Copyright by Allison Layne Craig 2009 The Dissertation Committee for Allison Layne Craig certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: “Quality is Everything”: Rhetoric of the Transatlantic Birth Control Movement in Interwar Women’s Literature of England, Ireland and the United States Committee: ____________________________________ Elizabeth Cullingford, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ Lisa L. Moore, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ Mia E. Carter ____________________________________ Dana L. Cloud ____________________________________ Patricia Roberts-Miller ____________________________________ Jennifer M. Wilks “Quality is Everything”: Rhetoric of the Transatlantic Birth Control Movement in Interwar Women’s Literature of England, Ireland and the United States by Allison Layne Craig, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2009 Acknowledgments While writing this dissertation, I was fortunate to be surrounded by a community of scholars and friends who were instrumental in bringing it to completion. Thank you first of all to my directors Lisa Moore and Elizabeth Cullingford, who were both involved in this project at every step and whose scholarship, teaching, and professionalism are a continuous source of inspiration to me. Thank you also to my dissertation committee, including Mia Carter, without whose work on Virginia Woolf I could not have finished the final chapter, Dana Cloud, whose early enthusiasm for the project was incredibly encouraging, Trish Roberts-Miller, whose reading suggestions were both instructive and disturbingly hilarious, and Jennifer Wilks, whose guidance in my research on Nella Larsen very much influenced the initial stages of the project. Thank you to my writing group; its rotating membership, including Lisa Moore, Aména Moïnfar, Caroline Wigginton, Catherine Bacon, Laura Smith, Matt Russell, Naminata Diabate, and Molly Hardy had an impact on every chapter. I would like to particularly thank Michelle Lee, whose advice and support got me through many challenging times over the two years we dissertated together. In addition to my official writing group, many colleagues at UT provided encouragement, commiseration, and inspiration. Thank you especially to Crystal Kurzen, Lena Khor, Olga Herrera, Erin Hurt, Melanie Haupt, and all of the members of the Feminist Solidarity Group. Thank you also to Laura Green for helping with the final stages of editing this document. iv Finally, thank you to my family. Mona, Jeff, and Justin Parish, Esther Fairless, James and Justine Parish, and John and Jan Craig all surrounded me with support and love throughout this journey. I could not imagine a more patient, more loving, more inspiring, or more fun partner than Matt Craig has been to me for the past eight years. Conversations with Matt are the basis of more sections of the final dissertation project than I would probably care to admit, and I’m incredibly grateful for his thoughtful entrance into my work. Last of all, thank you to Hope Allison Parish Craig, who enriched my research and writing at the last moment by giving me a chance to experience motherhood even as I was theorizing about it for my work. v “Quality is Everything”: Rhetoric of the Transatlantic Birth Control Movement in Interwar Women’s Literature of England, Ireland and the United States Allison Layne Craig, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2009 Supervisors: Elizabeth Cullingford and Lisa L. Moore This dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts. It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques, but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing. The introductory chapter, which frames the later literary analysis chapters, examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy. These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth, younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill-health, and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages. In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts, the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives. The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, vi a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually. Gilman adopted pro-birth control language, but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement. In addition to radical politics, the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas, an association that the third chapter, on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African-American racial uplift rhetoric. Crossing the Atlantic, the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak, a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself. The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Three Guineas (1938), illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro-eugenics agendas. Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement, the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality, reproduction, and race, but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment, which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project. vii Table of Contents Introduction: Contraception as Ideology and Technology……………………………..1 Chapter One: “Setting Motherhood Free”: Rhetoric and Ideology in Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger………………………………………………………………...19 Chapter Two: The Future of Sex: The Woman Rebel in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland Saga……………………………………………………………………60 Chapter Three: “That Means Children to Me”: The Birth Control Movement in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand……………………………………………………………..110 Chapter Four: Passion’s Possibilities: Desire and the Birth Control Movement in Kate O’Brien’s Without My Cloak…………………………………………………...154 Chapter Five: Doctors, Veterans, and Prostitutes: Fertility Control in Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Narratives……………………………………………………………..198 Conclusion: Birth Control and Twentieth Century Narratives of “The Erotic”………..247 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….257 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………269 viii Introduction Contraception as Ideology and Technology A recent television commercial for NuvaRing, the contraceptive vaginal insert, uses images of exhausted synchronized swimmers wearing bathing suits labeled with days of the week to contrast the ease of a once-a-month insertion with the drudgery of taking the pill every day. One by one, the swimmers step out of formation, take off their swim caps and one piece suits, and go sit in the hot tub in bikinis, enjoying the carefree life available to women who aren’t slaves to their daily birth control pill (Bosch). The advertisement’s message that the birth control pill places an undue burden on women trying to control their fertility highlights the rapid progress of contraceptive research and technology since the first birth control pills were made publicly available in 1960. Birth control remains, however, not only a practical but also an ideological issue for women of childbearing age and the apparently innumerable public figures—politicians, religious figures, insurance companies, pharmacists, media spokespeople, social workers—who believe they have a stake in those women’s family planning choices. As public debates over “freedom of choice” for pharmacists, over-the-counter birth control pills, and contraception distribution at high schools and colleges demonstrates, birth control is not just a technology, but also a discourse. In the ad described above, for example, we find not only the obvious argument that contraception is best when it is least intrusive in women’s lives, but the somewhat conflicting argument that women are solely responsible for fertility control in heterosexual relationships, and the profit-motivated argument that women are better off paying more for new technologies like NuvaRing (which has not 1 been released under a generic label) than sticking with their “onerous,” but cheap, off- label birth control pills. It was Margaret Sanger who invented the term “birth control” in 1914 and coalesced disparate movements related to population control, feminism, and poverty alleviation into a unified political agenda aimed at providing access to contraception to all American women. In the first issue of the Birth Control Review, the second pro-birth control periodical she founded,