Revolutionary bodies: Women and the fertility transition in the mid-Atlantic region, 1760-1820

Journal of American History

Volumn 85, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 910-943

  Klepp, Susan E ^a,b  

^a RIDER UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Pennsylvania Historical Association   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0007250783     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2567216     Document Type: Review

References (184)

1. Van Wyck Brooks, ed., Poor Richard: The Almanacs for the Years 1733-1758 (New York, 1964), 29.
2. Gen. 1:22, 28, 8:17, 9:1, 7, 17:20, 35:11. There is a large literature on revolutionary ideas and language, although not in relationship to fertility. See, for example, Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991);
3. and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York, 1996).
4. France is usually regarded as the nation that achieved truncated fertility earliest; see Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, Eng., 1979), 238.
5. A simultaneous transition in France and the United States is suggested by the timetable in Etienne van de Walle, The Female Population of France in the Nineteenth Century: A Reconstitution of Départements (Princeton, 1974).
6. John R. Gillis, Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850-1970: The Quiet Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
7. For a spirited defense of demographic modernization theory, see Susan Cotts Watkins, review of Situating Fertility edited by Susan Greenhalgh, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (Summer 1997), 90-91.
8. A merging of disciplines is proposed in Daniel Scott Smith and J. David Hacker, "Cultural Demography: New England Deaths and the Puritan Perception of Risk," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, ibid., 26 (Winter 1996), 367-92.
9. The latest findings put less emphasis on simplicity but continue to discount the agency of married couples; see E. A. Wrigley et al., English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), esp. 507-10.
10. John Cleland and Christopher Wilson, "Demand Theories of the Fertility Transition: An Iconoclastic View," Population Studies, 41 (March 1987), 5-30;
11. Daniel Scott Smith, "'Early' Fertility Decline in America: A Problem in Family History," Journal of Family History, 12 (nos. 1-3, 1987), 73-84;
12. Etienne van de Walle, "Fertility Transition, Conscious Choice, and Numeracy," Demography, 29 (Nov. 1992), 487-502, esp. 501.
13. More generally, see Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago, 1982), esp. 141-49.
14. J. William Leasure, "Mexican Fertility and the Revolution of 1910-1920," Population Review, 32 (nos. 1-2, 1988), 41-48;
15. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston, 1980), 80-83, 232;
16. Lee L. Bean, Geraldine Mineau, and Douglas L. Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation (Berkeley, 1990);
17. John Bongaarts and Susan Cotts Watkins, "Social Interactions and Contemporary Fertility Transitions," Population and Development Review, 22 (Dec. 1996), 639-82, esp. 639.
18. See also Susan Cotts Watkins and Angela D. Danzi, "Women's Gossip and Social Changes: Childbirth and Fertility Control among Italian and Jewish Women in the United States, 1920-1940," Gender and Society, 9 (Aug. 1995), 469-90.
19. Watkins and Danzi, "Women's Gossip and Social Changes";
20. S. Ryan Johansson, "'Implicit' Policy and Fertility during Development," Population and Development Review, 17 (Sept. 1991), 392.
21. My thanks to the author for bringing this important article to my attention. More generally, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1980), 155-63;
22. and David F. Noble, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York, 1992), esp. 283-86.
23. The following research question is an example of fertility without females: "Consider twin brothers. . . . The only difference is that one is a farmer in the East, and the other in the West. Why should the farmer in the East be more likely to show lower marital fertility than his brother in the West?" Lee A. Craig, To Sow One Acre More: Childbearing and Farm Productivity in the Antebellum North (Baltimore, 1993), 12.
