by E. J. Graff
Comstock eventually became the crusade’s public buffoon, so widely caricatured that even today readers might be able to picture his vested belly and muttonchops. But just as the free-lovers gave voice to a vision of our future, so Comstock gave voice to those trying to hold on to marriage’s past. He seized hundreds of thousands of pounds of books, pictures, photographs, “rubber articles,” playing cards, “pills and powders.” He entrapped, arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned dozens of pornographers; physicians who published pamphlets about sexual physiology and diseases; abortionists; and drugstore owners who mailed out pessaries, condoms, “female syringes” (or contraceptive douches) and “uterine tonics” that could have been sold over the counter without prosecution (although he never went after Colgate or Lysol). And he especially targeted free-lovers like a Boston publisher and bookseller who sold the contraceptive pamphlet The Fruits of Philosophy. In Britain, sellers and publishers of the same pamphlets were similarly hounded. In 1877, Britain’s pro-contraception crusader Annie Besant lost custody of her daughter when her abusive husband (from whom she was separated) accused her of being ready to expose the child to (gasp) “the physiological facts.”
In the United States, Societies for the Suppression of Vice sprang up around the country and urged individual states to pass local laws like the federal Comstock Act. Connecticut went so far as to prohibit the use of contraception—presumably deputizing God to make the necessary arrests, since it’s hard to imagine who else would. The statutes outlaw in one sentence any “lascivious book, pamphlet, paper, picture, print, drawing, figure, or image . . . [or] any drug, medicine, article, or instrument whatsoever for the purpose of preventing conception, or causing unlawful abortion.” Dirty pictures or pennyroyal, racy playing cards or pessaries—they were all the same to those intent on enforcing the Reproducing ideal, since they either aroused lust or prevented its “natural” consequences. (Imagine how those crusaders would feel about Viagra!) And since chest-thumping about “the children” is a specialty of moral panics, such laws tended to specifically penalize anyone who sold such items to “any family, college, academy or school.” At the height of this moral panic, more than half the states passed what we might call Defense of Decency laws (or as one state’s was titled, “An Act Concerning Offenses against Chastity, Morality, and Decency”). These laws’ purpose was precisely the same as today’s Defense of Marriage Acts: criminalize and prevent any sex acts that make love without making babies, because otherwise the very meaning of marriage might change—from an institution aimed mainly at procreative duty to an institution that accepted sexual love.
Comstock was not alone in decrying this new view of sex and marriage as perverted. Attacks were widespread and ferocious, far more so than we remember today, with rhetoric heated enough to match anything in today’s marriage and family wars. As late as 1926, the Atlantic Monthly winced at the political and spiritual consequences of contraception, which “challenge[s] the permanence of the State. . . . Such activity is distinctly antisocial, for it enables selfish people to escape their responsibility, ultimately to their own detriment and to the injury of the State . . . and what is the usual effect on the spiritual life of those who . . . keep their families down to a miserly minimum?” Clearly the Atlantic Monthly, like many others, thought the effect was, to put it mildly, vile. That was a high-minded version. The anti-immigrant fever sweeping the U.S. at the time allowed more unsavory arguments against native-born whites’ parsimonious childbearing: what would happen as proliferative Germans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs, and emancipated blacks poured into the industrial north while white women abjured their reproductive duties? “Race suicide” was the code phrase hurled from the bully pulpit. Teddy Roosevelt, himself the father of six, announced that any (white) person who didn’t pour out children was “a criminal against the race” and “the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.” Thundered Teddy, “Willful sterility inevitably produces and accentuates every hideous form of vice. . . . I rank celibate profligacy as not one whit better than polygamy.”
The Catholic Church was, naturally, aboil about how to respond to this religious rebellion, especially in late nineteenth-century Catholic France, which—if you read the demographic data—had to be sinning massively. One radical theologian wrote that priests should advise couples to have sex only during the newly discovered “sterile period.” Hardliners immediately attacked this new “rhythm method.” Wrote one, “This pernicious sensualism is entirely contrary to the laws of God . . . It constitutes the horrible crime against nature.” The rhythm-method book was quickly ordered out of circulation. In 1930, Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Casti Conubii (Of Chaste Marriage), which endorsed the old Refraining/Reproducing ideal by intoning that contraception “violates the law of God and nature,” and grew out of women’s “false liberty and unnatural equality”—a clear recognition that contraception and female emancipation went hand in hand.
But still the birth rate kept dropping, until one would suspect that more than half the nation—probably including the legislators themselves—were sex criminals. In Stanford researcher Dr. Clelia Mosher’s 1890 survey of white middle-class wives, she found that almost every one of them practiced some kind of birth control. Which didn’t mean, of course, that they were ready to “come out” publicly. By 1916, a pained Anthony Comstock was asked by a women’s magazine reporter what he thought of the birth control movement and efforts to help poor women keep from having more children than they could afford. With pure Augustinian rhetoric, Comstock cried, “Are we to have homes or brothels? Can’t everybody, whether rich or poor, learn to control themselves?”
