Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American ... and the University of North Carolina Press) Paperback – December 1, 2009

These women's health issues are not new, this was an interesting historic and scientific read.

This is a brilliant book that brings the eighteenth and early nineteenth century alive in the realm that historians find most difficult to discover: the history of private life, including sexuality and family life. In sum, this book argues that the real American Revolution for free women was their decision to have smaller families ca. 1760-1820, declaring independence from the "teeming bellies" esteemed earlier in the 18th C in favor of fewer children and greater attention and care for the children's educations. I have taught this book repeatedly in undergraduate classes as well as to graduate students, and they love the fascinating insights as well as the larger argument the book makes, which they find largely persuasive.The book also features a striking essay analyzing 18th C Anglo-American women's portraiture as a clue to these transformations, which we use in class alongside Google image searches of the paintings so we can see the full-color versions of the portraits included in the book (and some that aren't as well.)

This was a really good and exciting book although it didn't completely answer my questions about the time the author researched.

The United States did not seek to regulate contraception and abortion until the mid-nineteenth century. Family size peaked in the mid-eighteenth century. What happened in between? That, in a nutshell, is Klepp's topic in Revolutionary Conceptions. Klepp maintains that while the American Revolution was unfolding on the world stage, another, female-led revolution was unfolding behind the scenes as American couples began to delay marriage, space births, and curtail childbearing several years before the wives reached menopause. These changes transformed the pattern of women's lives and their very conception of their purpose in life.This engaging book is a surprisingly quick read as scholarly works go. It has a strong statistical foundation, with due attention to regional and class differences. Klepp approaches her topic imaginatively: in one lavishly illustrated chapter, she explores how images of women gradually changed from emphasizing fertility to emphasizing self-control. The chapter on the technology of birth control is less satisfactory because Klepp doesn't wrap it up with a clear assessment of exactly how the typical Revolutionary-era woman limited family size, but she does at least provide a comprehensive overview of the full range of methods available, with an emphasis on emmenagogues. In short, Revolutionary Conceptions is a well-researched and fascinating book that challenges many previous theories about when and why Americans began to limit family size. Highly recommended.