The Body and the City, 1880-1940 - Essay Example

AHH3215 THE BODY AND THE 1880-1940 Tamas Zelei Module Barry Doyle Review Essay This essay seeks to investigate the development of birth control between 1880 and 1940. Firstly, this assignment examines, the paper evaluates the different approaches taken by the different sources and authors. Next, the influence of these authors is compared as well as the evidence each uses. Finally, the paper evaluates the methodology and arguments raised, and how they authors used their methodologies to elaborate the topic of birth control. Having introduced the birth control as the issue of concern, this paper first explores the changes that took place between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century. In her comparison of contraceptive and sexual practices across the 18th and 19th centuries, Cook1 linked reproduction to sexuality and argues that over time, this culture has changed. Originally, heterosexual coitus, also advocated by Stopes, was necessary for reproduction. However, life demands and difficult economic times have altered attitudes towards sex, as families concentrate on labour to support their families. Consequently, few women afford time for multiple pregnancies, given the increased demands of breastfeeding and rearing of children. Stopes, like Seccombe, argues that these changes in attitudes towards sex are necessary given that a childbearing woman has to have sufficient time to recover her health and have the child grow with the right spacing. Stopes’ support the use of the menstrual cycle to decide the right time for sexual intercourse. She also for the argument by Cook2 that women in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century never had any reliable birth control method apart from coitus interruptus. In order to avoid unwanted pregnancies, men depended on withdrawal while women focused on abortion and abstinence. Over time, a wide range of contraceptives were developed, but women continued to avoid sex terming contraceptives as expensive, embarrassing, and impractical, thus not using them3. For the working women, the distaste and shame from sexual activities was enhanced by the perceived shame about their anuses and genitals, and this was transferred to female children who were made to perceive their genitals as ugly and dirty4. Lewis5 defined the pre-1940 eras as one where women in Britain and North America lived solely under the control of men as men had legal rights over them and their children, and no woman retained legal custody of children upon separation. In addition, women in rural areas were usually left to do physical labour and bear children. This led to the delineation of gendered roles that mainly saw men as the only ones responsible for working outside the home in the external sphere while women belonged to the private sphere of home and domesticity. Then, men despised contraceptives and preferred to use withdrawal until the first half of the eighteenth century as evident in low marital fertility in post-1945 baby boom.6 However, the low acceptance of contraceptives among men and women ended with the inter-war era that fostered favourable economic conditions that saw family sizes increase. To this point the focus has been on changes in birth control by early nineteenth century, it is now crucial to focus on birth control approaches by women back then.Cook7 linked reproduction with sexuality arguing that reproduction was necessitated by heterosexual coitus. Her approach was that everyone needs the experience of proper sexual pleasure without anxiety or fear of getting pregnant, since this translates to better and more committed contribution to the society. Like Marie Stopes,8 she terms the invention of contraceptives, as liberating for women sexually. Marie Stopes’ manual takes the approach of assisting newlyweds to increase the joys of their marriage and avoid sorrow as much as possible. As part of marital joy, Stopes elaborated on proper sexual intercourse basics such as foreplay, need for sleep, and the essence of orgasm for both men and women. Additionally, Stopes required that both parties take responsibility for building and enjoyable sexual experience, in order to create an exclusive and reasonable partnership. The manual also advocates contraceptives and family planning that recommends the use of women’s menstrual cycle to assist in the determination of the timing of sexual intercourse the same way the pills do. However, Stopes advocated that the conception of children was pleasurable, but family planning had to be used to ensure that pregnancy occurred only during appropriate moments for the couple. Much of Stopes advice arose from her experience as a person who was ignorant sex and paid dearly for it during the course of her two marriages, therefore deciding to use human service. Like Stopes, Seccombe9 argues that family planning and the use of contraceptives were deliberate moves by women in Germany to attempt to end child bearing before the end of one’s reproductive span. Many women took up the practice to dictate them to start and stop child bearing, space their children, and manage the size of their families. The involvement in labour emphasized the fact that spacing children was not just essential for the recupulation of a woman’s health but also for longer working and productive years. In the above discussion, several approaches to birth