24. Susan Greenhalgh, "Anthropology Theorizes Reproduction: Integrating Practice, Political Economic, and Feminist Perspectives," in Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry, ed. Susan Greenhalgh (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 3-28;
25. Fay D. Ginsberg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley, 1995);
26. Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston, 1987);
27. Alison MacKinnon, "Were Women Present at the Demographic Transition? Questions from a Feminist Historian to Historical Demographers," Gender and History, 7 (Aug. 1995), 222-40;
28. Nora Federici, Karen Oppenheim Mason, and Solvi Sogner, eds., Women's Position and Demographic Change (New York, 1993);
29. Anita Ilta Garey, "Fertility on the Frontier: Bringing Women Back In," Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 11 (Spring 1987), 63-83;
30. Nancy Folbre, "Family Strategy, Feminist Strategy," Historical Methods, 20 (Summer 1987), 115-18.
31. Not historical, but on point are Susan C. Watkins, "If All We Knew about Women Was What We Read in Demography, What Would We Know?," Demography, 30 (Nov. 1993), 551-78;
32. Elizabeth W. Moen, "What Does 'Control over Our Bodies' Really Mean?," in Perspectives on Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, ed. Scott W. Menard and Elizabeth W. Moen (New York, 1987), 277-88;
33. and Susan A. McDaniel, "Toward a Synthesis of Feminist and Demographic Perspectives on Fertility," Sociological Quarterly, 37 (no. 1, 1996), 83-104.
34. Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980), esp. 189;
35. Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner (New York, 1974), 119-36.
36. Anthropologists and demographers, more than American historians, have recognized that in many societies women desire large families. Useful here are L. J. Jordanova, "Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexuality," in Nature, Culture, and Gender, ed. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), 42-69;
37. Carol P. MacCormack, "Biological, Cultural, and Social Adaptation in Human Fertility and Birth," in Ethnography of Fertility and Birth, ed. Carol P. MacCormack (New York, 1982), 2;
38. and Karen Oppenheim Mason and Anju Malhotra Taj, "Differences between Women's and Men's Reproductive Goals in Developing Countries," Population and Development Review, 13 (Dec. 1987), 611-38.
39. Jan Lewis and Kenneth A. Lockridge, "'Sally Has Been Sick': Pregnancy and Family Limitation among Virginia Gentry Women, 1780-1830," Journal of Social History, 22 (Fall 1988), 5-19.
40. The findings about fertility and the fertility transition outlined in this and the following two paragraphs appear in the following works. For a classic overview, see Yasukichi Yasuba, Birth Rates of the White Population in the United States, 1800-1860: An Economic Study (Baltimore, 1962).
41. Bean, Mineau, and Anderton, Fertility Change on the American Frontier, esp. 239-54;
42. Richard A. Easterlin, "Factors in the Decline of Farm Family Fertility in the United States: Some Preliminary Research Results," Journal of American History, 63 (Dec. 1976), esp. table 1, 602;
43. and Smith, "'Early' Fertility Decline in America." Other indices of fertility follow the same pattern. For regional age-specific marital fertility rates, child-woman ratios, ages at last birth, and numbers of children per marriage, see Susan E. Klepp, " The Swift Progress of Population": A Documentary and Bibliographic Study of Philadelphia's Growth, 1642-1859 (Philadelphia, 1991), 16-25.
44. In that work I missed Alice P. Kenney, "Patricians and Plebeians in Colonial Albany, Part II - Aggregation," Halve Maen, 45 (no. 2, 1970), 9-11.
45. A few German sectarians did go against the grain - increasing fertility levels over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See Roger C. Henderson, "Eighteenth-Century Schwenkfelders: A Demographic Interpretation," in Schwenkfelders in America, ed. Peter C. Erb (Pennsbury, Pa., 1987), 25-40;
46. and Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem (Philadelphia, 1988), 51-85.
47. Pathbreaking research has revealed the linguistic isolation of Schwenkfelder women, their heavy reliance on religious imagery, and their role in preserving a minority culture. See Christine Hucho, "Female Writers, Women's Networks, and the Preservation of Culture: The Schwenkfelder Women of Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania," paper delivered at the brown-bag seminar, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Philadelphia, Pa., 1997 (in Christine Hucho's possession). These exceptions point to the importance of both vocabulary and social interaction in diffusing innovative behavior.
