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

Abstract

The 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.

Dobbs, the Intrusive State, and the Future of Solidarity

“…By the 1920s, physician control of pregnancy and delivery was almost complete; midwifery services were used primarily by poor and black women. 47 The Eugenics Movement In the 1920s, an emerging method of reproductive control based on a social movement promoting "good genetics" 48 saw states begin to pass eugenics laws permitting permanent sterilization of women who were "feeble minded or habitual criminals" 49 to "allow… the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable." 50 In its early years, this eugenics movement had the support of many women's suffrage leaders and social progressives, who reasoned that eugenic control of reproduction, along with social and educational reforms, would improve the lives of women, families, and society.…”