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Douches and diaphragms (called “womb veils,” “pessaries,” or, in the case of one 1846 prototype, “The Wife’s Protector’’) were also available (Degler 346). Diaphragms, in fact, were the choice of public health clinics once they finally began distributing contraceptives. By 1920, a “new lactic acid paste,” developed by Sanger’s clinic, was being used with diaphragms with a 98 percent success rate (Douglas 185). But as some historians point out, the diaphragm had serious drawbacks for the very population which needed it most. Its use (especially with the lactic acid paste or, later, spermicidal jelly) was difficult for women who lived in tenements without private bathrooms. In addition, many women failed to use it reliably simply because they did not understand “how conception takes place.” For these women, some writers point out, the condom was probably a much more reliable method (Hymowitz and Weissman 297–8).
And, of course, there was abstinence, a strategy widely advocated by strange bedfellows from both the left and right. On moral grounds, conservatives promoted abstinence even for married couples who wanted to limit the size of their families. Some radical feminists argued that women could truly control their own bodies only by abstinence and that using birth control would allow them one fewer rationale for controlling their own sexuality (Degler 257–8). Even most doctors remained skeptical of birth control. Dr. H. S. Pomeroy wrote in 1888 that there was only “one prescription which is both safe and sure — namely, that the sexes shall remain apart” (Rosenberg 138); and the American Medical Association did not endorse birth control until 1937 (Taft 222).
By whatever means women regulated their fertility, the declining birth rate confirms that couples were employing birth control methods more reliably than they had in the past. And, when all else failed, a’ large body of evidence suggests that abortion was also a common means of birth control, although it was illegal in most states by 1880 (Smith-Rosenberg 218). As Gordon points out, the increasing sexual freedom available to women made birth control “important for women,” not just married ones. She argues that “the possible impermanence of love made birth control an absolute necessity. It was not a solution to the problem of sexual equality, but it was a small help” (Woman’s Body 158).
The real problem for Jennie is not the lack of birth control technology, but her dearth of knowledge about how to control her own fertility. The disparity which Dreiser draws between Jennie’s and Lester’s knowledge about birth control makes a great deal of sense in the context of the mid-1880s (when this part of the novel is set) as well as in the decade or so during which Dreiser drafted
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the manuscript. Strong evidence substantiates the fact that in those decades information about birth control, despite the efforts of the Comstock forces, was readily available to the middle and upper classes. One doctor, for instance, reported around the turn of the century that “there was ‘hardly a single middle-class family’ among his clients … that did not expect him to implement their ‘desire to prevent conception”; and the American journalist Lydia Commander wrote in 1907 that “among the upper classes some kind of contraceptive knowledge was ‘practically universal.’”33
But the same was not true of women in the lower classes, who routinely found the reproductive process beyond their control. In 1903 an article in Popular Science Monthly asserted smugly that “outside our immigrant classes … women have learned the art of preventing pregnancy.” Historians have documented that members of the working class in the United States and immigrants have always had birth rates significantly higher than the middle and upper classes and that not all social groups practice birth control with equal effectiveness. There are probably several reasons for this difference — among them, the beliefs held within classes or ethnic groups about the relative advantages and disadvantages of having large families, as well as the cost of contraceptive devices (Kennedy 44; Degler 220–1).
Abraham Jacobi (known as “the father of pediatrics”) unleashed an unpopular topic when he used his 1912 inaugural address as president of the AMA to rally support for the dissemination of birth control to all women. His address underscored the inequality of a system in which the wealthy but not the poor could obtain contraceptives (Gordon, Woman’s Body 169). Then as now, education was also a key factor’ the poor have always been the last to get contraceptive information. As late as 1921 Emma Goldman wrote to Margaret Sanger, “Tell me how it is the wealthier class of people can get information like that and those that really need it, can’t?’’34 According to Degler, interviews of working women around the turn of the century suggest that immigrant women knew how to limit their fertility to a greater degree than observers like Sanger knew, but they had few reliable resources besides abstinence and abortion (22).
The difference in the number of their respective children is one fundamental difference between Jennie and her mother. Mrs. Gerhardt dies not only from overwork, but also from a lifetime of childbearing, as did many women of her day. In 1900, the average life span for women was approximately 48 years. This rose to more than 65 years by 1940, in large part because women were having fewer children and because childbirth had become much
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safer.35 Early in the novel Mrs. Gerhardt tells Senator Brander she has six children. His reply — “You’ve certainly done your duty to the nation” (14) — may seem somewhat peculiar to modern readers, but in 1911, it must have signaled a familiar debate.
The controversy belongs, in fact, to the period in which Dreiser was composing Jennie Gerhardt, not to the decades when Brander (who dies in 1880) was a Washington politician. By the late 1890s, Theodore Roosevelt’s concern about the nature of population growth had brought the issue to national attention. In well-publicized speeches he warned about the conjunction of the declining birth rate of native-born American women with increasing immigration and high birth rates among immigrant women. Between 1905 and 1910, the “race suicide” scare, linked to Roosevelt’s imperialistic designs for the ‘‘white” race, became particularly ugly. It reflected and intensified cultural anxiety about the inherent conflict between the immigrant and native populations. It attacked women who “strayed from their proper sphere,” especially college educated women (who tended to have the lowest birth rates) and middle-class women who joined the workforce. Native-born women who chose to have no children (or to have significantly fewer than did their mothers and grandmothers) Roosevelt labeled “criminal against the race … the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people” (Gordon, Woman’s Body 132–6). Roosevelt expounded, “If the women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother, why, that nation has caused [sic] to be alarmed about its future.”36
There is one odd element in Brander’s comment to Mrs. Gerhardt about the number of childen she had borne. He seems to consider them strong “native” stock whose proliferation is a credit to the nation. Although it is not clear whether Mrs. Gerhardt is native born, Mr. Gerhardt was born in Germany. The family is thus a poor immigrant family of the kind whose fertility Roosevelt and his supporters would gladly have limited. Perhaps Mrs. Gerhardt is a first-generation American, or perhaps Brander is more progressive than others in Washington. But it is evident, at any rate, that Mrs. Gerhardt’s patterns of reproduction are far different from the next generation’s.
In his personal life Dreiser surely was, as Robert Penn Warren tagged him, “hell on women.”37 But in his novels, particularly in Jennie Gerhardt, he exposes his empathy for women — especially members of the working classes — and his understanding of their plight. The novel’s engagement with turn-of-the-century women’s issues has always resonated with scattered readers, such
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as the Washington Evening Star’s reviewer, who “close[d] this book strengthened in her belief that this world is no place for women” (Salzman 75). Eighty-odd years later, reestablishing the complex and vital historical context out of which Dreiser wrote Jennie Gerhardt can help readers grasp just how realistic and radical this novel really is.
Notes
1. This essay was made possible by a 1992 Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
2. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Quoted by Ross Murfin in “What Is Reader Response Criticism?” The Awakening by Kate Chopin (New York: Bedford, 1993), p. 299.
3. Jack Salzman, Theodore Dreiser. The Critical Reception (New York: David Lewis, 1972), p. 76. For the reference to the writer’s gender, see the conclusion of the review quoted above, p. 73.
4. Jennie Gerhardt. The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition, ed. James L. W. West III (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 35. Unless otherwise indicated, internal page citations correspond to this edition.