The politics of female pain: women’s citizenship, twilight sleep and the early birth control movement

Abstract

The medical intervention of ‘twilight sleep’, or the use of a scopolamine–morphine mixture to anaesthetise labouring women, caused a furore among doctors and early 20th-century feminists. Suffragists and women’s rights advocates led the Twilight Sleep Association in a quest to encourage doctors and their female patients to widely embrace the practice. Activists felt the method revolutionised the notoriously dangerous and painful childbirth process for women, touting its benefits as the key to allowing women to control their birth experience at a time when the maternal mortality rate remained high despite medical advances in obstetrics. Yet many physicians attacked the practice as dangerous for patients and their babies and antithetical to the expectations for proper womanhood and motherly duty. Historians of women’s health have rightly cited Twilight Sleep as the beginning of the medicalisation and depersonalisation of the childbirth process in the 20th century. This article instead repositions the feminist political arguments for the method as an important precursor for the rhetoric of the early birth control movement, led by Mary Ware Dennett (a former leader in the Twilight Sleep Association) and Margaret Sanger. Both Twilight Sleep and the birth control movement represent a distinct moment in the early 20th century wherein pain was deeply connected to politics and the rhetoric of equal rights. The two reformers emphasised in their publications and appeals to the public the vast social significance of reproductive pain—both physical and psychological. They contended that women’s lack of control over both pregnancy and birth represented the greatest hindrance to women’s fulfilment of their political rights and a danger to the healthy development of larger society. In their arguments for legal contraception, Dennett and Sanger placed women’s pain front and centre as the primary reason for changing a law that hindered women’s full participation in the public order.

Knowledge about Fertility in Croatia, Measured with the Croatian Version of the Cardiff Fertility Knowledge Scale (CFKS-Hr), in Relation to Attitudes toward Having a Child and Associated Factors in a Cross-Sectional Survey

“…Social changes have influenced women’s priorities, which are increasingly dedicated to education and participation in the labor market than their mothers and grandmothers were. This attitude leads to the decision to postpone childbirth [ 47 , 48 ].…”

Knowledge about Fertility in Croatia, Measured with the Croatian Version of the Cardiff Fertility Knowledge Scale (Cfks-HR), in Relation to Attitudes toward Having a Child and Associated Factors

“…Social changes have influenced women's priorities, which are increasingly dedicated to education and participation in the labor market than their mothers and grandmothers were. This attitude leads to the decision to postpone childbirth [51,52].…”

Hanna Rion andThe Weekly Dispatch’s twilight sleep crusade

“…Historian Lauren MacIvor Thompson argues that advocating for better health for women had been part of the feminist movement since the emergence of such movements in the 1840s. Included in this advocacy for better health was encouraging women to study medicine, as well as campaigning for better treatments and access to services ( MacIvor Thompson 2019 , 68)…”

“…Kronig also believed that women were becoming sensitive to pain due to increased civilisation, but saw this as a warrant for pain relief. However, he saw upper-class women as more civilised than those of perceived lower classes or races, and therefore more in need of pain relief ( Leavitt 1986 , 130; MacIvor Thompson 2019 , 68). While it was a commonly held view that white, middle-class and upper-class women were becoming more ‘delicate’ and sensitive to pain, Rion herself did not appear to express it in any of her writings ( Wood 2018 ).…”

“…Women emphasised and appealed to the medical duty of doctors to alleviate pain during labour, now that this option was available, a possibility once unimaginable. MacIvor Thompson argues that at the heart of the twilight sleep campaign was a belief that eliminating female reproductive pain had the power to establish a new political order, where women were equals with men ( MacIvor Thompson 2019 , 68).…”