Birth Control

Birth Control Movement, Neo-Malthusianism, and Eugenics

Early birth control advocates came from different groups with various rationales. Influenced by the English economist and Anglican clergyman Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), a group of early 19th-century elite White males, including Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), Francis Place (1771–1854), and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), saw a solution for poverty in the regulation of fertility. Whereas Malthus stressed moral restraint—delayed marriage and abstinence—on religious grounds, neo-Malthusians searched for more practical methods, such as coitus interruptus, vaginal douching, condoms, pessaries, and sponges. They mainly campaigned as single individuals in their freethinkers’ circles until 1877, when Charles Drysdale (1829–2907) founded the Malthusian League in England and published a journal called The Malthusian to challenge Victorian sexual morality. Branches were established in Holland, France, and Germany in the 1880s and 1890s; the first International Neo-Malthusian Conference met in Paris in 1900.

Some feminists at the turn of the century shared with the neo-Malthusians the idea of legalizing contraception and making it more available, but to promote women's liberation and maternal welfare rather than on economic grounds. Leading figures include Aletta Jacobs (1854–1929) in Holland, Annie Besant (1874–1933) and Marie Stopes (1880–1958) in England, Helena Stoecker (1869–1943) in Germany, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) and Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) in the United States, and Ishimoto Shizue (1923–2001) in Japan. They wrote pamphlets and delivered public lectures to disseminate information about contraception. Significantly, they worked with female doctors to set up birth control clinics. The first centers in the Netherlands, the United States, Germany, and Japan were created in 1882, 1916, 1919, and 1922, respectively. These activists formed an informal transnational feminist network and influenced each other's work; they also [Page 131]sent information and supplies to dozens of countries. Like many pioneers, they faced harsh criticism. To some advocates of women's emancipation, the discourses and practices of the birth control movement seemed controversial and threatened to undermine their priority of women's suffrage; they refused to include the topic of birth control on their agendas. Medical professionals, predominantly male, also kept their distance from the movement. Eager to earn scientific endorsement for their work, the birth control campaigners turned to eugenicists and built an alliance with the eugenics movement.

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