[sub](an aside before we start - the thread on “well-behaved women” led me to do a little research on Margaret Sanger, which led me to the Comstock Act, which led me to ask this question)[/sub]
The reading I’ve done on the Comstock Act led me to believe that the reason that the measure got passed in the first place was that nobody in congress wanted to be known as being in favor of obscenity or contraception. What was wrong with these people? Were they so shortsighted that it didn’t occur to them that a decrease in the information on contraception would eventually lead to a decrease in their likelihood of getting laid? Or (contrary to today’s behaviour) didn’t congresscritters[sup]TM[/sup] like to have sex back then?
Is this a Debate, or is there a General Question here? “What was wrong with these people?”
Well, I dunno. They were religious, and they thought any sex outside of marriage was a sin, and they thought that if you had sex outside of marriage and got pregnant, then that was your punishment for your sin, right there. So if you allowed people to have birth control, then they would have sex outside of marriage, and they wouldn’t be punished for their sin by getting pregnant, and so this was bad. Sin must be punished. (This only applies to women, of course, as the men were exempt.)
There’s a book called The Scarlet Letter that deals with this mindset.
I think you answered your own question frogstein. They didn’t want to appear to be in favor of obscenity or contraception. As for any effect this law would have on their own private lives well… can you say “hypocrite”?
Frog, when respectable married people back in the 1870s decided that they didn’t want any more children, they moved into separate bedrooms. But the fact that a married couple might decide that they didn’t want any more children was considered to be nobody’s business but their own, and Society as a whole didn’t see the need to disseminate birth control information just so married folks could limit their families. And unmarried folks weren’t supposed to be having sex, anyway.
It was possible for a certain segment of upper-class white-collar educated society to get birth control information from a doctor (which was pretty much limited to condoms and early versions of the diaphragm), but jes’ plain married folks either practiced abstinence, or had a lot of babies.
Although the OP on this thread seems to be concerned mainly with the issue of birth control, the Comstock Act, as the link provided in the OP showed, was about more than just this one issue.
In fact, historian Alison Parker points out that many people of the middle classes during this time supported censorship as part of a more general belief that social change could be engendered by government regulation.
Many historians of censorship have focused on Comstock, who admittedly was an important figure, and the bill named after him enjoyed bipartisan support. But Parker shows that other groups such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union pushed a censorship agenda, arguing from notions of morality and impurity rather than Comstock’s more narrow emphasis on obscenity. As well as pushing for censorship, such groups also produced their own “morally pure” literature and films in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in an attempt to counter what they saw as the prevalence of immoral fiction, especially novels read by women.
See Alison Parker, Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship, 1873-1933.
I realise this doesn’t answer very much, but i just wanted to point out that the issue of birth control etc. also fell within a more general debate over censorship.
<gasp> 19th century women were reading novels?! :eek:
For shame! Think of all that time they wasted learning how to read. That time could have been better spent practicing their barefoot pregnant walking in the kitchen!
Yeah, I was aware of that; in fact, I can understand (not sympathize) where they were coming from in that regard; let’s face it, people were pretty repressed back then. But the idea of (essentially) outlawing contraception just boggles the mind. I suspect (having read Heinlein’s To Sail Beyond the Sunset) that people who really wanted to were able to get condoms anyway, but did this have any affect on birth rates?
Well, in class a few hours ago, my professor said that a common motivation for people pushing the anti-contraception and anti-abortion laws of the period was that they were afraid of “race suicide” (the term used then). Since it was mostly the middle and upper class white Protestants who were able to get contraceptives, their fertility rate was dropping way below that of lower class people like blacks and immigrants (horrors!). Comstock and others (including Theodore Roosevelt) were worried that their own class would lose power because of the many new non-WASP future voters coming in, and wanted to prevent that.
Well, but the Comstock Act didn’t outlaw contraception. It was a postal act. It outlawed sending material through the mails that promoted or discussed contraception, abortificants, and other sexually explicit material. People voted for it for the reason you mentioned, Frogstein. Would you like to have voted against it, and then became known in the next election as “The man who voted against stopping smut from going through America’s mails”?
I understand that; my objection was to the part of classifying birth control information as “obscene”. Looked at from a different angle, would you want to be the one who made nookie harder to get? Of course (and this is what I’m trying to figure out) apparently nobody looked at it that way.
Well, but the attitude was that information about birth control was obscene, because in order to discuss birth control, you would have to talk about “sexual relations” and private parts, and all those other subjects that might offend the ladies and warp the innocence of America’s youth, as well as encouraging those very same sexual relations even among unmarried people.
