Abortion on the Margins: How Material Texts Shaped Early-American Reproductive Freedom
The table of contents for Alfred G. Hall’s The Mother’s Own Book (1843) is unusually comprehensive in its descriptions of the practical medical advice contained in the volume’s pages. Readers are told where to look in the text if they need to learn how to cope with painful menstruation, clean their vaginal canals, and read the shape and color of their areolas for signs of possible pregnancy. But folded into this otherwise frank description of the volume’s contents are two subtitles advertising “secret knowledge.” If you follow the second of these subtitles to its corresponding page, you find a step-by-step guide to treating “suppressed menstruation” (54).
As historians of reproductive health have established, “bringing on the courses,” “provoking the menses,” “expelling uterine blockages,” and “preventing conception” were all terms used to describe what we now understand as abortion. Indeed, to peruse early American medical and domestic manuals is to discover that the boundaries between contraception, abortion, and miscarriage were incredibly murky, especially before what was termed “the quickening” or the moment when the mother could feel the fetus move. Even after the first American anti-abortion law was passed in Connecticut in 1821, it only prohibited abortion after a woman was “quick with child”, which usually occurred sometime around the fifth month. Many texts use the terms abortion and miscarriage interchangeably—in Daniel Fenning’s 1796 A universal spelling-book, abortion is literally defined as miscarriage—and “female pills” were advertised as both preventives to pregnancy and solutions for termination.
Whether this ambiguity was a result of limited medical knowledge, different notions of when conception began, or a recognition that to talk about contraception and abortion required the use of carefully coded language is difficult to know. But the way such advice appears in the pages of early American books suggests that for the writers, printers, sellers, and readers of these books, information about how to control one’s reproductive health necessarily existed on the margins of the kinds of knowledge sanctioned by mainstream medical discourse and white, middle-class domesticity. To find this knowledge often required facility with the material and paratextual features of printed texts, such as footnotes and appendices.
To understand abortion as early American readers would have understood it requires careful attention not only to what is said, but how and where it appears. Paratexts—in their capacity to direct and withhold, to conceal and to emphasize, to fortify or complicate a text’s interpretive possibilities, and often all of these things at once—offer a roadmap through what can often look like an impenetrable archival void, and help us understand the complex history of abortion and contraception in early America.
Consider, for example, Dr. A. M. Mauriceau’s The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion (1847), a pseudonymously authored treatise on contraception and abortion believed to have been written by a relative of the famous abortionist Ann Lohman, also known as Madame Restell, who was in prison at the time of the book’s publication. This slim, unassuming volume bears no publisher’s information and was bound in unadorned black fabric. It is small enough to conceal in a pocket or a drawer, and visually unremarkable enough to quietly pass on to a friend, even in a public setting. Readers could evade both personal judgment and legal censure in a New York where abortion was both growing in prevalence and becoming more controversial; as of 1845, New York women could be imprisoned for up to a year for procuring an abortion.
Most of the body text of The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion is devoted to moral, political, and philosophical arguments about the social importance of reproductive freedom: "Reform the Laws—equalize the comforts of society, and you need withhold no knowledge from your wives and daughters,” Mauriceau writes (133). Such lines feel directed toward a skeptical male reader; the “you” addressed here is someone who has violated the covenant of privacy the volume presumes. Actual advice about the procedures of contraception and abortion, meanwhile, is relegated to the footnotes. In a lengthy note which takes up almost an entire page, readers learn that “Portuguese female pills” and a “Preventive to conception” are available for purchase at 129 Liberty Street.
There is, of course, a particular audience imagined by The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion. Its careful deployment of paratexts is aimed at a highly literate bourgeois readership, those deeply familiar with the way material texts structure and disseminate knowledge. Indeed, the volume is not shy about setting the socio-economic parameters of its desired circulation. On the first page of the first chapter, entitled “Management of Female Complaints,” Mauriceau asserts that “Women in the higher ranks of life” are more likely to experience menstruation-related afflictions, whereas those “of the lower rank, inured to exercise and labor” will be less likely to suffer. As Elise A. Mitchell has demonstrated, the idea that white, upper-class women were the only people with legitimate claims to these forms of suffering meant that other women—particularly enslaved Black women—were perceived as dishonest if they raised complaints about uterine pain. As such, The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion, is quite explicit about who belongs to, and who is excluded from, its vision of feminine suffering. Bourgeois white women with money to spend would find in the book ample reasons to visit the Lohmans’ offices.