48. S. Ryan Johansson, "Fertility and Family History: Using the Past to Explain the Present," Population and Development Review, 23 (Sept. 1997), 627-37.
49. For an excellent introduction to these issues, see Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, eds., Milcah Martha Moore's Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (University Park, 1997).
50. Traditional metaphors were themselves unstable and had become more patriarchal in the seventeenth century. See Mary Fissell, "Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England," Gender and History, 7 (Nov. 1995), 433-56.
51. The longevity of the basic concepts is suggested in Etienne van de Walle, "Flowers and Fruits: Two Thousand Years of Menstrual Regulation," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (Fall 1997), 183-203.
52. Israel Acrelius, A History of New Sweden (1759; Ann Arbor, 1966), 156;
53. Gabriel Thomas, "An Historical and Geographical Account of Pensilvania and of West-New-Jersey," in Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware, 1630-1707, ed. Albert Cook Myers (New York, 1912), 333;
54. William Penn, "Letter to the Free Society of Traders" (1683), in William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania, 1680-1684, A Documentary History, ed. Jean R. Soderlund (Philadelphia, 1983), 317;
55. Johann David Schoepff, The Climate and Diseases of America, trans. James Read Chadwick (Boston, 1875), 11n1;
56. Randolph Shipley Klein, Portrait of an Early American Family: The Shippens of Pennsylvania across Five Generations (Philadelphia, 1975), 150-51;
57. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 102-3.
58. Charles Francis Adams, ed., Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution, with a Memoir of Mrs. Adams (New York, 1876), 129;
59. Sally Hastings, Poems on Different Subjects. To Which is Added, A Descriptive Account of a Family Tour in the West in the Year 1800, in a Letter to a Lady (Lancaster, 1808), 88-90.
60. William Logan to John Smith, 5th day morning, c. 1764, John Smith Correspondence, 1740-1770 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.); Ludmilla Jordanova, "Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction in the Eighteenth Century," in Conceiving the New World Order, ed. Ginsberg and Rapp, 369;
61. "To Mrs Rush on Her birthday" (March 2, 1776),
62. in Carla Mulford, Only for the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton (Charlottesville, 1995), 96.
63. Cash flows seem to have gone from parents to children well before the fertility transition. Among Quaker farmers, children were expenses, rather than sources of income. See Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (New York, 1988).
64. Among Lutherans, farmers on small holdings (20-99 acres) were likely to keep adult sons working on the family farm, but they were a minority. See Susan Klepp, "Five Early Pennsylvania Censuses," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 106 (Oct. 1982), 494. In the city, education and apprenticeships might cost money and removed children to other households. Textile mills in the nineteenth century did reward child labor, but only the most desperate immigrants accepted such employment.
65. See Cynthia J. Shelton, The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787-1837 (Baltimore, 1986), 61-63.
66. On these adjectives applied to colonial women and farm animals, but analyzed as "straightforward" descriptions rather than metaphors, see Catharine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society: 1650-1850 (New York, 1985), 15.
67. See also Sylvia D. Hoffert, Private Matters: American Attitudes toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800-1860 (Urbana, 1989), 15.
68. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York, 1982), 159-62;
69. Marylynn Salmon, "The Cultural Significance of Breastfeeding and Infant Care in Early Modern England and America," Journal of Social History, 28 (no. 2, 1994), 247-69.
70. For a detailed analysis of Sarah Logan Fishers childbearing career, see Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 80-83.
71. Elizabeth Coates Paschall, Recipe Book, c. 1745-1767, p. 10L (College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pa.);
72. Klein, Portrait of an Early American Family, 134, 277;
73. Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 (New Haven, 1984), 287.
