Mother Love and Men’s Rights: Discourses of Domesticity and the Sovereign Home in Anti-vaccination Politics in the United States, 1890–1918

When smallpox epidemics spread like wildfire across the United States at the turn of the century, public health reformers looked to the public school as the perfect site for vaccination campaigns. Building on existing compulsory schooling laws, municipal ordinances and state laws made vaccination a condition of entry to public schools, seeking to make the twenty million children enrolled in schools immune to the disease. As a result, the classroom took center stage in the anti-vaccination movement in the United States as parents railed against the authority of the state to make medical decisions on behalf of their children.

This paper explores the collision of sentimentality, skepticism of science and suspicion of state power that made up the anti-vaccination movement. In particular, it analyses the different gendered ideas about domesticity, parental authority and the sovereignty of the home that circulated in anti-vaccination networks. It argues that the association between the family and the state in this period was more than a metaphor or analogy. By looking at the ideas about the home and parental rights in the anti-vaccination movement, the paper reveals that the family was understood by many Americans to be its own form of government, a sovereign jurisdiction beyond the reach of state power. Indeed, the broad based consensus about the sovereignty of the home formed a foundational building block for an anti-statist movement against compulsory vaccination, one that was grounded in women’s moral authority as mothers and men’s rights as citizens.