Though The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion transforms its footnotes into explicit advertisements for costly medical services and restricts its desired audience in the process, it borrows its strategies from a longer tradition of concealing practical knowledge about abortion in paratextual spaces, often in texts designed for circulation among poor and working-class readers. In The Compleat Housewife (1742), the first cookbook printed in early America, readers would find “Menses, how to procure them” in the volume’s index, which would lead them to a recipe on page 221, one of the final pages in the volume. What is more, the copy of this text held at the American Antiquarian Society also contains an additional pamphlet appended to the back of the volume: a 1751 copy of Every Man His Own Doctor, or the Poor Planter’s Physician, which also provides a recipe for “suppression of the courses.” Unlike The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion, one of the purposes of these two texts was to obviate the need for expensive medical treatments and equip ordinary people to care for themselves and others. The title page of The Compleat Housewife encourages “publick-spirited Gentlewomen” to help “their poor neighbors,” while the title page of Every Man His Own Doctor, or The Poor Planter’s Physician promises the “means for persons to cure themselves…at very little charge” using home-grown herbal remedies. According to a handwritten inscription, the volume was purchased “at Mather’s Court House, July 12th, 1812,” which means it continued to circulate for decades after it was initially printed, and was perhaps resold second-hand.
The practice of appending medical pamphlets as paratexts to popular instructional manuals was not unique to this volume. As Molly Farrell has discussed in her recent essay for Slate, Benjamin Franklin added “Every Man His Own Doctor or The Poor Planter’s Physician” to the end of The American Instructor, his 1748 reprinted and expanded edition of a popular British how-to manual. As Farrell convincingly argues, Franklin’s choice to include the pamphlet speaks to how commonplace abortions were in early America, and how inseparable knowledge about how to obtain reproductive freedom was from things like literacy and arithmetic. But the pamphlet, like the “secret knowledge” in The Mother’s Own Book or the footnotes of The Married Woman’s Medical Companion, occupies the status of an appendix rather than being inserted into the body of the text. As such, it is simultaneously emphasized—set apart from the rest of the information in the volume—and concealed. The volume lacks a table of contents, instead relying on the title page to announce in the broadest possible strokes what readers can expect to find. And while there is a brief index for the remedies and diseases addressed in “The Poor Planter’s Physician,” it is tucked away at the end of the pamphlet’s main text, followed by Franklin’s own set of postscripts and addenda.
There is, of course, a way to read the paratextual mediation and concealment of information about abortion as evidence against its widespread practice and acceptability. It is hard to find explicit mentions of abortion in early American texts, a fact which has led members of the U.S. Supreme Court to determine that it either rarely happened or was widely disapproved of. But such a conclusion is as ahistorical as it is willfully inaccurate. Historians of slavery have offered some of the best work on the circulation of knowledge about reproductive health, and have shown time and again that abortion was both commonplace and an essential tool of survival and resistance for enslaved women. In such cases, by necessity, the knowledge in question often flowed through networks of kinship and care, evading the potentially incriminating reach of printed texts. But as I hope the above examples demonstrate, knowledge about abortion was printed, was availabe to bourgeois, mainstream readers, and was widely practiced, often in ways that implicitly excluded poor, enslaved, Black, and Indigenous women.
In order to understand the way abortion appears in Early American texts, we need to develop a sensitivity both to the indeterminacy of the terms used to describe it and the textual practices through which information about reproductive health was disseminated. These vexed moments in which essential reproductive knowledge is presented and concealed demonstrate how challenging it was for eighteenth-century writers to shake off the yoke of puritanical restrictions to sexuality, and to navigate the crosscurrents of opposition to abortion and contraception in their own moments. Moreover, even as we recover these hidden textual histories of abortion—many of which can feel radical, or even liberatory—we must recognize their power to uphold and reproduce the dynamics of white supremacy. Learning to read the way paratexts mediate the circulation of knowledge, and who is included and excluded from that circulation, is a step towards understanding the long and uneven history of contraception and abortion in the United States.
Further Reading
Melody Rose. “Abortion in Early America,” Abortion: a Documentary and Reference Guide : A Documentary and Reference Guide (ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2008): 1-22.
Susan E. Klepp. “Potions, Pills, and Jumping Ropes,” Revolutionary Conceptions : Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 2009): 180-214.
Jennifer Morgan. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2004).
Many thanks to Elizabeth Watts Pope, curator of books and digital collections at the American Antiquarian Society, for pointing me in the direction of the sources referenced in this essay and for offering her generous support during the research and writing process.