Woman of Valor (5 page)

Two portraits survive. The first, a miniature hand-colored photograph, reveals an attractive, rather ethereal, young woman in an elegant costume of satin and lace, an ivory brooch at her collar, her long hair beautifully curled and piled high. The pose is captivating and wonderfully romantic. The second, a sepia photograph, shows a matronly woman dressed in black and much sobered by age and circumstance, her aquiline features broadened and hardened, her beauty lost, but her will still strong and determined. In Margaret's memory, her mother never grew stout and always carried herself perfectly erect, without a hint of the slouch to which so many working women of her era succumbed. And then there were the wild flowers she used to decorate the family table, because there was never money or leisure to plant a garden. She possessed a simple grace with nature.
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Family legend traced the Purcell lineage to the Norman conquerors of England and Ireland and maintained that ancestors had ruled over County Cork as squires and country gentlemen since the twelfth century, leaving their mark in war and politics. The Purcells even claimed a distant kinship with the distinguished Victorian man of letters, Edward FitzGerald, author of the popular
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
, whose hapless crises of religious conviction made him a cultural icon. The friend of Tennyson, Thackeray and Carlyle, FitzGerald was actually born a Purcell and only later assumed the noble patronym of his mother's family. The stories were probably nothing more than the fabulation of aspiring Irish immigrants who felt a need to distinguish themselves from more common brethren, but they provided a romantic and powerful legacy.
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Grand as they were, however, Anne's affectations could not undo the harsh conditions of her life. Michael, by his daughter's recollection, read the children fables and fairy tales and
Gulliver's Travels
and later engaged them in discourse on history, phrenology, and science, but it was Anne who fetched the water from the outdoor pump that cooled a child's feverish lips on cold and dark winter nights. She routed the vagrants from the kitchen floor when her husband left the door unlatched as his way of defying the exclusionary prerogatives of private property rights, and she faced up to the schoolteachers who lashed her sons for asserting the irreverent opinions their father had taught them at home. Moments of shared intimacy and repose between mother and child were obviously cherished, and even as an old woman herself, Margaret remembered how her mother had gently rinsed her hair in pure rainwater captured in a barrel, so it would retain its natural luster. Through all the years, Margaret kept the thick auburn braid of hair that she had first cut off when bobbing became the fashion of the 1920s, the relic of an innocence that, however remote, could still totally absorb her.
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Anne Higgins served her family with selfless strength even as her health deteriorated from a chronic tuberculosis that more than once threatened her life. By her daughter's reckoning, she always had a cough so severe she would have to brace herself against a wall to regain composure. The therapeutic regimen that sent wealthy Victorian consumptives to sanitaria in search of rest and fresh air was not available to her, and she seems to have wasted slowly from the disease and from the constant pregnancies that weakened her resistance to it. Whatever homage Margaret later paid her father, she could never forgive him for this. She could never reconcile his ardent embrace of the advanced political and social thinking of his day with the indulgence that in her mind so obviously left the promise of her mother's life unfulfilled. In her autobiographies Margaret blamed this predicament on her parents' ignorance of birth control. What she chose not to acknowledge openly were her mother's deeply felt religious convictions in the face of contraceptive knowledge that circulated widely at the time.
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Americans devised a clear pattern of fertility control in the nineteenth century. Though there were variations by social class, geographic region, race, and ethnicity, each generation after 1800 reduced the number of its children, so that by century's end the nation's birthrate had been cut in half, from an average family size of more than seven children to fewer than four. Contraceptive tracts and instrumentalities disseminated widely. But while options were abundant, they remained essentially primitive and often unreliable, so that no agreement ever developed about their utility, safety, or moral efficacy. Instead, religious, social, and scientific taboos against contraception gained currency as the century progressed and eroded confidence in commonplace behavior. Attitudes toward contraception incorporated the larger sexual and social tensions of the culture, and private strategies for limiting fertility became more problematic, rather than less.

What were the most common arrangements of the era?

