But it hasn’t been an easy story to tell, partly because accurate information about the plants women used in family planning has been difficult to come by. And partly because there are so many tragic stories—like the story of Delia Hunt, in this book, whose life was ended when she mistook one plant for another. (Or was it a mistake? There are many ambiguities, and to tell the truth, I’m not really sure how Delia died. All we know is that our fictional sheriff doesn’t feel that he can press charges.) Over the centuries during which women have been seeking ways to avoid pregnancy or end it in the first couple of months, many such mistakes must have been made, and that’s the real tragedy. Lacking a guide or adequate information, women took what they hoped would be an effective remedy. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn’t.
As for accurate information, the whole issue is clouded—and for some very understandable reasons. In most cultures, in both ancient and modern times, a woman’s control of her fertility is a vexed question. A woman who wanted to avoid pregnancy could be faced with religious prohibitions, restrictive and punitive laws, and the disapproval of family and community. Whatever she did to control her reproductive process, she usually did in secret and in silence, with the support of only her closest female friends or a sympathetic sister or mother. She relied on folk knowledge that was shared among women, was rarely written down, and offered varying degrees of reliability.
What’s more, the folk knowledge that women possessed in earlier centuries, because it was orally transmitted and rarely written down, has been virtually inaccessible to us. When knowledge about women’s bodies was considered “black magic,” it was important not to possess any written evidence of the practices, to avoid being burned at the stake. When few women could read or write, most got their information from family and friends, often in the form of folk sayings, like the Devonshire ditty about lad’s love and maiden’s ruin, or “Rue in thyme is a maiden’s posy”—which often were not recorded until much later. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, modern medicine worked very hard (and quite successfully) to suppress information about all medical practices involving therapeutic plants. Documenting the uses of plants in the management of women’s fertility has been difficult.
Thankfully, there is more interest in and respect for folk medicine today than there has been in the past century. A number of contemporary scholars have worked hard to discover and share with us the long, long history of women’s uses of contraceptive and abortifacient plants. I have relied on the work of four for the herbal information in this novel. John M. Riddle’s study, Eve’s Herbs, is a history of contraception and abortion, primarily in the West. Ann Hibner Koblitz’s Sex and Herbs and Birth Control is a cross-cultural study that includes examples not only from the ancients and from Western Europe, but from Algeria, China, India, Vietnam, and indigenous North American peoples. Her work gives us a glimpse into the methods that women of many cultures have used to regulate their fertility and control their reproduction. A third is the chapter on “anti-fertility technology” in Autumn Stanley’s all-around excellent book, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. The fourth is Daniel Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany, a massive catalogue of North American plants and their uses by indigenous peoples. Moerman lists forty-one plant species that were used by Native American women as contraceptives and 102 as abortifacients. Women from different tribes frequently used the same plant. Artemisia, for instance, was used as an abortifacient by Blackfoot, Chippewa, Dakota, Kawaiisu, Menominee, Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, and Sioux. Autumn Stanley made a comment that I find interesting: she noted that often during ethnobotanical studies, informants claimed that they didn’t know or couldn’t remember the names of plants that were used to control female reproduction. Stanley adds, “I suspect that the women knew very well what plants were used but would not tell a male anthropologist such secrets.” Indeed!
Researchers who have tackled this thorny subject agree on a list of traditional herbal contraceptives that were used across cultures: parsley, rue, thyme, pennyroyal, juniper (savin), tansy, golden groundsel, artemisia, blue cohosh, acacia, assafoetida, Queen Anne’s lace, slippery elm, calamus (sweet flag), and cotton root. Most of these were described as emmenagogues, plants used to provoke or induce menstruation by causing uterine contractions—good to know if your period was late. These herbal preparations were usually taken orally as a strong tea (plant material steeped in boiling water) or as a tincture (plant material steeped in alcohol). If you were more than a few weeks late, some of these plant remedies might have been administered vaginally. Koblitz, for instance, tells us that both slippery elm (in North America) and mallow root (in medieval Turkey) were used as an abortifacient: “fashioned into a probe and inserted into the womb” with one end attached to the thigh by a string. The probe remained in place “for as long as two weeks until bleeding occurred” (Sex and Herbs and Birth Control, p. 21).
To prevent conception, plant-based barrier devices were used, depending on what was locally available and culturally acceptable. In coastal regions, women employed vaginal seaweed sponges or kelp treated with honey (an antimotility agent) or lemon juice (a spermicide). In North America, native women made diaphragms of birch bark, while in Sumatra, women made tampons dipped in tannic acid (another effective spermicide). And there was the lemon-half cupped over the cervix, said to have been used by American female slaves (Mothers and Daughters of Invention, p. 261). Women’s ingenuity was matched only by their desire to avoid pregnancy unless they could welcome the child into a supportive and caring family.
Both
