The Coat Hanger Trick

 From Coat Hangars and Knitting Needles. Women living in New England  in the late 1800s and early 1900s speak about abortion.

         A Victorian Woman Speaks 

 

 

If she used the knitting needle method,

did she and her friends shove it up their vaginas themselves?

 

 

My grandmother, Florence Stockbridge Sargent (or Dar to everyone who knew her), was the perfect Victorian lady. Even in the early 1960s she would never leave the house without her hat, gloves and corset.

I couldn’t imagine her having sex, and that is not a grandchild’s lack of imagination. She bragged that her late husband had never seen her naked, but they must have had sex at least three times because she had three children.

She often repeated the story of helping at the birth of her nephew, Lawrence. Her sister-inlaw was in agony.

“You are next, Mrs. Sargent,” the doctor was reported to have said.

“Not until I forget tonight,” my grandmother claims to have replied.

She must have forgotten. My Uncle Gordon was born in 1910, his sister Lois in 1915. Lois died during her first year in my grandmother’s arms, cause unknown, but she had “failed to flourish,” an often-used term to describe babies that do not seem to accept nourishment.

My mother was the replacement child born in 1917.

Anxious to preserve my purity, my grandmother cautioned me on keeping the proper distance from a boy on the dance floor. After I had dated my future husband for several months while a sophomore in high school, she asked if he’d ever kissed me. When I nodded, she asked,

“On the mouth?”

I did not go into French kissing or our petting sessions in his 1950 green Chevrolet.

My imagination was boggled a couple of years later when we were discussing the small number of children her friends had. They were all wives in middle-class Massachusetts and were the essence of the cliché prim and proper. They could star in a period drama of their time.

Trying to think of them having a sex life is hard. My grandfather was an engineer and gruff. He could have taught dogs how to bark at strangers, yet never did a spring go by where he did not pick one endangered-species lady slipper from the land behind their house and give it to his wife.

His law-abiding ways were put aside to bring her the pleasure of her favorite flower.

Had my grandparents and their friends practiced abstinence?

It was not something I could have ever asked. I didn’t have to. Dar voluntarily said that the families were small because her friends used the “knitting needle” trick.

[This was 1965. Griswold v. Connecticut had just been passed so as a married woman (I was 23) I could legally buy birth control for the first time since the Comstock Laws were passed in 1873.]

I sat there stunned, not sure that I understood what my grandmother was saying. Once I processed the information, so many thoughts raced through my mind.

If she used the knitting needle method, did she and her friends shove it up their vaginas themselves?

Did a friend help? 

Was there a doctor who did it?

I wished I’d asked, but at the time, it seemed so inappropriate. I could not imagine how I would have gotten the words out my mouth. And as loving as my grandmother was, could I have assaulted her privacy beyond her remark about the “knitting needle” solution?

I believed my grandmother. Her friends had to have some way to control reproduction, because most had two or a maximum of three children. They would cluck at foreigners and Catholics, whom they said “bred like bunnies.” I can’t imagine all those Victorian ladies’ husbands going for years without sex. One or two, maybe, but certainly not all.

Thus, when my grandmother referred to the “knitting needle” method of birth control, I was equally shocked that she said it in the same way that she would have said, “It’s time for bed” or “What will we have for dinner tonight?”

Unmarried sex was somehow not all right, but abortion, when necessary, was.

I am now older than my grandmother was when we had the “knitting needle” conversation, and it still shocks me for the casualness of it and the acceptance of something that seems outside the strict spoken moral tone of the time, never mind the legal.

The more I researched this book, the more I became aware that although there was so much talk about abortion being totally unacceptable, it was a solution for millions of women.