Revolutionary Bodies: Women & Fertility Transition in Mid-Atlantic Region (1760-1820) PDF

Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid- Atlantic Region, 1760-1820 Author(s): Susan E. Klepp Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Dec., 1998), pp. 910-945 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2567216 Accessed: 19-09-2024 22:43 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Organization of American Historians, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of American History This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region, 1760-1820 Susan E. Klepp "A Ship under sail and a big-bellied Woman, /Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common," said Poor Richard in 1737, expressing an aesthetics of the female body at odds with that found in most twentieth-century magazines.' But it is not simply this aphorism that has become exotic. The metaphoric language of the seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century pregnant body has largely disappeared as well. "Teeming," "flourishing," "breeding," "fruitful," "prolific," "lusty," "big with child," "gone with child," "great with child," "big-bellied," or just plain "big": these are among the exuberant, expansive adjectives that colonial women and men employed to refer to the pregnant body. Why were these terms employed, why did most rapidly disappear by the end of the eighteenth century, and what might it mean that the shift to new descriptors anticipated falling fertility rates and smaller family size? The metaphors for generation that supplanted the old during and after the Revolution are equally unfamiliar. Those "expected pledges of matrimonial love," "beloved urchins," or "little strangers" are at once too sentimental and too impersonal for late-twentieth-century sensibilities, yet the adoption of this vocabu- lary announced the beginning of the fertility transition, a profound reconfiguration of women's construction of the fecund possibilities of their bodies. The language of the pregnant and birthing body reveals a historic moment during and after the American Revolution when intellectual, social, and economic change reciprocated with emerging individual, class, and national aspirations to begin a move from lifelong childbearing to truncated fertility patterns. This shift in vocabu- Susan E. Klepp is professor of history at Rider University and president of the Pennsylvania Historical Association. Versions of this article were presented at the annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and at the brown bag seminar of the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, and the seminar of the Wood Institute for the History of Medicine of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Thanks for valuable advice on earlier drafts to Ava Baron, Richard S. Dunn, Richard Godbeer, Ruth Herndon, Tom Horrocks, Anya Jabour, Jan Lewis, Kenneth Lockridge, Gloria L. Main, Leslie Patrick, Marylynn Salmon, Ronald Schultz, Billy G. Smith, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Daniel Scott Smith, Camilla Townsend, Michael Zuckerman, and the anonymous reviewers. And for generously adding to my fund of citations: Susan Branson, Konstantin Dierks, Owen S. Ireland, and Rosalind Remer. ' Van Wyck Brooks, ed., Poor Richard: TheAlmanacs for the Years 1733-1758 (New York, 1964), 29. 910 The Journal of American History December 1998 This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 911 lary was begun by women who constructed an alternative to a lifetime of childbear- ing, rejecting repeated biblical admonitions to "be fruitful and multiply" in favor of a language of reason, foresight, constraint, and sensibility. This was not exactly the quiet revolution that fertility transitions have been labeled: the American Revolution provoked a widespread discussion of virtue and a critique of luxury in the context of offering women a minor place in the new republic. In France, the only other nation to experience an early fertility transition, there was a parallel outcry against excess, irresponsibility, and luxury after the middle of the eighteenth century.2 American women adapted a revolutionary rhetoric of independence, self-control, sensibility, contractual equity, and numerical reasoning to their procreative physi- cality, recasting and reshaping their bodily images between 1760 and 1820 to de- emphasize bellies and to stress head and heart. The new vocabulary proclaimed a selfless, domestic womanhood while allowing expanded choices and a limitation of traditional obligation. This was a radical reimagining of femininity that most women diarists, correspondents, and poets seem to have embraced, at least con- ceptually. Practically, some women continued to bear children every two years but assisted in creating a new climate of opinion by expressing sympathy and sorrow for the similar childbearing experiences of their peers. Other women likewise accepted their traditional lot in life but worked to assure a different fate for their younger sis- ters and daughters by giving them explicit birth control information. Many eigh- teenth-century women, and many more nineteenth-century women, were moved to restrict their own family size despite the pull of tradition and anxiety about self- interested, self-assertive womanhood. It appears from the incomplete record avail- able to us that it was women who led in redefining their relationship to fecundity, starting in the mid-1760s. Men seem less forward and, before-very roughly-the 1790s, less fully convinced of the necessity of change. There exists a generation of scholarship on the fertility transition, largely from the vantage point of nineteenth- century men's concerns over economic opportunity and intergenerational wealth flows. An examination of the vocabulary of birth allows for a woman-centered, microlevel examination of the late-eighteenth-century beginning of the transition to ever-lower levels of fertility. Demographers, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have spilled much ink trying to explain the transition from relatively "high" to "low" mar- ital fertility or, to be more accurate, from lifetime childbearing to truncated child- bearing. Nearly all demographers and economists imagine a past when reproduction was "simple" and "natural," much to the dismay of social historians, anthropologists, 2Gen. 1:22, 28, 8:17, 9:1, 7, 17:20, 35:11. There is a large literature on revolutionary ideas and language, although not in relationship to fertility. See, for example, Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revo- lution (New York, 1991); and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1996). France is usually regarded as the nation that achieved truncated fertility earliest; see Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), 238. A simultaneous transition in France and the United States is suggested by the timetable in Etienne van de Walle, The Female Population of France in the Nineteenth Century: A Reconstitution of Departements (Princeton, 1974). John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850- 1970: The Quiet Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 912 The Journal of American History December 1998 and feminists, whose work stresses cultural constructions and contestations of gen- der and the body, among other human phenomena. Demographers and economists consider high-fertility societies "natural fertility" regimes, where no control over fer- tility is practiced. They place married couples in a primitive, Lockean state of nature where women produce children as quickly as biology allows: only age at marriage (relatively late through much of western Europe before the nineteenth century), rates of celibacy (relatively high), length of marriage (rather short), and breast-feeding prac- tices (variable) are believed to have impinged on this biological regime. Opposed to natural fertility are modern low-fertility societies, described as "parity-specific." No longer is marriage the primary mechanism controlling reproductive capacity, rather, couples project an ideal number of children (theoretically always assumed to be a small number) and stop childbearing when that number is achieved (parity). In parity- specific regimes, fertility is considered rationalized-human will, calculation, and technology are brought to bear, supposedly for the first time, on fertility. The process of movement from natural fertility to parity specific fertility has been a matter of debate. Economic and demographic explanations for the fertility transition favor quantifiable data sets that are presumed to measure structural change: degrees of urbanization, availability of land or population density, cost of child rearing, eco- nomic value of children, intergenerational wealth flows, literacy rates or years of edu- cation, and rates of industrial development.3 How broad social and economic changes were incorporated into individual per- ceptions of fertility and into individual behavior has been little studied. This is in part because assumptions of "naturalness" foreclose analysis of individual agency. However, John Cleland and Christopher Wilson have suggested that only the devel- opment of widely shared "aspirations, knowledge, attitudes or social norms" can explain how new fertility goals are simultaneously embraced both by those who ben- efit economically from reduced fertility and those who do not or why fertility rates still frequently differ across regions, religious groups, or social classes experiencing similar stages of economic development. The development of numeracy, the precise use of numerical concepts, has been suggested as the important attitudinal factor in fertility reduction. Etienne van de Walle has argued that a "fertility decline is not very far away when people start conceptualizing their family size, and it cannot take place without such conceptualizing." J. William Leasure noticed that the adoption of ideas of personal autonomy can be a key to fertility decline, especially as these emerge during revolutionary times. Certainly American revolutionary rhetoric about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, about human equality, and about the right to be represented sometimes challenged traditional gender roles and expectations. Lee L. Bean and his coauthors add that personal autonomy favors innovative behav- I For a spirited defense of demographic modernization theory, see Susan Cotts Watkins, review of Situating Fertility edited by Susan Greenhalgh, Journal ofInterdisciplinary History, 28 (Summer 1997), 90-91. A merging of disciplines is proposed in Daniel Scott Smith and J. David Hacker, "Cultural Demography: New England Deaths and the Puritan Perception of Risk," ibid., 26 (Winter 1996), 367-92. The latest findings put less emphasis on simplicity but continue to discount the agency of married couples; see E. A. Wrigley et al., English Population His- toryfrom Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), esp. 507-10. