Pronatalism, Women's Reproductive Labor, and US Empire: The Pacific Northwest in the 1840s

In the antebellum era, rapid population growth underlay the success of U.S. settler colonialism in the Midwest, as well as in newly claimed areas of the Deep South. Democrats, however, who advocated further expansion and occupation of Oregon, faced resistance from opponents because of the perceived challenges of occupying such distant territory.  Critics cited the risk of conflict with native peoples and with Britain and the logistical challenges of sending white families to occupy the Pacific coast, as obstacles.

This paper examines the pro-natalist arguments that expansionists crafted in the 1840s to counter such objections and promote colonization.  Examining debates over bills proposed by Missouri Senators Lewis Linn and Thomas Hart Benton, culminating in the Donation Land Act of 1850, the paper argues that advocates saw white women’s reproductive labor as essential to conquest of the Pacific coast.  The goals of rapid reproduction and population growth were promoted by grants of land to married women and, as originally proposed, “headright” grants to heads of household for each child produced, including those born during a family’s first five years in Oregon.

The paper will discuss the origins of these remarkable bills by noting the distinctive prior history of what we might call “reproductive expansionism.”  It will briefly examine the strategic and military assumptions that underlay the Donation Land Act, its partisan implications in the decade of Manifest Destiny, and its impact on marriage age and family size in early Anglo Oregon.