In the Age of Revolution, how did American women conceive their lives and marital obligations? By examining the attitudes and behaviors surrounding the contentious issues of family, contraception, ...abortion, sexuality, beauty, and identity, Susan E. Klepp demonstrates that many women--rural and urban, free and enslaved--began to radically redefine motherhood. They asserted, or attempted to assert, control over their bodies, their marriages, and their daughters' opportunities.Late-eighteenth-century American women were among the first in the world to disavow the continual childbearing and large families that had long been considered ideal. Liberty, equality, and heartfelt religion led to new conceptions of virtuous, rational womanhood and responsible parenthood. These changes can be seen in falling birthrates, in advice to friends and kin, in portraits, and in a gradual, even reluctant, shift in men's opinions. Revolutionary-era women redefined femininity, fertility, family, and their futures by limiting births. Women might not have won the vote in the new Republic, they might not have gained formal rights in other spheres, but, Klepp argues, there was a women's revolution nonetheless.
Susan E. Klepp Klepp, Susan E
Early American studies,
10/2019, Volume:
17, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Klepp conveys that once, before pioneers like Mary Maples Dunn emerged, there was no such thing as women's history. History traced events, change, unique personalities. The prevailing assumption was ...that women were always the same: marrying, bearing children, and training the young, while cooking, gardening, brewing, baking, sewing, tending the sick, and serving their husbands' interests. The few attempts at a history of women, like Elizabeth F. Ellet's The Women of the American Revolution, focused on the wives of important men or women who briefly picked up guns or acted as spies until their husbands returned to govern the household. Twelve years later, Dunn's two important articles emerged out of a decade's worth of increasingly sophisticated research and analysis. One of Dunn's many insights was that women's history not only evolved over time but differed at any particular point in time by the amount of power available to specific groups of women and by their ability to have their voices heard. Dunn's professional life was motivated by concerns very similar to those she had identified in the earliest Congregationalists and the Quakers.
By inverting the social order in his humorous depiction of the 1754 parliamentary election, William Moraley ridiculed the snobberies of the elite, making their pretensions absurd. The recent ...discovery of a single copy of Moraley's pamphlet The Proceedings and Humours of a Late Election, in the City of Sandberg, which contains both printed text and contemporary annotations, provides an unusual look at the political views and the sources of group identity of urban workingmen and middling sorts during a period long thought to have been politically quiescent and hints at the influence of colonial experience on developments in England.
Klepp discusses why American women adapted a revolutionary rhetoric of independence and self-control to their procreative physicality, recasting and reshaping their bodily images between 1760 to ...1820. A shift in women's vocabulary about pregnancy marked the beginning of the fertility transition.
In 1936, Norman E. Himes published his now-classic work,Medical History of Contraception.Himes sought to demonstrate that all human societies have attempted to “control fertility by artificial ...means.” All, that is, except western Europe. There he found that only folkloric methods of doubtful efficacy prevailed before 1800 and that even these few techniques were not widely diffused in the population. Himes concluded that most women for most of European history had little or no knowledge of contraceptive technology. Social and economic historians have generally followed Himes in asserting that techniques of fertility control were unavailable to Europeans or Americans
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