1 gen 1873 anni - Comstock Act

Descrizione:

The average American family, especially in the middle class, decreased in size during the industrial era. In 1800, white women who survived to menopause had borne an average of 7.0 children; by 1900, the average was 3.6. On farms and in many working-class families, youngsters counted as assets on the family balance sheet: they worked in fields or factories. But parents who had fewer sons and daughters could concentrate their resources, educating and preparing each child for success in the new economy. Among the professional classes, education became a necessity, while limiting family size became, more broadly, a key to upward mobility.

EXAM TIP
Understanding the changes in family life in the late nineteenth century is critical for the AP® Exam.

This photograph, a portrait of a middle-class American family, the Hedlund family, was taken on July 4, 1911, on the front porch of their home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Families like this one — with three children — were becoming typical among the middle class, in contrast to larger families in earlier generations. This photo was taken by twenty-​one-​year-​old Joseph Pavlicek, a recent immigrant from Eastern Europe who was boarding with the Hedlunds.
Portrait of a Middle-Class American Family

This photograph of the Hedlund family was taken on July 4, 1911, on the front porch of their home in St. Paul, Minnesota. Christian, Grace, and Anna Hedlund appear on the top row, Louis and George on the bottom. Families like this one — with three children — were becoming typical among the middle class, in contrast to larger families in earlier generations. This photo was taken by twenty-one-year-old Joseph Pavlicek, a recent immigrant from Eastern Europe who was boarding with the Hedlunds. Pavlicek bought fireworks for the children to celebrate the holiday. He remembered being so proud and grateful to be in America that his heart “was nearly bursting.”


Several factors limited childbearing. Americans married at older ages, and many mothers tried to space pregnancies more widely — as their mothers and grandmothers had — by nursing children for several years, which suppressed fertility. By the late nineteenth century, as vulcanized rubber became available, couples also had access to a range of other contraceptive methods, such as condoms and diaphragms. With pressure for family limitation rising, these methods were widely used and apparently effective, though couples rarely wrote about them. Historians’ evidence comes from the occasional frank diary and from the immense success of the mail-order contraceptive industry, which advertised prominently and shipped products — wrapped in discreet brown paper packages — to customers nationwide.

Reluctance to talk about contraceptives was understandable, since information about them was stigmatized and, after 1873, illegal to distribute. During Reconstruction, Anthony Comstock, crusading secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, secured a federal law banning “obscene materials” from the U.S. mail. The Comstock Act (1873) prohibited circulation of almost any information about sex and birth control — even in private letters. Comstock won support for the law, in part, by appealing to parents’ fears that young people were receiving sexual information through the mail, promoting the rise of “secret vice.” Though critics charged Comstock with high-handed interference in private matters, many Americans supported his work, fearful of the rising tide of pornography, sexual information, and contraceptives made available by industrialization. A committee of the New York legislature declared Comstock’s crusade “wholly essential to the safety and decency of the community.” It appears, however, that Comstock had little success in stopping the lucrative and popular underground trade in contraceptives.

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