My daughter wanted to share this term paper related to History of Post-Confederate Quebec as a comment because she felt it related to my recent many Catholic Church blogs. She wanted to share in particular the part where the church was manipulative over people's lives.
______________________________________________________
The obvious decline in Quebec’s birth rate during the 1960s and following decades was due largely to the release of oral contraceptives. This was a pivotal time for women, as it allowed them to achieve freedom over their sexuality and their bodies. Effects of this newfound freedom were felt throughout Quebecois society with dire consequences for the Catholic Church. While the Catholic Church had played a great role in the lives and especially the sexuality of Catholic spouses during the beginning of the twentieth century, its position quickly became compromised in the latter half of the century. The widespread availability of oral contraceptives had other consequences, notably on birthrates, pre-marital intercourse, marriage and the discussion of sexuality in general.
Prior to the 1960s, methods of contraception ranged from abstinence to limiting intercourse during the woman’s cycle when she was least likely to be fertile. This combined with that fact that the Catholic Church had a staunch reputation against contraception, meant that women had limited control over their pregnancies and family size. They had even less control of their sexuality, since their enjoyment of intercourse was seen as an evil by the Catholic Church. This meant that at times when couples broke from their abstinence, the woman was not permitted to enjoy the act itself. However, women “were generally forgiven, provided that they did not take pleasure in and consented to relations only after unsuccessfully trying to convince their husbands about the merits of abstinence”. It is interesting to note that while the Catholic Church had obvious disdain for contraception, they also viewed the act of intercourse as something un-pure and sinful, for which the couple needed forgiveness in the form of confession. Women then looked for absolution during confession, and most priests, with the exception of a few, gave it, since they felt a “desire to relieve women’s suffering” and many felt sympathetic to the distress they saw from numerous women about their sexual moral dilemma.
Some Catholic clergy argued that if the man withdrew before completing the act of lovemaking, it would not count as a sin, because they had not gone through the full act, there was intention but no completion. While this method allowed couples to receive communion, the Catholic Church preferred couples showed their love and devotion to each other through others ways like “marriage characterized by permanence, fidelity and openness to life” as well as “through virginity or celibacy”. And when couples did decide to engage in “sexual love”, the Catholic Church firmly believed that “using the natural rhythms of the body to regulate fertility is a more humanistic way to live procreative responsibility than using chemical or mechanical contraceptives”. The doctrine of the Catholic Church presents us with an interesting dichotomy between the fact that couples should be abstaining from intercourse in general, since making love was a sin, the fact that if couples were participating in the act of lovemaking that they should not be practicing methods of contraception and finally that if they were making love that women should not be enjoying themselves during the act.
This pressure placed undue stress on wives, as “one secularized priest expressed resentment […] ‘women were extremely distraught … I heard a priest say [to one woman] …. [that] when her husband takes her, she only has to say her prayers and she won’t feel pleasure’”. The marital turmoil caused by abstinence also had its effects on Catholic French Canadian couples, who “found themselves in a moral dilemma, torn between the physical desire that they felt for one another, their desire to limit the size of their families, and their desire to live in a proper Christian way”. This moral dilemma often led to sour marriages, since the constant sexual conflict did not help the mental state of couples, especially with priests breathing down their necks. The amount of sexual repression that Catholic couples were subjected to before the 1960s quickly led the Catholic Church become associated with negativity in relation to their interference in marriages and sexuality. Couples essentially ended up having to make the choice of “God over love or love over God”, where the first choice resulted in eternal conflict within the marriage and the second choice resulted in confession of sins to receive absolution from the Priest, and his endless hounding in face of their constant sinning.
The release of the oral contraceptive in the 1960s had a number of effects on Quebecois society. First, women now had the option of using this contraceptive to limit their family size without resorting to abstinence. Secondly, the Catholic Church rejected this new form of contraception, which placed them in the way of their followers’ ability to control their own sex lives. A great number of priests had hoped the Vatican Council of 1962 would accept the oral contraceptive, on the grounds that it would relieve them of their task of comforting countless women who wanted to limit their family size. As aforementioned, previous to oral contraceptives, some methods did exist to control family size, including abstinence and the rhythm method. While practicing the rhythm method was did not always guarantee to prevent pregnancies, they did limit the number of pregnancies, and this had a modest effect on the birthrate. It was even recognized that among North American Catholics the “number of children per family among Catholics of the middle and comfortable classes is little more than half the average that obtained the families of their parents”. This illustrates that while limiting family size and preventing pregnancies were not most effective previous to the oral contraceptive, the methods available were already a start in the right direction, when considering birth statistics.
