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Brodie recommends the following books and papers (p. xv)

      Linda Gordon, "Why Nineteenth Century Feminists Did Not Support 'Birth Control' and Twentieth Century Feminists Do: Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family"

      James W. Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (1978)

      Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family from the Revolution to the Present (1980)

      James Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy (1978)

      Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (1936)

      Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers (1966)

1.       "The Rare Book Room of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine of the Harvard University Medical School has the largest number of nineteenth-century works giving reproductive control advice. There are also important holdings at the American Antiquarian Society, the National Library of Medicine, and the Library of Congress." p. xvi

2.       "Advertisements played on the many meanings attached to botanical products, such as that from the Carter Medical Company of E. Hampton, Connecticut: "Ladies. Carter's Relief for Women is safe and always reliable; better than ergot, oxide, tansy or pennyroyal pills. Insures regularity.

         Much of the enormous range and variation in this terminology stemmed from prudery. People relied on euphemisms for subjects of dubious propriety. In the 1870s, when states and the federal government made dispensing information about contraception and abortion illegal, such circumlocution was a way of avoiding legal prosecution." pp. 5-6

3.       Regarding colonial America: "So rare and so hushed was any public discussion of reproductive control that no laws or statues proscribed contraceptive practice4s. Abortion, on the other hand, was a serious offense in the eyes of both the law and the church." p. 39

4.       "Still, because there was little privacy in any of the seventeenth-century colonies, married women must have been very careful if they took actions or used any products that in parts of America by the nineteenth century were called "character spi'lin" because any woman seen taking them was suspected of trying to prevent conception or induce miscarriage." p. 40

5.       "Fears about land scarcity and declining properties to leave to children affected many New Englanders as early as the second half of the seventeenth century, and women may have had their won motives for wanting greater intervals between children." p. 40

6.       "By the late eighteenth century, married women and even their husbands openly expressed displeasure over unchecked pregnancies." p. 41

7.       "Infanticide and voluntary abortion were common, although not universal, in the Native American cultures of North America.

         Because the tribes did not keep written records and only a few white travelers and priests recorded any detailed information about any tribal medicines (and then they used colloquial names for plants), it is difficult to trace Indians' beliefs about plant contraceptives, abortifacients, and parturients (remedies to ease and speed childbirth). Some, however, did at least try. In 1769 a Connecticut physician, Benjamin Gale, wrote to a Protestant missionary among the Oneida tribe asking him to "make Enquiry, what Medicines the Indian Parturient Women take antecedent to Delivery which occasions so easy a Travail -- they have given some of our [English] Captives Medicines which have had very extraordinary Effects to Ease their Travail Pains." Whatever answers Gale learned he did not leave for posterity.

         By the nineteenth century Native American fertility-inhibiting herbal lore had penetrated deeply into American folk medicine. Native American plant lore included effective obstetrical botanicals, especially plants known in European medicine as oxytocics -- products believed capable of directly stimulating contractions in the smooth muscle of the uterus and thereby speeding childbirth. Cimefuga racemosa of the Crowfoot family of plants, known colloquially as "black cohosh," "black snakeroot" and "squaw root" was used by eastern tribes throughout North America to stimulate menstruation, cause abortion, or stimulate labor by causing "rapid expansion of the [uterine] parts." " p. 51

8.       "Slaves from Africa and the Caribbean brought involuntarily to North America an abundance of medical lore which included plant contraceptives and information about substances to abort a fetus. Slave expertise permitted white colonists to cultivate indigo, rice, and cotton, and there is no reason to doubt that slaves just as readily transferred to their New World surroundings their knowledge of fertility-inhibiting plants. Such information may have been passed down from generation to generation, particularly among those women renowned for their healing and midwifery. By the eighteenth century, slave botanical lore from Africa was intermixed with what slaves had learned from Native Americans and whites." p. 52

9.       "Even the Roman Catholic church gave tacit approval to the rhythm technique, foreshadowing its later support for the twentieth-century model of the rhythm method. In 1853 the French bishop of Amiens asked the Penitentiary, the office of the Holy See that dealt with cases of conscience, if couples should be rebuked by the church for abstaining from sexual intercourse on the days which, in the opinion of skilled doctors, conception was likely. Ignoring or forgetting the teachings of Saint Augustine that reliance on a sterile period was a contraceptive method (and therefore a sin), the Penitentiary replied that "those about whom you ask are not to be disturbed provided they do nothing by which conception is prevented." pp. 81-82

10.       "The works of two men were especially important in making reproductive control a more public matter. Robert Dale Owen's Moral Physiology, published late in 1830 or early 1861, was a concise, careful, logical argument about the need for fertility control, advocating the old method of coitus interruptus. In January 1832 appeared Charles Knowlton's The Fruits of Philosophy, full of concrete advice, especially on douching with spermicides. The two methods they emphasized -- Owen's requiring primary cooperation from the male, Knowlton's from the woman, became significant methods of fertility restriction throughout the rest of the century." p. 89