74. Karlsen and Crumpacker, eds., Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 253;
75. Elaine F. Crane et al., eds., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (3 vols., Boston, 1991), I, 741-42;
76. Barbara De Wolfe, ed., Discoveries of America: Personal Accounts of British Emigrants to North America during the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1997), 148.
77. John Fitch characterized traditional birthings as "cerimonies merryment and invidious talks"; see Frank D. Prager, ed., The Autobiography of John Fitch (Philadelphia, 1976), 21.
78. A European thought cash gifts to new mothers rather extravagant: "politeness required that a gratuity of four or five shillings or even a dollar, be given." See Peter Kalm, Peter Kalm's Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770, ed. Adolph B. Benson, trans. John Reinhold Forster (New York, 1964), 677.
79. Anne M. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady (1808; 2 vols., New York, 1970), I, 274;
80. James Tilghman to Mr. Anderson, Sept. 10, 1766, box 1764-69, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pa.). My thanks to Konstantin Dierks for this citation. James Read to John Smith, c. 1761, Smith Correspondence; Sallie Eve Diary, Feb. 1, 1772, p. 18 (Special Collections Department, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.).
81. Sarah Logan Fisher Diary, 1 mo. 1778, vol. 5, p. 4 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania);
82. Eliza Chadwick Roberts Scott, "Occurances of Life," c. 1814, p. 12 (Monmouth County Historical Society, Freehold, N.J.).
83. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 85;
84. Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), esp. 62-66, 79-93;
85. Crane et al., eds., Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, I, 872, 872n132;
86. Margaret Morris, Private Journal Kept During the Revolutionary War (1836; New York, 1969), 6, 11, 21.
87. Susan E. Klepp and Karin A. Wulf, eds., The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom (Philadelphia, forthcoming), entry for Oct. 30, 1758. The original is in the American Philosophical Society. Similar sentiments were expressed concerning a daughters birth and death in 1754, "a Christian parent possesses an unspeakable privilege, who gives birth to an immortal being, and is permitted to give it away to God.
88. " See William P. Farrand, ed., "Memoirs of Mrs. Hannah Hodge, who died in Philadelphia, Dec. 17th, 1805, in the 85th year of her age," General Assembly's Missionary Magazine; or, Evangelical Intelligencer for 1806, 2 (Feb. 1806), 93.
89. See also Karlsen and Crumpacker, eds., Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 192. All these cases of extreme passivity date from the 1750s, a decade not only of peak fertility rates in the mid-Atlantic but also of religious revivalism. Burr and Hodge were New Light Presbyterians, Callender a Quaker.
90. Paschall, Recipe Book, 9L. See Susan E. Klepp, "Lost, Hidden, Obstructed, and Repressed: Contraceptive and Abortive Technology in the Early Delaware Valley," in Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850, ed. Judith A. McGaw (Chapel Hill, 1994), 68-113, esp. 88-91;
91. and Susan E. Klepp, "Colds, Worms, and Hysteria: Menstrual Regulation in Eighteenth-Century North America," in Ambiguous Intentions: Women, Emmenagogues, and Menstrual Regulation, ed. Etienne van de Walle and Elisha Renne (Chicago, forthcoming).
92. Simon Gratz, "Some Material for a Biography of Mrs. Elizabeth Fergusson, née Graeme," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 39 (no. 3, 1915), 277;
93. Sarah Logan Fisher, "'A Diary of Trifling Occurrences,'" ed. Nicholas Wainwright, " Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, ibid., 83 (Oct. 1958), 418;
94. Klepp and Wulf, eds., Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom, Nov. 24, 1769;
95. Susan Burrows Swan, Plain & Fancy: American Women and Their Needlework, 1650-1850 (Austin, 1995), 128, 130.
96. Mulford, Only for the Eye of a Friend, 177;
97. Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations, 14 (Spring 1986), 19;
98. Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs, 4 (Winter 1978), 219-36;
99. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980);
100. Ruth H. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs, 13 (no. 1, 1987), 37-58;
101. Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (Oct. 1987), 689-721;
102. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America," in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore, 1988), 160-84;
103. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986).
