It’s a truth universally acknowledged that after a bride and groom consummate the marriage the pitter patter of little feet will surely follow (and follow and follow and follow). Such was the case during Jane Austen’s day. Her mother bore eight children and luckily survived her ordeals. The wives of Jane’s brothers Edward and Frank did not, both dying in childbirth with their eleventh child. That these two women were able to survive so many pregnancies was a miracle in itself, given that the chance of a woman dying in childbirth at the time was 20%.
Queen Charlotte, King George IIIs consort, gave birth to 15 children in 21 years. The King and Queen are depicted with their 6 eldest.
Deborah Kaplan writes in Jane Austen Among Women:
“On the birth of his fourteenth child in 1817, Thomas Papillon received this advice within a letter of congratulations from his wife’s uncle, Sir Richard Hardinge: It is now recommended to you to deprive Yourself of the Power of Further Propagation. You have both done Well and Sufficiently.”
The fashionable mamma, or the convenience of modern dress, James Gillray
Abstinence was one method of birth control, as Sir Richard recommended. Breast feeding was another. If a mother breasfed her child for 3-4 years, the pregnancies would be naturally spaced inbetween periods of amenorrhea (the absence of menstruation). While breastfeeding regained some popularity during the Georgian and Regency eras, women did not feed their babies long enough to supress menstruation for very long and often handed them over to a wet nurse. Cassandra Austen farmed her children to a nurse in a nearby village after six to eight months, guaranteeing that her lactation would soon cease and that she would soon be fertile again. The common belief that having intercourse during lactation would in some way harm the mother and child did offer some added protection from pregnancy, but large families were still common.
Amanda Vickery shows a bachelor cadging food from an irritated married friend. The poor young man probably lived in a modest rented room.
Social customs also served to keep pregnancies down. Amanda Vickery mentioned in At Home with the Georgians that a bachelor needed to acquire a house and reliable income before he could seriously contemplate marriage. Such acquisitions took years to amass and would hold up the young man’s inevitable role as parent. Once the young man could afford to marry, however, his long period of delayed consummation with a chaste woman ended and he would waste no time in siring a legitimate child.
A woman’s chaste reputation owed much to the urgent necessity of her not getting pregnant before marriage. Conceiving a child out of wedlock turned a woman into a pariah. In medieval times a chastity belt guaranteed that no bride would enter her marriage bed sullied. Unfortunately, these contraptions came in only one size and were therefore extremely uncomfortable for the larger sized woman.(Johannah Cornblatt, Newsweek). Update: Information about chastity belts in medieval times is being debunked these days as a myth. See links in the comment section below.
James Gillray's priceless caricature.
Married couples anxious to reduce their number of offspring (or who had reached their limit of 10, 11, or 15) tried coitus interruptus and the rhythm method. Since the female fertility cycle was not fully understood until the early twentieth century, the latter form of birth control resembled a game of Russian Roulette more than family planning. Several religious institutions, the Catholic Church in particular, frowned upon a married couple attempting any form of birth control at all, but there was evidence that birth control was effectively practiced. “Some couples managed to delay the first conception within marriage and few babies were born in the months of July and August, when the heaviest harvest labor took place.”-History of Birth Control.
Condoms, which were made of linen soaked in a chemical solution or the lining of animal intestines, had been in use for centuries, but this method of birth control was linked to vice and was mostly practiced in houses of ill repute.
Casanova blowing up a condom with prostitutes looking on.
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725-1798) was among the first to use condoms to prevent pregnancy. The famous womanizer called the condom an “English riding coat.” His memoirs also detail his attempt to use the empty rind of half a lemon as a primitive cervical cap. The engraving shows the Italian seducer blowing up a condom. The photo shows an early 19th-century contraceptive sheath made of animal gut and packaged in a paper envelope. – Newsweek
Condom made of animal gut with paper envelope. Image @Newsweek
One can imagine that such clumsy barriers to impregnation failed on too many occasions to count, although they did manage to prevent venereal disease.
Georgian caricatures made much sport of condoms. This one is entitled: "Quality control in a condom warehouse."