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 913 ior, such as is needed to truncate childbearing. John Bongaarts and Susan Cotts Wat- kins have proposed that scholars look at specific networks of social and linguistic interaction in order to trace the communication and acceptability of new ideas and technologies. They found that in the twentieth century, well-developed national media and governments acting "to equalize the distribution of resources" have been particularly important in opening dialogues on innovative attitudes toward fertility. Perhaps two hundred years earlier, national debate during republican and demo- cratic revolutions fulfilled the same requirements.4 Who were the individuals who conformed to new social norms, who were innova- tive, numeric, communicative, and autonomous? Most analysts assume it was men, except when gossip networks are examined. While S. Ryan Johansson has urged his- torical demographers to remember that "women's individual bodies [are] the basic observational unit [and that n]ations, provinces, counties, communities, occupa- tional groups, households, or couples do not have babies, except by courtesy of met- aphor," women and their bodies remain strangely absent from most explanatory models of the fertility transition.5 Anthropologists and feminists have been calling for an appreciation of women's agency in fertility decisions and practices, criticizing whiggish assumptions of uni- directional progress and Western superiority in much of the discussion of human fertility. These critiques have remained largely theoretical. In particular, the his- tory of Western fertility has been of little interest to anthropologists because in their analyses current Western norms often serve simply as a contrast to, or an influence on, the variety of indigenous attitudes and practices. Historians have contributed little to this recent debate. In the 1970s and 1980s, social historians argued that the development of independent women's movements in the early national period unleashed latent demands for lower fertility among American 4John Cleland and Christopher Wilson, "Demand Theories of the Fertility Transition: An Iconoclastic View," Population Studies, 41 (March 1987), 5-30; Daniel Scott Smith, "'Early' Fertility Decline in America: A Problem in Family History," Journal of Family History, 12 (nos. 1-3, 1987), 73-84; Etienne van de Walle, "Fertility Tran- sition, Conscious Choice, and Numeracy," Demography, 29 (Nov. 1992), 487-502, esp. 501. More generally, see Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread ofNumeracy in Early America (Chicago, 1982), esp. 141- 49. J. William Leasure, "Mexican Fertility and the Revolution of 1910-1920," Population Review, 32 (nos. 1-2, 1988), 41-48; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience ofAmerican Women, 1750- 1800 (Boston, 1980), 80-83, 232; Lee L. Bean, Geraldine Mineau, and Douglas L. Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation (Berkeley, 1990); John Bongaarts and Susan Cotts Watkins, "Social Interactions and Contemporary Fertility Transitions," Population and Development Review, 22 (Dec. 1996), 639-82, esp. 639. See also Susan Cotts Watkins and Angela D. Danzi, "Women's Gossip and Social Changes: Childbirth and Fertility Control among Italian and Jewish Women in the United States, 1920-1940," Gender and Society, 9 (Aug. 1995), 469-90. 5Watkins and Danzi, "Women's Gossip and Social Changes"; S. Ryan Johansson, "'Implicit' Policy and Fertil- ity during Development," Population and Development Review, 17 (Sept. 1991), 392. My thanks to the author for bringing this important article to my attention. More generally, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1980), 155-63; and David F. Noble, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York, 1992), esp. 283-86. The following research question is an example of fertility without females: "Consider twin brothers.... The only difference is that one is a farmer in the East, and the other in the West. Why should the farmer in the East be more likely to show lower marital fertility than his brother in the West?" Lee A. Craig, To Sow One Acre More: Childbearing and Farm Pro- ductivity in the Antebellum North (Baltimore, 1993), 12. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 914 The Journal of American History December 1998 women.6 The unintended corollary of such a position is that if women "naturally" always favor delimiting their fertility, if an inclination to restrict childbearing is always latent, then their relationship to reproduction is biological rather than cul- tural. Women's bodies have therefore been at odds with their own self-interest until recent times. Consequently, women have been entirely dependent on mod- ern technology and the good will of enlightened men in order to achieve their timeless preference for an escape from fecundity. It was not an argument that encouraged further investigation. Only Jan Lewis and Kenneth A. Lockridge have gone beyond historians' domi- nant assumption of women's "natural" relationship to fertility by uncovering one shift in women's construction of the experience of pregnancy. Late-eighteenth- century Virginia women of gentry status created "a feminine reason for birth con- trol," through a fear of death in childbirth. Soon, "women and men both were begin- ning to describe pregnancy and childbirth as something un-natural, a disruption of a woman's health."7 Yet the reclassification of pregnancy as sickness that dominated Virginia women's new relationship to fertility was just a minor theme in the meta- phoric transformation of fertility observable among women in the mid-Atlantic states. The fertility transition affected and reflected changes in the political, social, economic, aesthetic, moral, and cultural dimensions of human experience as well. In comparison to fertility rates in old England, those in colonial British North America were high. One measure of fertility, the crude birthrate (births per 1,000 population), can be found in the figure (p. 918), and other measures-age-specific marital fertility rates, child/woman ratios, and average number of children born follow the same trend. The standard reasons proposed for the higher fertility in the ISusan Greenhalgh, "Anthropology Theorizes Reproduction: Integrating Practice, Political Economic, and Feminist Perspectives," in Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry, ed. Susan Greenhalgh (Cam- bridge, Eng., 1995), 3-28; Fay D. Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley, 1995); Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduc- tion (Boston, 1987); Alison MacKinnon, "Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition? Questions from a Feminist Historian to Historical Demographers," Gender and History, 7 (Aug. 1995), 222-40; Nora Federici, Karen Oppenheim Mason, and Solvi Sogner, eds., Women's Position and Demographic Change (New York, 1993); Anita Ilta Garey, "Fertility on the Frontier: Bringing Women Back In," Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 11 (Spring 1987), 63-83; Nancy Folbre, "Family Strategy, Feminist Strategy," HistoricalMethods, 20 (Summer 1987), 115- 18. Not historical, but on point are Susan C. Watkins, "If All We Knew about Women Was What We Read in Demography, What Would We Know?," Demography, 30 (Nov. 1993), 551-78; Elizabeth W. Moen, "What Does 'Control over Our Bodies' Really Mean?," in Perspectives on Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, ed. Scott W. Menard and Elizabeth W. Moen (New York, 1987), 277-88; and Susan A. McDaniel, "Toward a Syn- thesis of Feminist and Demographic Perspectives on Fertility," Sociological Quarterly, 37 (no. 1, 1996), 83-104. Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980), esp. 189; Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian Amer- ica," in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Mary Hartman and Lois W. Ban- ner (New York, 1974), 119-36. Anthropologists and demographers, more than American historians, have recognized that in many societies women desire large families. Useful here are L. J. Jordanova, "Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality," in Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), 42-69; Carol P. MacCormack, "Biological, Cultural, and Social Adaptation in Human Fertility and Birth," in Ethnography of Fertility and Birth, ed. Carol P. MacCormack (New York, 1982), 2; and Karen Oppenheim Mason and Anju Malhotra Taj, "Differences between Women's and Men's Reproductive Goals in Developing Countries," Population and Development Review, 13 (Dec. 1987), 611 -38. 7Jan Lewis and Kenneth A. Lockridge, "'Sally Has Been Sick': Pregnancy and Family Limitation among Vir- ginia Gentry Women, 1780-1830," JournalofSocialHistory, 22 (Fall 1988), 5-19. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 915 colonies and on later frontiers of Euro-American expansionism include earlier mar- riages, relatively high standards of living, greater access to land, higher wages, labor shortages, optimism about the future, and disruptions in women's traditional sup- port networks. Birthrates in Philadelphia, for example, were already high in the 1690s, a decade after English settlement, then rose to a peak in the 1760s, started falling during the Revolutionary War, and except for the occasional postwar baby booms and immigrant-fed baby booms of the 1780s, 1820s, 1890s, and 1950s, have fallen steadily to the present day. The national pattern was smoother, but similar.8 Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, smaller families and fewer births were embraced by some groups more readily than others. Regionally, lowered fertility was more predominant in the Northeast, with the New England states in the lead. It was characteristic of urban centers and those rural areas con- nected to larger markets, usually where real estate values were rising. The South and isolated rural areas were slower to change, while second-decade frontier settlements uniformly had the highest rates. However, each successive wave of western settle- ment failed to reproduce the fertility heights of the previous wave. Rates were falling everywhere. On the household level, restricted fertility and high rates of literacy or years of education were persistently linked: the higher the educational attainment of women, the lower fertility rates. Households dependent on salaries or fixed wages were more likely to reduce family size than those with irregular incomes or more fluid forms of wealth. Native-born Americans had lower fertility than most immigrants. More sec- ular individuals, along with liberal and pietistic Protestants, were among the van- guard; biblical literalists, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics lagged behind. Yet rates would converge over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nearly eliminating initial differences by residence, occupation, and religion.9 By the 1820s it became apparent that the regions of the United States where fer- tility rates were falling most rapidly were also the regions that led in industrializa- tion. The linkage between the two phenomena remains obscure. Neither of the two 8The findings about fertility and the fertility transition outlined in this and the following two paragraphs appear in the following works. For a classic overview, see Yasukichi Yasuba, Birth Rates of the White Population in the United States, 1800-1860: An Economic Study (Baltimore, 1962). Bean, Mineau, and Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier, esp. 239-54; Richard A. Easterlin, "Factors in the Decline of Farm Family Fer- tility in the United States: Some Preliminary Research Results," Journal ofAmerican History, 63 (Dec. 1976), esp. table 1, 602; and Smith, "'Early' Fertility Decline in America." Other indices of fertility follow the same pattern. For regional age-specific marital fertility rates, child-woman ratios, ages at last birth, and numbers of children per marriage, see Susan E. Klepp, " The Swift Progress of Population": A Documentary and Bibliographic Study of Phila- delphias Growth, 1642-1859 (Philadelphia, 1991), 16-25. In that work I missed Alice P. Kenney, "Patricians and Plebeians in Colonial Albany, Part II-Aggregation," Halve Maen, 45 (no. 2, 1970), 9-11. 