104. Mary Clarke, ed., The Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson (1822; Philadelphia, 1838), 51-52;
105. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 332n31;
106. Hoffen, Private Matters, 15, 61-70;
107. Jacob R. Marcus, ed., The American-Jewish Woman: A Documentary History (New York, 1981), 10.
108. While most evidence about language comes from the well-to-do, John Fitch, poor and barely literate, wrote of friends in 1789 that "the effects of Love promised further increass to their families," a circumlocution only slightly less stylized than those of the better educated. See Prager, ed., Autobiography of John Fitch, 127.
109. For Eliza Roberts's statement, see Scott, "Occurances of Life," 40-41.
110. On the rare mentions of pregnancy, see Degler, At Odds, 59-62.
111. For examples of inaesthetic pregnant bodies, see Virginia K. Bartlett, Keeping House: Women's Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850 (Pittsburgh, 1994), 144 .
112. On shame, see Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America (New York, 1977), 77-106.
113. Davidson, Revolution and the Word;
114. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992).
115. Samuel Richardson is quoted in Dolores Peters, "The Pregnant Pamela: Characterization and Popular Attitudes in the Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14 (Summer 1981), 448.
116. John R. Gillis, For Better, for Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985), 31 -34.
117. In 1779, Capt. George Bush of the Eleventh Pennsylvania Regiment recorded this verse from a current song: "Kate, take my tobacco box, a soldiers all, / Lest by some d - d Hessian, I should chance to fall. / That when Tom's life is ended, you may justly prove, / You had my first, my last, my only pledge of love." See Kate Van Winkle Keller, ed., Songs from the American Revolution (Sandy Hook, 1992), 14.
118. An exceptional case of mixed agricultural/religious and sentimental imagery comes from 1755. Mary Pemberton wrote to her husband about "those tender and Pleasant Plants committed to our care, that in due time by the blessing of divine Providence they may grow up trees of Righteousness, Producing fruits of the Spirit, thereby, be usefull Ornaments of Society, and Pledges of our mutual Love," quoted in Judy Mann DiStefano, "A Concept of the Family in Colonial America: The Pembertons of Philadelphia" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1970), 128.
119. Sylvia [Anna Young Smith], "Verses on Marriage," c. 1778, Thomas Coombe Papers (Historical Society of Pennsylvania). My thanks to Susan Stabile for the attribution.
120. Clarke, ed., Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson, 52-53;
121. Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 162.
122. J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore, 1974), 139, 156;
123. Susan E. Klepp, "'And Women Rule over Them': Rough Music in Philadelphia, 1778," in Parades and Power, ed. Bill Pencak and Simon Newman (forthcoming);
124. "From a late Philadelphia Paper," Boston Continental Journal and Weekly Advertiser, July 30, 1778.
125. Crowley, This Sheba, Self, 154;
126. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1991).
127. On the cultural construction of academic knowledge, see notes 5, 6 above. Jordanova, "Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction," esp. 372-73.
128. William Bradford Reed, ed., The Life of Esther De Berdt, Afterwards Esther Reed, of Pennsylvania (1853; New York, 1971), 181;
129. Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789 (24 vols.; Washington, 1976), X, 102.
130. My thanks to Konstantin Dierks for this citation. Merrill Jensen, ed., Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (2 vols., Madison, 1976), II, Pennsylvania (microform supplement: no. 146). My thanks to Owen S. Ireland for this citation.
131. Virginia Armentrout and James S. Armentrout Jr., eds., The Diary of Harriet Manigault, 1813-1816 (Rockland, 1976), 9;
132. Fisher Diary, 11 mo. 1769, vol. 8, p. 93;
133. Ann Warder Diary, 15th and 18th, 5 mo., 1786 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania).
134. The calculations are derived from Elaine F. Crane, "The World of Elizabeth Drinker," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 107 (Jan. 1983), table 1, p. 27.
