ESSAY A Right to Ourselves: Women’s Suffrage and the Birth Control Movement Heather Munro Prescott* and Lauren MacIvor Thompson** *Corresponding author. Central Connecticut State University. Email: prescott@ccsu.edu **Corresponding author. Georgia State University. Email: lmacivor1@gsu.edu Abstract The suffrage and birth control movements are often treated separately in historical schol- arship. This essay brings together new research to demonstrate their close connections. Many suffragists became active in the birth control movement just before and after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The roots of suffrage arguments were deeply embedded in the same ideas that were foundational to the birth control movement: bodily freedom and notions of what constituted full and participatory citizenship. Beginning in the 1840s, women’s rights reformers directly connected the vote to a broad range of economic and political issues, including the concept of self-ownership. Wide-ranging debates about individual autonomy remained present in women’s rights rhetoric and were then repeated in the earliest arguments for legalizing birth control. The twentieth-century birth control movement, like the suffrage movement before it (which had largely focused only on achieving the vote for white women), would then grapple with competing goals of restrictive racist and eugenic arguments for contraception alongside the emphasis on achieving emancipation for all women. Keywords: Birth control; reproduction; suffrage; women’s rights This article will explore the links between suffrage history and the history of the birth control movement in the United States, especially among white reformers and activists. These ties have received little attention from other scholars, as the suffrage movement and the birth control movement are usually studied separately. As Americans reflect on the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment and its unfinished legacy, this piece will expand and update the scholarship on both movements by illustrating the ties between rights ideology in the nineteenth century and the beginnings of birth control activism in the early twentieth century. Although the term “birth control” was not coined until the early twentieth century—and popularized by Margaret Sanger—the history of repro- ductive rights rhetoric is firmly rooted in nineteenth-century reformers’ discussions of marriage, bodily autonomy, and self-ownership. These concepts both predated and evolved alongside women’s demands for the vote beginning in the 1840s, and contin- uing after the Civil War as women struggled to define what citizenship meant for them In the original online version of this article, the authors’ affiliation headings were omitted. They have been added above and an erratum has been published. © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2020), 19, 542–558 doi:10.1017/S1537781420000304 https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781420000304 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 207.241.231.83, on 07 Nov 2020 at 03:04:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.