9 A few German sectarians did go against the grain -increasing fertility levels over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Roger C. Henderson, "Eighteenth-Century Schwenkfelders: A Demographic Interpretation," in Schwenkfelders in America, ed. Peter C. Erb (Pennsbury, Pa., 1987), 25-40; and Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem (Philadelphia, 1988), 51-85. Pathbreaking research has revealed the linguistic isolation of Schwenkfelder women, their heavy reliance on religious imagery, and their role in preserving a minority culture. See Christine Hucho, "Female Writers, Women's Networks, and the Preservation of Culture: The Schwenkfelder Women of Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania," paper delivered at the brown-bag seminar, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Philadelphia, Pa., 1997 (in Christine Hucho's possession). These exceptions point to the importance of both vocabulary and social interaction in diffusing innovative behavior. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 916 The Journal of American History December 1998 countries that pioneered in reconfiguring fertility, the United States and France, had industrialized at the beginning of the transition, although both were engaged in the sophisticated trade networks of the Atlantic world. Meanwhile the leading industri- alized nation in the world, Great Britain, did not experience a fertility transition until the second half of the nineteenth century.10 This article argues that what the United States and France had in common in the eighteenth century was intellectual, social, and economic turmoil leading to revolution. Although it is beyond the scope of this article to test the French case, the model proposed here suggests that the nearly simultaneous development of parity-specific fertility in France, which had the lowest birthrates in the Western world at the onset of the fertility transition, and in the United States, which had among the highest, was not an inexplicable anomaly. Innovation, autonomy, numeracy, and broad social networks, seen as necessary pre- conditions for truncated fertility by demographers, were present in the republican/ democratic revolutions of these two nations. Women applied egalitarian ideas and a virtuous, prudent sensibility to their bodies and to their traditional images of self as revolutions inspired discussion and debate. However, the institution of slavery com- plicated the fertility experiences of the vast majority of African Americans whose condition was not changed by the Revolution. For this large group of Americans rates would not peak until the mid-nineteenth century but then fell as soon as free- dom was achieved in the wake of the Civil War. (See figure, p. 918.) It was another period when large numbers of people asserted their independence in the name of civil rights, virtue, and human equality. The mid-Atlantic region was close to the national median in its fertility levels. The eastern part of the region was commercial and urban between 1760 and 1820; the west was being conquered. No other area of the country contained the mix of religions, ethnicities, races, and social rankings that typified Pennsylvania, New Jer- sey, and New York. This article examines contemporary writings from the region in order to explore how individual women and men understood their relationship to fertility while moving from high fertility levels to restricted fertility. The surviving sources, like all qualitative records from the period, are biased toward the wealthier segments of society-people who were better educated, had more leisure to write, and left descendants who imagined historical significance in their ancestry, donating family papers for inquisitive historians to mull over. In the mid-Atlantic region, these constraints will tend to select Quakers, Presbyterians, and Anglicans out of the mix of denominations, and British ethnicities out of the many nationalities present. The full recovery of women's voices is impossible-in comparison to their male peers, they were less educated, they often complained about the difficulty of writing with toddlers tugging on their sleeves, and their descendants were far less likely to be impressed with their accomplishments. Attitudes toward fertility are so deeply embedded in the culture of human socie- ties and appear so natural that sustained discussion rarely appears. Current investi- 10 S. Ryan Johansson, "Fertility and Family History: Using the Past to Explain the Present," Population and Development Review, 23 (Sept. 1997), 627-37. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 917 gations of fertility goals in Asia and Africa rely on targeted, in-depth interviews of individuals that occasionally still fail to elicit comprehensive responses on attitudes toward fertility, but these techniques are hardly applicable to the eighteenth cen- tury. References to pregnancy, birth, and other bodily functions were quite scarce in the diaries, letters, and other documents of early America. Not only did contempo- rary literary models discourage discussion of such earthy subjects, but the conven- tion of circulating and reading aloud letters, diaries, and commonplace books further inhibited writers.1" In addition, those genealogically inclined descendants who gave their family papers to historical societies sometimes censored them. Although in this essay every effort has been made to be inclusive, the very small group of people whose papers survive and who slipped in some passing reference to fertility could not, by themselves, have caused the fertility transition. New relation- ships to human fertility were being forged in the last decades of the eighteenth cen- tury, and substantial portions of the population were influenced, as the statistical evidence indicates. Of course, individual motivations can never be fully recovered, but a close reading of the scraps of surviving evidence, when linked to current work in history, demography, and anthropology, opens an individual, woman-centered, angle of vision on an event much studied in terms of impersonal forces of change and men's economic activities. Before the American Revolution, common descriptive terms for pregnant women, used by women and men alike, were agricultural or botanical: for example, "flourish- ing" women, "breeding" women, "teeming" women, and, most commonly, "fruitful" women. Those allegorical descriptions were suggestive of a bountiful, domesticated natural order in which agricultural production and human reproduction merged into a single vision of welcome abundance-as in Poor Richard's bountifully laden ship and pregnant woman. German and Swedish speakers in Pennsylvania, as well as English speakers, employed analogous adjectives, many of which are biblical in origin.12 One example of the slippage between the productivity of women and the produc- tivity of agriculture can be seen in Israel Acrelius's account of Pennsylvania in 1756. Under the heading, "The Fruitfulness of the Country," he wrote, "The country is undeniably fruitful, as may be judged from the following examples: Joseph Cobern... had the blessing to have his wife have twins, his cow two calves, and his ewe two lambs, all on one night." His wife, his cow, his ewe: all redounded to the blessing of their owner and the reputation of the country. Pennsylvania's high fertility was touted as a lure for immigrants, as in 1698 when Englishwomen were to be enticed II For an excellent introduction to these issues, see Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, eds., Mil- cah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (University Park, 1997). '2Traditional metaphors were themselves unstable and had become more patriarchal in the seventeenth cen- tury. See Mary Fissell, "Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England," Gender and History, 7 (Nov. 1995), 433-56. The longevity of the basic concepts is suggested in Etienne van de Walle, "Flowers and Fruits: Two Thousand Years of Menstrual Regulation," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (Fall 1997), 183-203. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 918 The Journal of American History December 1998 Crude Birth Rates 70.................................. (Births per 1,000 Population) 60 0~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1 50 | --@tft wwsw WB , 8b- 30 1 I.......;..........................I.......................... 20 - - II 1670-1699 1700-1729 1730-1759 1760-1789 1790-1819 1820-1849 1850-1879 - England - US-white -- US-black e Philadelphia * Rural Mid-Atlantic Sources: For Philadelphia, revised figures from Susan E. Klepp, "Lost, Hidden, Obstructed, and Repressed: Contraceptive and Abortive Technology in the Early Delaware Valley," in Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, ed. Judith A. McGaw (Chapel Hill, 1994), 107. For estimates of rural Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York counties, Morton Owen Shapiro, "Land Availability and Fertility in the United States, 1760-1870," Journal of Economic History, 42 (Sept. 1982), 599. For United States estimates (white population), calculations using Robert W. Fogel et al., "The Economics of Mortality in North America, 1650-1910: A Description of a Research Project," Historical Methods, 11 (no. 2, 1978), 99. For United States estimates (black population), Robert W. Fogel, "Revised Estimates of the U.S. Slave Trade and the Native- Born Share of the Black Population," in Without Consent or Contract. The Rise and Fall of American Slavery: Evidence and Methods, ed. Robert W. Fogel, Ralph A. Galantine, and Richard L. Manning (New York, 1992), 54. For English estimates, E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), 531-35. Birth rates in Philadelphia dropped below English rates only in the 1 830s, those in rural mid-Atlantic counties by the 1860s. But before the 1830s, as is evident in age-specific marital fertility rates not included here, many American women had already stopped lifetime childbearing, unlike their British counterparts who continued child- bearing into their late thirties and forties. