peasant cultures," they tend to be used in a hit-or-miss fashion. More important, methods like coitus interruptus, which rely on the man’s cooperation, may be incompatible with the reality that "the physical burden and danger of childbearing, and the responsibility for nourishing and rearing the child, fall mainly on the mother" and that "a wish to avoid childbirth… is apt to be hers rather than her husband’s."14 Abortion does not require male cooperation, is technically simple and completely effective, and responds to the problem at hand. In fact, it is incorrect to refer to abortion as a "technique" of fertility control. Abortion is the prevention of a pregnancy that has already begun from going to term, from eventuating in childbirth; and abortion may be accomplished through a variety of methods—chemical, herbal, mechanical, surgical. It is a timing of birth control, rather than a specific technique, and its usefulness derives from the many reasons—historical, economic, psychological—why "planning ahead" might be neither effective nor appropriate to the situation.
When does a pregnancy begin? That question has confused the meaning of abortion through many historical periods, revealing once again that human biological experiences are always mediated by social life. The very concept of an abortion is a particular way of constructing an event whose boundaries and content have differed in different situations. Can we always identify the markers on the continuum between a "spontaneous" abortion and one that is "helped along," or between the latter and a whole series of possible interventions through different means and at different points during a pregnancy? Women in preindustrial Europe do not seem to have drawn any sharp distinction between "potions" that intervened before or after conception, since conception (as opposed to "animation") had no special meaning. In England and America prior to the mid-nineteenth century, pregnancy as a biological event was not
thought to begin until "quickening," at which time there was a "child." Before that, a woman was "irregular"; herbal potions and purgatives, hot baths, or vigorous jumping were natural, not medical, strategies to make her "regular" again.15 Moreover, since most abortions until the present century either were self-induced or were administered by midwives or through the remedies of local lay healers, herbalists, or female kin or neighbors, they have no recorded history; they are not "cases" in a medical sense. Only in France in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in America and England in the nineteenth century, when a rising male-dominated medical profession exposed the practice of abortion and its lay practitioners to scrutiny and attack, did abortion acquire a history, both demographic and medical. Under the "surveillance" of physicians and populationists, it acquired an incidence (social measurement) and a politic (state regulation). In this regard, abortion is similar to mental illness and homosexuality; it is historically constructed and takes a particular ideological form through the scrutiny and "recordings" of positivist medicine.16 Its very meaning—as act of "deviance" (defiance?) or act of "nature"—reflects cultural inscription and social change.
Contrary to the thesis that fertility control is a product of modernization, some historical demographers have established that major declines in fertility occurred in rural areas of England, France, and America long before "mature" industrialization. These declines were due mainly to the deliberate use of birth control and abortion within marriage, rather than the postponement of marriage. A classic study of the village of Colyton, England, for example, demonstrated that as early as the mid-seventeenth century, villagers were using systematic methods of "family limitation"— probably abortion and coitus interruptus, and possibly infanticide. Family reconstitution methods show changes in the age-specific fertility rate and the age at which wives had their last birth. One can quite reasonably infer the use of fertility control methods from the fact that married women were restricting childbearing to the early years of their fertile period and reducing their total number of children.17
Although they document these facts, historical demographers are reluctant to acknowledge their social implications. E. A. Wrigley remains fixed in the cultural biases of modernization theory when he argues that people in preindustrial societies adopt methods to limit births or population as an adaptive behavior geared toward group survival, not unlike that exhibited by "robins and rooks." Fertility control in premodem contexts is thus a form of "unconscious rationality," which contrasts sharply with the "conscious rationality" of modern couples when they exercise "private choice" to use birth control.18 This notion of unconscious rationality is based on ignorance of the specific activities and knowledge of women in preindustrial societies as well as the presence in those societies of conscious, materially based motives for limiting births. Demographers
cannot explain birth control in preindustrial, particularly preagricultural, societies—before there was a systematic ideology of "birth planning"— because of their inattention to the sexual division of labor in those societies and women’s work as childbearers and rearers.
By contrast, Linda Gordon notes the "different interests of men and women in the practice of birth control" and emphasizes the existence of birth control and abortion methods in traditional societies as "part of the folklore and folk culture . . . developed by women and handed down from generation to generation."19 The methods used most frequently in preindustrial societies—magic, potions, or other means to induce abortion, as well as abstinence and infanticide—were "more amenable" to secret use by women. Such methods did not depend on male compliance or cooperation. (Gordon argues persuasively that even magical or obviously ineffective methods may be rational insofar as they are believed to have a causal effect on fertility and, at the least, indicate a conscious acceptance of birth control as a legitimate aim.)
Nevertheless, recognizing that women’s use of birth control crosses many cultures and predates modern times should not suggest a false universality. The degree to which women use or even have any notion of fertility control methods, effective or ineffective, may vary tremendously within the same country or time period, even from one town or village to the next. How do we explain the absence of "techniques" when techniques have already been invented? How do we understand the social transmission of knowledge or lore, except in terms of social life?
The argument I am making here assumes that abortion and contraceptive practices, like changing rates of fertility, have to do with changes in the social relations of reproduction, which are inherently gender relations, and not in the first instance with technology. What a feminist perspective on historical demography would lead us to expect is that where conditions exist that enhance women’s power—strong female networks of kin or neighbors, matrilocal or matrilineal patterns of kinship, or direct female access to the material resources of survival (employment or land)—methods of contraception and abortion will be systematic and effective. Conversely, where childbearing is the only source of prestige for women and relationship to men the only means of survival, fertility control methods may be less accessible to women. But these conditions vary perhaps even more among tribal, horticultural, peasant, and preindustrial societies than they do among industrial ones.
