Control over both land and people were an idea central to the patriarchal system that ruled antebellum southern society. The society in which women of this era lived allowed men to preside over their wives just as they did over their slaves; these white males even argued that the institution of slavery was comparable to marriage between a man and woman. Central to this patriarchal system was the concept of large families. Because of this, southern men glorified the maternal role and criticized “masculine” northern women who stepped beyond it.1 For a southern male, a large family reflected positively on his status, his masculinity, and his ability to support his dependents.2 This societal attitude among men forced southern women to live in an environment where large families were expected and birth control and abortion were rarely used. During the antebellum period the patriarchal society of the south continued to mandate large families, causing the birth rate in southern locations to remain high as the average birth rate declined in other areas of the country.

In the south’s patriarchal society, women served the essential role of linking families through marriage and continuing the patriarchy by giving birth to heirs.3 The antebellum south was a place of endless land and economic opportunities; however it was the societal belief that motherhood was a woman’s main role in life that perpetuated the large family sizes that were common in the south. In this hierarchical world of rural plantation society, women had few choices other than to become a mother, and most southern women had been properly brought up to accept this position and to veil any protests.4 One Tennessee doctor noted that a patient had given birth to several children because she was eager to make her husband happy by having a large family.5 Women accepted this duty because they accepted their role in this society as being dependent upon their male counterparts. In letters written by R.F.W. Allston, a rice planter and governor, to his wife, Allston addresses her as his “dear child.” Similarly a plantation mistress thanked God for giving her a husband who possessed a “master will” that suited her female nature.6 Considering the positive impact that having a large family had on a white male’s reputation and masculinity, why would he not want to have as many children as possible.

Yet another reason why men were more likely to be enthusiastic about a pregnancy pertained to the fact that they did not have to endure the discomforts of pregnancy, the pains of labor, and usually the direct responsibilities of infant rearing.7 Although southern women accepted their roles as child bearer and mother, they did not always share their husband’s enthusiasm. An entry in the diary of Ella Clanton Thomas suggests this by saying that the “sickness of stomach” she was experiencing probably indicated that she was pregnant. Thomas refers to the possibility of being pregnant again in the summer as a “calamity”; she had no wish to go through the same pains of a summer pregnancy that she had experienced the year before.”8 During her third pregnancy in three years of marriage, Thomas remarked that she wanted to have other children, but she would prefer to space them out over longer periods of time.9 If this sentiment was common among southern women, they avoided discussion of it in their journals and diaries, but what can be found in their manuscripts is that these women were giving birth to numerous children, with many giving birth to anywhere from eight to a dozen live children each.10

Family size decreased nationwide during the antebellum period, from an average of 7.04 children per woman of childbearing age in 1800 to 5.4 in 1850, but this decline in the national birth rate did not appear to occur in the south.11 A recent study conducted by Jane Turner Censer concluded that the average birthrate among the North Carolina plantation population was seven children per marriage during the antebellum period.12 Another study estimated that plantation wives in Alabama had an average of 5.5 live children during this period.13 The traditional large families of the antebellum south left visitors such as, John Bernard, an English comedian who visited North Carolina about 1800, amazed. Bernard never saw fewer than a dozen children in a family and said that “the women seem to bear them in a litter in these regions.”14

Families in Georgia also adhered to the southern trend of large families, and the genealogies of several generations of the Durham’s of Clarke County provide a localized example of the tendency for prominent southern women to give birth to many children. The Durham family tree provides information regarding four generations of Durham men and their families. Samuel Davis Durham and his wife Isabel Lindsey gave life to the first generation that included a total of seven children given birth to between 1782 and 1798. The births were between two to four years apart. From this brood came William Durham who married Rebecca Reynolds. This couple had a total of ten children between 1807 and 1831, however the exact birth dates were not provided for these children. Dr. Lindsey Durham was the next generation of Durham men to have a large family when he married Martha Walker, who gave birth to fourteen children between 1823 and 1843. These births occurred in usually one to two year increments. The last generation of Durham men listed in this chronology is Judge Lindsey Durham, Jr., who married Lettitia Johnston Richardson. Between 1846 and1868, the couple had thirteen children in one to four year increments. The number of children born to the sisters and brothers of these men were also typically larger than five.15 The trend of large families exhibited by the Durham’s extends to a listing of fifty-seven other families that lived in Athens during the antebellum period. Of the fifty-seven families examined, only thirteen of them had less than five children, while twenty-six families had between five and eight children, and eighteen families had between nine and twelve children.16 Both the number of children born to the four generations of Durham’s and the fifty-seven Athenian families sampled indicate that southern women were ahead of the national average of births rate that had been declining during the antebellum period.