According to Gervais and Gauvreau’s data, in Canada, from 1876 to 1886, the average number of children per married woman was 6.4, while 50 years later, from 1926-1931, it was 3.6. In the span of 50 years, the average family size had already decreased by about half. Thus while older methods of contraception may not have been at their most effective, they still helped diminish the birthrate. Of course, since they were ineffective at preventing all unwanted pregnancies, many women still became pregnant, and in fact “the overall percentage of brides who were pregnant at marriage increased through the 1950s, reached a peak in the late 1960s, and only began to decrease among women married in the 1970s”. Though birth control was available in Canada starting in the 1960s, the number of pregnant brides was still high, because not all women were educated enough to receive instructions about it, and the overall amount of sexual relations occurring in this decade rose dramatically, thanks to the pill itself. Since women now believed sex to be safe, the incidences of women having intercourse increased, especially those who began having premarital sex. However, according to Cook, while women began having sex before and outside of marriage, some claimed not to have started using the pill until they were in a serious sexual relationship. This meant that if they had intercourse with a man and were not in a relationship with them, they were more likely to get pregnant, because they were not in fact using the pill at that moment.
The pill also brought the concept of contraception into the medical sphere, since women had to visit a physician to get them. Thus contraception became less of a problem for the priesthood and a practice instead regulated by the medical profession. It “allowed physicians relatively painlessly to supplant priests as the new, less intrusive social gatekeepers of sexuality and reproduction in Quebec”. Before the pill, no medical methods had been available and physicians had basically been respondents, there to treat the woman in the occurrence of “a miscarriage, an abortion or a birth”. Abortions were illegal, but many women resorted to them in the face of their ever expanding family size. These abortions were done illegally, with “disastrous consequences when performed with makeshift devices”, and doctors were called onto the scene to clean things up afterwards, though they could not “finish illegal abortions themselves” they were “expected to do what they could to save a patient”. Thus they did have some part of pregnant women’s lives, but it was mostly when the pregnancy was already over, or for actual medical emergencies during the pregnancy. This clearly changed when women procured the pill by prescription from physicians, though physicians weren’t there to discuss marital problems, family size or contraception. Instead, they were there to provide a treatment for “a means of controlling irregular menstrual cycles”, which was very different from the so called responsibility of priests towards marital issues of family limitation.
When the Catholic Church decided that they would oppose contraception, it appeared to be on grounds of women belong to the domestic sphere. Since the oral contraceptive allowed for greater control over the number of children a couple would have, some Catholic clergy argued that it would “weaken women’s commitment to an ideal of domesticity founded upon maternity and this, in a larger sense, would erode one of the central pillars of Quebec’s laboriously constructed post-war synthesis of democracy and authority, that is, the close identification of married women with family roles.” The idea that the women’s sphere was the home and the private, domestic life, had already been struggling in the advent of World War II, when many women went to work because of a shortage of men. Easier, readily available contraception could be coupled with this newfound independence and project women from the house into the workplace, since they were not subject to constant pregnancies, taking care of children and managing the household. The pill meant that women could finally have some measure of control over their lives and “take the more equal status that the assertion of the right to sexual pleasure and greater freedom from constant maternity conferred to argue for greater equality and independence in the wider public sphere”. Not everyone was content with this jump women were about to make, including some physicians that were treating them during the release of the birth control. As one said “birth control had evolved from a moral issue involving husbands to a women’s decision exclusively and thus a source of concern for husbands”, making it clear that physicians, as men, may have been threatened by the idea of the pill.
In Quebec, conservatives were trying to keep women in the home, in the domestic sphere and “frequently evoked the image of women attending to motherhood and household in the hope of creating a psychological placebo that would deflect married women away from seeking fulfillment through economic equality in work roles”. They were attempting to convey the image that women belonged in the home, and should return there to take care of their family and children. There were others who were of a different opinion, who regarded women’s roles with the potential “of wife, mother, widow, and single person, which offered the possibility of a variety of activities and careers”. The pill came at a time when the ideas of a purely women sphere were becoming eroded, and the chance for women to migrate into the men’s sphere, albeit difficult and subject to many obstacles, was starting to be possible and not at all uncommon. It was a positive development for women who wanted to be single or even married without the pressures of motherhood.
It is clear that with the widespread availability of new methods of contraception, the character of Quebecois society was permanently changed and many of these changes can still be felt today. The influence of the Catholic Church waned, due in part to its loss of authority over sexual relations and its opposition to the new oral contraception. It was also an important stage for women on the road to independence and equality in a patriarchal culture.
Written by Samantha Orianne-Walker
Bibliography
Andrews, Gilly, ed. Women’s Sexual Health. Edinburgh: Elsevier Ltd, 2005
Beaujot, Roderic and Don Kerr. The Changing Face of Canada: Essential Readings in Population. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc, 2007.
Cook, Hera. The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex & Contraception 1800-1975. New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 2004.
Dickenson, John and Brian Young. A short history of Quebec. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
Gauvreau, Michael. The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005.
Gervais, Diane and Danielle Gauvreau. “Women, Priests and Physicians: Family Limitation in Quebec, 1940-1970.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 293-314.
Szreter, Simon, Nye, Robert A. and Frans van Poppel. “Fertility and Contraception during the Demographic Transition: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34-2 (2003): 141-154.
Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Catholics and Contraception. New York: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Posts