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 919 by the fact that "Barrenness among Women [is] hardly to be heard of,... seldom any young Married Woman but hath a Child in her Belly, or one upon her Lap." The ability to produce male offspring was particularly indicative of the strength of a country and its men, so William Penn complimented Pennsylvania Swedes in 1683 by noting "they have fine children, and almost every house full; rare to find one of them without three or four boys, and as many girls; some six, seven, and eight sons." Conversely, it was an insult to aver low fertility. The army physician Johann David Schoepff had little good to say about America in 1780, as his Hessian troops faced losing the war, so it is not entirely surprising that he found that "American women are not very prolific. They are amazed at the fourteenth pregnancy of the queen, and when I tell them that I know mothers with eighteen and twenty-four living children, those who accept the story at all cannot help betraying envy in the expression of their countenances." People undoubtedly made strange faces, but Schoepff had to stretch to come to his conclusion, which was not supported elsewhere in his own writings. His comment does point to the competitive element in male attitudes on women's reproductive capacities, a competition that helped to shape local, national, and imperial identities. In private, as in public, large families were sources of pride, congratulation, and competition for men, especially when they contained several sons.13 Women's writings also linked abundance in agricultural productivity and human procreation. Abigail Adams was deliberately metaphorical and ironic when she com- mented in 1775, as war followed years of escalating conflict: "Philadelphia must be an unfertile soil, or it would not produce so many unfruitful women.... [but] they are certainly freed from the anxiety every parent must feel for their rising offspring." For Adams childlessness may have been a rational response to wartime anxiety, but it was also a selfish attempt by urbane women to save themselves the trouble of child- rearing. This state of affairs reflected badly on both Philadelphia's environment and its women. In 1805 Sally Hastings chastised a friend for turning down a proposal of marriage. Her friend, she asserted poetically, was getting old and would be barren like the trees of winter if she did not change her ways and marry. The particular hus- band-to-be was unimportant, the chance to have children, to bear fruit, was. Sample stanzas link seasonal cycles of fertility and infertility to women and the married state. Oh! hadst thou, in thy April dress, Secur'd thy shining store [that is, marriage], Thy fragrant shade [home] we would not miss; Thy fruit [children] would charm us more! 13Israel Acrelius, A History ofNew Sweden (1759; Ann Arbor, 1966), 156; Gabriel Thomas, "An Historical and Geographical Account of Pensilvania and of West-New-Jersey," in Narratives ofEarly Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630-1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York, 1912), 333; William Penn, "Letter to the Free Society of Traders" (1683), in William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 1680-1684, A Documentary His- tory, ed. Jean R. Soderlund (Philadelphia, 1983), 317; Johann David Schoepff, The Climate and Diseases ofAmer- ica, trans. James Read Chadwick (Boston, 1875), 1 Iln; Randolph Shipley Klein, Portrait of an Early American Family: The Shippens of Pennsylvania across Five Generations (Philadelphia, 1975), 150-51; Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 102-3. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 920 The Journal of American History December 1998 Then do not spend your spring in vain, Nor let your blossoms fade, 'Till you secure a fruitful gain, And leaves for future shade. 'Then, in old age, when others fade,' Like barren leafless trees, You still will bloom, yield fruit and shade; You'll profit, shine, and please. Hastings's assumption of profitability, rather than primitive accumulation (the simple amassing of assets), in childbearing and in fruited trees was new, but her linking of children with fruitfulness was traditional. Her poem was one of the last times these metaphors would be employed and it appeared in rural Lancaster County, not urban Philadelphia, where such sentiments were already old-fashioned. 14 When William Logan in 1764 replied to his brother-in-law's teasing, "I am Obliged to thee for thy desires of my hav[in]g more Children as I am for thy Banter about my Great Estate," both men assumed the equivalence of children and wealth. Prior to the Revolution, women "produced" children, and childbearing was labeled generation or procreation. Women's bodies had created abundance and a symbolic, if not actual, form of wealth. In 1776 Annis Boudinot Stockton's primary wish for her newlywed daughter's birthday was, "May prattling infants round you smile /And pay with love their mother's toil." An abundance of children was the ideal. Chil- dren's future rewards to their parents were couched in terms of love and duty, not hard cash or productive labor, but were perceived as an exchange for a mother's toil or, more commonly, for paternal cares. Women attained consequence through their productive powers, especially as harnessed in their husbands' interests.15 These images of teeming, flourishing, fruitful trees, soils, crops, and women were partially rooted in the Bible and partially in familiarity with agricultural production. Opposed to fertility, both for women and for farms, were barrenness, unfruitfulness, and infertility. Pregnancy was the natural condition of married women (although hardly without dangers and needing careful management); barrenness was unnatural. As these images related to women, they evoked an organic unity of women and preg- 14Charles Francis Adams, ed., Familiar Letters ofJohn Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution, with a Memoir ofMrs. Adams (New York, 1876), 129; Sally Hastings, Poems on Different Subjects. To Which is Added, A Descriptive Account ofa Family Tour in the West in the Year 1800, in a Letter to a Lady (Lancaster, 1808), 88-90. 15William Logan to John Smith, 5th day morning, c. 1764, John Smith Correspondence, 1740-1770 (His- torical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.); Ludmilla Jordanova, "Interrogating the Concept of Reproduc- tion in the Eighteenth Century," in Conceiving the New World Order, ed. Ginsberg and Rapp, 369; "To Mrs Rush on Her birthday" (March 2, 1776), in Carla Mulford, Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems ofAnnis Boudinot Stockton (Charlottesville, 1995), 96. Cash flows seem to have gone from parents to children well before the fertil- ity transition. Among Quaker farmers, children were expenses, rather than sources of income. See Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York, 1988). Among Lutherans, farmers on small holdings (20-99 acres) were likely to keep adult sons working on the family farm, but they were a minority. See Susan Klepp, "Five Early Pennsylvania Censuses," Pennsylvania Magazine ofHistory and Biography, 106 (Oct. 1982), 494. In the city, education and apprenticeships might cost money and removed children to other households. Textile mills in the nineteenth century did reward child labor, but only the most desperate immigrants accepted such employment. See Cynthia J. Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787-1837 (Baltimore, 1986), 61-63. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 921 nancy. The normative condition of women, the center of housewifery, was procreation. Sarah Logan Fisher worried over every indication that she might not be pregnant and welcomed each of her nine pregnancies through the 1770s and 1780s as a blessing, despite increasing difficulties in labor and delivery. Elizabeth Coates Paschall recalled around 1750 that she "Never Expected health again," until she had cured herself "after So Long a habit of Miscarriage." Childbearing was welcomed as a sign of health and well-being. Other common terms for late pregnancy included being "lusty," in a "thriv- ing way," or, as Esther Edwards Burr described her condition in 1753, "a very comfort- table state of helth-I suppose more Fleshey an Fresh than ever you saw me.""16 There was competition among women as well as men. Burr was invited to a forth- coming lying-in in 1757 and commented "this is quick work for her Child is near two Months younger than mine," referring to her friend's success in conceiving only eight months after her last delivery, cutting in half the usual fifteen- to seventeen- month interval between childbirth and conception. Elizabeth Drinker observed in 1795 that her daughter-in-law's first labor was "severe," but "I have been accustomed to severer labours." Mary Boyd Simm wrote to her Scottish sister-in-law in 1778 that "I also rejoice with you in being the Mother of So large a family." But after two stillbirths Simm bemoaned the "calamities of War" in America and bitterly remarked that "we Women may truly Say blessed is the Womb that beareth not," paraphrasing Luke 23:29 on the unnatural desolation caused by disaster. Simm's anguished long- ing for a large family is palpable in the brief account left to us. Meanwhile, Annis Stockton promoted a multitude of infants. Women took pride in their large families of children; they enjoyed calling friends together to assist at the birth; they regaled each other with heroic tales of survival from difficult labors; they remembered tragic cases of suffering and death; they poked fun at men and male pretension; they wel- comed the gifts and cash bestowed on the new mother in the weeks after the bap- tism. There was, by and large, no latent demand for an end to childbearing. To flourish was to have health, prosperity, and success.17 Abundance was welcome, and children were undoubtedly loved, but the botanic imagery was unsentimental as it related both to wives and to children. Women 16On these adjectives applied to colonial women and farm animals, but analyzed as "straightforward" descrip- tions rather than metaphors, see Catharine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society: 1650-1850 (New York, 1985), 15. See also Sylvia D. Hoffert, Private Matters: American Attitudes toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800-1860 (Urbana, 1989), 15. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives ofWomen in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York, 1982), 159-62; Marylynn Salmon, "The Cul- tural Significance of Breastfeeding and Infant Care in Early Modern England and America," Journal of Social His- tory, 28 (no. 2, 1994), 247-69. For a detailed analysis of Sarah Logan Fisher's childbearing career, see Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 80-83. Elizabeth Coates Paschall, Recipe Book, c. 1745-1767, p. 10L (College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pa.); Klein, Portrait ofan EarlyAmerican Family, 134, 277; Carol F. Karlsen and Lau- rie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal ofEsther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 (New Haven, 1984), 287. 17Karlsen and Crumpacker, eds., Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 253; Elaine F. Crane et al., eds., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (3 vols., Boston, 1991), I, 741-42; Barbara De Wolfe, ed., Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America during the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1997), 148. John Fitch characterized traditional birthings as "cerimonies merryment and invidious talks"; see Frank D. Prager, ed., The Autobiography ofJohn Fitch (Philadelphia, 1976), 21. A European thought cash gifts to new mothers rather extrav- agant: "politeness required that a gratuity of four or five shillings or even a dollar, be given." See Peter Kalm, Peter Kalms Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770, ed. Adolph B. Benson, trans. John Reinhold Forster (New York, 1964), 677. