Knowlton Biography, Chapter 22
Twenty-two: Moral Physiology
Let us say…that the youth who thus sacrifices the present for the future chooses wisely between the two evils, profligacy and asceticism. This is true. But let us not imagine the lesser evil to be a good. It is not good for man to be alone. It is for no man or woman’s happiness or benefit…It is a violence done to the feelings, and an injury to the character.
In 1830, Charles Knowlton’s friend Robert Dale Owen published a short book called Moral Physiology. Owen was the son of Robert Owen, a Welsh textile-mill owner who had become a social reformer. After using a lot of his personal wealth to improve working conditions for his employees in Britain, Owen moved to America to start a cooperative community at New Harmony, Indiana. Robert Dale had moved from New Harmony to New York to work with Frances Wright on the Free Enquirer not long before meeting Charles.
Robert Dale Owen was a lifelong advocate of freethought and workers’ rights. Owen and his father have been called utopians and socialists. These are labels they would have been happy to apply to themselves—but not in exactly the sense many Americans now understand the terms. Since the Owens’ day, the word socialism has become even more politically charged than it was then, while the goals of many socialists have remained the same: equality, friendship, peace, and cooperation. These were Robert and Robert Dale Owen’s goals when they helped invent the cooperative movement.
When he met Charles, Robert Dale was working on a problem that has worried many freethinkers throughout history, euphemistically called “The Population Question.” The changes brought by the industrial revolution had focused the attention of economists and social philosophers not only on the unequal distribution of wealth, but also on urban growth and the problem of feeding everyone. As nations industrialized, farmers left the land and became wage workers in the cities. Industry benefited, but families earned less and less as urban overpopulation pushed down wages. Factory workers packed into the new industrial cities were at the mercy of economic cycles they couldn’t understand or control, as decades of British famines and bread riots during the early years of industrialization showed.
A few years before Charles Knowlton’s and Robert Dale Owen’s births at the turn of the nineteenth century, an Anglican priest named Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus’s essay became instantly famous on both sides of the Atlantic. It was read with alarm by President Thomas Jefferson, who immediately wrote his economic advisor to ask what could be done. The essay went through six editions in the early nineteenth century, with one coming out in 1826, just before Charles and Robert Dale met. While the essay had been written in academic language for an elite audience, its message was simple. Basically, Malthus claimed that unregulated populations could increase exponentially, while food supplies could only increase arithmetically. Sooner or later, he said, an unregulated population would run out of food. The important word in Malthus’s theory, of course, was “unregulated.” Throughout history wars, plagues, and famines had always regulated human populations. But Owen believed, and he convinced Charles, that depending on disasters to answer the population question was barbaric and unnecessary.
So the two friends decided to do something about it. It’s unclear exactly when they first made plans to write about the population question, but it was probably in the months immediately after Charles published Modern Materialism, when he was still confident the book would make him rich and famous. Robert Dale published a short book he called Moral Physiology and Charles started working on his own volume, which came out a few months later. Owen knew, he said in his Preface, that Moral Physiology would “subject me to abuse from the self-righteous, to misrepresentation from the hypocritical, and to reproach even from the honestly prejudiced. Some may refuse to read it; many will misconceive its tendency.” Robert Dale’s argument was that people, especially poor people, had the right and the responsibility to limit the sizes of their families to levels they could afford.
Other than disaster, the only solution that Reverend Malthus had been able to suggest to the population question was a vague concept he called “moral restraint.” Owen objected as much to Malthus’s second solution as he had to the first. It was ridiculous to expect everyone to abstain from sex, Owen said. Worse, “celibacy is a mortification of the affections, a violence done to social feelings, sometimes a sacrifice even to health.” In Britain, many young men who delayed marriage for financial reasons resorted to prostitutes, which shifted the burden of unwanted children to an even more vulnerable class of people, created a criminal underground, and spread venereal disease. But there were ways, Owen claimed, for couples to marry, satisfy their sexual needs and prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Owen’s favorite method of birth control, withdrawal, is now known to be relatively ineffective—although that doesn’t prevent a lot of people from still depending on it. Owen also discussed contraceptive sponges, which he said were first mentioned by a British freethinker named Richard Carlile in Every Woman’s Book. Finally, Owen discussed condoms, which he said were over a century old and very popular in France.
Although a few British radicals like Carlile had begun advocating birth control in pamphlets and newspapers written for regular people, the population question was still mostly debated by elite philanthropists using academic language and vague euphemisms only they could decode. “The chief difference between this little treatise,” Owen said, “and the allusions made by the distinguished authors…is that what public opinion would only permit them to insinuate, I venture to say plainly.” Since he completed his book several months before Charles, Robert Dale Owen should be remembered as the first author to plainly advocate birth control in the United States. Some historians have quibbled that Owen was British, and have tried to give Knowlton credit as the first American author. This isn’t an argument the two friends would have had, since they continued to work closely on the project for many years.
Robert Dale Owen was a groundbreaker, but he knew he was not an expert on the physiology of preventing pregnancy. He asked his friend Charles to consider the issue as a doctor, and develop a method that could be “proved effectual by experience.” Owen was looking for effective, medical birth control—something concrete that could help families control conception. Charles focused on the question and when he found an answer, Robert Dale added it to Moral Physiology.