Dreamers of a New Day (16 page)

While proponents of voluntary motherhood put the stress on the individual woman’s right to control her own destiny, from the early nineteenth century radicals had also argued that control over reproduction could benefit society, especially the poor. They based their case on the theories of the eighteenth-century economist, Thomas Malthus, who had maintained that fewer children would alleviate poverty. Annie Besant’s popular tract
The Law of Population
(1877) approached ‘limiting the family’ as a social question and stressed how it would reduce poverty.
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Jane Hume Clapperton drew on Malthusian ideas in
Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness
(1885):

The issue of artificial checks to reproduction promises, in my opinion, to effect eventually all that is desirable, and seems to me the
only possible method
by which society can reach to the foundation of its miseries, its poverty, its pauperism, and check these
at the source
.
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While some radicals accepted family limitation, others suspected that Malthusian population control substituted restricting fertility for changing the ownership and distribution of wealth. The argument continued on into the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, the Malthusian League’s propaganda was explicitly targeting ‘working men and women’; large families meant children could not be well cared for and the mothers’
health suffered, while in the long term fathers faced more competition in the job market. Slanting its approach in an anti-capitalist direction, the League posited that the people who benefited from large families were:

(1) those who want to keep up
cheap labour
; (2) those who think an
enormous standing army
is necessary; (3) those who prefer that the poor shall always exist, so as to have a class ready to do all the disagreeable work of the world; (4) those who think that this world doesn’t matter, and no matter how miserable we are here, we’re sure of a good time in another world.
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Unlike the free lovers’ individualist approach, the ‘Malthusians’, or ‘Neo- Malthusians’, put the economy, the state and industrial relations in the foreground, presenting sexual reproduction as an integral part of society. Instead of a discourse of rights over one’s person, they emphasized the need for economic and social policies to control population. Despite efforts to combine the two ways of looking at fertility in the late nineteenth century, the conflict rumbled on into the twentieth.

Another influential current, the eugenicists, also focused on the social implications of reproduction, claiming that the reorganization of fertility was the key to national efficiency. Eugenic ideas had originated in the American utopian milieu where perfecting and controlling all aspects of life and social relationships had appeared to be a possibility. John Humphrey Noyes developed his own idiosyncratic approach to changing sexual practices at the Oneida Community in New York State (1848–1881). Concern about women’s suffering in childbirth led him to seek ways of separating what he called the ‘amative’ side of sex from propagation. The result would be a system of tight cultural regulation over sexuality. Only the older men who had learned to have intercourse without ejaculating were permitted to have non-procreative sex with young women. The young men were confined to older women. Those who wished to have children applied to Noyes and a committee who decided which mates would be best for the community. The children were cared for communally. Though Noyes’s selection process was haphazard, he bequeathed the idea of ‘stirpiculture’ to the free lovers who saw it as part of their efforts to perfect personal and social existence. The Heywoods were enthusiastic advocates and so was Moses Harman, who in 1901 asserted ‘the right to be born well’.
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This phrase circulated widely, and was being repeated by the municipal reformer Mary Beard as late as 1915.
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A term for the study of selective breeding, ‘eugenics’ was coined by the British scientist and geographer Francis Galton in 1883. The first cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton produced a social theory which complemented the competitive struggle for existence in the natural world. His aim was to produce ‘better’ people. Eugenics presented a supposedly scientific answer to social problems, and Galton’s proposition that a better future could be secured for the whole nation by engineering reproduction possessed a strong attraction for the growing strata of middle-class professionals. In a period when the working class was pressing for change in the organization of production, eugenics provided an alternative promise of progress without seriously upsetting the status quo. The loaded question was, of course, who decided who was ‘fit’ and who was ‘unfit’. Given their own breeding pool, eugenic theorists tended to equate ‘fitness’ with the white Anglo-Saxon middle class, and worried that the ‘wrong’ people were having the most children. There were thus two aspects to eugenic propaganda: positive and negative. On the one hand eugenicists wanted the ‘best’ stock to reproduce itself, while on the other they sought to restrain those they saw as ‘unfit’ from bearing children.
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The appeal of eugenics reached right across the political spectrum. It was adopted by social reformers, such as the Progressives in the US and the Fabians in Britain, who believed in the need for evolutionary change, but feared class conflict. It found favour too with imperialists concerned to strengthen the imperial race in Britain, while eugenic warnings about dilution and swamping played on the fears of Anglo-Saxon Americans facing the mass immigration of workers to the US. At the same time eugenics could be embraced as a positive force by feminists and socialists campaigning for better conditions of motherhood, while birth controllers and advocates of free love could similarly back up their cause with eugenic rhetoric. Eugenic arguments were mixed with environmental ones to support a variety of causes.
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For advocates of mothers’ pensions, mothers needed resources from the state in order to build up ‘the race’ and free women who chose their partners would, according to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, eliminate the lower type of male.
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On the other hand, the possibility of elite new women exercising choice by rejecting fertility could present a threat to eugenic plans. Harriot Stanton Blatch introduced a menacing observation into her 1891 paper on ‘Voluntary Motherhood’: ‘more and more the best women
turn from the work of motherhood and join the ranks of competitive labour, or seek in society and politics a field for the free play of their ambitions.’
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This idea of a ‘birth strike’ intrigued utopian novelists in the late nineteenth century; it figures in
The Strike of a Sex
(1891), written by George Noyes Miller, the son of John Humphrey Noyes, and in Lois Waisbrooker’s
A Sex Revolution
(1894) as a metaphor for women’s sexual power.

