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 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.

“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 “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.

scholarly journals When the Personal Is Always Political: Norwegian Muslims’ Arguments for Women’s Rights

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
Hannah Helseth
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
The Public ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

For almost two decades, the public debate about Islam in Western Europe has been dominated by concerns about the lack of gender equality in the racialized Muslim population. There has been a tendency to victimize “the Muslim woman” rather than to encourage Muslim women’s participation in the public debate about their lives. This contribution to the study of discourses on Muslim women is an analysis of arguments written by Muslims about women’s rights. The data consists of 239 texts written by self-defined Muslims in major Norwegian newspapers about women’s rights. I will discuss two findings from the study. The first is an appeal to be personal when discussing issues of domestic violence and racism is combined with an implicit and explicit demand to represent all Muslims in order to get published in newspapers—which creates an ethno-religious threshold for participation in the public debate. The second finding is that, across different positions and different religious affiliations, from conservative to nearly secular, and across the timeline, from 2000 to 2012, there is a dominant understanding of women’s rights as individual autonomy. These findings will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives to explore how arguments for individual autonomy can both challenge and amplify neoliberal agendas.

The Nineteenth Amendment Today

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-154
Author(s):  
Paula A. Monopoli
Keyword(s):  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Women's Equality

Chapter 8 concludes that the Nineteenth Amendment can be revitalized today, to more fully ensure women’s equality. It reviews new legal scholarship that suggests direct applications of the Nineteenth Amendment to today’s voting rights challenges. And it describes how some scholars suggest that the Nineteenth should be read together with the Fourteenth Amendment, as a normative matter, to provide a more capacious understanding of the Fourteenth, as applied to women’s rights, beyond voting. Given persistent gender inequality, and the uncertain status of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the chapter concludes that it is worth revisiting the jurisprudential potential of the Nineteenth Amendment, at its centennial.

The Politics of Commemorating the Woman Suffrage Movement in New York City: On the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422094412
Author(s):  
Sierra Rooney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
American Woman ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Central Park ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
Woman Suffrage Movement

This article traces the commission, design, and public reception for New York City’s Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument as a case study for the contentious politics of monument-building. The Central Park statue—as of this writing, not yet realized—has followed a protracted, frequently contested path since its conception in 2015. It was originally designed to depict women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. What began as an initially well-received initiative to correct the gender imbalance in the city’s public art became mired in controversy amid the politically charged atmosphere of the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency. I argue that, while the polarity of contemporary politics amplified the statue’s controversy, the tensions at play are the product of more than 170 years of conflicts inherent in the progressive activism of the American woman suffrage movement and commemorations of it.

‘La Femme’ Before and After the Tunisian Uprising: (Dis)continuities in the Configuration of Women in the Truth Regime of ‘Tunisianité’

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 201-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loes Debuysere
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Before And After

The rights of Tunisian women have been safeguarded in the aftermath of Tunisia’s popular uprising, despite initial and widespread fears of the contrary following the democratic victory of the Islamist Ennahdha party. Article 46 of the new constitution not only reinforces ‘les droits acquis’ of Tunisian women, but also seeks to expand them. The post-uprising preservation of women’s rights can be explained by the persistent hegemony of the image of the professional, modern and emancipated ‘Femme Tunisienne’ – since independence presented as a role model for women to live up to – and its crucial role in the truth regime of Tunisian modernist identity (‘Tunisianité’). In order to understand the (dis)continuities of this imaginary after the overthrow of Ben Ali, the paper traces the origins of the hegemonic yet ambiguous ‘Femme’ and discusses the role of Tunisia’s women’s movements in its reconstruction since the uprising.

scholarly journals Women Artists and Activism in Ellen Clayton's "English Female Artists" (1876)

Oceánide ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 37-44
Author(s):  
María Begoña Lasa Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Women's Education ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Specific Domain ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Art Academies

In her biographical compilation English Female Artists (1876), Ellen Clayton documented the lives of many talented and hard-working women as a means of bringing to light and celebrating their role in the history of art. Moreover, she also explored these artists’ biographies in order to problematize more general issues, thus entering into one of the most significant initiatives of the period: the movement for women’s rights, with proposals including the improvement of women’s education, their access to art academies, and the amelioration of laws regarding marriage, family and employment. Of particular interest are the lives of celebrated artists who were also leading activists in the period, such as Laura Herford, Eliza Bridell-Fox and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Therefore, this study aims to explore not only Clayton’s approach to female artists within the specific domain of art, but also the incursions that they made into broad social and political issues regarding women. Finally, the presence in various biographies of the term “sisters” is particularly revealing in that Clayton, through her text, could be said to be assembling as many women as possible, not just artists, as a means of fighting for their rights together as sisters.

scholarly journals The Spain Women’s anti-fascist movement in the XX-th century

enadakultura ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elene Chirakadze
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Spanish Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function

If we look at the modern world, we can clearly see how big problem it is to achieve gender equality. Women still have to fight for their rights. Gender research has become particularly relevant in the 21st century. Special institutions, faculties, organizations and movements have been established which are actively working on this problem, including in Georgia. It should also be noted that the issue of women's participation in politics has become especially relevant in the world today, which has defined our interest in the history of gender. Since the XXth century, we have been actively witnessing the establishment of gender sciences in various educational institutions. For historians, gender issues are very interesting in the context of studying political, economic or social history, it is interesting how the role and function of women was seen at different stages of history, according to countries with different levels of development or type of government.This paper presents one specific section of the huge prism of the struggle for women’s rights that followed the existence of the Francoist dictatorship in Spain.The paper focuses on the anti-fascist movement of Spanish women and their activities during the Francoist dictatorship in Spain. It also gives a brief history of the pre-period status of women's rights in the country and how it changed before and after the civil war.It is noteworthy that Europe in the second half of the twentieth century was completely different from Spain in the territory of Western Europe, where there was discriminatory rule on the basis of gender.

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