Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Susan E. Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions tracks the changes in family size ideals and the associated changes in family planning and women’s roles in early America. It is unsurprising that Klepp’s work highlights the limitations to women’s agency in family planning. Revolutionary Conceptions makes clear that women played an increasing role in determining the number of children they would have, and how this was tied to a greater presence of women outside of the domestic sphere.

Klepp reproduces letters from women who talk about their desire to have fewer children, which are usually followed by a revelation that woman, ultimately, gave birth to (by modern, typical North American views, anyway) a large number of children. Female slaves, were, alternately, wanted for their reproductive capacity and then sold for having had “too many” children when large families were no longer en vogue. Klepp also highlights some areas in which women had (limited) control. Women were brought to court to testify as experts in cases such as rape and infanticide; however, it was men who made the ultimate decisions in these cases. Klepp notes, “[I]n the colonies, month-to-month fertility decisions were left to women.”

Throughout the text, the author notes the difficulties in acquiring information about her topic. Early censuses, for example, routinely under-counted infants, particularly girls, which makes Klepp’s task of tracking changes in birth rates difficult. Klepp’s task is even more challenging due to the paucity of birth records for slaves. Further, when Klepp examines family planning, she quotes from letters and other texts in which women talk about limiting the number of children they would have, but the methods these women used were not shared.

In one interesting section, Klepp discusses herbs and concoctions used as emmenagogues (used to induce menstruation), abortifacients, and contraceptives, but notes, “Women usually made only oblique references to their use of these medicines and practices.” Despite this, Klepp is able to produce a highly detailed study of the issue.

I appreciate the comprehensiveness of Klepp’s approach. Not only does she support her study with statistics (represented in text as well as several graphs and tables), but she also includes artwork. Her chapter examining images of women describes and provides examples of portraits of women and their children, as well as husbands, from 1682 to approximately 1830. Klepp traces changes in women’s poses and the symbolism of the accessories that accompany them.

The main flaw I found in this chapter was in the accompanying examples. It is a shame that not all images that Klepp discusses are included in the book, and the black and white reproduction of the images that do appear has obscured many of the significant details Klepp describes; however, these issues do not detract from Klepp’s analysis.

Despite the vagaries, lost information, and reticence to have recorded information in the first place, Klepp has produced a highly detailed, fact-based, and—perhaps most importantly—interesting study of the declining number of children that early colonial American women bore, and what this meant for their agency both within and outside of the household.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, February 27th 2010

Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank

admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Randi Hutter Epstein

W.W. Norton

When researching medical or social history, one of the things that often becomes apparent is the level of mystery that surrounded women’s bodies and bodily functions. This mystery and speculation is the subject of Randi Hutter Epstein’s Get Me Out. As the title suggests, Hutter Epstein, a medical journalist, presents an overview of ideas related to conception, pregnancy, and childbirth spanning from antiquity to the modern day. While it is easy to laugh at some of the mistaken notions from the past (and some of them are, indeed, hilarious and/or terrifying), Hutter Epstein also makes sure to note the unknowns that still surround these processes today.

One thing that Get Me Out makes very clear is the way in which pregnancy and childbirth—and, therefore, women’s bodies—have continuously been the subjects of experimentation. This has sometimes been to women’s benefit, but all too often to their detriment. Early medical texts were written by monks who were not only excluded from the delivery room due to their gender (only women were allowed to attend childbirth) but were also likely completely unfamiliar with women’s bodies, leading to a lot of guesswork. Hutter Epstein describes disturbing experiments on female slaves that did eventually produce positive results, but at unknown cost to the women experimented upon. Another type of experimentation Hutter Epstein recounts is pain suppression during childbirth. Get Me Out describes the contradictory views of women towards drug use during childbirth over time: from these drugs being a part of women’s liberation to the drugs being a tool of subjugation.

The key strengths of Get Me Out are the fascinating nature of the information it provides and the book’s readability. Get Me Out is incredibly engaging. As Hutter Epstein notes in the title, this is a history; she does not attempt to tell the history. This approach allows her to describe some of the high (or low) points of ideas and processes from antiquity to the nineteenth century in the first few chapters, and then focus the rest of the book on the twentieth century. Even with the volume of material presented, I appreciated that Hutter Epstein did not rigidly confine herself to the topic at hand. The book is peppered with footnotes that provide additional, often tangential, information. At one point, the author uses a footnote to discuss the differences in the sperm trade between humans and thoroughbred horses. It is clear that Hutter Epstein has a very curious mind, which has led to her creating an interesting, funny, illuminating, enjoyable book.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, December 27th 2009