Originally published in 1978, this title contends that the great interest of the 19th-century birth control debate is that it reveals that there was not a growing consensus of opinion on the question of family planning but rather two cultural confrontations.

The decline of the British birth rate was arguably the most important social change to occur in the last decades of the nineteenth century, but historians have shown remarkably little interest in the phenomenon. Most of the work done on the question has been by sociologists and reflects their assumption that the progressive adoption of birth control was largely a matter of the lower classes aping the behaviour of their ‘betters’. Originally published in 1978, this book argues against this interpretation. It contends that the great interest of the nineteenth-century birth control debate is that it reveals that there was not a growing consensus of opinion on the question of family planning but rather two cultural confrontations – the struggle of the middle-class propagandists of both left and right to manipulate for political purposes working-class attitudes towards procreation, and, on a deeper level, the clash of the differing attitudes of men and women towards the possibility of fertility control. The purpose of this study is to place the idea and practice of birth control in their social and political context, and four major factors are focused upon to this end: the first is that the birth control issue played a key role in the confrontation between Malthusians, socialists, eugenists and feminists. Secondly, the whole question of contraception led to a conflict between doctors, quacks, midwives and ordinary men and women seeking to control their own fertility. Thirdly, men and women belong to different sexual cultures and necessarily respond in different ways to the possibility of family regulation, and finally, despite the claims of some that birth control was an innovation, it was the pre-industrial forms of fertility control – including abortion – which brought the birth rate down.

This text traces the history of contraception and abortifacients from ancient Egypt to the 17th century, and discusses the scientific merit of the ancient remedies and why this knowledge about fertility control was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages.

Originally published in 1984 Reproductive Ritual examines fertility and re-production in pre-industrial England. The book discusses both through anthropological research and reviews of contemporary literature that conscious family limitation was practised before the nineteenth century. The volume describes a surprising number of rules, regulations, taboos, injunctions, charms and herbal remedies used to affect pregnancy, and shows the extent to which individual women and men were concerned with controlling the size of their families. The fertility levels in England – as in Western Europe as a whole – were a very long way from the biological maximum in these centuries, and the book discusses the various reasons why this was so. The book reviews traditional ideas concerning the relationship between procreation and pleasure, drawn from a range of contemporary sources and discusses ways in which earlier generations sought both to promote and limit fertility. The book also examines abortion and shows how much evidence there is for its actual practice during the period and of traditional views towards it. This book provides a detailed understanding of historical attitudes towards conception family planning in pre-industrial England.

Drawing from a wide range of private and public sources, examines how American families gradually found access to taboo information and products for controlling the size of their families from the 1830s to the 1890s when a puritan backlash made most of it illegal. Emphasizes the importance of two shadowy networks, medical practitioners known as Thomsonians and water-curists, and iconoclastic freethinkers.

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John M. Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve’s Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times? Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed “secret knowledge” to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception. Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as “witchcraft” in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by “Eve’s herbs” has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.