Birth control and sexology

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, early sexology supported Victorian conventions that saw sex as a primarily procreative activity and women as sexually passive. Yet sexology also helped transform attitudes to sexuality. Borrowing from Darwinian theory and popular eugenics, sexological theories began to promote non‐procreative sex and family planning in the interest of individual and national health. This development was a major factor in legitimizing the birth control movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, which criticized legal crackdowns on public discussion of contraception and abortion. In the United States and Western Europe, the birth control movement, alongside the feminist movement, began to win gradual but increasing respectability after World War II, leading to a renewed interest in sexology as the scientific study of diverse human sexual behaviors and desires. However, this entry argues that birth control has never been solely an issue of women’s rights or individual sexual liberty, but is also a tool of population control which remains morally, politically, and economically controversial. State policies have supported drastic measures of birth control to wage race wars against poor and immigrant groups; and it is no longer clear how the scientific study of sex can resolve the political and moral issues surrounding national birth control policies.