During the 1900s, anxiety about a real ‘birth strike’ was causing widespread concern because the middle- and upper-class birth-rate was in decline. In practice it was tricky for the state to intervene in the procreation habits of the privileged, while negative eugenic propaganda against the ‘unfit’ tended to feed into a social panic rather than policy. However, Britain’s 1913 Mental Deficiency Act did reflect eugenic attitudes. Children and young people could be classified as feeble-minded and moral defectives for failing in school and for delinquent behaviour. Delinquency included young unmarried women who became pregnant; it was commonly assumed that their children would be degenerate.
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In 1915 Mary Beard recorded discussion about the segregation and sterilization of the ‘feeble-minded’ in the US, though doubts were expressed by women reformers about whether
all
unmarried mothers could be viewed as feeble-minded.
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Critical voices were being raised against eugenic authoritarianism from the 1890s. Lizzie Holmes, Lillie D. White and Voltairine de Cleyre all combated eugenic ideas among free lovers and anarchists, while Lois Waisbrooker, who had been initially enthusiastic, shifted her position after observing the popularity of eugenics among the Progressive social reformers in the early 1900s. She came to believe ‘that as long as mothers were both independent and loving, eugenics could be forgotten.’
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There was, moreover, dissent within the Progressive camp. Alice Hamilton’s experience of working at Hull House from 1897 convinced her of the need for birth control. But she was not

moved much by the plea that the upper classes are being submerged by the lower and that the poor must be kept from breeding too fast. We know that ability and character are not a matter of class and that the difference comes from the unfair handicaps to which the children of the poor are subject, and we would remedy matters by working for equality of opportunity for all children, instead of trying to encourage the propagation of one class and not of the other. The arguments for
birth control which most appeal to us are based on the welfare of the women of the poorer classes and the welfare of their children.
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Instead of eugenics Hamilton invoked the old radical arguments of the poor needing knowledge and power, coupling these with change in the social environment that produced poverty.

Environmental rather than eugenic arguments prevailed among socialists advocating birth control, on the grounds that it would help working-class women and improve family life. Though some socialists maintained that socialism would make contraception irrelevant, others were beginning to think otherwise. In response to the demand for information, Julia Dawson, a columnist on the British socialist paper, the
Clarion
, recommended a birth control tract in 1896 which demonstrated how to make pessaries from cocoa butter and quinine.
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The working-class socialist and feminist from Derbyshire, Hannah Mitchell describes in her autobiography
The Hard Way Up
how she decided to marry in the mid-1890s because of ‘the newer ideas which were being propounded by the Socialists’. Among these new ideas was ‘limiting the population as a means of reducing poverty’. Pragmatically Mitchell combined the social and economic case with individual rights: ‘although birth control may not be a perfect solution to social problems, it is the first and the simplest way for the poor to help themselves, and by far the surest way for women to obtain some measure of freedom.’ As a young woman Mitchell had resolved that she was not going to join the ranks of ‘pretty merry girls who had married on a small wage and whose babies had come first’. She dreaded their destiny, which was to become ‘slatterns and prematurely aged women’.
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Her aspirations were shared by other thoughtful working-class women radicalized by socialism and feminism. By the early twentieth century, the Neo-Malthusian Alice Vickery, who was active in the propaganda drive in working-class areas of South London, presented her audiences with both individual
and
social reasons for birth control. Vickery also made a point of engaging with women in labour organizations in 1912, addressing the Women’s Co-operative Guild in Tottenham, North London on how ‘married persons’ could limit births.
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In the United States the penalties for propagating birth control information were so severe that only the most intransigent sexual radicals, such as Moses Harman, were prepared to risk repeated prosecutions. Some were broken by repression; in 1900 Ida Craddock committed suicide
rather than face another term of imprisonment.
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However, by 1910 European Neo-Malthusian ideas were being debated in the American Socialist Party. The catalyst was Antoinette Konikow, a doctor born in Russia and educated in Germany, who contended that smaller families would enable workers to avoid extreme poverty and thus fight more effectively for social change. In 1913, Konikow used Engels’s writings on reproduction to argue for the ‘wonderful interdependence of the manifold factors of human life, especially the factor of sex relations with the basic ones of economics’.
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This emphasis upon reproduction and production as linked structures complemented the individualistic strand in radicalism which emphasized self-possession. But Konikow’s influence was limited, partly because many American Socialist Party members adhered to social-purity assumptions about sex, and partly because assertions of the individual’s capacity to act held a greater appeal than her Marxist concepts of reproduction and production, which could appear abstract and remote. Many Marxists continued to oppose birth control because it was considered to be a diversion from the class war.

By the early 1900s, however, feminists, anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and socialists in many countries were discussing the link between controlling fertility and women’s control over their bodies, invoking Nietzsche’s celebration of the will, sex psychology and anarcho-syndicalist ideas of control and direct action. Theories about reproductive freedom were transmitted through international networks which included Madeleine Pelletier and Hélène Brion in France, and Alexandra Kollontai in Russia, as well as Stella Browne in Britain. In Germany the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sexual Reform approached reproduction as a totality, advocating chosen motherhood, contraception and maternity reforms.

Emma Goldman was quick to make the connection between birth control and women’s sexual and social liberation. She had become convinced of the need for information about contraception while working as a nurse among immigrant women on the Lower East Side. In 1900, through her anarchist friend Victor Dave, she attended a secret Neo-Malthusian conference in Paris where she learned about the latest contraceptive methods. Though Goldman spoke in support of free motherhood and ‘Family Limitation’, she did not outline methods of contraception until 1915, because she knew it would mean jail and prevent her from supporting her numerous other causes.
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