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A Right to Ourselves: Women's Suffrage and the Birth Control Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2020

Heather Munro Prescott  and
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
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Abstract

The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical scholarship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women's rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women's rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the vote for white women), would then grapple with competing goals of restrictive racist and eugenic arguments for contraception alongside the emphasis on achieving emancipation for all women.

Keywords

Birth controlreproductionsuffragewomen's rights
Type
Special Issue: The Nineteenth Amendment at 100
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 542 - 558
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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Footnotes

In the original online version of this article, the authors' affiliation headings were omitted. They have been added above and an erratum has been published.

References

Notes

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62 Gordon, Moral Property of Women, 205. An extensive literature describes this transformation, illustrating how women's clubs and the ABCL, working alongside eugenicists, bundled birth control activism together with calls for restrictive social hygiene and eugenic measures. These groups lobbied for a successful and widespread legal program of state sterilization initiatives for “unfit” populations that lasted well into the late twentieth century. See Carlson, Elof Axel, “The Hoosier Connection: Compulsory Sterilization as Moral Hygiene” in A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era, ed. Lombardo, Paul A. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Kline, Wendy, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Kluchin, Rebecca M., Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Ladd-Taylor, Molly, Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Larson, Edward J., “‘In The Finest, Most Womanly Way’: Women in the Southern Eugenics Movement,” American Journal of Legal History 39 (Apr. 1995): 119–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rensing, “Feminist Eugenics in America”; Schoen, Johanna, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Ziegler, Mary, “Eugenic Feminism: Mental Hygiene, the Women's Movement, and the Campaign for Eugenic Legal Reform, 1900–1935,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 36 (Winter 2008)Google Scholar.