There was, first, coitus interruptus or withdrawal, a self-evident, autonomous and cost-free procedure.
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The New Testament clearly enjoins withdrawal, and the prohibition is mentioned occasionally in eighteenth-century religious texts, but it only became a public controversy when European thinkers began to link the size of individual families to an emerging concern for the larger economic and social well-being. In 1798, an Anglican clergyman in London by the name of Thomas Malthus, soon to make his reputation as demographer and economist, first published postulates on the potential conflict between unrestrained population growth and what he believed to be the finite nature of the world's food supply. A devout man, Malthus only recommended postponing the age of marriage as a voluntary check on the birthrate. In 1821, however, the British liberal James Mill wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica of the need to find a more practical means of preventing conception. The British reformer, Jeremy Bentham, arguing that withdrawal diminishes sexual pleasure, then advocated contraception through the use of “certain sponges,” as a utilitarian remedy for poverty. And in 1822, the self-educated London tailor, Francis Place, who became another leading spokesman of British liberalism, circulated an anonymous pamphlet—the Diabolical Handbill, as it came to be known—identifying both withdrawal and sponges as procedures already well-established in France. In his widely read
Everywoman's Book
of 1826, the reformer Richard Carlile then presented condoms as a third option.

These ideas first found their way to America in the hands of Robert Dale Owen, son of the Utopian social reformer of New Harmony, Indiana, who in 1831 wrote
Moral Physiology; or A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question
. The younger Owen advocated contraception, not only as an economic benefit, but also as an instrument to promote the right of women to self-determination and to advance his own perfectionist social ideas. His pamphlet, in turn, influenced a free-thinking Boston physician by the name of Charles Knowlton whose
Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Married People
became, in 1839, the first known tract on the subject published in this country by a physician. Knowlton recommended the superior contraceptive utility of postcoital douching to flood the vagina with water and evacuate the sperm. Though prosecuted for his views under common law obscenity statutes in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he became a respected member of his profession and his community. The pamphlet sold thousands of copies, was widely plagiarized, and as late as the 1870s, was still being referred to in popular advice books on marriage. Numbers of different “sanitive” powders or suppositories were marketed, from the relatively harmless bicarbonate of soda to such potential toxins as carbolic acid and borax. Fountain syringes were also widely distributed among women and became staples of mail order houses such as Lydia Pinkham's.

Charles Knowlton also influenced a well-known writer and traveling lecturer on marriage and sexuality by the name of Frederick Hollick, who popularized douching and in subsequent years advanced a rhythm system of contraception to use in tandem with withdrawal, and in place of barrier methods, which physicians were beginning to blame for vaginal infection and disease. Hollick's proposal was based on a crude but substantially accurate calculation of the woman's menstrual cycle, the precision of which was subsequently challenged by several established medical authorities, but then, contradictorily, endorsed by others. (Medical confusion on the matter was finally ended in the 1930s, when definitive research on ovulation was made available.)

In 1837, the Connecticut inventor, Charles Goodyear, had successfully vulcanized rubber in his laboratory, subsequent refinements of which made possible the manufacture of a flexible new material with thin and delicate properties. A domestic industry then developed in rubber condoms. Male sheaths had been used since ancient times, but had been made previously from the internal membranes of sheep or other animals. Manufactured in small quantities in France, they were imported to the United States at great expense. With Goodyear's discovery, condoms could be mass marketed cheaply and became a staple of prostitutes and so notorious in reputation that the inventor never dared take any credit.

Among the hundreds of products listed in his published inventories of the 1850s, however, were rubber devices known as pessaries and commonly sold to married women in pharmacies, to be inserted into the vagina in order to support or medicate the uterus. Pessaries became something of a gynecological fad, and a Philadelphia physician and sexual liberal named Edward Bliss Foote soon described their contraceptive potential. Foote actually invented a “womb veil” made of India rubber and marketed it to married women to insert before intercourse. He was considered a bit of a kook, however, and though his device had similar properties to the modern vaginal diaphragm or cervical cap, it did not enjoy a terribly wide circulation. By contrast, devices of this nature, invented around the same time in Germany and Holland, earned the confidence of established physicians there and were widely recommended.

