18.4&5: Motherhood, Contraception and the Cultre of Control
Supplement to Endnotes
Over the nineteenth century, women like Mary Cole had fewer children for many reasons. Many hoped to escape death and morning. In the nineteenth century, four out of every ten deaths were of children under the age of five; and almost every woman knew or knew of another woman who had died during the ordeal of labor. Women also reduced the size of families to escape the physical suffering that accompanied pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.[1]
For all kinds of American parents, having fewer children, and the marketplace of contraceptive ideas and tools that made that possible, were part of a larger endeavor to rescue life from the jaws of fate. Lecturers such as Frederick Hollick, maybe the most renowned expert on reproductive control in his day, toured cities and towns with wax and papier-mâché models that had removable intricacies, teaching couples that they, like the artificial bodies on the stage, were knowable, controllable objects, not creatures of mystery.
Though it happened when George and Mary were only children, one male admirer wrote Robert Dale Owen about his pioneering work in the 1830s on contraception, saying that after reading Owen’s book, “a new scene of existence seemed to open before me. I found myself, in this all important matter, a free agent, and in a degree, the arbiter of my own destiny.” In her own way, Mary was asserting control of her selfhood and destiny.[2]
The belief in the power to shape one’s own destiny made the shaping of children a moral imperative and an intense burden. Some lecturers even promised that by controlling the timing of conception, they could shape the looks and character of offspring. The power of parents to form children by design only added to the dedication of more and more resources into their well-spaced, intentional offspring. The message also resonated with the working classes, especially among artisans and journeymen who had aspirations for advancement and who, therefore, embraced the “middle-class” gospel of self-control, delayed gratification and careful planning for the future.[3]
An American mother from a walk of life similar to Mary’s, and who was also deeply anxious about unwanted pregnancy, wrote in 1848 to her parents that, “I often fear I shall commit some error that shall affect them for life and forever.” Particularly among the middle-class, where the home was sentimentalized as the place where mothers nurtured children, and mothers had the time and means to read to toddlers instead of laboring at a mill, sons and daughters were viewed as vessels with the seemingly endless capacity to hold all that mother could pour into them. The weight of this elevated calling of motherhood is articulated well in a child-rearing advice book: “Yes, mothers, in a certain sense, the destiny of a redeemed world is put into your hands.” [4]
Changing views of children and how to educate them traced back to the ideas of Daniel Defoe, John Abrey and John Milton. The idea of innocent children, freshly separated from the goodness of God, resonated in Romantic Era poetry, especially of Willam Blake and William Wordsworth. (A true Victorian father, George Cole fretted over what the scenes at his jail would do to his girls.) In middle-class, urban homes a new ideal of sheltered childhood. The deepest mark was made by John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Pestalozzi. After the Atlantic revolutions, in new republics like the United States and France, mothers were often depicted as the hope for the new nation. Locke’s seminal writings on education, and his depictions of children born with a blank slate for character and morality -- the tabula rasa -- led to widespread emphasis on the proper education of young children, and in the necessity for mothers to be sufficiently educated for the essential work.
And so, women had fewer children because it allowed them to pour more of their energies into fewer lives. Mothers in antebellum and Civil War era America, who lived downstream from Lockean ideas about blank-slated children and the power of education to shape the destiny of humans, felt the burden of properly placing children on the right path toward successful citizenship and a moral life (a path that the rhetoric of self-made manhood tried to erase).[5]
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[1] See: Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, “Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920” in Women and Health in America: Historical Readings (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Judith Walzer Leavitt, “Under the Shadow of Maternity: American Women's Responses to Death and Debility Fears in Nineteenth-Century Childbirth,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 129–54.
[2] Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in the Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 112-119 (young mechanic quoted on p. 60).
[3] Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in the Nineteenth-Century America, pp. 112-119, 131, 183; Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004), pp. 77-81.
[4] Mary Poor quoted in, Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in the Nineteenth-Century America p.15; See quote about redeemed world in: Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 82.
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[5] In the wake of the American Revolution, mothers were tasked with the grand responsibility of shaping blank-slate children into committed republican citizens. This in turn became the justification for young women’s education to prepare them to be teachers of civic and moral responsibility. Education led to increased capacity for women to recognize, name and challenge their status as dependent beings, absorbed in their husband’s identity through the cultural and legal practices of coverture. The ideas of Locke, in short, inspired both women’s rights and the increased burden of motherhood. See, Chapter 4 in Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft; Chapter 4 in Carl N. Degler, At Odds.
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