Birth Control vs. Women's Suffrage

So, I am reading Michael Willrich's, AMERICAN ANARCHY: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books Perseus, 2023) which I mentioned recently. I am not ready to review it in full yet, but it has indeed been extremely enlightening. Not about the philosophy; the author doesn't really care about the ideas, and makes no attempt to elucidate them. He's a historian, not a philosopher, but he takes his part seriously -- that is, getting the facts straight and presenting them honestly.

One subset of the book that I have just finished was the way in which birth control arguments developed independently from the women's suffrage movement. I was quite surprised by this, as in my lifetime and my parents' as well the two things were presented as part of the same general feminist struggle for additional rights for women. 

That was not true at the beginning, however. Women's suffrage was a comfortably middle-class issue, with some wealthy women also quite engaged in it. Birth control was an anarchist movement, attempting to help poorer workers deal with the burden of large families. Richer women didn't have a problem with obtaining birth control, because their private physicians could prescribe it under existing laws. 

The obscenity laws that forbade even discussing or printing materials about birth control were protected first and foremost by the churches' influence on society. Anarchists wanted to reduce the amount of religious law affecting private conduct. The Suffrage movement, meanwhile, had been joined at the hip from the beginning with the Temperance movement, an intensely religious movement to drive out the demon alcohol from society -- which the anarchists also did not want, many of them being Germans and Italians, whose cultures were built around beer and wine respectively. 

The same class distinctions turned up in Prohibition as in birth control, in fact: even during the period of Prohibition, the 18th Amendment which was ratified just a year before the 19th Amendment, those same private physicians could prescribe you whiskey. The rich were omitted from both the obscenity laws and the anti-drinking laws through the same back door. 

Likewise, Suffrage was successful because it was an anti-immigrant move -- more men than women had migrated in the 19th century and early 20th century (as indeed also today), so giving women the vote was plausible to a lot of older American men (the ones who voted it in) because it diluted the migrant vote by more or less doubling the old American vote. Just as Prohibition was anti-immigrant, so too Suffrage in its way. 

So these things really didn't belong to the same 'feminist' movement at all, not at first. They were oppositional drives by women of quite different classes and mostly different ethnicities. 

What brought them together, you may be amused to learn, was a trial of 'Queen of Anarchists' Emma Goldman for passing contraception pamphlets. At her conviction, one member of the three judge panel (all male, of course) foolishly remarked not only that her pamphlets were obscene, but that he thought that the women who kept asking for 'equal votes' could do a lot more good by encouraging women to have more children instead.

That one remark, widely reported, incensed the wealthy women so much that birth control very quickly became taken up by the Suffrage movement as well. They were successful in getting birth control laws overturned well before getting either of their real desiderata, Prohibition or Suffrage. 

The rest is history. 

UPDATE: I wondered how Wikipedia told the same story, and they emphasize mostly different things. They suggest the movement started in 1914, which actually isn't the case according to Willrich's book, which mentions several predecessors among the anarchist movement dating into the 19th century. It also plays up Margret Sanger, who fled the country to avoid prosecution. Her husband ended up taking the rap for her after some police entrapment around his wife's work. 

Sanger and Goldman are reported by Willrich to have been increasingly antagonistic to each other over these issues. Sanger was one of the upper class women, younger and less famous than Goldman but more well-connected socially. She initially favored birth control over abortion, on the correct grounds that abortion necessarily involves taking life no matter how early it is done; but we all know how her organization turned out in the end.