How did women avoid pregnancy before the pill?

[ericcartman]

How come most families weren't the size of football teams back then? I mean bar any fertility issues or couples stopping having sex what else was there? I know condoms and abortions have been around for ages in one form or another but I doubt either was that common till the 20th century, especially when talking about married couples.

Condoms
Sponge
Withdrawal

All were available before the pill. Many families were large anyway my gm was one of 10 and they weren't Catholic.

Of course women also died in childbirth/ had damage that wasnt repaired which also limited the size of families.

Loveobject A lot of the women in those laundries were victims of rape/ sexual abuse.

Back street or abortions at home.

Yes, of course they were. The last one to close was about a mile from where I grew up, and my mother befriended three of the last inhabitants, whose stories were so awful I can hardly bear to think about them. The social consequences were much the same if you were raped or got ‘caught out’ — what made your experience better or worse was having a supportive family with money.

My grandmother once alluded to her mum knowing how to get rid of a pregnancy and lots of women in the village went t her. I was doing an aromatherapy course and she recognised some of the oils!

Another thing that was often said was that a good husband was one who didn't 'bother his wife much'. No ideas that sex was meant to be pleasurable for the woman - probably because it wasn't. My other grandmother told my mum 'It always hurt'.

There was definitely other forms of contraception before the pill. But Catholic church discouraged the use of such things.

Maybe something to do with the fact its run by (supposedly) celibate men who never needed to worry about the cost of feeding or clothing a large family. They don't have wifes either so no need to worry about the damage to her body caused by so many pregnancies.

Ministers / Vicars are free to marry and have children. So actually understand the problems of having huge familes. So probably wanted to use protection themselves and couldn't discourage their use.

Pure curiosity what about other religious leaders muslim / jews are they allowed to marry?

LoveObject I am one of those 'hidden' babies from a traditional Irish/Catholic family and I was brought up to believe my birth mother was actually my unmarried Aunt. I was adopted by her brother and his wife as they had been married for 2 yrs (unusual in a young Catholic marriage) and raised as their's. A couple of years later they had a DD who I believe is their natural child, we were treated so differently and even as small children knew which family members

Btw, this adoptive mother told me to 'always' have a knitting needle or two on hand and make sure I had a nurse as a friend in case I needed to them in the future.

At the time (1966 or thereabouts) I didn't know what she was eluding to and she wouldn't elaborate, it was some years later before I realised it was to cause an abortion. Throughout my childhood she had several friends who were nurses and who visited our house on a regular basis (weekly) often unknown other women would visit at the same time and I remember 'all' kids were locked outside to play in the backyard. Reading this thread has brought it all back as if it was yesterday.

Makes me shudder to think what was happening in my own home.

Withdrawal, condoms, sponges, douching with disinfectant, diaphragms

Families were bigger, women had back street abortions it’s was horrific

My nanny told me how her mil (my great granny) cried when she found out she was pregnant at 48 and she had fallen down the stairs, took numerous hot baths and prayed she would start bleeding

Condoms, diaphragm, withdrawel, rthym method...
Thinking of my parents/aunts generation (50s and early 60s). Familys were mainly 2,3,4 dc.

It's my grandparents generation that was 6, 7, 9. Although my DGM born 1933 was only one of 3.

Btw - these are all Italian Catholics in my examples. Mostly from the countryside.

@zzzzz Think about your statistics again....

Makes me shudder to think what was happening in my own home.

It was a good thing. Those women desperately didn’t want to be pregnant. Probably saved a few lives too.

If two people have two children, then they are 'replacing' themselves....

Dry humping

Zzzzzz you come up with a better idea why the Catholic church was so keen to reject and discourage the use of contraception.

It has to be related to having male leaders who weren't directly affected by the policy. Yes they must have seen the effects on there mothers or did they really see what happened - who went without food to ensure that the kids were fed?

Agreed, IfIWas. I'd be saving my horror for the political and religious regimes which denied women control of their own bodies.

Attempting to abort wasn't necessarily a scuzzy backstreet phenomenon, either -- the fantastically respectable Victorian Mrs Gaskell, famous novelist, wife of a Unitarian minister, mother of four, writes in a letter that she wished someone had let her know that her friend Charlotte Bronte was dying of HG, because she would have attempted to induce a miscarriage in order to save her.

