Contraception and the Working Classes: The Social Ideology of the English Birth Control Movement in its Early Years

Abstract

A host of social movements which had as their goal the improvement of the living conditions of the working classes emerged in England in the 1820s and 1830s. Owenism and Chartism come first to mind, but historians have recently acknowledged the social significance of a number of less well-known groups that proclaimed the benefits of temperance or mechanics' institutes or phrenology or infidel missions. The birth control movement in its early years has as yet received little attention from the historians of the English working classes. A possible reason is that the opposition of the 'pauper press' to the movement has led later observers to adopt the view that it was simply a middle-class Malthusian crusade which set out to convince the poor that the only escape from poverty lay in individual self-help. In what follows I shall sketch out the general lines of argument advanced by the advocates of birth control and their antagonists in the working-class movement. The purpose of the paper is not to provide yet another history of the first neo-Malthusians, but to use the arguments their activities elicited to gain a better understanding of nineteenth-century working-class culture.