Child Birth and Abortion in Gilded Age Cities

Social Purity in White Middle Class Families Limits Family Size

Jan 24, 2009 Michael Streich

While white middle class women represented a steady decline in birth rates, the new immigrants in urban centers exhibited dramatically higher birth rates.

Declining birth rates for white middle class women during the last two decades of the 1800s highlighted changing social patterns affected by growing industrialization and urbanization. At the same time, Victorian “social purity” contributed to a general lack of knowledge among middle class women regarding sexuality while birth rates among the “new” immigrant groups were high. Social engineers reacted with solutions that affected the American way of life well into the next century.

Industrialization and Urbanization

As migrants moved from rural communities to urban centers, the need for larger families became less apparent. Sexuality was still geared toward procreation as a primary motivation. Farm communities necessitated larger families. Moving into cities, however, this absolute need was no longer evident. White “nativist” Americans that began to form the growing middle class, resulting from industrialization, limited their families.

Sexual expectations within these families were also very limited. As a result, growing red light districts within urban enclaves functioned to service males of all classes. As D’Emillio and Freedman note, sex was a commodity. Brothels represented a business that satisfied needs frequently unavailable in the home. [1]

The growth of cities was due in large measure to the rapid influx of millions of new immigrants, many from Italy. These unskilled workers were, for the most part Catholic. Rejecting any notions of indirect family planning within families, their religion, culture, and experience bound them to accept as many children as possible. Additionally, just as in white rural communities, children represented an addition to the individual family workforce.

Response of Professionals and Government to Low Birth Rates

As Janet Brodie demonstrated in her book Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, physicians and a variety of social purity crusaders managed to criminalize abortion and severely limit birth control information. The motives appear to reflect growing fears that white-born American women were having fewer children while child rates among immigrants were rising.

The debate was neither religious nor moral. In fact, by the turn of the century, the debate focused on eugenics in which movement leaders like Margaret Sanger strove to undue the ban on abortion and contraceptives precisely for reasons of limiting child births among immigrant groups.

At the same time, physicians drew a correlation between growing numbers of men afflicted with venereal disease and brothel patronage. This became an important issue for the early twentieth-century Progressives who were successful in driving prostitution underground through the passage of local “Red Light Abatement Laws” that allowed communities to effectively shut down the houses.

American views of sexuality would change over the twentieth century, reflecting the national economy and periods of relative openness frequently followed by periods of sexual conservatism.

Sources:

Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 1997)

[1] John D’Emillio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America Harper & Row Publishers, 1988) see chapter 8.