control adopted by women have been considered. However, examining the evidence used by birth control advocates in its support is also worth consideration. Stopes used advice manuals to argue that working women would benefit from the Spacing theory since they would not only rejuvenate their health, but also enable them to resume work. In addition, the theory aligned with Stope’s argument that both men and women were equally responsible for the creation of enjoyable sexual experience for an equitable and outstanding partnership. Furthermore, Stopes, unlike other writers greatly advocated for gender equality to a higher degree compared to other experts. Although her advocacy does not condemn the idea conjugal rights, she points out that no man woos and wins a woman one for all upon marriage. On the contrary, a man must woo his woman prior to each and every distinct act of coitus, while women should also remain active in the man’s companionship. Davies10 uses letters from working women to understand the decline in fertility while Seccombe11 used a sample of German married couples during the 18th and 19th centuries. The testimonies of these women offer intuitions into behavioural variations involved in the shift to deliberate marital fertility control propelled by Stopes unlike natural fertility.12 A further factor to consider in the advent of contraceptives and birth control methods is abstinence. Instead of advocating for abstinence, Stopes13 advocated for appropriate sexual intercourse timing. In her view, there was need for couples to wait until the most appropriate time or through informed precaution delay, decide on bearing children. One of her renowned theories is that of “spacing” to allow the child to grow to at least one year, while allowing the mother’s health to rejuvenate. This view contradicted Cook’s advocacy for abstinence where women and men were expected to control their through controlling sexual desires. Eventually, a culture of sex repression spread widely, and reduced coital frequency causing alarmingly high rates of abstinence. In addition, Stoopes argued that as humans transform, the greatest social unit is will be recognized as a pair joined together by love such that all human potentialities belong to a pair. Furthermore, Stopes associated abstinence as being the cause of diseases such as neuralgia and nerves to fibroid growths in both men and women. Clearly, birth control and the advent of labour offered women numerous benefits of for spacing children to recover their health and participate in labour. According to Lewis,14 women are never comfortable in formal unions that are bureaucratic since they never adequately take into consideration the complexities of their daily lives. The same applies for men. Like the world of industrial capitalism, marriage constitutes of two parties that import different resources into the marriage institution in the hope that they satisfy the demand. However, women are mostly left to bear the burden that results from unions ranging from constraints in private experience and imagination, to defying the particularities of the everyday lives and dreams of women. The result of such marriages is a situation where a woman’s personality is encroached upon by men who are apparently unaware of such consequences. Although men could be acting with good intentions, they can cause unhappy moments for their wives through their possessiveness outside the bedroom. Lewis like Stopes15 supports gender equality in that women each partner must should work towards sustaining the marriage through their financial contributions as a result of wages from working outside the home. In order to attain financial contributions, the marriage institution must defy all ideas about gender roles that inhibit union happiness and joy, and that perceive men as the only sources of financial contribution to the family. Furthermore, the era of industrialization brought about delineation of gendered roles, especially given the changes in the economy that tended to dictate new ways of thinking about the ideal family and novel standards of living. This only emphasized the role of women within the private sphere where they were guardians of morals, children, and home while men were expected in the labour force or the public sphere. Compared to Lewis, Seccombe16 also brings out the fact that married and working women were more comfortable where they controlled their child bearing patterns and not where men or their families and state dictated it for them. Consequently, the decision of women to concentrate more on labour and less on child bearing led to a larger decline in working-class birthrates contributed mostly by Stopes’ discovery of the pill and other contraceptives and family planning strategies unlike withdrawal. Bibliography Cook, Hera. The long sexual revolution: English women, sex, and contraception 1800–1975. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Davies, Llewelyn. Maternity : letters from working-women. United States: McMillan, 1978. Lewis, J. Labour and Love: Womens Experiences of Home and Family, 1850-1940. 222-247, 1986. Seccombe, W. "Starting to Stop: The Proletarian Fertility Decline." In Weathering the Storm: working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline, by W Seccombe. London: Verso, 1993. Stopes, Marie. Married Love or Love in Marriage. New York: The Critic and Guide Co., 1918. Read More