(And yes, some people think CB died of typhus, and her death cert says TB, but a lot of biographers think otherwise, and in any case, it's interesting to think of a pillar of society like Mrs Gaskell referring in a completely matter-of-fact way to ending a pregnancy using some unspecified domestic means at her disposal.)

I think religion influenced things. Catholics were encouraged to have children, presumably it was gods will, all children were precious type of attitude. Imv asa non catholic , a good way of increasing numbers. Whereas Protestants could use contraception but also, imv, it was looked down on to appear to be at it, with many DCs, often in poor households. Irresponsible.
In some African countries girls are marriageable very young so have a long reproductive life, whereas in the west the reproductive years are shortening as people start families later.
Switzerland has I believe very strict immigration laws and even if people work there they still may not get passports so that will make a difference to other countries, though might have changed recently.
2/3 of European Jews were killed in death camps/ ww2 I think, must have affected stats.
If each couple has 2 children the population will shrink slowly as some DCs are lost due to illness/ accident pre procreation.
I can't spare time to look up and check all this. These are my beliefs.

Zzzzz most cultures marriage comes before children. Thats not unique to RC

My point is that as a previous poster pointed out in Ireland at the same time as Catholics were having huge families, Protestants were limiting their families.

Ok, what other than single blokes who make up the rules, made the church really push the view that restricting babies was a bad thing?

I don't believe it was purely belief about procreation. All Christian churches have the same bible. What is / was the real agenda ?

Curiousity do Jews hold the same views, do they have huge families, are their leaders free to marry?
And the same for muslims?

Withdrawal has been around since forever. It's not terribly effective but probably "works" enough to at least space out pregnancies.

Vaginal douches and sponges were in use from quite some way back--certainly in the mid-19th century (which is the point when we can see clear evidence that middle-class families in places like England and France were definitely starting to take steps to limit family size).

The coil dates back to the early 1900s. Tubal ligation probably not long after. Even in our times, tubal ligation/vasectomy is still probably the biggest contraceptive of all in terms of number of potential births prevented. Most couples who have completed their families get snipped rather than relying on long-term use of the pill.

From the middle ages until the Industrial Revolution, the biggest limitation on family size was late marriage. Contrary to what is common believed, early-teen brides were not the norm. The mean average age of marriage for women in this period was around 24-ish in England and probably similar in most other western countries, and records suggested on average women had their last child at around 35 or 36. That only leaves about 12 years to have children.

I think anal as well.
Men don't just go without sex.
I feel sorry for women in those days who were probably desperate to be left alone so they didn't have to be pregnant yet again.

as a previous poster pointed out in Ireland at the same time as Catholics were having huge families, Protestants were limiting their families.

If you're talking about post-independence Ireland, contraception was illegal from the early 1930s till 1980, when the situation was relaxed gradually. So anyone living in Ireland at that time, whatever their religious beliefs, was bound by the same law, and the same lack of availability of condoms, pill etc.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraception_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland

The Catholic position on 'artificial' contraception by which is meant anything other than the rhythm method (which is essentially abstaining from sex when you're fertile) because all sex acts have to be open to the possibility of contraception is laid out in a papal encyclical called Casti conubii in 1930, and the more famous one Humanae Vitae (1968). The date of the latter is no coincidence -- it was after the pill was being marketed internationally, and many Catholics (and priests) believed the encyclical would allow the use of the pill, and were horrified when the position stayed the same.

I don't think it's any particular mystery why Catholicism enforces a celibate clergy though in fact it did so quite late, 12th century. As well as setting its priesthood apart, making them more special, and requiring total dedication to God in the way favoured by Saint Misogynist-- Paul who thought marriage was only for those without the strength to be celibate, it also meant that the considerable wealth of the church remained centralised and was not passed down via inheritance to children. Before it made clerical celibacy a rule, there were various canon laws about forbidding priests' children to inherit.

From almost the beginning of the post-Reformation church, Protestantism was anti-celibacy, partly to differentiate itself from Catholicism, partly because it saw clerical celibacy as promoting homosexuality and masturbation -- hence married Protestant clergy.

(Though there are now a minority of Catholic married priests -- when women priests were allowed by various Protestant denominations, some married priests who weren't happy with this converted to Catholicism, and obviously remained married.)