Knowlton Biography, Chapter 32
Thirty-two: Birth Control in Ashfield
I had thought that the people of this country were not under a priestly despotism—that the orthodox clergy had no right to become the self-appointed censors of the American Press! but an American had a right to search into the secret operations of nature, and having discovered any facts that may be of use to any considerable part of the human family, had a right to make these facts known.
Charles Knowlton believed that the biggest objection to Fruits of Philosophy wasn’t that it gave people the power to reduce the sizes of their families, but that he had claimed in his “Philosophical Proem” that religion should have nothing to say about the matter. He was jailed and persecuted, Charles taunted his adversaries, “ostensibly, for diffusing scientific knowledge of practical utility; but, really, for giving thee a small pill in connection with it, slyly wrapped up, which thou canst not swallow.” Other birth control advocates, such as Abner Kneeland and Robert Dale Owen, agreed that by giving regular people the ability to limit the sizes of their families, they were instigating a radical social change. By reducing the number of mouths they had to feed, the reformers said, families would become better able give their children the nourishment and educations they needed. Most freethinkers agreed it was important to give everybody the right to choose, and that the social reforms they supported would be advanced by effective family planning.
But was Knowlton’s method effective? Should Charles be remembered as an early champion of the idea of choice, or as someone who actually helped people reduce the sizes of their families in ways that led to social change? Either way, Charles was ahead of his time—and helped change America from a society ruled by the authority of religious leaders and their arbitrary edicts, to one where most people now take it for granted that having children is a private, family decision.
Because Charles Knowlton lived in Massachusetts, it is possible to trace some of the immediate effects of Fruits of Philosophy. In the early twentieth century, Vital Records books were published for every town in the state, listing all the births, marriages, and deaths from the late eighteenth century up to 1849. Charles arrived in Ashfield in 1832, and comparing the records of the generations before and after his arrival shows the impact of his presence. Not everyone in Ashfield took Charles’s advice, of course. But Knowlton’s enemies believed he was showing his book to everyone he could, so it’s fair to conclude a lot of Ashfield families knew of it.
Before Charles arrived in Ashfield, the largest family in town had eleven children. Women married at an average age of twenty-one, and the average family had seven children. Most women continued having children until they were forty years old, if they lived that long, and had a baby every couple of years from marriage to menopause. Only fourteen families in town had fewer than four children, and this was usually explained by the illness or death of a parent. Eleven families had eight or more children.
Between 1832 and 1849, when Charles was Ashfield’s leading doctor and Fruits of Philosophy was the focus of much attention, women continued marrying at twenty-one, on average. And most Ashfield women continued having children until they were forty, but they had only half as many. The average family size in Ashfield dropped from seven to 3.5 children. Thirty-nine families had only two or three children, and no families had more than seven children.
Before Charles arrived in Ashfield, most local families had from five to nine children. After Charles began practicing medicine and distributing his book there, most Ashfield families had only two to four. The speed and timing of this change suggests Fruits of Philosophy was effective in reducing family sizes in Ashfield.
Historians have often described the early nineteenth century as a period of “decreasing fertility” in the northeastern states—but usually without explaining how the decrease in childbearing was achieved. Some have accounted for the change by saying women were gaining more control over their reproductive rights and more power in their families. This observation is undoubtedly true, but it does not explain how women exercised this new control or how the idea of reproductive choice spread so quickly. Fruits of Philosophy answers that question, through a combination of its radical claim about choice and its practical birth control method. Although even in Ashfield, some women probably reduced the number of their children without using his method, Charles Knowlton deserves credit for teaching effective birth control and for denying the authority of religion and introducing the idea of choice into the lives of Ashfield families.