Linda Gordon traces the development of the birth control movement from the 1870s to the 1970s. In the process she weaves together material from a range of topics including feminism, socialism, psychology, and eugenics. Ultimately, Gordon unearths the threads of various ideas that influenced the struggle for reproduction control. Gordon also places birth control within a broader social and political framework through an examination of a variety of sources such as the American Birth Control League papers, local and national Planned Parenthood archives, medical journals, diaries, and letters. In the end, Gordon contends that reproductive freedom is central to the struggle for social justice.
Gordon argues that the history of birth control must be placed in a larger social, political, and ideological context. “Reproductive patterns,” she explains, “are determined by sexual morality, by the overall-status of women, by class formations, and by the nature of the struggles for social change.”[1] In Gordon’s view, the struggle for reproductive freedom should not be separated from class systems, capitalist economics, male-dominated politics, and sexual relations. Moreover, according to Gordon, birth control is a symptom and a cause of various elements and patterns in American history.
For Gordon, birth control is an issue of politics not technology. Gordon insists that technological breakthroughs did not determine the practice of birth control used at any particular time. Rather the practice was determined by changes in social behavior and political beliefs. Gordon defines birth control as “efforts to increase individual control over reproduction.”[2] Infanticide, abortion, coitus interruptus, periodic abstinence, and the use of spermicides were all available to limit the number of children in preindustrial societies. But, Gordon contends that by the late-nineteenth century birth control had changed from an individual decision to a social movement. The emergence of birth control as a respectable practice resulted from changing sexual standards that are related to women’s struggle for freedom.
Gordon identifies three stages in the birth control movement. The first phase, “voluntary motherhood,” emphasized women’s morally superior place within the traditional family. Gordon contends that this stage emerged from the advent of American feminism in the 1870s and essentially involved a women’s right to withhold sexual relations.[3] Thus, this first phase placed sex within a permanent, monogamous marriage and gave women authority over childbearing decisions. Gordon suggests that despite the repressive features of the Victorian era, the period still provided women with a degree of reproductive control.
Gordon dates the second phase from 1910 to 1920; she explains that this phase produced the term “birth control.”[4] During this time, the influence of European sexual theorists created a radical shift in the attitudes of leading American intellectuals and reformers. As a result, a new concept of birth control emerged that conceptualized sexual activity and reproduction as two separate human activities. In this new conceptualization, sexual indulgence reinforced reproductive self-determination. In this context, turn-of-the-century socialists and feminists integrated reproductive control into a broader critique of American civilization. As the stage she most admires, Gordon contends that this phase “stood not only for women’s autonomy but for a revolutionizing of society and the empowering of the powerless- the working class and the female sex primarily.”[5] For Gordon, this stage was truly radical as it attacked the established system of sex, economics, politics, and class.
Gordon identifies the third phase as “planned parenthood.” She explains that it developed after socialism and feminism faded in post-World War I America. Gordon contends that by the 1920s professionals- eugenicists, physicians, and social workers- transformed birth control into a centralized elitist enterprise. And, Gordon asserts that by the late 1930s, these professionals had increasingly identified birth control as an economic tool to solve unemployment and preserve capitalism. These changes culminated with the creation of Planned Parenthood in the 1940s; an entity that Gordon maintains was neither revolutionary nor feminist. To this point, Gordon argues that by confining itself to a single issue, Planned Parenthood essentially functioned as a tool to strengthen capitalism. For Gordon, the purpose of Planned Parenthood was to encourage the “incorporation of reproductive control into state programs as a form of social planning.”[6] This phase systematically separated the feminist impulse of the earlier periods by making the family the focus of reproductive control, rather than women. Thus, for Gordon, the third stage helped to integrate birth-control ideas into mainstream social planning, which further separated birth control from any remaining feminist orientation.
The planned parenthood phase, Gordon argues, also created a bridge between two previously distinct movements. Descended from Malthusianism, the population control movement had separate roots from the birth-control movement. According to Gordon, the organization and theoretical background of the population control movement congealed around the elitist and racist eugenics movement of the early 1900s. This movement attributed all social ills to over population, rather than to inadequacies of the social system. Unlike the struggle for reproductive self-determination, the population control movement aimed to limit the growth of minorities, the poor, and Third World nations.[7] For Gordon, the planned parenthood phase represents the suppression of birth control as a bottom-up social movement; it replaced the call for women’s reproductive freedom with an emphasis on social planning by experts. Gordon concludes that the birth control movement sold its soul for respectability and, as a result, it opened the door for eugenicists, racists, and advocates of population control.
Gordon’s work combines a historical analysis with a Feminist/ Marxist perspective. In Gordon’s view, it is vital to study modes of reproduction, and not just simply modes of production. To this point, she explains that changes in reproduction patterns affect daily life, class- consciousness, social mores, and overall power structures. Gordon contends that when class and sexual relationships are unequal, gains in a single area become counterproductive. As she eloquently states, “The pretense of equality in the face of basic inequality merely contributes to the inequality.”[8]
Altogether, for Gordon, the increased availability of contraceptives for women has produced mixed results. To be sure, the growing respectability of the birth control movement contributed to the rebirth of feminism in the 1970s. Yet, Gordon contends that the women’s movement is fractured by a “professional–class of white women,” who largely ignore the plight of working-class women “whose problems require structural change in the society.”[9] In sum, Gordon concludes that the birth control movement settled for reform within the status quo, as it divorced itself from attending to the deeper societal problems that plague women and the poor.
Gordon sees both feminist and socialist groups suffering from a schism that separates the sexual, social, and political. Even so, Gordon locates a brief period in American history where activists linked the struggles for reproductive freedom with radical politics. Consequently, as she states, her work presents a “documented plea for the importance of a total program of female liberation, for a never-ending vigilance to view birth control and sexual activity in the context of the over-all power relations of the society, especially sex and class relations.”[10] Gordon makes a compelling case for understanding the birth control movement in its larger political, social, and ideological context. In the end, this study embodies the ethos of women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, as it seeks to reveals how the personal truly is political.
—Rebecca DeWolf, Ph.D.
[1] Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman, 1976), 404.
[2] Ibid., xiv-xv.
[3] Gordon recognizes that there is a definitional issue with the word “feminism,” since it originally referred to a specific period within the women’s rights movement. Gordon uses the word more generally describing feminism as an impulse to “increase the power and autonomy of women in their families, communities, and/or society.” Gordon, xiv. For more information on the historical specificity of feminism see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).
[4] Even though “birth control” was originally associated with this specific, radical movement, Gordon points out that it is now the accepted term for “reproductive control.” Consequently, she uses “birth control” and “reproductive control” interchangeably. Gordon, xvi.
[5] Gordon, xv.
[6] Ibid., 341- 342.
[7] Gordon recognizes the necessity for considering the question of overpopulation, but points out that the population control movement always considers birth rate reduction before women’s right to reproductive self-determination. Gordon, 401-402.
[8] Ibid., 413.
[9] Ibid., xviii.
[10]Ibid., 415.