“The Reasonable (Wo)man”: Physicians, Freedom of Contract, and Women's Rights, 1870–1930

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 771-809 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Macivor Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Birth Control ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Medical Jurisprudence ◽  
Freedom Of Contract ◽  
Women's Rights Movement ◽  
Birth Control Movement ◽  
Intellectual Incapacity ◽  
Women Disabled

This article examines how ideals of contract freedom within the women's rights movement challenged medical and medical jurisprudence theories about women between 1870 and 1930. Throughout this period, medicine linked women's intellectual incapacity with problems rooted in their physical bodies. Doctors opined that reproductive diseases and conditions of pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and menopause rendered women disabled, irrational, and inherently dependent. Yet at the same moment, the elimination of the legal disability of coverture, and new laws that expanded women's property and earnings rights contributed to changing perceptions of women's public roles. Courts applied far more liberal understandings of sanity and rationality in property and contract cases, even when the legal actors were women. Seizing this opportunity, reformers made powerful arguments against doctors' ideas of women's “natural” mental weakness, pointing out that the growing rights to contract and transact illustrated women's rationalism and competency for full citizenship. Most significantly, these activists insisted that these rights indicated women's right to total bodily freedom—a concept that would become crucially important in the early birth control movement.

The Politics of Birth Control, 1920–1940: The Impact of Professionals

1975 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Sex Education ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Population Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Professional Staff ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Birth Control Movement ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Held Back

Before the 1920s, a birth control movement arose in the United States out of socialist, feminist, and other radical groups concerned with women's rights and sexual freedom. After 1920 the birth control movement became gradually transformed into a respectable, nonradical reform cause, the recipient of large grants from big business, with women's rights secondary to an overriding concern with medical health and population control. This transformation was achieved through the professionalization of the birth control movement—that is, its takeover by professional experts, almost all male, in place of the radical amateur women, fighting for their own interests, who initiated it. The article examines two groups of professionals who were particularly influential in this transformation: doctors and academic eugenists. The former made birth control a medical issue, held back the development of popular sex education, and stifled a previously developing feminist approach to women's birth control needs. The latter contributed racism to the birth control movement, helping to transform it into a population control movement with racist and anti-feminist overtones. Both groups, while they made contributions to the technology of contraception, simultaneously held back the spread of birth control by transforming the campaign for it from a popular, participatory cause to a professional staff lobbying operation.

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

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 542-558
Author(s):  
Heather Munro Prescott ◽  
Lauren MacIvor Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Birth Control ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
White Women ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Birth Control Movement ◽  
Before And After ◽  
New Research

AbstractThe 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.

The “Incidental Relation” of Mother

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy A. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Reproductive Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
Reproductive Control ◽  
The Law ◽  
Social Reformers

This chapter explores Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s views on women’s reproductive rights. It traces the voluntary motherhood movement among women’s rights activists and social reformers, which endorsed women’s singular right to choose sexual relations and procreation. Stanton took this concept a step further, advocating eugenic ideas of enlightened motherhood as a method of birth control. The chapter juxtaposes Stanton’s work for reproductive control against the abortion movement of the latter nineteenth century, which eventually criminalized abortion in all states. Following Stanton’s interest in the trial of Hester Vaughan for infanticide, the chapter reveals how Stanton used the trial to expose gendered inequalities of the law, including women’s exclusion as judges, lawyers, legislators, and jurors.

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