Susan Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009. 328 pp., $24.95
Check out this review of a new book by Prof. Susan Klepp. Klepp shows that birthrates in the United States declined around the time of the American Revolution…
Both Europeans and Americans were exposed to enlightenment values of liberty and equality, but only in the United States and France did fertility decline in the late eighteenth century (the rest of western Europe did not follow until the 1870s). Klepp argues that the American Revolution made new ideas about marriage, childrearing, individualism, and happiness more tangible. American women applied this language to their own lives, abandoning “the Sex” for self-controlled, sensible, and rational womanhood. They viewed large families as a self-indulgent and aristocratic luxury… American women turned to family planning, and their husbands and children followed.
The question is how, approximately a century before the diaphragm, and two centuries before the birth control pill, American women controlled their fertility…. Klepp also examines the various technologies to limit or stop childbearing. Her evidence demonstrates that women used emmenagogues, or medicines for regulating the menstrual cycle, such as savin, juniper, rue, aloe, pennyroyal, and snakeroot, as abortifacients
As a Canadian historian, I am left wondering to what extent the demographic phenomenon described by Klepp also took place in those parts of North America that remained part of the British Empire after 1783. Did knowledge of birth control seep across the border? If United Empire Loyalist women in Upper Canada, New Brunswick, the Bahamas limited their family sizes at the same time and in the same ways, it would suggest that the link Klepp posits between the American Revolution and the demographic transition is specious one. It would be helpful if a Canadian social historian compared Klepp’s findings with the Canadian experience. Sadly, there are fewer primary sources with which to work in Canada.
The Past Speaks 