"Quality Not Quantity": The Influence of World War I on Birth Control Discourse in the United States

Using the U.S. birth control movement’s national publication the Birth Control Review (BCR), I analyze the impact World War I had on birth control discourse in the United States and argue that the war shaped the eugenic nature of that discourse. Historians of the birth control movement have explained that U.S. involvement in the war led to increased domestic policing of dissenters and radicals, which played a significant role in moving the birth control movement away from its early feminist and socialist base. I contend that this explanation underestimates the role that World War I played in shaping the birth control agenda in addition to overestimating the extent to which the national movement was, as a whole, leftist at its start.

The United States entered WWI shortly after the BCR began publication, and early arguments for birth control in the BCR’s pages reflected war-time fears about the fragility of national borders, the “Yellow Peril,” and the racial quality of soldiers. I show that, responding to the chaos of war, the emerging birth control movement proposed birth control as a panacea that would not only protect women from unwanted pregnancy but also protect the “race” and the nation from the evils of uncontrolled population growth domestically and internationally. This shift--from emphasizing birth control’s benefit for women to emphasizing its benefit for society--laid the discursive foundation for the movement’s eugenic future.