University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2002 "Grim realities of involuntary motherhood" Montana women and the birth control movement 1900-1940 Dana V. Green The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Green, Dana V., ""Grim realities of involuntary motherhood" Montana women and the birth control movement 1900-1940" (2002). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 8984. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/8984 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. 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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ‘Grim Realities of Involuntary Motherhood’: Montana Women and the Birth Control Movement, 1900 — 1940 By Dana Green B.A., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1992 ******* Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master o f Arts THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA, MISSOULA 2002 Signe^ By; Committee Chai; son Dean, Graduate School O 2 Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number; EP39785 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI Oissartatiori Publishing UMI EP39785 Published by ProQuest LLC (2013). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Green, Dana V., M.A., May 2002 History Grim Realities of Involuntary Motherhood’: Montana Women and the Birth Control Movement, 1900—1940 ^ Committee Advisor: Professor Anya Jabour This paper examines the attitudes of rural Montana women towards contraception, abortion, and the birth control movement during the homesteading era, the 1920s, and the Great Depression. As revealed in oral histories and letters to politicians and birth control activists, Montana women were active supporters of the birth control cause. They experimented with contraception, wrote to birth control activists for advice, offered to help the birth control cause, and wrote to local politicians asking for their support for pro­ birth control legislation. Rural women in Montana in the interwar years were questioning many characteristics of agrarian life and unwanted pregnancies were a source of friction and controversy. Throughout, birth control use in Montana is placed in the context of Montana politics and economics, as well as the national birth control movement. In the nineteenth century, open access to contraception was interrupted by the anti-obscenity laws of the 1870s, passed in response to social fears about the rising demand for contraception. On Montana’s homesteading frontier in the I9l0s, the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, and a strong desire to limit births, led to experiments with birth control despite a lack of information. In the years before World War I, the birth control movement sought to give rural women information. However, wartime politics hampered radical activism and altered the message of the birth control movement. In the 1920s, Margaret Sanger offered physicians control over the contraceptive information women received. These changes advanced the cause, but hindered a proposed birth control clinic system and abandoned rural women. In the 1920s and 1930s, frustrated women in Montana wrote letters to newspapers and politicians. Finally, as “voluntary motherhood’’ shifted to “planned parenthood” during the Great Depression, birth control professionals stopped questioning whether motherhood was women’s obligatory role. In conclusion, the years between World War I and World War offered few practical or political gains for rural women in terms of contraception. The result of this stasis was that rural women, frustrated with the lack of progress in receiving birth control information often chose to leave rural communities during the Depression years. Today, access to contraception continues to be problematic in Montana’s rural communities. u Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Preface They leave us at home while they go to the wars; but that is nonsense. For I would rather go into battle thrice, than bear a child once. - Euripides One fable among many from the mythic West is the persistent image of the farm woman, clasping a baby to her hip, surrounded by a passel of towheaded children. It is an enduring and captivating picture: a contented woman of the earth populating the heartland. Even today, this cultural myth colors our view of farm women, historic and present. This paper is an attempt to discover whether that myth reflected reality. It examines the use of contraception and abortion by Montana women and their involvement in the birth control movement during the interwar years. It attempts to determine whether rural women in Montana intended to bear as many children as they did; if they did not, did they support the efforts to overturn the Comstock laws, which restricted access to contraceptive information? Historians have searched for the answers to these questions primarily in the oral histories recorded by Montana women. However, as Deborah Fink has observed, it is problematic to rely only on oral histories when documenting the lives of rural women. Looking back after twenty, thirty or perhaps even fifty years, contemporary circumstances can alter memories of earlier lives. Examining oral histories for evidence in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of contraceptive use is particularly problematic. When women’s contraceptive use failed, the result was a living child. Women interviewed in oral histories were often reluctant to admit that they attempted to prevent a child’s birth. It is a distinct possibility that women interviewed could not remember (or claimed not to) when in fact they had experimented with birth control.' Therefore, I have also examined the letters Montana women wrote to birth control activists and politicians during the 1920s and 1930s. Compared closely to oral histories, these letters offer a different vision of Montana women and their experiences with birth control. Not only were Montana women experimenting with contraception, they wrote to Margaret Sanger directly asking for advice, offered to help the birth control cause, and wrote letters to their Congressmen requesting their support for pro-birth control legislation. Where the cultural image of rural women evokes passive acceptance and tolerance, the reality was that rural women voiced their dissatisfaction with many aspects of farm life, and unwanted pregnancies were their most serious concern. Rural women’s demands for birth control appear to be evidence that they supported feminist causes in the 1920s. However, historians have yet to fully grasp the complexities of rural women’s lives. Our knowledge of work roles, support networks, political involvement, and private lives is still incomplete. As Joan Jensen has pointed out, when rural women engaged in what appear to be feminist protest, the goal for these women was always survival. For rural women, support networks, political activism, and protest against inequalities were undertaken because it would help women survive extremely difficult circumstances. Rural women’s motives for feminist activity were often very different from those of urban women." iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Just as the feminist label seems inaccurate, it is equally flawed to label these agrarian women as anti-feminist or anti-progressive in the interwar years. As Jensen discusses in her anthologyPromise to the Land, rural women were involved in national political events since the early nineteenth century. It was predominantly Quaker farm women who attended the 1848 woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. In later years,