Information was flawed, and almost every idea had its detractors, yet by the middle of the century, knowledge of coitus interruptus and various proposals for periodic abstinence, spermicidal douches, condoms, sponges, and other occlusives, along with emmenagogues believed to bring on menstruation and other nostrums of varying degrees of effectiveness, was widely circulated in America by midwives, physicians, popular health lecturers, phrenologists, freethinkers, and pharmaceutical salesmen. Abortifacient properties were attached to chemicals like morphine and tannin, and to such plants as tulips, yarrow, milkweed, or rosemary, whose capacity to alter the estrogen and progesterone levels necessary to female reproduction has since been scientifically confirmed. Until obscenity statutes were passed in the 1870s, contraception was also openly advertised in the highly competitive tabloid newspapers and penny presses of the day, in almanacs and mail-order catalogs, and thereafter a covert trade prospered. Young women whose marriages were announced in local newspapers commonly received advertisements and circulars in the mail—often for pharmaceutical products sold under the euphemism of “feminine hygiene,” or simply given a “French” label, but widely recognized as contraceptives.
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Who used these products and who did not is less clearly understood. Little is known for certain, apart from what has become a much analyzed and often quoted survey of female behavior—a questionnaire of fifty wives of Stanford University professors distributed in the 1890s by a female physician in Palo Alto named Clelia Mosher. Dr. Mosher's questionnaire uncovered nearly universal sexual activity and contraceptive practice, and this among a sampling of married women said to be demographically representative of a larger middle-class population.
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The accepted motivation for contraceptive use was the simple desire to get ahead in a world where a large family was no longer a necessary asset, but success also demanded discipline over personal gratification. The cost of artificial preventives may have been a factor, as well. Prices declined over time but remained high relative to family income. A dozen reusable condoms of allegedly high quality was advertised at $9.00 by the health writer Frederick Hollick in 1847, at $5.00 by his competitor Edward Bliss Foote in 1865, and at $1.50 in a Chicago mail order catalog from the 1880s. Yet, the average annual income of a working man in midcentury was only $600. Fertility thus correlated inversely with income, education, and job status, Margaret's own experience being exemplary.
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Until the 1870s, in fact, American birthrates declined steadily, and the commercial trade in contraception prospered, with remarkably little accountability or controversy, and with virtually no resistance from organized religion. The silent complicity of the nation's clergy reflected the ascendence of a liberal theology and utilitarian moral theory in the Protestant churches, where the dark legacy of Saint Augustine gave way to a more popular romantic optimism about human nature and to increasing confidence in the possibility of scientific improvement on divine intention. This new relativism admitted the possibility of reasonable differences of individual conscience and behavior in such matters as family size, and contraception was tolerated within marriage, because it promoted the desirable ends of smaller families, improved standards of living, and human happiness. Tolerance, however, never meant outright endorsement. American Protestants made no official statements on birth control until well into the twentieth century, and even then, only over the protest of conservative and fundamentalist elements among them.

By contrast, the Catholic Church closed ranks around a traditional morality rooted in ancient canons demanding individual discipline and self-sacrifice. The Vatican's theological orthodoxy demanded that personal considerations never justify deviation from absolute, revealed standards of good and evil, right and wrong. Pope Leo XIII, in an encyclical issued in 1880, dwelt at length on the danger of interpreting marriage as a mere human arrangement subject to individual whim and fancy. Instead, he emphasized the sacramental character of the wedding contract and its significance as a symbol of the inviolable union of Christ and his church. His message expressly enjoined divorce on these grounds, but, surprisingly, it did not explicitly mention or prohibit contraception, despite the fact that decrees issued in the 1850s by the Holy Office in Rome had declared Onanism as intrinsically evil and forbidden by natural law.