There were other means of pregnancy prevention. Aristotle recommended anointing the womb with olive oil. His other spermicides included cedar oil, lead ointment, or frankincense oil.
Pessaries, 1755. Image @The Global Library of Women's Medicine
“The pessary [mechanical tool or device used to block the cervix] was the most effective contraceptive device used in ancient times and numerous recipes for pessaries from ancient times are known. Ingredients for pessaries included: a base of crocodile dung (dung was frequently a base), a mixture of honey and natural sodium carbonate forming a kind of gum. All were of a consistency which would melt at body temperature and form an impenetrable covering of the cervix. The use of oil was also suggested by Aristotle and advocated as late as 1931 by birth control advocate Marie Stopes.” – History of Birth Control
Other societies had used methods of blocking sperm including plugs of cloth or grass in Africa, balls of bamboo tissue paper in Japan, wool by Islamic and Greek women, andlinen rags by Slavic women. Ancient Jews used a sea sponge wrapped in silk and attached to a string. – History of Birth Control.
Many young girls who had been seduced, engaged in pre-marital sex, or been raped would attempt not to get pregnant by any means. The unfortunate women who did were ostracised, much like Colonel Brandon’s young charge, Liza, who had been enticed by Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility to give up her virginity. These women were frantic to end their pregnancies rather than lose their standing in society or their livelihood, for no pregnant unmarried woman could work as a maid, shopgirl, or seamstress. They would try anything to end their pregnancies, including ingesting turpentine, castor oil, tansy tea, quinine water into which a rusty nail was soaked, horseradish, ginger, epsom salts, ammonia, mustard, gin with iron filings, rosemary, lavender, and opium. Severe exercise, heavy lifting, climbing trees, jumping, and shaking were also attempted, in most instances to no avail. – History of Birth Control
Tess of the D'Urberfield and her baby, Sorrow. Thomas Hardy wrote about the consequences of seduction. (Nastassia Kinski as Tess, 1980)
Infanticide has been practiced since the dawn of time, most famously with the Greeks, who left deformed babies to die outdoors. In Regency times, desperate women would leave their babies in the streets to die. Many left their infants at workhouses, a form of infanticide as the quote below attests, and a large number, too poor to support themselves and unable to work off their debts, wiled away their time in prison.
“When the poor stayed with their children in workhouses, the outcome was little better. Between 1728 and 1757, there were 468,081 christenings and 273,930 infant deaths in those younger than the age of 2 in London workhouses. Foundling hospitals and workhouses were institutionalized infanticide machines.” – Global Library of Women’s Medicine
Women at Bridewell Prison, 1808. Rowlandson and Pugin for Ackermann's Repository of Arts
Once children were born and the family was large, it was not unusual to farm out a few children, some to work in their childhood, as Charles Dickens did, and other to live with relatives, as was the case with Fanny Price, who lived with her aunt’s family in Mansfield Park and Edward Austen Knight, who was adopted by a rich, childless couple.
Early 20th century attitude towards an unwanted child. Image @Newsweek
It has been said that families had many children during the 18th and 19th centuries because of the high rate of infant mortality and the need for many helping hands on the farm. But as society became industrialized, large families became a hindrance. With many mouths to feed and limited resources (except in the case of the rich), it is no wonder that couples since time immemorial have searched for ways to limit the number of their offspring. Update: As Nancy Mayer rightly pointed out in her comment, most women during the Georgian and Regency eras thought it their duty to bear their husbands children and oversee the family household. The matter of family planning might well have been influenced by women of a certain class who could not allow pregnancies to interfere with the rhythm of the work cycle, single women who were desperate to seek ways to end their pregnancies before their condition became obvious, and in houses of ill repute, where condoms would offer some protection against disease. Mistresses and prostitutes would find pregnancies to be more of a hindrance than help in their work. I have often wondered, for example, how Emma Hamilton managed to have so few children and yet enjoy the charms of so many men.