135. Crane et al., eds., Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, III, 1761 (1804). For evidence on her shift to numeracy, see appendix.
136. Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York, 1995), esp. 21-40;
137. Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 1996), esp. 9-32.
138. To trace the beginnings of formal adoptions in the 1790s, see Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, Baptismal Records (Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.). The conversation with a childless woman's sister, recorded by Charles Willson Peak in 1778, is quoted in Charles Coleman Sellers, The Artist of the Revolution: The Early Life of Charles Willson Peale (2 vols., Hebron, 1939), I, 189.
139. Fisher Diary, 12 mo., 1778, vol. 6;
140. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit, eds., The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, March 4, 1789-March 3, 1791 (Baltimore, 1988), 214, 248.
141. On the individualizing of children, see Susan E. Klepp, Philadelphia in Transition: A Demographic History of the City and Its Occupational Groups, 1720-1830 (New York, 1989), 147-51.
142. Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple, ed. Ann Douglas (1791; New York, 1991), 62, 89, 105.
143. Clarke, ed., Memoirs of the Celebrated and Beautiful Mrs. Ann Carson, I, 105-7.
144. Legal changes reflect a similar reconstruction of sexuality. Up until 1700 in Pennsylvania, rape was a crime against a father or husband who received monetary compensation for the reduced value of his property. After 1700, the fines went to the state. In 1794, however, rape became the third most harshly punished crime (after treason and first-degree murder), with sentences running twice as long as for second-degree murder. Forced pregnancy threatened women's very existence. Staugton George, Benjamin M. Nead, and Thomas McCamant, eds., Charter to William Penn and Laws of the Province of Pennsylvania, passed between the years 1682 and 1700 (Harrisburg, 1879), 12;
145. The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, from 1682 to 1801 (17 vols., Harrisburg, 1896-1911), II, 7, XV, 175.
146. On the later history, see Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1976), 49-61;
147. James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy (New York, 1978)
148. ; and Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1984), 113-44.
149. Norton, Liberty's Daughters, 233;
150. Klepp, "Lost, Hidden, Obstructed, and Repressed," 88-89, 100-101.
151. [Esther De Berdt Reed], "The Sentiments of an American Woman" [1780], Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 18 (no. 3, 1894), 361-66.
152. The four Shippen sisters and their sister in-law had mixed success with 2, 5, 7, 8, and an unknown number of children, but four of the five bore their last children unusually early, at ages 32, 33, 34, and 36, while one was over 44. Klein, Portrait of an Early American Family, 285n105, 300.
153. Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, 1994).
154. Charles Varley (Varlo), The Unfortunate Husbandman: An Account of the Life and Travels of a Real Farmer in Ireland, Scotland, Enghnd and America, ed. Dennis Clarke (London, 1966), 111.
155. For Dr. Benjamin Rush's remark, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Baltimore, 1968), 519;
156. Eliza Cope Harrison, ed., Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800-1851 (South Bend, 1978), 176, 311;
157. Joseph Price Diary, Sept. 9, 1804 (Historical Society of Pennsylvania); Philadelphia Mechanic's Free Press,
158. quoted in Edward Pessen, "The Working Men's Party Revisited," in New Perspectives on Jacksonian Parties and Politics, ed. Edward Pessen (Boston, 1969), 203.
159. [Jane Haldimand Marcat], Conversations on Political Economy; in which the Elements of that Science are Familiarly Explained (Philadelphia, 1817), 118-20, 123.
160. My thanks to Scott Stephan for finding the attribution in History of Women (microfilm, 995 reels, Research Publications, 1975-1979), reel 116, no. 772.