11.       "Almost alone among nineteenth-century American advisers, Owen argued the importance of reproductive control for single women, noting that men who seduced women went unpunished by society, while women and their illegitimate offspring had to endure scorn and abuse. Unmarried women needed knowledge of "checks" as a defense against the "social brutality of illegitimate pregnancy." All sons, said Owen, "are not chaste and temperate," nor were all daughters "passionless and pure." A knowledge of preventives would save many from ruin and despair. Owen criticized the argument of some opponents of contraceptive knowledge who suggested that wives and daughters were virtuous only because they were ignorant of ways to prevent pregnancy. Such beliefs, Owen charged, slandered women and libeled the whole sex." p. 91

12.       "Knowlton presented the first detailed, explicit, and graphic account to be published in the United States on the 'physiology of the female genital system." His purpose, he said, was to "enable the reader to see how the checks effect their intended objet." He wanted readers to be able to use contraceptive techniques "more confidently and effectively." He presented, therefore, a brief explanation of the "labia externa," the "external organs of generation," the "internal organs of generation," menstruation (though it has only "slight practical connexion with the main object of this work"), and conception. He did not mention sperm or the male sexual organs until the book's second edition, when he explained , succinctly: "As the seminal animalcules are essential to impregnation all we have to do is change the condition of, or (if you will) to kill them." Because animalcules were small and delicate, Knowlton wrote, it would be easy to do. By the fourth edition, Knowlton, no longer reticent about describing the male sexual organs, started the chapter on generation with a remarkably detailed discussion of testicles, the prostate gland, the penis, semen, and the role of "seminal animalcules" in conception. It remained one of the longest and least euphemistic discussions of male sexual anatomy in all the nineteenth-century popular literature offering sexual advice.

          Knowlton's understanding of the process of conception was largely inaccurate by today's knowledge, but even so, readers could have practiced more effective contraception for having read his book. . . .

          "His 1839 edition had an entirely new chapter on pregnancy and fetal development, including four pages on the rights of women to have abortions, a subject earlier editions had no broached and one few other writers in the century faced as directly." pp. 98-99

13.       "The lyceum and itinerant lecture circuits were a highly important form of entertainment and education in early nineteenth-century America." p. 106

14.       "Frances Wright dared to challenge two of the most sacred institution in American culture -- marriage and Christianity -- and to try to remedy the horror at its core -- slavery. Yet even she, courageous and boldly iconoclastic, could not raise the controversial issues surrounding reproductive control in any public way. That she appears to have been unable or unwilling to address them privately was her greatest tragedy. Her silencing profoundly underscores the larger public silencing around the issues of reproductive control and the extreme social constraints facing more ordinary women." p. 125

15.       "Before the 1860s there is little direct evidence that female lecturers disseminated contraceptive or abortive information. The most important of those who did do so was probably may Gove Nichols, whose public and private life, like that of Frances Wright, was full of sexual paradox. " p. 125 

16.       "The book Esoteric Anthropology appeared in 1853. Although Thomas Low Nichols is credited as its sole author, the wording of the text -- especially the opinions about contraception and abortion -- suggests that Mary Gove Nichols wrote parts. In any case, both probably shared its views and may have expressed them in their lectures and, almost certainly, in their private consultations. Esoteric Anthropology boldly argued a position she had long held: "If a woman has any right in this world it is the right to herself; and if there is anything in this world she has a right to decide, it is who shall be the father of her children and to choose the time for having them." . . .

          It defended the right of women to abort more boldly than any nineteenth-century sexual advisor except James Ashton:

          [T]he ovum belongs to the mother -- she alone has a right to decide whether it shall be impregnated. It is the same after pregnancy. It still rests with the mother. . . . It is an unnatural thing for her to refuse this sustenance -- it may be very wicked. But it is exclusively her own affair. The mother, and she alone has the right to decide whether she will continue the being of the child she has begun. The wishes of the father should weigh with her -- all obligations, moral, social, religious, should control her; but she alone has the supreme right to decide." p. 127

17.       "Another lecturer, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, an antislavery and woman's rights activist in the 1830s, became active in health reform after her husband's death. From 1845 to 1849 she toured throughout the East and Midwest speaking to audiences of women on health reform, anatomy, and physiology. " p. 128

18.       "After the Civil War increasing numbers of women lecturers on woman's rights linked feminist concerns to issues of health reform, especially gynecological and obstetrical problems, sexual physiology, reproduction, and maternity. They gave particular attention to women's need for sexual self-sovereignty and often veered easily into discussion of "voluntary motherhood," especially in the late 1860s and 1870s." p. 131

19.       "[Abner] Kneeland has the dubious distinction of having been the last person tried in Massachusetts for the crime of blasphemy." p. 137