1920's Lysol Advertisement. Image @The Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health
More on the topic:
- Contraceptive sponge, Science Museum of London
- Kathleen London – History of Birth Control
- History of Contraception
- Condoms: History Hoydens
- Birth Control in the 18th Century: Catherine Delors
- Global Library of Women’s Medicine
- Campbell, Linda. Wetnurses in Early Modern England: Some Evidence from the Townshend Archive, Medical History 1989
- Constructions of Infanticide in Early Modern England: Female Deviance During Demographic Crisis, Sarah Cristine Shipley Copelan, 2008
- History of Condoms
- Safe Sex?
- Secret Sex Poems
- Hygienic Motherhood: Domestic Medicine and Eliza Fenwick’s Secrecy, Mercy Cannon, PDF Document, 2008
- Recommended reading: City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London, Vic Gatrell, 2006. ISBN 10 0 8027 1602 4
Jane Austen's World 
Wonderful information, Vic! This topic is an important one to Regency readers and writers. You did a superb job of bringing the facts together. As always, your site is a fantastic resource! I’m adding a link to this article on my own website.
Thank you, Joanna. Coming from you that is quite a compliment.
A great article! Informative and interesting, with great illustrations. Maybe all these hardships were the reason why Jane Austen never chose to marry. Getting married would have meant being pregnant constantly and possibly having to die of childbirth.
I’m not sure how effective breastfeeding would have been as a birth control method, however. I think you can get pregnant easily even while breastfeeding. But then, perhaps that was one of the common old wives’ tales of the period.
Oh, and by the way, Tess of the d’Urberville’s was written by Thomas Hardy (not Charles Dickens). A great book!
Thanks, Anna. I had Charles Dickens on my brain when writing this article. Proof that I need a proofer!! The information about breastfeeding came from several sources, including a Yale article. I found this answer from a Dr. Sears interesting:
“How reliable is breastfeeding as a natural contraceptive?”
You have to follow the rules of the game to get the full benefit of breastfeeding’s effect on fertility. In the last ten years, lactation researchers have developed the lactational amenorrhea method of family planning, called LAM. Research shows that LAM’s effectiveness in preventing pregnancy is better than 98 percent, a figure that compares well with artificial methods of birth control.”
The mother has to be breastfeeding full time in order for this method to be effective. http://www.askdrsears.com/topics/breastfeeding/faq%E2%80%99s-about-milk-supply-and-breastfeeding-challenges/breastfeeding-fertility
Planned Parenthood asserts that this method of birth control is 99% certain for only 6 months. There seems to be a concensus that a woman must breastfeed her child 100% of the time for the suppression of hormones that trigger ovulation. Once other food is introduced and the mother stops breastfeeding full time, this method of birth control becomes less reliable.
Interesting! I didn’t think this was likely as I know some women who have had two children with just 1 year apart. So that means they must have been exceptionally lucky – or unlucky!
Regency Era Family Planning—yet another reason that, although I love to fantasize about the lifestyle, I’m really grateful to be living in this modern era!
OMG! I can’t imagine what the poor woman …and especially her internals must have endured!
I hate to think what putting dung or lysol into your body does for long term health…
Thank you for such an informative & fascinating topic. Wonderful read…as always
hugs
A very good article, Vic. I learned a few things.
All the best,
Tony
While the means of attempting contraception were available– and had been from herbalists and midwives for centuries without having to use dung or even orange halves– we have little or no information of use by married couples. The condom was used so often as a preventative against sexually transmitted disease and in brothels, that I doubt men would think about using them with their wives. Or if they did, they didn’t tell anyone.
Today there are babies conceived all the time because the man disn’t like the feel of a condom, how much more must that have been true in the past.
I think some wives would have liked to have used something but many of those women didn’t have any idea how to do it. Quite a few women and men thought it somewhat scandalous and others thought it immoral to use any thing to prevent contraception.
Good points, Nancy. I did mention that the use of condoms was considered a vice at the time and perhaps did not point out enough that these were used primarily in brothels.
One imagines, though, that midwives must have transmitted much of the information about pregnancy prevention via herbs and devices to their clients, rich or poor. I doubt that male doctors would condescend to have such discussions with their female patients.
Fascinating topic that I have wondered about before, especially in light of the fanfiction of Jane Austen’s works where the authors have the hero and heroine anticipate their vows. The percentage of women dying in childbirth was also something that I had wondered about. Thanks for answering that. With all of the facts surrounding this topic, one wonders if there were ever women able to talk with a best friend about possibly enjoying sexual relations? It was such a topic shrouded in silence.