161. Hastings, Poems on Different Subjects, 194.
162. Hastings's confidence in 1800 would soon be replaced by a melancholy religiosity (see note 14 above) caused, at least in part, by her inability to sue for divorce. Traditional outlooks could have remarkable pulling power. Mary E. Karnes, "Sally Anderson Hastings: A Poetic Diary," Journal of the Lancaster County Historical Society, 99 (Spring 1997), 31-44;
163. Armentrout and Armentrout, eds., Diary of Harriet Manigault, 51.
164. Donald Gibson, ed., A Parson in the Vale of White Horse: George Woodward's Letters from East Hendred, 1753-1761 (Gloucester, 1982), 153.
165. Fearing the emasculation of English was William Stanley, "Proposal for Regenerating and Modernizing Shakespeare," Gentleman's Magazine, 61 (Dec. 1791), 1100.
166. Judith Schneid Lewis, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760-1860 (New Brunswick, 1986), 72.
167. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701-1837 (New Haven, 1992), 237-81, esp. 240, 268.
168. For the literary perspective, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, 1995);
169. and Ruth Perry, "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (no. 2, 1991), 204-34.
170. To compare the use of many of these same texts by Americans, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982).
171. The continuation of primogeniture and the idea it inculcated, that it is acceptable to treat children unequally, is mentioned as another reason for the British failure to adopt limited fertility before the mid-nineteenth century. See Johansson, "Fertility and Family History."
172. David Levine, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge, Eng., 1987);
173. John R. Gillis, "Gender and Fertility Decline among the British Middle Classes," in European Experience of Declining Fertility, ed. Gillis, Tilly, and Levine, 31-47;
174. Wally Seccombe, "Starting to Stop: Working-Class Fertility Decline in Britain," Past and Present (no. 126, Feb. 1990), 151-88;
175. Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 527, 530, 576.
176. Shawn Johansen, "Before the Waiting Room: Northern Middle-Class Men, Pregnancy, and Birth in Antebellum America," Gender and History, 7 (Aug. 1995), 183-200;
177. Julia Epstein, "The Pregnant Imagination, Fetal Rights, and Women's Bodies: A Historical Inquiry," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 7 (no. 139, 1995), 139-62;
178. J. David Hacker, "Religious Secularization, Child Naming, and the Decline of Marital Fertility in the United States, 1800-1880," paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, 1997 (in Susan E. Klepp's possession). My thanks to the author for sending a copy of this innovative analysis.
179. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, 45-54;
180. Susan E. Klepp, "Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition," Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, Boulder, Colorado, June 1996 (in Klepp's possession). Patriarchy seems to have been stronger in the South and the possibilities of social equality for disenfranchised groups less tolerable. There, "sentimental attitudes toward children could increase, rather than decrease, the 'determined number' of children." Anya Jabour to Susan E. Klepp, July 10, 1996,
181. Susan E. Klepp, " Revolutionary Bodies: Women and the Fertility Transition, " Annual Conference of the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, 1996 (in Klepp's possession). Patriarchy seems to have been stronger in the South and the possibilities of social equality for disenfranchised groups less tolerable. There, "sentimental attitudes toward children could increase, rather than decrease, the 'determined number' of children." Anya Jabour to Susan E. Klepp, July 10, 1996, ibid.
182. See also the sources cited in Melinda S. Buza, "'Pledges of Our Love': Friendship, Love, and Marriage among the Virginia Gentry, 1800-1825," in The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia, ed. Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis (Charlottesville, 1991), 9-36.
183. Virginia women stressed gendered difference - feminine fears against masculine strength - in order to justify restraint in childbearing, while mid-Atlantic women seem to have usually argued on the basis of equity. Most women in the United States feared the dangers of childbirth, but northern women did not usually make fear the basis of their argument for restricted fertility as so many southern women seem to have done. Lewis and Lockridge, " 'Sally Has Been Sick'"; Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 (New York, 1986), 13-35;
184. Jacquelyn C. Miller, "An 'Uncommon Tranquility of Mind': Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of Social History, 30 (Fall 1996), 129-48.