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 922 The Journal of American History December 1998 could be as callous toward children as men could be about women and children. If parents have "a crop both feeble and redundant," wrote Anne M. Grant, "they must carefully weed and prop." The prevailing social inequalities that Grant articulated were evident in the behavior of many parents. Some family members were more important than others. James Tilghman introduced a discussion of his six sons in 1766 by noting in passing that "Breeding ha[d] almost destroyed" his wife, who had borne ten children. He was not dismayed by the toll on his wife, and his four daugh- ters did not merit a mention. Even more solicitous husbands assumed masculine superiority. Thus in 1761 James Read planned to give his wife "the last Ride, per- haps, She will get ere she rejoices, with me, that a Son is born." A son was the great desideratum. Sallie Eve wrote in 1772 that she was "not a little laught at as I had pronounced that both the Ladies would of had males instead of fefales [sic] however I was mistaken," while Sarah Logan Fisher in 1778 referred casually to her cousin's "favorite Son & 4 of her other Children." Eliza Chadwick, a redundant girl born on a New Jersey farm in 1784, later recalled that "My father was no doubt disapointed as to my sex and oftimes wished me a boy." The agricultural images might invoke health and prosperity, but they could also allow parents, like a hypothetical farmer at work in his fields, ruthlessly to pick, weed, and sort superfluous or disappointing off- spring, while the equation of childbearing with repeated harvests led to the natural exhaustion of the fertile soil of the female body.18 These agricultural motifs were not the only conceits employed to describe preg- nancy. To first "be with child" or to "go with child" and then to "be big with child" and finally to be "great with child" were common self-referential terms used by women, especially in informal conversation with family and friends. Relatively little of casual speech patterns survives, and those terms may have loomed larger in daily experience than the surviving, and more reflective, writings of the eighteenth cen- tury indicate. But in this vocabulary the emphasis was on the existential state of the woman, "being with," or the process, "going with," as much as the end of the preg- nancy, "child." "Child" itself could be used to objectify the fetus, and its etymology is rooted in the Old English word for womb, not infant or person. The vocabulary of process measured the progression of the pregnancy through the growth of the woman's body developing in tandem "with child." As Barbara Duden has pointed out, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pregnant female body was viewed externally, and the assessment of the viability of the pregnancy was made by the woman herself. The womb provided a matrix in which life might or might not finally develop. The use of the term "life's porch" for the birth canal was another indication of the ambiguous status of the fetus prior to birth, especially given the "8Anne M. Grant, Memoirs ofan American Lady (1808; 2 vols., New York, 1970), I, 274; James Tilghman to Mr. Anderson, Sept. 10, 1766, box 1764-69, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pa.). My thanks to Konstantin Dierks for this citation. James Read to John Smith, c. 1761, Smith Correspondence; Sallie Eve Diary, Feb. 1, 1772, p. 18 (Special Collections Department, William R. Per- kins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.). Sarah Logan Fisher Diary, 1 mo. 1778, vol. 5, p. 4 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania); Eliza Chadwick Roberts Scott, "Occurances of Life," c. 1814, p. 12 (Monmouth County Historical Society, Freehold, N.J.). This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 923 high rate of stillbirths and neonatal deaths. Women did not give birth, but were "brought to bed," "confined to their chamber," or they "lay in," sometimes "with child." The woman remained at the center of the images of pregnancy, process was stressed over end; the future child was an uncertain, hazily conceptualized possibil- ity. Even after birth, women's offspring were frequently referred to only as "my little flock"- the undifferentiated, but now animate, products of fruitfulness.19 This view of pregnancy as organic and natural could encompass a wide range of responses to a suspected or self-diagnosed pregnancy. On the one hand, it might engender a passivity in some women, who could see their bodies only as the fields on which men's heirs were born, all according to the will of God. Hannah Callender wrote in 1758 that "there can be no greater felicity on this side [of] the grave than that of a Man who has a good Wife and large family of Promising children, to think that he has been one means of fitting so many inhabitents for the region of Eternal Happiness." This extreme example of feminine passivity, written by a young woman before her marriage, attributed all creation to the actions of a patriarch. (It caused a descendant, probably in 1888, to pencil three exclamation marks in the margin, an indication of how foreign this particular opinion had become.) Women sometimes commented on the inevitability and indeterminacy of multiple pregnancies. Esther Edwards Burr wrote in 1755 after her second child's birth, "How I shall get along when I have got 1 /2 dzn. or 10 Children I cant devise." But obviously she knew that she would somehow get along, even if she could not anticipate the frequencies within the course of her lifetime of childbearing.20 On the other hand, these views of organic unity could also give women a measure of control over their bodies. Any eighteenth-century medical text, herbal, or home guide to health contained instructions under the category of emmenagogues (men- strual regulators) on how to apply abdominal pressure or how to prepare herbal medicines in order to restore menstruation or, more explicitly, to expel "dead fruit." These appear from statistical analyses of the scanty and, by modern standards, quite incomplete medical records of the time to have been about 70-85 percent effective in removing uterine "obstructions." Elizabeth Coates Paschall gave a detailed descrip- tion of how she had successfully induced labor in the 1720s or 1730s when three months "Gone with Child" to treat a case of severe colic. Paschall looked forward to multiple pregnancies and recorded two recipes intended to prevent miscar- riage. Yet if conditions were not favorable, she, like others, might diagnose illness 19Norton, Libertys Daughters, 85; Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), esp. 62-66, 79-93; Crane et al., eds., Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, I, 872, 872n132; Margaret Morris, Private Journal Kept During the Revolutionary War (1836; New York, 1969), 6, 11, 21. 20 Susan E. Klepp and Karin A. Wulf, eds., The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom (Philadelphia, forthcom- ing), entry for Oct. 30, 1758. The original is in the American Philosophical Society. Similar sentiments were expressed concerning a daughter's birth and death in 1754, "a Christian parent possesses an unspeakable privilege, who gives birth to an immortal being, and is permitted to give it away to God." See William P. Farrand, ed., "Memoirs of Mrs. Hannah Hodge, who died in Philadelphia, Dec. 17th, 1805, in the 85th year of her age," Gen- eral Assembly's Missionary Magazine; or, Evangelical Intelligencer for 1806, 2 (Feb. 1806), 93. See also Karlsen and Crumpacker, eds., Journal ofEsther Edwards Burr, 192. All these cases of extreme passivity date from the 1750s, a decade not only of peak fertility rates in the mid-Atlantic but also of religious revivalism. Burr and Hodge were New Light Presbyterians, Callender a Quaker. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 924 The Journal of American History December 1998 Elizabeth Peel by Benjamin West, oil (1 75 1) This typical mid-eighteenth-century pose shows a young woman with a basket of flowers held before her stomach, swelling her silhouette as if pregnant. Abundance in both agriculture and the female body was often symbolized by flowers or fruit. The position of the woman's hands and arms furthers the image of a rounded belly. The brightly colored flowers distract the viewer's attention from the face. She sits with her legs splayed apart; a leaf points to her crotch. Courtesy Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gift ofJohn Fredrick Lewis. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 925 Rebecca Holdsworth Young and Granddaughter. Rebecca Woodward by John Hesselius, oil (1763). The granddaughter holds an apron filled with bright, red strawberries in prediction of a fecund future. Her grandmother, undoubtedly postmenopausal, holds a single strawberry at her lower abdomen, but the real fruit of her loins is likewise placed between her outspread legs-the granddaughter. Again the brightly colored fruit jostles for the viewer's attention, distracting from the face. The granddaughter comfortingly pats her grandmother's thigh. Heirs provide for their forebears. Courtesy Winterthur Museum. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 926 The Journal of American History December 1998 and delay childbearing. A lifetime of childbearing would resume as soon as health pe mitted.21 While a range of behaviors was compatible with the fruitful images of the eigh- teenth century, what apparently could not be imagined was an alternative to the reproductive cycle. Women were physical beings whose lives conformed to biological rhythms. It was not that women had no control, but that control focused on imme- diate circumstances rather than lifetime goals. Postponement of the next birth typi- fied women's responses in times of illness, economic stress, or crisis, especially war, for when times were more propitious, childbearing would resume. Women's recipe books placed more emphasis on enhancing fertility than on diminishing fertility. Women's self-images were inextricably tied to their fecundity. Public and private pressure to conform to contemporary standards of high fertility was intense, and women who failed to produce children could find themselves the objects of pity or censure. Their private failure became a source of public comment. It was a reflection of their abilities, of their husband's masculinity, of the country's prosperity. As revolutionary protests began, the language of women's fertility and the pregnant body started to change. Eliza Stedman, "talking Like ane american" in 1764, mocked traditional attitudes: "those that are in that State of bondage [marriage] think fit now and then to increase and Multiply in down right compasion as this is a young Country and wants peopling." Not only did she find that many young women were delaying marriage and therefore not having children, but she predicted that if her satiric com- ments were made known wives, too, "would have none." Other Philadelphia women criticized the constant emphasis on childbearing as essential to femininity. When Han- nah Callender Sansom "paid a Lying in vis [it]" in 1769, she noted that "the custom of paying Vails [tips, gratuities] to Nurses begins to drop." In a 1777 Quaker meeting, Suzy Lightfoot admonished "young mothers not to make such great preparations for their lying-in as they generally do, & to avoid those formal visitings upon the occasion which are too much made use of" Lightfoot worried that women appeared frivolous, and apparently many women agreed. The elaborate communal celebrations of child- bearing rapidly became extinct, and such quieter celebrations as continued focused on the newborn child. Women in the 1770s sewed pin cushions as gifts for the newborn inscribed with the slogan Welcome, Little Stranger, the linked initials of the parents, and the date. Birthing was shifting from being woman-centered to being child-centered.22 The traditional language of pregnancy was no longer applicable. Professionals con- tinued using "fertility" and "fecundity" for women, livestock, and agricultural produc- tivity, but these were not vernacular terms. Fruitful, flourishing, teeming images were 21 Paschall, Recipe Book, 9L. See Susan E. Klepp, "Lost, Hidden, Obstructed, and Repressed: Contraceptive and Abortive Technology in the Early Delaware Valley," in Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, ed. Judith A. McGaw (Chapel Hill, 1994), 68-113, esp. 88-9 1; and Susan E. Klepp, "Colds, Worms, and Hysteria: Menstrual Regulation in Eighteenth-Century North America," in Ambiguous Intentions: Women, Emmenagogues, and Menstrual Regulation, ed. Etienne van de Walle and Elisha Renne (Chicago, forthcoming). 