In the "Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith discusses the families of the poor as having many children, and that the children often didn't live to adulthood. He also describes the rich as having very few children. The passage is written:
"a half-starved highland women frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of baring any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station. Luxury in the fair sex, while it inflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy the powers of generation."
Did the upper class have any type of birth control or prophylactic measures in this time period? Is this observation correct, or some form of bias against the poor / women?
I can't speak to England or the upper class, but contraception was absolutely practiced among poorer French families in the 18th and 19th Centuries. As historian Peter McPhee (my primary source for this post) writes:
Forms of contraception had always been practiced in those rural communities where smaller families had been economically necessary, and certainly well before feminists and social reformers began explicitly to challenge church teachings in the 1880s. (215)
That's not to say all French women everywhere used contraception. Use of it varied widely from region to region, "according to the availability of economic resources, the level of infant mortality, the length of time babies were breast-fed, and the degree of acceptance of the strictures of the Church" (15). For example, in the town of Lourmarin in Provence in the 1790s, 19 percent of women were pregnant at marriage and most women had fewer than four children. Lourmarin was heavily Protestant. In contrast, in devoutly Catholic Brittany, only 1 percent of births were out of wedlock, "and women usually had a baby every 20 months between marrying (on average at age 26) and menopause (age 41-3). That said, there are examples of devout areas where contraception was used, such as the village of Collioure in the Roussillon, where "births were planned to occur in winter because women's work was so important in the wine and fishing industries in the warmer months" (15).
So what kind of contraception were these Frenchwomen using? Largely the kind of methods that modern women often regard with horror for their unreliability, and with good reason: they aren't good ways to avoid ever having a child. But they can be effective at limiting the number of children you have. By far the most common was coitus interruptus, or pulling out:
"The most common method used was withdrawal, denounced as 'Onanism' by the Church," McPhee writes. According to the priest of Clermont-l'Hérault in the Midi, it was 'encountered daily everywhere'; in 1829 the priests of the diocese of Gap, high in the Alps, claimed that 'the detestable crime of Onan... has occurred even in peasant huts'" (153). Pulling out was common enough that the French had a number of proverbs to describe the practice:
There was also a proverb around Toulouse encouraging young women to abstain from sex after their first child: "You should put your tools away in the attic" (215).
I don't have statistics on how common coitus interruptus was in France compared to other countries, but contemporaries certainly seemed to have a point of view here. McPhee notes that "Onanism" was "known elsewhere in Europe as 'the French sin.'"
Aside from pulling out, couples used "rhythm methods" and douching. If those failed, women could resort to abortion and even infanticide. In the mid-19th Century, there was "one discovered infanticide for every 583 live births," though doubtless there were more — especially in rural areas — that were not discovered. Moreover, "it was the poorest rural women in the poorest regions who felt forced to take this action: in the three departments of the Limousin the rate was 1:230-320" (160). More humanely, both the church and the government operated foundling homes where women could drop off their unwanted children anonymously by putting them in a little revolving door built into the outside of a church or orphanage.
Though French women, particularly in rural areas, had always practiced contraception, its use definitely increased over the course of the 19th Century. This is seen in France's famous and dramatic plunge in the birth rate from 38.8 births per thousand people in 1789, to 32.9 in 1804, to 26.5 in 1848, down to 26.5 in 1848 and 21.3 in 1900 (McPhee, 104; European Historical Statistics, 116-124). In 1815-19, 14.2 percent of French families had five or more children; this was 6.7 percent in the 1870s (McPhee, 195).
Over this time, contraception use became more common among the urban poor, too, as this class grew:
In industrializing towns such as Saint-Chamond, married women found it increasingly difficult to contribute to the family budget and instead used contraception and abortion to limit family size. ...
The combined effects of gradual transformations in the nature of the workplace and the household economy were expressed in the strategies single women and couples adopted to control fertility. The labor of children was less important to working-class families than it had been in rural households or among artisans, especially with the passing of new laws restricting child labor. Similarly, the nurturing of a new infant threatened the very survival of single urban women without an extended family. Consequently, despite the fulminations of priests and male doctors about the spiritual and physical evils of preventing contraception and birth, couples increasingly practiced contraception. (193, 195)
Besides immediate economic necessity, another spur for regulating family size was the new French inheritance law passed during the Revolution. Previously, France followed primogeniture, where the eldest son inherited most or all of a family's property. The Revolution established equal inheritance as the rule; this was reinforced by Napoleon and kept by the Restoration. Now if small families had lots of children, they risked having to split up the family farm, shrinking it to a level below what was capable of supporting a family. (And many French peasants farmed extremely small plots to begin with, as small as a few acres.) The combination of a new economic incentive for smaller families with the collapse of anti-contraception Church authority under the Revolution meant that "rural people responded by deliberately limiting family size" (104-5).
Of course, as I've mentioned, contraception was not popular. Not only was the church opposed, but many doctors were (as mentioned above); after France's defeat to Prussia in 1871 the country's low birthrate became a national security issue, too. (Despite this France's birthrate would remain low until after World War II.) As McPhee notes, "Given the unreliability of available methods of contraception, to women alone fell the dangers, physical and legal, of aborting pregnancies."
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