Recent economic downturns have moved the punditry moving right past the soft word "recession" to openly invoking a word with stronger connotations--"depression."  Most of us living have no experience with the kind of hard times that we are likely facing, and so we glance back into history for some idea of what might come next. Most people conjure up grainy black and white footage of soup lines or Henry Fonda looking torn by despair. The common assumption is that people back then were more conservative, or as the far right likes to euphemize, more "traditional."  

Not quite.  After all, in the 30s, there was an actual Communist party in the U.S., and the discovery that she voted for them in 1936 almost got Lucille Ball blacklisted.  The Great Depression completely remade the operation of the federal government, and the neoconservative project of privatization has largely been a decades-long backlash.  But attitudinal differences extended into the bedroom as well, as has been amply documented in Leslie Reagan's must-read book When Abortion Was A Crime.  Prior to the Great Depression, both contraceptive methods and abortion were illegal and stigmatized. But by the 1930s attitudes changed.  Margaret Sanger, who had to flee the country in the 1910s because she kept getting arrested for distributing birth control, was able in the 1920s to operate somewhat freely to teach women how to avoid unplanned pregnancy. 

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Attitudes about abortion and contraception are inextricably linked, of course, so as attitudes about contraception relaxed, so did social attitudes about abortion.  From the 19th century up until the 1930s, documents Reagan, prosecuting abortion was a high priority for law enforcement.  The Great Depression almost abruptly changed that.  Abortion didn't become legal, but it was far more accessible and safe than it had been before, and many doctors provided abortion and abortion referrals somewhat openly. The invention of the legal therapeutic abortion made this easier. The plausibility of legalizing abortion entered the public conversation.    

Reagan focused most of her attention on the city of Chicago, which has been a reliable microcosm of the United States, especially so in the mid-20th century.  She documented her evidence by piecing together newspaper reports, doctors' records, and court transcripts.  The changes in abortion access in the 1930s are nothing short of remarkable.  Before this era, most abortion providers were midwives or freelance workers with no formal training.  In the 1930s, Reagan found that doctors openly provided referrals to abortion providers who were also licensed physicians - the first time in history this happened.  Physicians who provided abortion services became so open with it that they printed up business cards so other physicians could refer easily, and they kept records of their patients. Reagan doesn't argue that it was all roses -- many physicians hid the actual place they performed abortions as a precaution, or paid off law enforcement.  But still, it was a unique moment in time.  Prior to the 1930s, physicians didn't perform abortions.  After the 1930s, they did but had to be more covert about it, as law enforcement began raiding clinics.

There's very little doubt that these liberalized attitudes towards sex had everything to do with the economy. Reagan speaks plainly on this topic: 

The Depression years make vivid the relationship between economics and reproduction.  Women had abortions on a massive scale.  Married women with children found it impossible to bear the expense of another, and unmarried women could not afford to marry.  As young working-class women and men put off marriage during the Depression to support their families or to save money for a wedding, marriage rates fell drastically.  Yet while they waited to wed, couples engaged in sexual relations, and women became pregnant.  Many had abortions. 

The effect that the economy had on the birthrate was dramatic, as this chart shows.  And society began to realize that women had very good reasons to control their fertility and plan their families.  I can't help but wonder if a nation that had real problems, like a broken economy, realized that moralizing about sex is piddly stuff in comparison.  One way or another, the suffering brought on this country by the Depression increased the empathy society had for women and the tough decisions they sometimes have to make. 

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It's not time to pat ourselves on the back and assume we'll react to this economic downturn with the empathy and maturity our predecessors had.  There's no guarantee, of course, that society will react as a whole with more understanding when faced with hard times.  The wind can easily blow in the other direction, and society can start hunting for scapegoats, and rebellious women are a perennial favorite. Fascism rose in Europe at the same time that Americans were liberalizing, and fascists were right-wing right into the bedroom, of course.  In the conflict between allowing women more freedom to make their own choices in hard times or idealizing the obedient and fertile mother, the Nazis picked the latter with gusto, going so far as to bribe women considered racially pure to have lots of children. That we have politicians in our country espousing similar beliefs should be a cause for concern.

Nor is there any reason to suspect that Americans' inherent national character will make the liberalizing attitudes towards women seen during the Great Depression come automatically.  As Susan Faludi demonstrated in her book The Terror Dream, Americans can easily react to hard times by ramping up the misogyny. In fact, that's precisely what's happened in the years after 9/11--and that's how the Bush administration presided over the biggest rollback to women's rights since the feminist victories in the 60s and 70s.  Clearly, a great national trauma could send the nation in either direction on the subject of women's rights.

Stressful, hard times are ahead, and there is no quick fix that will make everything right, as the plummeting Dow demonstrates.  We may have a limited ability to prevent or control what comes next, but we do have a chance to control how we react as a nation, starting with how we react to the choices each individual makes. And how we treat women--as breeding machines or as people who have a series of influences that legitimately influence their decision-making--will indicate on the whole the levels of maturity and empathy we will access when confronting our economic crisis.