Although wills left by the deceased may not provide any entirely accurate number of children born to a specific family due to deaths of children or favoritism, these documents can still serve as a resource to examine the number of children that were present - and in good standing with the writer of the will - at the time it was written. Wills written by Talbot County, Georgia, residents during the antebellum period support of the existence of larger families. The majority of these wills were either written or signed - it was difficult to figure out which - in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s when the national average of children per family was 5.4. Out of the twenty-four families examined, twelve of them had five to eight children, while one family had eleven children.17

The examples these genealogies and wills provide indicate how common larger families were in the south, as well as how acceptable they were considered by antebellum southern society. This expectation of large families left southern women who were unable to have as many children as families such as the Durham’s, or the other families examined, at a disadvantage in this society. Women who were unable to have children such as Mary Boykin Chestnut referred to herself as a “childless wretch,” and noticed, “women have such contempt for a childless wife.”18 The attitude toward childless women that Chestnut observed was one that originated from male glorification of woman’s role as mother. Not only did southern men believe that childbearing and child rearing were central to a woman’s existence because of the important role that they played in the patriarchal system, but they were responsible for instilling their ideas concerning the joys of childbearing and child rearing into the minds of the southern women they controlled. A southern medical student - no doubt male - of this period believed that women had eternally seen an inability to have children as a “great calamity” and that all of their hopes and happiness were centered on the hope of having children.19 If this was the belief among antebellum men, it is understandable that women must have been easily persuaded into believing that motherhood was their destined role in life.

Doctors, such as Lindsey Durham, even had remedies to help women “produce menses” and to help with sterility.20 His remedies were more than likely ineffective or potentially harmful by today’s medical standards, but the remedies were probably quite acceptable during his time considering Durham was a respectable physician in Athens. In his bound book of medical remedies, Durham suggests that a barren woman take five pieces of silver, put them into a basin of water, and place the Bible over the basin. After a period of time, the woman is instructed to dip her right hand followed by her right foot in the water and to repeat this on the other side. Then she should wet the crown of her head and then throw the water behind a fire, resulting in fertility.21 To produce menses he suggests filling a bottle more than half full with an herb and adding spirits to fill the bottles. The woman should then drink a moderate amount of this five times a day until menses is achieved.22 The presence of these ‘cures’ indicates that a woman’s ability to get pregnant and stay pregnant were of central concern to this society. His interest in recording these remedies also indicates that they were probably used regularly, as they were listed alongside cures for the flu and other common ailments.

Although southern doctors such as Durham provided women with such remedies for becoming pregnant, there is no record of them supporting or informing patients about the growing trend of practicing birth control. During the first half of the nineteenth century, methods of birth control such as withdrawal, douching, and rhythm were gaining popularity in America, and literature such as Moral Physiology, by Robert Dale Owen, that informed people about birth control methods became much easier to attain as well.23 The availability of both products and literature concerning birth control shows that use of contraception had been commercialized and had become a more public topic than ever before. Although women in the north were able to experiment with the knowledge they gained about methods of birth control, southern women remained ignorant. The patriarchal system of the south did not allow women to practice these new ideas, or at least the higher southern birth rate suggests this. Southern society instructed its women to readily accepted their role as mothers of large families, and there are few records of birth control or abortions being used in this region.

One form of potential birth control that southern women sometimes practiced was breastfeeding, an activity that could help them avoid becoming pregnant again and would be beneficial for their newborn infant. This was one method that women had looked to particularly during the eighteenth century24, and like their ancestors, antebellum southern mothers might have favored breast-feeding because they understood that lactation could impede conception. Medical journals of the south, such as the Charleston Medical Journal and Review, printed an article written by Robert Barnes that discussed how women who breastfed their infants had a lower rate of conception. The presence of this article affirms that doctors of this period were aware of the relationship between lactation and conception; however whether or not they shared this knowledge with patients is unknown.25 As with anything sexually related, women usually did not leave any written evidence that they used breastfeeding for contraceptive purposes. However, if a woman was looking for a way to avoid pregnancy, unlike the withdrawal method or abstinence, breastfeeding was a way for women to prolong the period between giving birth and becoming pregnant again without having to provide answers to the men in their lives.

By the 1830’s, withdrawal and other means of birth control were being practiced by middle-class couples in the Northeast, but southern women rarely did, at least judging by large southern families and the frequency with which white women bore children.26 Most southern women did not consider using birth control for personal or religious reasons. A Mrs. Norwood, seemed to never even consider birth control as a means to limit her family size, and said that she often worried about the speed at which her family was growing larger.27 Similar to the way in which slaves were also dependent upon southern white males, women could not be given information concerning contraception, as controlling one’s fertility would be a means of independence. Southern men surely realized that providing women with knowledge of how to limit family size would have produced smaller families, a change that had the potential to destroy the hierarchy that these men had been accustomed to reigning over. Mrs. Norwood was probably never informed about a means to limit her family size because it would have undermined the patriarchal system; informing her would have allowed her to be her husband’s equal in this area, not his subordinate.

