In January of 1832, a 64-page book entitled Fruits of Philosophy, or the private companion of young married people, was published in New York. Credited to “a physician” and only 3 inches by 2 ½ inches, it would become of the most important American birth-control books of its era. The epigraph on the title page was, “Knowledge is wealth. – Old saying.” The book’s author, a country doctor from Western Massachusetts, was the first person to be imprisoned for birth-control writing on any continent. Decades after he died, his book would be credited with the reversal of population growth in England and the popularization of contraception in the United States. His name was Charles Knowlton.
When he published Fruits of Philosophy the nation was experiencing a boom in contraceptive literature. Before that decade, reproductive information had been disseminated via pamphlets of questionable medical value, verbal gossip, and doctors who often gave misinformation. By the 1830s, Malthusian theory—the idea that population would outstrip food supply—was growing popular in England and the U.S. In that decade, some books posited the radical idea that sex and reproduction could be separated. English reformer Richard Carlile’s Every Woman’s Book (1826) gave instruction on partial withdrawal, vaginal sponges, and condoms. Socialist and labor activist Robert Dale Owen’s Moral Physiology (about 1830), recommended the same methods, eventually selling about 50,000 copies in the US and England. The book was overtly political; Owen wrote that single women and women with genetic diseases should not have children.
Knowlton read and was inspired by Moral Physiology. He knew Owen personally, through physician and freethinker circles. Among his own patients, Knowlton had witnessed impoverishment, stress, and health problems caused by frequent unplanned pregnancies and childbirths. Fruits, he said, was inspired by his “feelings of humanity—feelings that none but a physician could experience; for none but a physician could have a full idea of the miseries it is designed and well calculated to alleviate or prevent.”
The Book
Fruits, drafted in the summer of 1831, began with a provocative chapter called Philosophical Proem which stated that sexual desire was not inherently evil. “When an individual gratifies any of his instincts in a temperate degree, he…causes the amount of human happiness to exceed the amount of misery.
In Chapter II, “On Generation,” Knowlton argued that birth control, which he called “checks” on conception, would prevent overpopulation, decrease poverty and crime, reduce illegitimacy, and encourage early marriage—as couples would be less anxious about accidental pregnancy.