Poor Comstock: the answer was no. The children Comstock had tried to save from depravity were launching the Jazz Age. Women dropped pounds of petticoats, bustles, hats, and ankle-length skirts and ran around looking like prostitutes with their short skirts, short hair, lipstick, cigarettes, and shaved legs. Their petting parties and speakeasies became the scandal of the age. Against his will, Comstock was about to pass the historical baton to Margaret Sanger and the birth controllers.
It was no mistake that Margaret Sanger came out of feminist and socialist organizing. Perhaps the central issue at stake in the contraceptive wars was a woman’s freedom to choose the course of her life. Should she be the angel in the house, belonging to her husband—or should she be an independent person, free to vote, work, own property, and marry for companionship and shared sexual pleasure? From 1890 to 1910, female college enrollment tripled. The number of women doing paid work doubled from 1880 to 1900 and then went up another 50 percent between 1900 and 1919. More and more, the new middle classes believed that it was only fair for women to take an equal place in the world. But all this female emancipation quite definitely depended on freedom from children by accident—without sacrificing pleasure. Not just impurity in the marriage bed, but this firehose of social change was what birth control opponents were battling. And since economic and social change is difficult to fight, it’s much easier to launch a social panic about sex—since changes in sexual order can feel intuitively, viscerally disturbing, especially if you’ve been taught that sexual restraint equals morality. In the 1890s, physicians were warning parents against letting their daughters ride bicycles, lest they deflower themselves, have orgasms from the bicycle seat, and be picked up by men in strange parts of town. That same sexualized fear of female freedom fueled the campaign against contraception. Was sex—and therefore marriage—about duty, subordination, and respect, or was it about shared interests, equality, and love?
Feminists understood that battle line. After fifty years of pamphlet wars on contraception, the free-love ideals were no longer quite so marginal. And so Margaret Sanger opened her first—illegal—birth control clinic in Brooklyn’s Brownsville district in October 1916. Her goal was to keep women from suffering the unnecessary poverty of rearing a large brood, and to keep them from an early grave after being exhausted by ceaseless childbearing—which
she believed had happened to her Catholic mother Anne, dead of consumption at fifty. Sanger advertised in English, Yiddish, and Italian—and patients lined up so immediately that the clinic recorded 464 visits in only a few weeks. The New York vice squad shut down the “obscene” clinic within three weeks—much as, forty years later, two women seen kissing could count on being arrested. Sex without babies? Call the vice squad!
The Sanger trial became a cause célèbre, trumpeted daily on tabloids’ front pages. In the courtroom, wealthy suffragettes in furs and Brownsville mothers with paper bags of bread and cheese sat side by side, united in their desire to shake off household slavery, to choose sex while still controlling their family lives—to be “unnatural” wives and change the very meaning of marriage. Or to quote the credo issued by Margaret Sanger’s supporters: “Whether or not, and when, a woman should have a child, is not a question for the doctors to decide, except in cases where the woman’s life is endangered, or for the state legislators to decide, but a question for the woman herself to decide.” Indeed! Can we be surprised that Comstock—his era over—caught a cold and dropped dead of pneumonia within a few weeks of the trial?
In those first decades of the twentieth century, as the Refraining ideal began to fall, its adherents’ rhetoric got even more extreme. One pundit sputtered that by using contraception, “sexual congress is thus rendered but a species of self-abuse.” A Lutheran synod accused the American Birth Control League of “spattering the country with its slime.” And a New York archbishop’s 1930s fundraising letter leaned on the demon of the birth control campaign: “The downright perversion of human cooperation with the Creator in the propagation of the human family is openly advocated and defended. It is not what the God of nature and grace, in His Divine wisdom, ordained marriage to be; but the lustful indulgence of man and woman. . . . Religion shudders at the wild orgy of atheism and immorality the situation forebodes.”
Interestingly, those who feared that the birth controllers were in vice’s vanguard (at least in the terms of the day) were correct—and even more interestingly, we no longer much care. Despite their respectable public rhetoric about freeing married women to have children by choice instead of accident, privately Sanger and many of her supporters did believe in a new, free sexuality—not just for men, but for women. As a young woman, Sanger had been sexually involved with a man who was courting her, a “trial marriage” that she later broke off. After having three children with her first husband, William Sanger, she was never again monogamous, but took more than a dozen lovers ranging from the infamous (and impotent) sexologist Havelock Ellis to the writer and radical H. G. Wells. These men wrote her ravished love letters importuning her for more time and attention. In her case, the gender tables were turned: the men yearned for intimacy, and the woman seemed cold and distant and enjoyed sex without bonds. Even while married to the wealthy Noah Slee—the manufacturer who on her behalf imported spermicidal jelly in his motor oil cans, and later staked one of her old boyfriends in becoming a contraceptive manufacturer—she traveled widely, spent passionate weekends with her lovers, kept up her amorous correspondences. Like male politicians whose outsized passion for power so often spills over into their sexual appetites, Margaret Sanger never seemed to require the emotional precision of one deepening love.
