4/9 Solinger 2&3

Pregnancy and Power by Rickie Solinger

Racializing the Nation = Regulating sex, pregnancy, and reproduction = white supremacy

Civil War (1870-1920)

• Women moved away from their communities to cities, to find jobs as domestic laborers, in needle trades, manufacturing and clerical jobs (their labor was less valuable for farming communities), or because they were widowed or divorced. The city offered anonymity.

• Commercialization of contraception and abortion = separated sex and reproduction

• Traditionalists were upset by women challenging sexual conventions, breaching codes of sexual conduct—compromised femininity and purity, that is white privilege.

• All women, of all economic means could buy contraceptives

• Middle class women - with privacy - began contraceptive douching (unreliable and ineffective) so doctors continued performing abortions

• In 1873, the Comstock defined contraception materials and information as obscene and immoral and banned their dissemination (banning misoprostol)

• Urban law enforcement officials prosecuted violators.

• Comstock law: proponents justified it = contraception threatened (1) the “health” of the nation and (2) the meaning of womanhood

• It ensured the demographic advantage and the political of the “right” social class and racial group

  • It had little impact on middle class married women who had abortion and babies in the privacy of home

  • Poor women did not have private doctors, not have private spaces in home (suffered severely)

• for women who had little or no money, voluntary motherhood was irrelevant

• poor women were nearly destitute, barely able to feed, clothe, or house themselves

• In 1890s a diaphragm equaled a week’s wages. Reformers created rescue homes, to stamp out infanticide. Some tried to keep babies by putting them in baby farms, which were very dangerous to babies (poor nutrition, infant mortality in particular for African Americans)

1920s - Eugenics

• Undesirable (nonwhite, mixed-raced, immigrants, poor and working class whites who produced too many children) were unfit for reproduction

• Avoid race suicide by reproducing population in the image of those political and economic elite = whites

• native women were pushed into the public sphere through gov projects to take their children away into boarding schools

• did not have the right to be mothers as they lacked some biologicially based

• IQ test became a tool for determining which child coul dbe a citizen, soldier, woker, reproducer, and which should not have been born - 1907 - mid-1920s states provided eugenics sterilization

• Institutionalizing promiscuous women was becoming too expensive

• sterilization was cheaper and made women more amenable to discipline and less restless

• 1927 (Buck vs Bell) affirmed the gov the right to interfere and terminante productive capacity of social inadequate persons

• All history that portrays the US in a bad light is never discussed.

Great Depression

• 1933 ¼ workers were out of a job and the average family’s income fell 40% since 1929

• Men who could not earn a living stayed away from matrimony

• Unmarried couples and unemployed had sex anyway: (1) unintended pregnancies, and (2) determination to curb fertility.

• “Do women realize that true emancipation and acknowledgement of an equal status for women can never be realized until motherhood is a choice?” Sanger

• Immigration laws were used to protect quality of “American” babies and the jobs of “American” workers

• repatriation and forced exodus

• 1930- huge number of women obtained abortions

• deaths from professional administered abortion was rare. resources and privileges associated with class and enabled privacy

• women lacking the resources to pay a professional are likely to induce the procedure on themselves

• the poorer a woman, the less likely she had access to private medical care, and more likely to attempt self-abortion

• many hospitals opened abortion wards to respond to the mayhem from self-abortion