22 Simon Gratz, "Some Material for a Biography of Mrs. Elizabeth Fergusson, nede Graeme," Pennsylvania Magazine ofHistory and Biography, 39 (no. 3, 1915), 277; Sarah Logan Fisher, "'A Diary of Trifling Occurrences,"' ed. Nicholas Wainwright, ibid., 83 (Oct. 1958), 418; Klepp and Wulf, eds., Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom, Nov. 24, 1769; Susan Burrows Swan, Plain &Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1650-1850 (Austin, 1995), 128, 130. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 927 rarely invoked after the 1770s, despite their biblical origins. "Breeding" referred almost exclusively to slave women and farm animals by the 1780s, and the term was becom- ing a sign of contempt. The pregnant, "big-bellied" body was effaced by the turn of the century. The distinctive swollen breasts and abdomens of the nursing and pregnant colonial woman and the separate gatherings of women to celebrate those distinctions were disappearing behind the rational mind, tender heart, and prudent management of women citizens in the new republic. As Annis Stockton put it about 1793, They despise us poor females, and say that our sphere Must move in the kitchen or heaven knows where The nursery, the pantry, the dairy is made The theatre on which our worth is display'd. Stockton, who had previously celebrated a wealth of "prattling infants," now preferred to showcase feminine intelligence. To emphasize woman's mind in a revolutionary age of reason was to suppress the physical body: for it is then, as Thomas Laqueur has argued, that the "body is regarded simply as the bearer of the rational subject, which itself constitutes the person." Nancy Cott has recognized that passionlessness became an ideal for women at the end of the eighteenth century as part of an attempt to emphasize women's rationality rather than physicality and sexuality. Academic educa- tion for women of the middle classes and basic literacy for poorer Americans, both women and men, were advocated, if not always funded, in the early national period. Revolutionary rhetoric, first in the American uprising, reinforced later in the French Revolution, at least raised the possibility of more equitable gender relations, even if the result, politically and civilly, was very nearly a reversion to the status quo ante bellum.23 But if the laws changed little, the metaphors of birth were transformed, an indication of a reconceptualization of women's relationship to fertility. After the 1760s women no longer described themselves as fruitfilA or big during pregnancy, they awaited or expected the "little stranger," "the little urchin," that is, Cupid, "the beloved object," or the "first pledge of matrimonial love." Women were not lusty, but were "in the way to become a mother." "In the family way" appeared later. They did not lie in nor were they confined to chamber, but women "gave birth." The change in definition could be sudden. Miriam Gratz felt that she had to translate her meaning when she wrote to her brother in 1769 that she and her husband were in "Expectation of a new happiness (I expect a baby)."24 23Mulford, Only for the Eye of a Friend, 177; Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations, 14 (Spring 1986), 19; Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs, 4 (Winter 1978), 219-36; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980); Ruth H. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs, 13 (no. 1, 1987), 37-58; Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (Oct. 1987), 689-721; Car- roll Smith-Rosenberg, "Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America," in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, 1988), 160-84; Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986). 24 Mary Clarke, ed., The Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson (1822; Philadelphia, 1838), 51-52; Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 332n31; Hoffert, Private Matters, 15, 61-70; Jacob R. Marcus, ed., The American-Jewish Woman: A Documentary History (New York, 1981), 10. While most evidence about language comes from the well-to-do, John Fitch, poor and barely literate, wrote of friends in 1789 that "the effects of Love promised further increass to their families," a circumlocution only slightly less stylized than those of the better educated. See Prager, ed., Autobiography ofJohn Fitch, 127. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 928 The Journal of American History December 1998 Pregnancy was becoming an obligation, a duty, that women undertook voluntar- ily for rational, sentimental, and instrumental purposes: to welcome a stranger and to secure a marriage by expressing romantic love. It was "expected," both planned and controlled. The woman was "in the way to become a mother," and it was her intention to alter her life in order to reach a stated goal. The pregnancy was a finite, temporally limited shift in a woman's life course, an alternative to other possible ways of life. The child was a gift, freely given by the woman out of a selfless concern for others. There were no descriptors for the pregnant body itself In 1804 Eliza Roberts mentioned that her "health [was] very delicate" and that she "expected in a few weeks to become a mother," circumventing any direct reference to her present state of preg- nancy. The process of bearing children, in which the stages of development ("going with," "big with," "great with") were measured by changes in women's bodies, was eclipsed by a focus on the end result. Rarely mentioned, the pregnant body was to be hidden as ugly or shameful. No longer was the emphasis on the woman, great with child, but on externals to her physical body: her free will, her responsibilities, and the stranger anticipated in fulfillment of the marriage vow. Childbearing had become "unnatural," exceptional, as well as all too natural, an animalistic episode in the life of an otherwise rational, civilized being. This new vocabulary of fertility was sentimental in reference to the role of women as givers of hospitality and love, but it also indicated that pregnancy was no longer to be the normal state of women. It is no wonder that at roughly this same historical moment women increasingly sought out professional assistance, even in normal labors. Extraordinary events called for special measures, special training.25 More and more women in the mid-Atlantic region began defining pregnancy as an alien experience. Some, like the Virginia women described by Lewis and Lock- ridge, medicalized pregnancy as sickness and nonfecundity as health, reversing the polarity of colonial discourse. Yet few mid-Atlantic women stressed their paralyzing fear of death or their need for their husbands to protect them from mortal danger as Virginia women were doing, perhaps an indication of a developing regional differ- ence in gender relations. Rather than defining their condition as a serious threat to health, women in the middle states sometimes spoke of their delicate condition and the need to exercise caution. These women were more likely to distance themselves from their fertility through a metaphoric language of tender pledges and little urchins than through declarations of fear or helplessness. Much of the new language of pregnancy and childbirth had its origin in the senti- mental novel, although "little stranger" was an older term now used more frequently and modified by the language of love and expectancy. The new genre of the novel allowed women to imagine a tender, sensible, heroic self. Novels held out the possi- bility of more egalitarian, loving marriages; they advocated the rational pleasures of reading and education for women; they constantly warned of the dangers of seduc- 25 For Eliza Roberts's statement, see Scott, "Occurances of Life," 40-41. On the rare mentions of pregnancy, see Degler, At Odds, 59-62. For examples of inaesthetic pregnant bodies, see Virginia K. Bartlett, Keeping House: Women's Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850 (Pittsburgh, 1994), 144. On shame, see Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (New York, 1977), 77-106. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 929 tion, of unrestrained passion. Novels focused on the freedom and choices of unmar- ried heroines and their suitors: children seldom appeared. A culture of sensibility, drawn from the language of novels and the psychology of contemporary medicine, promoted a civilizing project in which women could reform men and society, foster- ing humanitarianism through the cultivation of sympathy and empathy. The liberty and autonomy that the revolutionary republic promised men might be matched in the influence accorded to women through sensibility. Sensibility did not, however, threaten traditional feminine roles, for marriage and dependence remained at the core of women's existence, and influence over men was not power.26 It was Pamela, the heroine of Samuel Richardson's novel of the same name, who referred to her firstborn as "the Pledge, the beloved Pledge of our happier Affec- tions," in a letter to her husband, asserting her own important contribution to a marriage of social unequals. In this passage Richardson has feminized -and idealized the traditional pledge of affection or love, or the token of regard, which was a suitor's gift of a comb, carved spoon, garter, or ring to his intended spouse. Those gifts had long been associated with magical binding powers and were to guarantee the man's commitment to marriage. But while the novel appeared in 1740 and was enthusias- tically read by the same mid-Atlantic women who left diaries and correspondence, the sentimental language of "beloved, tender pledges" did not appear in women's writ- ing until decades later. Anna Young Smith and her husband were refugees from British- occupied Philadelphia in early 1778. She united political liberty and marital love into a single image of domestic peace that tamed wild nature and obliterated war. While Love and liberty still bless'd each Shade. We liv'd contented in the peaceful Grove, With the dear pledges of Connubial Love. Those dear pledges bound together husband and wife into a shared realm of love and liberty.27 The word "pledge" has several meanings. The fictional Pamela took the custom- ary unilateral token given by male suitors and found a female equivalent that sig- naled a wife's comparable initiative in cementing the marital bond. More negatively, a pledge might be a hostage designed to prevent hostilities. Ann Baker Carson 26 Davidson, Revolution and the Word; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eigh- teenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992). 