But Sanger’s sex life—like the charge that legalizing contraception would turn us into a bestial, orgiastic nation—was a red herring. Sexual choice was shocking only as long as women were denied other choices as well. As women gained rights that ranged from property ownership to education to the vote, as both men and women gained the freedom of choice required by a capitalist society, birth control came to seem as natural as women on bicycles. What was most frightening was the most straightforward effect: female freedom, not the predicted apocalypse. Can we survive in a world without women imprisoned at home to do the mothering, without dads locked to those moms by law? We’re still skirmishing over that question today.
Over the next decades—as the children raised in the Jazz Age came to power, much as the 1960s generation has come to power now—the new sexual ideal became the reigning public philosophy. By April 1931 even the conservative New York Academy of Medicine issued a statement that contraception was acceptable, since married sex was “a supreme expression of their affection and comradeship—a manifestation of divine concern for the happiness of those who have so wholly merged their lives.” Since legislators were still too frightened to touch the controversial issue of contraception, judges took the lead, poking holes in the Comstock laws and thereby allowing physicians to prescribe contraception as they saw fit. By 1936, in the precedent-setting United States v. One Package, a federal appeals court decided that Comstock had been wrong to link contraception and pornography—and allowed diaphragms to be shipped through the mails, Comstock’s own turf. The ginger-whiskered crusader was turning in his grave.
By the 1950s, even the Pope agreed that “husband and wife should experience pleasure and happiness in body and spirit. In seeking and enjoying this pleasure, therefore, couples do nothing wrong.” Goodby to Augustine! No wonder Catholics started massively defying the Church’s contraceptive strictures: the prohibition stopped making sense. If it is only pregnancy that justifies the evil nastiness of sex, then contraception is easy to understand as sin. But if sexual pleasure and happiness are ordained by God, then why should you make babies every time? Sex as spiritual expression: the Refreshing ideal had won the war.
Over the course of this battle, having sex while preventing babies was compared to all the usual suspects. Contraception was worse than homicide, incest, polygamy; was against nature or bestial (i.e., not animal or too animal); disease-ridden, immoral, vice-ridden, equivalent to masturbation, prostitution, adultery, atheism, orgies; it would destroy youth, marriage, the family, the state, and civilization. Of course, all those charges are now used against same-sex marriage, and for the very same reasons—to call up the cultural idea that sexual pleasure is disgusting and sinful if it does not lead to babies. What other arguments can you resort to when your ideology is outdated—except apocalyptic predictions of misery, disease, and God’s wrath?
But once that kind of rhetoric is used, the battle is lost. In this society, we believe people should be free to use their own judgment and make their own choices. With no more socioeconomic justification for enforcing the link between sex and babies, with the very idea at odds with the philosophies behind consumer capitalism, the state had to step out of the debate: contraception was up to each individual conscience. By 1998, 75 percent of Americans believed health insurance should underwrite contraception just as it does any other prescription—as if the link between sex and pregnancy was a health condition to be prevented, not a crime against nature or a direct contravention of God’s law. In other words, today if you want to have sex without making babies—contrary to more than a thousand years of official Christian teaching—you can still call what you have not a brothel, not a bestiary, not an adultery, not an orgy, not a crime against nature, but a marriage.
Refreshing, 2: Intimate to the Degree of Being Sacred
There are two postscripts to this particular battle, at least in the United States. In Connecticut, Comstock’s law stayed on the books so long that there are still women alive today who will talk about how, as young women, they had to show at least their wedding rings, if not their marriage certificates, to get a diaphragm prescribed. They shared the names of contraceptive-prescribing physicians in the same way that, during that era, lesbians and gay men traded the names of illegal gay bars that they knew full well might be raided. As one lawyer marvels retrospectively, as late as 1961 intervening in sex was still “accepted by many as a legitimate exercise of the police powers of the state.” Legislators were not about to wade into the political mud of legalizing contraception, not with a powerful and openly threatening Catholic lobby and a lingering sense that enjoying sex was immoral. And so a group of lawyers and contraceptive activists opened a s
torefront contraceptive clinic, inviting arrest—and launched the test case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court as Griswold v. Connecticut, which overturned the last legal enforcement of Comstock’s Reproducing ideal.
It’s fascinating that in 1965, what the U.S. Supreme Court found shocking was the opposite of what had seemed shocking just one hundred years earlier. “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?” wrote Justice Brennan. Just a century before, what seemed shocking was the idea that contraceptives, not police, would invade a marriage. In the same way, the Protestant Reformation had once reinterpreted Catholic celibacy, turning a saintly act into an invitation to sin. Even more thrilling for observers of history’s marriage skirmishes is Griswold’s more famous phrase: that marriage was “intimate to the degree of being sacred” even if it did not create babies. Its sacredness lay not in its procreativity but in its intimacy. That radical claim was a shocking upset in the marriage wars. The Refreshing ideal had triumphed.