Following Women's Money: Population, Development, and Indo-American Birth Control Politics in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

Abstract: This article traces the history of a transnational birth control movement centered on India and the United States during the 1950s, a transitional decade that followed Indian independence from the British Empire and that witnessed growing US hegemony in a cold war world. I focus on one key philanthropic organization, the Watumull Foundation, and the activities of its leader, Ellen Jensen Watumull. The Watumull Foundation funded birth control activists in India and the United States, including Dhanvanthi Rama Rau and Margaret Sanger, and supported a growing turn toward population control as a chief purpose of the transnational birth control movement. The result was an Indo-American birth control politics in the 1950s that drew upon racialized networks of kinship, marriage, and friendship; was controlled largely by women; and mobilized small donors to bring American philanthropy into Indian development planning.