27 Samuel Richardson is quoted in Dolores Peters, "The Pregnant Pamela: Characterization and Popular Atti- tudes in the Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14 (Summer 1981), 448. John R. Gillis, For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985), 31-34. In 1779, Capt. George Bush of the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment recorded this verse from a current song: "Kate, take my tobacco box, a soldiers all, / Lest by some d-d Hessian, I should chance to fall. / That when Tom's life is ended, you may justly prove, / You had my first, my last, my only pledge of love." See Kate Van Winkle Keller, ed., Songs from the American Rev- olution (Sandy Hook, 1992), 14. An exceptional case of mixed agricultural/religious and sentimental imagery comes from 1755. Mary Pemberton wrote to her husband about "those tender and Pleasant Plants committed to our care, that in due time by the blessing of divine Providence they may grow up trees of Righteousness, Produc- ing fruits of the Spirit, thereby, be usefull Ornaments of Society, and Pledges of our mutual Love," quoted in Judy Mann DiStefano, "A Concept of the Family in Colonial America: The Pembertons of Philadelphia" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1970), 128. Sylvia [Anna Young Smith], "Verses on Marriage," c. 1778, Thomas Coombe Papers (Historical Society of Pennsylvania). My thanks to Susan Stabile for the attribution. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 930 The Journal of American History December 1998 enjoyed a brief respite from her husband's "caprices, jealousies, and petulancy" after their son was born in 1806 and "fancied our mutual happiness would be secured for ever." A pledge could also refer to the security for fulfillment of a contract. Sev- eral scholars have noted the substantial changes in contractual relations occurring during the Revolution. As Gordon S. Wood has argued, although not in reference to women, "colonists tried to grapple with the changes taking place in their lives almost solely in terms of their traditional personal relationships-perhaps most clearly revealed in the way in which they blended their enlightened paternalism into the new meaning they gave to contracts." For instead of endorsing hierarchical relationships, revolutionary period contracts, including marriage contracts, were redefined as "positive bargains deliberately and freely entered into between two par- ties who were presumed to be equal and not entirely trustful of one another." The language of pledges nicely stressed the binding powers of love and disguised the force of legal inequalities while assuming a woman's right to assent to the uses of her body. Women posited an equality with men through their common share of reason and calculating prudence, or they created a symmetry by balancing women's sympathy against men's courage, but there were now possibilities of self-identity beyond the cycles of fertility and nourishment.28 The revolutionary debate about luxury and extravagance caused women and men to emphasize prudence. The revolutionaries called on women to enforce boycotts through nonconsumption and nonimportation. Superabundance and, superfluity were under attack; restraint and self-control were promoted. As early as the 1769 nonimportation movement, as J. E. Crowley has noted, "women played a key role in these expressions of industry and frugality because they were thought to have a determining influence on the fashions and therefore the luxury in American society.... they would aid public virtue both by their frugality and by their example." Men were asserting their liberty, rationality, and civic virtue, and, although most women did not seek equality on a male model beyond a recognition of their rationality, they were creating feminine equivalents to liberty and civic virtue in affectionate, limited- obligation marriages and in a prudent, responsible domesticity. In the revolutionary crisis women had an opportunity to assert their versions of liberty, rationality, and civic virtue. They could overcome their presumed predilection for abundance and luxury by choosing to adopt simplicity, self-control, and restraint. Extravagantly dressed women were mocked in street theater, in public prints, in newspapers and magazines during the war, and their pregnancies, whether legitimate or not, were decried as evidence of sexual corruption. In 1778, one commentator burlesqued the "extraordinary natural weight which some of the ladies carry before them" and added that "most of the young ladies who were in the city with the enemy and wear the present fashionable dresses have purchased them at the expense of their virtue." The republican wife and mother, in contrast, would mediate between the family and the state by adopting self-control, between the present and the rising generation by 28 Clarke, ed., Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson, 52-53; Wood, Radicalism oftheAmer- ican Revolution, 162. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 931 replicating republican virtue. And just as the political term "virtue" came to be asso- ciated with women's sexual restraint after the Revolution, so too did the economic virtue of "prudence" come to be linked to women's restraint of births. The Revolu- tion gave a national purpose to this reconfiguration of gendered expectations and held out the possibility of a more inclusive polity in which there would be a role for women. Crowley assumes a masculine subject when he writes that "Liberty depended on the individual's control over the fruits of his industry," but women, whether Whigs, Tories, or neutrals, might find a parallel liberty in their prudent con- trol over the fruits of their bodies.29 Economic ideas were changing in other ways as well. Under the developing mar- ket economy, self-interest was less often perceived as a threat to the social order. Since the deliberate restriction of births had been associated with selfishness, the more positive valuation of self-interest may have encouraged women to consider limiting their fertility. However, it is probable, given the conventional images of self- less, charitable, and nurturing womanhood, that any overt declaration of self-interest by women would be repugnant. The postrevolutionary period saw a more powerful tendency to remove women entirely from the economic realm, to make women's labor invisible, to assign all economic value to male breadwinners. Self-interest could then operate in the economic realm dominated by men, while virtue was preserved within women's realm. Jeanne Boydston has convincingly described this process as the pastoralization of women's work. Before the Revolution childbearing had been considered as procreation and generation. After the 1780s childbearing was described as reproduction, a process distinct from production and therefore divorced from notions of wealth. Reproduction was not of interest to the men creating the dismal science of economics since it had no value. Birthrates became a residual function of the structures of male economic opportunity. Demographers who sought economic motives for the fertility transition could likewise focus on men, because women were not economic actors. The shift to conceptualizing childbearing as reproduction also, as Ludmilla Jordanova has recently argued, both "marginalizes human agency and abstracts the process [of bearing children] from the bodies and persons involved," while moving "away from associating children 'naturally' with their fathers and toward associating them 'naturally' with their mothers." Women's imagined bodies moved toward the laissez-faire world of economic ideas as the mind gained control over the physical body. Women were rational actors as capable as men of making rea- sonable choices concerning their lives (although their lives were more restricted than men's). And yet women, by engaging in reproduction rather than production, moved away from the wealth-producing capacities of the emerging industrial age. Their physical labors had no value.30 29J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Balti- more, 1974), 139, 156; Susan E. Klepp, "'And Women Rule over Them': Rough Music in Philadelphia, 1778," in Parades and Power, ed. Bill Pencak and Simon Newman (forthcoming); "From a late Philadelphia Paper," Boston ContinentalJournal and Weekly Advertiser, July 30, 1778. 30 Crowley, This Sheba, Self 154; Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1991). On the cultural construction of academic knowledge, see notes 5, 6 above. Jordanova, "Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction," esp. 372-73. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 932 The Journal of American History December 1998 Hannah Mayer Cuyler by an unknown artist, oil (1790). This typical postrevolutionary pose shows a woman with her hands hiding her abdomen. She is holding a book, an indication of her intellectual interests; on the dressing table are a fan, which suggests sociability, a pincushion for her artistic skills, and a pocketbook. Her watch suggests responsibilities; a portait of her husband connects to her heart. Her knees are held close together; her body is self- contained, no longer open to the public gaze. Courtesy Albany Institute of History andArt. The new definitions of pregnancy that emerged during and after the Revolution were accompanied by numeracy and an emphasis on prudence in planning family size. Esther De Berdt Reed wrote to her brother in 1772, "I have fulfilled your wish of a son [her third child]. I wish I could stop with that number, but I don't expect it." She did have two more children before her early death, but a lack of success does not indicate the absence of a desire to establish a numeric limit to childbear- ing. By 1778, her husband would mock his English in-laws for "going on in the old This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 933 Rebecca EgdhillMiflin and Granddaughter, Rebecca Francis by Charles Willson Peale, oil (c. 1777-1780). The grandmother instructs her granddaughter, holding a book on her lap, while the child reads. The imagery is intellectual rather than fertile. The book and the older woman's arms cover her abdomen; her legs are placed together; the child leans on the grandmother but is outside her body. The child's adbomen is likewise covered by her arm. It is the grandmother who virtuously and selflessly comforts and protects the child by wrapping her arm around the granddaughter's shoulder. Children are a responsibility, not a source of future benefit. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum ofArt) Egleston Fund, 1922 (22.153.2). This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 934 The Journal of American History December 1998 patriarchal Style begetting Sons & Daughters." Somewhat uneasily, Joseph Reed was considering restraints on his role as husband and patriarch. By 1780, Esther Reed proposed a formal political and fiscal role for women through the appoint- ment of "treasuresses" on the county, state, and national levels, urging women to offer "more than barren wishes for the success of so glorious a Revolution." Here, feminine barrenness meant, not infertility, but a failure to exercise political influ- ence. Her dual aspirations for all American women and for personal, parity-specific control over reproduction help pinpoint the links between the Revolution, trun- cated fertility, and the expansion of women's roles. When Sally Redwood Fisher considered a ninth pregnancy one too many in 1787, her husband was not con- vinced, remarking only that "the World would not be so well peopled as it is, if these Matters were left to the Choice of women." But his defensive recognition that women were perceiving childbearing both as a burden and as a choice was in itself an indication of changing attitudes.31 Numbers, both ordinal and cardinal, were soon joined to sentiment in a way that suggests that a prudent sensibility was tied to the calculus of women's obligations to marriage. Harriet Manigault was amused by the 1814 visit of "Aunt Izard & her three tender pledges, as she never fails to call them." Precise numbers coexist uneasily with the sentimental language of giving pledges, although perhaps sentiment justi- fied actions at which Abigail Adams had earlier looked askance, suspecting selfish- ness. Numbers were more commonly used for the ostensibly unselfish purpose of calculating pity for other women through a complex factoring of age, health, num- ber of births, and spacing of births. In 1769 Sarah Logan Fisher clucked over Peggy Howell's "6th Child before she is 29," implying a numeric relationship based on the possibility of dividing 6 into the remainder of 29 minus the age at marriage. Ann Warder in 1786 was enraged that "our worthy & much to be pitied sister Polly Emlen" had a "Husband who execed the desription of my Pen for Insinsibility-Her Children are presented Yearly which, keep her in constant III health, this with his improper example & want of resolution render the two eldest Boyes like Tyrants." Tyranny, insensibility, lack of self-control, and annual childbearing were inseparably linked in Warder's analysis. She later added, "What a pity if girls dont know better that there Mothers should not teach them." For Warder, and for many other women, sensibility, self-control, and responsibility should be brought to bear on the timing and number of births as the duty of husbands, fathers, wives, and mothers. Elizabeth Drinker undertook that responsibility insofar as she was able. While she had 8 births between 1761 and 1781 (although only one after 1774) at an average interval of 16 months and was 47 at her last delivery, her three daughters averaged 4.3 births between 1790 and 1807 at 21-month intervals and bore the last child at age 36. Drinker felt powerless to help in 1804 as she precisely calculated her daughter-in- 31William Bradford Reed, ed., The Life of Esther De Berdt, Afterwards Esther Reed, of Pennsylvania (1853; New York, 1971), 181; Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789 (24 vols.; Washington, 1976), X, 102. My thanks to Konstantin Dierks for this citation. Merrill Jensen, ed., Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (2 vols., Madison, 1976), II, Pennsylvania (microform supplement: no. 146). My thanks to Owen S. Ireland for this citation. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 935 law's burdens, "our Son Henry at present has 6 Children, and has buried two-they have been married 9 years and 8 months, nearly-O dear!" Women had learned numeracy; teaching men sensibility was apparently more difficult.32 Demographers have assumed that numeracy was concerned with the number of children. But what most of these women were counting was the tax of childbearing on women's time, health, and marital commitments. They measured women's con- tributions to a loving marriage and indicated the point when enough was enough. No taxation without representation might well have had parallel significances for women and men, with a wife's reproductive pledge to the marriage as finite as a hus- band's productive pledge. The old patriarchal model of marriage that Joseph Reed had made into a joke was being replaced by a contractual model of shared responsi- bilities, although it made childlessness even more of a crisis for a woman since it meant she had not lived up to her part of the marital bargain. By the nineteenth cen- tury, women hastened to produce children early in marriage as their contribution to fulfilling the marriage contract, but having accomplished their purpose, they cur- tailed childbearing when they reached their thirties. If no children appeared, couples now formally adopted children, rebaptizing and renaming them as their own off- spring. Pledges of matrimonial bliss were necessary to complete marriages, but only a few were needed. As one childless woman reportedly said in 1778, "she would be mighty glad to have only one."33 Despite an explosion of terms to describe the outcome of the pregnancy, the new metaphors objectified and depersonalized the fetus-that future "stranger," "urchin," or "object"-just as "with child" or "my flock" had formerly. The love and sentiment that accompanied the new vocabulary of birth was initially directed toward hus- bands and a reconfigured marital state. For Sarah Logan Fisher, as for others, chil- dren were ancillary to her love for her husband. In 1778 she wrote in her journal, "came home in the evening & found my beloved returned, spent an Hour with our sweet Children Oh the sweet union that we feel to unite our Hearts in one-may we be sensible of the Blessing & favour of being united together & of having two such sweet pledges of our mutual Love." It would be some time before children were fully bathed in the sentimental glow of nonpatriarchal families, when vague refer- ence to "my flock" or the newer "tender pledges" was replaced by individual recogni- tion of sons and daughters. Identifying favorite children or enforcing inequalities among children did become less acceptable, and a strong preference for sons alone 32Virginia Armentrout and James S. Armentrout Jr., eds., The Diary ofHarrietManigault, 1813-1816 (Rock- land, 1976), 9; Fisher Diary, 11 mo. 1769, vol. 8, p. 93; Ann Warder Diary, 15th and 18th, 5 mo., 1786 (Histor- ical Society of Pennsylvania). The calculations are derived from Elaine F. Crane, "The World of Elizabeth Drinker," Pennsylvania Magazine ofHistory and Biography, 107 (Jan. 1983), table 1, p. 27. Crane et al., eds., Diary ofElizabeth Drinker, III, 1761 (1804). For evidence on her shift to numeracy, see appendix. 33 Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York, 1995), esp. 21-40; Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in Americafrom Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 1996), esp. 9-32. To trace the beginnings of formal adoptions in the 1790s, see Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, Baptismal Records (Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadel- phia, Pa.). The conversation with a childless woman's sister, recorded by Charles Willson Peale in 1778, is quoted in Charles Coleman Sellers, The Artist of the Revolution: The Early Life of Charles Willson Peale (2 vols., Hebron, 1939), I, 189. This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 936 The Journal of American History December 1998 The satin pincushion hanging from a doornob reflects a fashion prevalent near New York City after 1750. The pincushion bears the slogan WELCOME LITTLE STRANGER, with the initial M (the baby's?) centered above and linking two sets of initials, CM and AB, undoubtedly those of the parents. There is a double (not triple) heart below, also linking the paired initials of the married couple. It is sentimental, but the unnamed little stranger is important chiefly as the pledge that ties man and wife together. The closed door might represent birth as a private event. There is no indication of the woman- centered celebrations of the birthing woman and her gossips typical of earlier decades. Courtesy Winterthur Museum. was moderated by the postwar period. In 1790, William Maclay at least felt guilty about his partiality: "wrote to every One even little Billey. I however crouded the Girls into One letter. This hardly fair. but I must be more liberal to them next time." And he was. The fertility transition occurred within a context of revolutionary anti- authoritarianism. The promotion of sentiment, liberality, and fairness within mar- This content downloaded from 76.132.113.238 on Thu, 19 Sep 2024 22:43:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Women and the Fertility Transition in the Mid-Atlantic Region 937 riage also set in motion a reevaluation of parent-child relationships that might equalize siblings.34 The new conceit of "tender pledges" demanded that pregnancy be the uncon- strained choice of a woman who abided by the vows of love contractually and equi- tably expressed in the marriage ceremony. But not all pregnancies are voluntary: some will result from seduction or force; some will be illegitimate. If women have effaced their pregnant bodies to bear "pledges" and "strangers" out of love and ratio- nal choice, what happens when there is no love, no real choice? According to the best-selling novelist Susanna Rowson in 1791, "Alas! when once a woman has forgot the respect due to herself, by yielding to the solicitations of illicit love, they [women] lose all their consequence." The body is gone; the woman's mind or emotions are not engaged; only the fetus matters. Charlotte, the tragic heroine, cries to her lover, "kill me, for pity's sake, kill me, but do not doubt my fidelity," even while she entreats him "not to forsake my poor unborn child." The "innocent witness" became the focus in the absence of a woman's rational decision or loving vows. The physiological irrationality of Charlotte's pleading-wishing her own death while concerned with the fate of her "unborn child"-reflects contemporaries' goal of separating women from the pregnant state. Both the fictive heroine and the disembodied actual reader were threatened with death or dissolution in the absence of rational choice, senti- ment, and respectability. It was only appropriate that Charlotte died in childbirth, but her daughter lived.35 This transformation can also be seen in the 1822 autobiography of Ann Carson. She denounced an unnamed local doctor who had seduced and would abort his wife's cousin, Susan Elliot. Carson reminded Elliot that "for the destroyers of inno- cence, perdition is the proper punishment." Abortion had traditionally been crimi- nal when it concealed illegal activity, so Carson condemned the doctor because he intended to remove the evidence of his adultery and of his seduction of Elliot. Elliot, however, did not interpret this statement as a condemnation of her lover but responded "Oh! Ann, you have pronounced my condemnation." She did not see herself as the innocent victim of a seducer but interpreted the plan to abort the preg- nancy as the destruction of the innocent. This moment of miscommunication cap- tured the sea change in attitudes on pregnancy, fertility, and legitimacy. Pregnancy either represented a woman's choice, where choice was essential to her identity as wife and citizen, or it represented the fetus, which emerged as a being with some characteristics of a separate person in the absence of a woman's volition and as an innocent in the context of its criminal or immoral conception. Attitudes toward pregnancy, the fetus, and abortion were changing, and women in their attempts to highlight their minds and hearts and to suppress differences between the sexes by ignoring the

Revolutionary Bodies: Women & Fertility Transition in Mid-Atlantic Region (1760-1820) PDF

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