A woman was by no means considered her husband’s equal. In issues of the Southern Banner, the Athens newspaper, between the years of 1831-1838, this fact becomes painfully obvious. In each paper there were ‘notices’ sections that listed the town’s events, advertised various services, informed of runaway property, and warned of people charged with having bad character. There were also notices from men warning townspeople against having anything to do with their disobedient wives. Judging by the frequency of these notices over this eight-year period, women did not always adhere to the strong hand of their husbands. But when they disobeyed, the punishment was perhaps as harsh as one that would be given to a disobedient slave. Some men such as an A. Chastain simply warned people against trading with his wife as she had left his bed and board.28 Other men threatened legal action against anyone who might aid the woman, as James Dabbs warned townspeople against “harboring or boarding” his wife under the penalty of law.29 In some of these notices, men also mentioned that their wives had left without just cause or without their consent; women were written about as property that should be returned. Alongside these notices concerning runaway wives were those asking for assistance in locating runaway slaves. Women and slaves were both dependents as well as property of the white southern male, and notices such as one written by Colson Copland offering a five dollar reward for the apprehension and return of his wife, Martha Copland, verify this.30

Southern women were being exploited for their childbearing capabilities, in much the same way that slaves were being used for their laboring capabilities in the antebellum south. In the nineteenth century, various birth control methods were becoming popular among women in the north. The once private and personal topic was becoming both commercial and public. But, because southern women were considered to be as dependent upon their husbands as his slaves were for survival, women were denied knowledge of ways in which they could limit the size of their families. Instead of being told there were alternatives to numerous pregnancies, these women were bombarded with the male glorification of motherhood that left most southern women uninterested in using birth control or having fewer children, and resulted in a higher birth rate in the south than in the north.

If these women had been capable of limiting their pregnancies they would have been allowed freedom and control over their own bodies. White males recognized that giving both freedom and control to dependent members of society would ensure the collapse of the patriarchal system these men were fully aware that allowing one group independence would lead to the other group to desire freedom. If women had been capable of gaining reproductive independence, slaves might have seem themselves as being entitled to some form of freedom as well. It was far easier to control all levels of southern society than to allow selective liberties.31 To allow either group even a small amount of independence would have lead to the demise of the patriarchal system. And so southern men avoided the downfall of their beloved system by placing women into the role of reproducer and mother, which in turn perpetuated their patriarchies.

There is little evidence to suggest that women did not willingly accept the southern expectation of having numerous children; southern women typically avoided discussing sexually oriented topics in their letters and diaries, and it is difficult to know if women longed to use birth control or have fewer children. Perhaps women could not protest what was perceived to be their ‘natural’ role in life because they were so accustomed to the masculine perspectives that had been engrained in their minds since childhood. Perhaps they were incapable of thinking outside of the box. Considering the large size of southern families that persisted throughout the antebellum period, it appears that because of their duty in southern patriarchal society women accepted the expectation that they would have numerous children and would like doing so. It would not be until the end of slavery that the southern white male’s worst nightmare would come true. Once slaves gained their independence women became capable of demanding freedoms of their own. Unfortunately, the Comstock Law would be passed in the late nineteenth century that made transmission or knowledge of birth control or abortion illegal, at the time when the southern female was finally allowed to seek some reproductive freedom. Once the Comstock Law was passed, the government did not allow southern women to practice birth control, but these women were finally free of the rigid patriarchal system that had left them ignorant of birth control methods and had lead to such numerous pregnancies - an ironic ending to the story of this southern family tradition.

1. Sally G. McMillen , Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990) , 3 .

2. Sally G. McMillen , Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South (Arlington Heights, Ill: Harlan Davidson, 1992) , 50 .

3. Michael Johnson , “Planters and Patriarchy: Charleston, 1800-1860 ,” The Journal of Southern History 46, no. 1 (1980) : 50.

4. McMillen , Motherhood in the Old South , 183 .

5. McMillen , Motherhood in the Old South , 35.

6. Stephanie McCurry , “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina,” The Journal of American History 78 , no. 4 (1992) : 1253.

7. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 35.

8. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 34 .

9. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 122 .

10. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 32 .

11. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 32.

12. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 32.

13. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 32.

14. Guion Griffis Johnson , Unheard Voices: the First Historians of Southern Women , ed . Anne Firor Scott (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1993) , 160 .

15. Lindsey-Durham Manuscript Collection , University of Georgia Hargrett Library Collection .

16. Augustus Longstreet Hull , Annals of Athens 1801-1901 (Danielsville, Ga: Heritage Press, 1978) , 441-478 . ( However I was lacking two pages of the genealogies, pages 460 and 461, and based my count of families on this.)

17. They Were Here , vol. 9 (Albany, GA: Georgia Genealogical Records, 1977) , 123-129.

18. McMillen , Motherhood in the Old South , 32 .

19. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 32 .

20. Lindsey-Durham Manuscript Collection .

21. Lindsey-Durham Manuscript Collection .

22. Lindsey-Durham Manuscript Collection .

23. Janet Farrell Brodie , Contraception and Abortion in 19th Century America (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994) , 60.

24. Brodie , 45-46 .

25. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 122 .

26. McMillen , Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South , 50 .

27. McMillen , Motherhood in the Old South , 108 .

28. “Notices,” Southern Banner , 22 December 1838 .

29. “Notices,” Southern Banner , 12 October 1832 .

30. “Notices,” Southern Banner , 9 August 1834 .

31. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South , 183 .