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By Root 7483 0

and receive medical attention in private. Many European cities had such institutions, so as not to box pregnant women into choosing between abortion and disgrace. In Catholic Ireland, Dublin’s lying-in hospitals freely admitted all of the thousands who applied each year, never asking if they were married. The New York Asylum for Lying-in Women on Orange Street also offered poor pregnant women a midwife’s services and postpartum care, but the “lady managers” accepted only “reputable married” females—lest they encourage “criminal improvidence”—and demanded references in advance, ideally from a “respectable New York citizen.” Once admitted, moreover, patients were treated like servants: forbidden to have visitors, to leave without permission, or to use liquor or profane language. A female matron enforced deference and decorum, with violators subject to dismissal. After delivery, the asylum placed many of the mothers as wet nurses with respectable women, assuring prospective employers that their candidates’ breasts were in good condition and that “their characters [had] already [been] investigated by the Visiting Committee.”

The sole alternative to the.asylum was the almshouse, and poor women preferred the former to the latter. It was nearer their homes, was reputedly safer, and protected them from having to associate (and be associated) with prostitutes, and its wet-nurse employment service provided them with a year-long “situation,” even if it did require they nurse only their employer’s baby and farm out their own. Most avoided both if possible.

New York had no place that would take in foundlings, either. No hospital (again excepting Bellevue) would accept deserted or abandoned children, or even admit a sick child under two. Bellevue paid poor women to care for these unwanted children—usually less than it cost them to do so—with the result that nearly 90 percent of those farmed out died. According to the Almshouse commissioner, nearly one thousand babies perished each year between 1854 and 1859.

Awakened to this situation by a personal experience, Mary Delaneld DuBois, wife of a well-to-do Gramercy Park lawyer, joined with Anna R. Emmet, wife of a famous New York specialist in the diseases of women and children, and in May 1854 they opened a Nursery for the Children of Poor Women in a small house on St. Mark’s Place. It became the first institution in the country devoted primarily to day care, taking in the children of working women (including wet nurses) so their mothers could “go out to service.” Yet here too the pioneers drew back from establishing a Dublin-style opendoor institution. They would only accept the progeny of an unwed woman if it was her first lapse and she could demonstrate victimhood: “The mother must produce evidence of having borne a good character until the dark shadow of him who ruined her fell across her path.”

Beyond these efforts, women unhappy with existing sexual codes and practices would not or could not go. Public discussions about erotic matters remained difficult or impossible, and only those wrapped head to toe in the mantle of purity dared address such issues at all. It was left to a tiny handful—the men and women of the Free Love movement—to issue a more frontal challenge to the conventional order, and the rough handling they received served as a warning to others to keep silent.

Free Lovers rejected coercion in sexual relations, whether from male lust or legally prescribed duties of marriage. Stephen Pearl Andrews, a philosopher influenced by anarchism and Fourierism, argued that only “passional attraction”—spiritual holy love—should bind two individuals. The state had no business in the bedroom. Legal marriage, like many other governmental or religious institutions, was inherently enslaving, little more than a form of legalized prostitution, and ought to be abolished. Decisions about engaging in sexual relations should be left to the “well developed conscience,” with women having an absolute right to refuse such connections.

Free Lovers by no means advocated promiscuity. Most considered