20.       "Ironically, although religious objections were among the earliest to be raised against the emerging public issue of reproductive control in the 1830s, formal religious opposition during the rest of the century was generally muted, unlike the clear-cut opposition to birth control mounted in the twentieth century by the Catholic church and fundamentalist Protestants." p. 153

21.       "If physicians wanted a greater role as moral leaders and if publicizing the evils of abortion was a step toward that goal, then it would be strategically sound to criticize the older arbiters of the community's moral behavior -- the clergy." p. 154

22.       "Some particularly feared the social and economic leveling advocated -- and symbolizes -- by free enquiry." p. 155

23.       "Only Ashton's pamphlet, singular in this as in other ways, provided dispassionate advice about when and how to bring about miscarriage. He warned that abortions "should never be resorted to except in extreme cases and then only under medical advice," yet devoted three pages to information on how to induce abortion." pp. 186-187

24.       "The advice literature demonstrated a range of attitudes toward sexuality and sexual pleasure for married couples and does not support the arguments that Americans were curtailing their martial fertility by rigorous sexual abstinence." p. 188

25.       "In the 1830s and 1840s abortion drugs, condoms, cures for venereal disease, aphrodisiacs, and abortion were advertised in major urban newspapers of New England and the Middle Atlantic states." p. 190

26.       "For two centuries in America, abortion had been treated according to common law tradition in which abortion before "quickening" -- fetal movement -- were not punishable, and those procured later, after quickening, might be high misdemeanors if the woman died, but not felonies. Some states began criminal code revisions in the 1830s and 1840s and included in those revisions statutes against abortion. The thrust of the new laws was twofold: to regulate those who could legally give abortions and to punish unlawful abortionists. In some states -- Connecticut, Missouri, Illinois -- abortion restrictions came in the form of tighter laws against the use of poisons. Only in New York was there a foretaste of the more stringent antiabortion laws to come. The New York law, passed in 1829, prohibited anyone, including a doctor, from attempting abortion at any period of pregnancy except to save a woman's life.

          Between 1840 and 1860 the new statutory restrictions on abortion were challenged in nine state supreme courts, seven of which had upheld the common law tradition and ruled that an abortion before quickening was not a criminal offense. Even after 1860 abortion cases were hard to prosecute: prosecutors found it difficult to obtain convictions, especially if there was any doubt about whether quickening of the fetus had occurred, or if common law traditions covering evidence and criminal defendants'[ rights appeared to have been violated by the prosecution or the police. Juries continued to treat the prequickening distinction as significant, and of course it was difficult to prove that quickening had or had not occurred. Horatio Robinson Storer, a leader in the antiabortion campaign, noted disapprovingly in his 1860 book On Criminal Abortion in America that between 1849 and 1858 Massachusetts had prosecuted thirty-two trials concerning abortion but won not a single conviction." p. 254

27.       "A free love convention held in Ravena, Ohio, in December 1873, nine months after congressional passage of the federal Comstock Law, passed resolutions that affirmed women's right to have control over their sexuality and their right to reproductive self-control.

          Organized feminists did not speak out against the Comstock laws, in large part, because many disliked contraception, viewing it as a threat to their demands for "voluntary motherhood." It is true that women's rights activists in the postbellum period spoke increasingly publicly about women's sexual rights in marriage; Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke to small private groups of women on sex and marriage, and in even more intimate afternoon parlor sessions on women's need for "self-sovereignty" over their bodies and their sexual lives. But she and others did not officially oppose Comstockery." p. 280

28.       "In ex parte Jackson in 1877 the Supreme Court ruled that the Comstock Law did not deny free speech. Not until the Stopes case in 1931 did the Supreme Court rule that birth control discussions were not ipso facto obscene." p.286

29.       "The most striking example of the legacy of the campaigns against reproductive control can be found in Margaret Sanger's account of her fruitless six months' search in 1913 for contraceptive information in the best libraries in America. The doctors and nurses she consulted told her that if she did not avoid the subject she would run afoul of the Comstock laws. The feminists she talked with expressed shock at the idea of a public campaign for family limitation and argued that all efforts for women's autonomy should be concentrated first on obtaining the vote. Libraries yielded no information on the "secret" women wanted. ("Why was it so difficult to obtain information on this subject? Where was it hidden? Why would no one discuss it? . . . It was like the lost trail in the journey toward freedom.") Sanger searched the Library of Congress, the books in the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Boston Public Library. "At the end of six months I was convinced that there was no practical medical information on contraception available in America.

          She exaggerated in order to underscore the importance of her own movement, but the symbolism of her point is crucial: the most dramatic legacy of the new social and legal policies of Comstockery was the void Margaret Sanger found where once there had been information. The combined force of the social purity legions, of the Comstocks and the Storers, and of overwhelming public acquiescence overrode a generation of commercialization and growing public discourse and drove reproductive control, if not totally underground, at least into a netherworld of back-fence gossip and back-alley abortions." p. 288

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