Karen, This article written by Jan Marsh for the Victoria and Albert Museum discusses sex in the Victorian times. It alludes to the fact that the Regency era was a more licentious era, and it also mentions the infanticide that desperate women turned to when all other avenues were closed.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/sex-and-sexuality-19th-century/
“In medieval times a chastity belt guaranteed that no bride would enter her marriage bed sullied. Unfortunately, these contraptions came in only one size and were therefore extremely uncomfortable for the larger sized woman.”
Chastity belts were rare, and worn as rape prevention devices in precarious situations, not, as commonly fantasized by fetishists, as common everyday accessories. As for the sizing, while it may be true that the extant examples are of a narrow size range, that does not prove that they came stamped “One size fits all”.
Actually, I should amend that to say that there is little evidence that chastity belts existed at all during the Middle Ages. It is now believed that many of the “extant examples” were for some other, often unidentified, purpose, and were labeled as “chastity belts” for sensationalist reasons.
Margo, it is true that I got that statement from one source only (Newsweek) but it was such a delicious tidbit. Also, I do not think that I presented the topic as a fetishist device. Your knowledge is rather recent (or at least in my world, since I graduated from college a long time before this hypothesis was busted and am coming from a place when such knowledge was considered a fact.) This Project Muse article, found on Google, discusses the mythmaking of the chastity belt and its use: muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_english_and…/108.1.bornholdt.pdf
Here’s a Google book on the topic: The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Mythmaking Process by Albrecht Classen, 2007. http://books.google.com/books?id=r_hncxYRQIoC&dq=chastity+belts+doubt+as+to+their+use+in+medieval+times+myth&source=gbs_navlinks_s
I have made a minor edit to your statement, as I am totally open to corrections and don’t mind a healthy debate or gentle reminder about disputed facts or opinions.
Since many modern couples need fertility advice before they can produce a family, I wonder what percentage of early 19th century young marrieds experienced the same problems and what advice they might be offered as remedies.
Fascinating post! I can’t imagine having some of the contraceptive options they came up with enter my body. Couldn’t possibly have been good for them. Thank goodness for modern technology.
i remember reading that salt was also used as a contraceptive. they would soak the sponges in salt water before inserting. a book i read years ago talked of the history of contraceptives and used salt as a basis for a natural jell to be used with a diaphram. this was to encourage women to get away from chemicals and have a more natural birth control.
This was excellent. I did extensive genealogical research in a small mining town in PA where my parents grew up. In the 1900 census the US govt. asked how many children/how many living. It was so sad to see how many children had died. My own grandmother died of childbirth fever at the age of 38 after eight pregnancies.
[…] To conceive or not to conceive: that is the Regency question Highly entertaining AND informative look at birth control pre-modern life. […]
As a modern practitioner of what we now refer to as the Sympto-Thermal Method of Natural Family Planning (and also a teacher), I can attest to the reliability of breastfeeding amenorrhea as a method of birth regulation. Indeed, one has to follow the correct procedure (no artificial nipples, co-sleeping, and full-time breastfeeding as has been stated previously, for example). In my personal experience having had four children I can attest that my fertility signs returned after only six months every time no matter how faithfully I followed the procedures. However, I have known women who, on breastfeeding long-term, have managed to suspend the return of their fertility for close to two years (like the fertility cycle itself, the length of breastfeeding amenorrhea varies from woman to woman). In fact it was only the introduction of changes like sleeping arrangements or diet that brought on the cycles of these women, so it is highly likely that a Regency Era woman who did not turn her child over to a wet nurse could have had extended infertility. I suspect that practicing breastfeeding with reliable diligence would have severely cut into the social activities of the wealthier set, so probably more often then not a wet-nurse was employed as a matter of convenience, therefore bringing on the continuance of fertile cycles. It is likely that had our forebearers in the Regency Period had the understanding of the fertility cycle that we now have, they would have had much greater success with NFP!
[…] To conceive or not to conceive: that is the Regency question Highly entertaining AND informative look at birth control pre-modern life. […]