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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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