An example of this variation and its impact on fertility in one preindustrial context is offered by David Levine, who compares fertility patterns in four rural villages in "protoindustrial" (seventeenth — to eighteenth-century) England. Levine adopts the concept of "family strategy" to show the deliberate use of fertility control among working-class families even before industrialization and urbanization. That strategy differed depending on economic conditions, especially shifts in the demand for labor, in different locales.20 This analysis reveals that while economic shifts affect fertility patterns, they do so in ways that are not mechanical or readily predictable but that depend on particular circumstances of class, occupation, and locality.
Some historians recognize that land enclosures and the rapid proletarianization of the rural population in England created a different relationship to an economic future and to children than did traditions of peasant proprietorship. For cottagers and laborers, in the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, a "marginal and precarious" existence and the development within capitalist "protoindustry" of a demand for child labor and occasional labor created disincentives to delay marriage and pregnancy and a generally rising rate of fertility.21 But while these conditions pertained to the large majority of rural proletarians (thereby keeping English fertility high well into the nineteenth century), skill and occupational divisions and local labor markets created significant variations in working-class fertility patterns. In seventeenth-century Terling, for example, the complete and early pauperization of the rural proletariat removed all hope of improved circumstances or acquiring land; thus "a calculating approach to reproductive behavior. . . was undermined," and earlier marriages and more childbearing were the result.22 In contrast, skilled framework knitters in Shepshed accommodated their fertility to the need for domestic labor (wife and children) in a family mode of production, resulting in early marriage and childbearing combined with low overall fertility.23
But the care with which Levine considers class and occupational influences on fertility contrasts with his carelessness concerning how fertility was controlled and by whom. In the village of Colyton, deteriorating conditions in the woolen industry and a high level of unemployment among men were accompanied, not by higher fertility, but by lowered fertility within marriage.24 Apparently, then, "a calculating approach" to fertility was not "undermined" in this case, but Levine’s explanation of this discrepancy is confusing because he defines the proletarian family’s "fertility strategy" and its economic situation solely from the viewpoint of the male wage earner. Thus, Levine focuses on age at first marriage rather than fertility control within marriage as the predominant "strategy" of fertility control, even though Wrigley’s earlier study had demonstrated that it was marital birth control and abortion that mainly accounted for reduced fertility in Colyton. Specifically, Levine argues that men, in response to rising unemployment, "chose older brides."25 This is a striking example of male bias, since it assumes that decisions about marriage and fertility are invariably made by men. Nor does it explain why the loss of male economic opportunities in Colyton should lead to the opposite strategy from that which prevailed in Terling. Given that Colyton women,
unlike men, were regularly and continually employed outside the home, why should we not assume that it was women who chose to delay marriage? Indeed, the major difference between Colyton and Terling is that the former maintained a high rate of female employment in a thriving lacemaking industry. "Sixty percent of all women over 15 . . . were engaged in lacemaking" in 1695, so that "throughout the whole period. . . women in Colyton would find employment in activities which tied them to a larger, extralocal economy. . . ."2e
. . . these phenomena must be seen in the context of an increase in independent women’s work. The spread of lacemaking in Colyton was probably crucially important in freeing women from the strict confines of family economies.27
While Levine recognizes this "independence" in relation to illegitimacy and early marriage in the eighteenth century, he does not ask whether delayed marriage and low marital fertility in seventeenth-century Colyton may not have had the same roots, that is, may not have been a female strategy based on the economic and social conditions of women. Proletarianized women of Colyton were less dependent than women of other locales on marriage for their economic survival, while their work outside the home no doubt exerted pressures on their time and capacity as childbearers and brought them into contact with other women. But this interpretation does not fit easily within Levine’s overall framework, which fails to consider how women’s work may have different implications for marital (and premarital) fertility than men’s, given the sexual division of labor around child care.28 A crucial result of this shortsightedness is that Levine ignores Wrigley’s evidence that seventeenth-century Colyton women not only delayed marriage but controlled their fertility within marriage and that this was the main factor in their reduced childbearing. The likelihood is that decreased fertility among Colyton residents was achieved mainly through abortion and contraception and that these were strategies initiated by, learned through, and shared collectively among a community of working women.
Birth control practices do not fall from the sky. Their development and use follow from specific social conditions that have to do with economic shifts or gender relations or some interaction of the two. These constants do not mean that there are no fundamental changes or cleavages in the practice of fertility control but that such changes generally occur in the realm of ideas, social organization, and politics, rather than technology, and that they have social and economic roots. Thus, with the development of a capitalist market and long before industrialization, a new consciousness about fertility control began to arise (its predecessor, presumably, was not "unconsciousness" but different preindustrial forms of consciousness). This new fertility ethic focused on children as a "value" and, in the true spirit of capitalist accounting, on the calculation and "rational planning" of family size in accordance with family resources.29 But for children to be perceived as an "investment" in the future, rather than security against old age, extra hands, or extra kin, presupposed definite conditions that transform the meaning of having and raising children. Central among these conditions in Western Europe were (1) a system of production in which land and its products become commodities of exchange (so that the economics of consolidating and appropriating supersede the custom of parceling out); (2) a wage-labor economy that is sufficiently pervasive that families are dependent on it to survive and sufficiently expansive that they have some hope of a future to plan for; (3) a sociomedical context in which infant and child mortality is low enough to make "frugality" in childbearing worth the risk; and (4) a family structure whose core is the married couple and whose central purpose is the production and maintenance of children as values.
In other words, what was necessary was an idealized version of the nuclear family, which eventually would be inherited, in a bourgeois society, by most of the working class.30 These conditions historically have arisen according to different timetables for different classes; moreover, their implications at a given moment may differ for women and men within those classes. But whatever the class and gender specifics, the conditions give rise to the techniques, not the other way around; the need and desire for fertility control necessarily precede the practice of it and the forms that practice takes.