In what does freedom consist? This has been a subject of theological reflection for centuries: St. Paul wrote of Christ’s freeing power; Augustine contemplated the “Freedom of the will,” and Luther meditated on the “Freedom of a Christian.” More recently, democratic theorists have contested the concept of “freedom,” exploring what kinds of negative and positive liberties might be entailed by the concept of freedom. In popular culture, civil rights activists have sung “freedom songs”; feminists have worked for “women’s liberation,” while queer activists worked for “gay liberation.” Of course, theologians, for their part, have developed liberation theologies. But what, in practice, might freedom look like?
This paper considers the concept of freedom at a crucial point in reproductive technological advancement: the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, at the development of medical contraception and the climax of the suffragette movement. It focuses on the advocacy of women of that period for what they called “voluntary motherhood.” Women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman insisted that reproduction never be forced upon a human being, but rather be each woman’s prerogative.
Freedom, for these women, was not confined to the realm of abstraction, as it long has been in political theorizing and theologizing. Freedom meant not being forced to gestate, nurse, and rear children.
Crucially, these arguments were substantiated with both political and theological reasoning. Stanton, for example, wrote that each woman has the “sovereign right to her own person”—and that such a right was “sacred.” Perkins wrote, furthermore, that women ought to be allowed to freely choose in order that they might beget and rear their children in love, as an element of a virtuous Christian ethic. Of course, the freedom of voluntary motherhood, for first wave feminists, required both the development of and accessibility to medical contraception and the criminalization of marital rape. But in response to both of these challenges, many suffragettes argued for the morality of voluntary motherhood using religious and theological rationales. (Among the sources for the paper are Samira Mehta’s forthcoming book, God Bless the Pill, which considers historic religious responses to the development and legalization of medical contraception.)
This paper suggests that, rather than arguing for the defense of reproductive justice on largely atheological grounds, we recuperate the work of these early feminist activists in defending access to contraception and abortion with theological reasons. These may not be the only reasons with which we might substantiate reproductive justice. But, I argue, they are critical tools for making the case for women’s choice in a political context in which those who seek to subject women to involuntary motherhood do so on (misguided) religious grounds. There is a tradition of theologically infused advocacy for voluntary motherhood that merits—indeed, perhaps demands—retrieval today.