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Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article restores pregnancy testing to its significant position in the history of the women’s liberation movement in 1970s Britain. It shows how feminists appropriated the pregnancy test kit, a medical technology which then resembled a small chemistry set, and used it as a political tool for demystifying medicine, empowering women and providing a more accessible, less judgmental alternative to the N.H.S. While the majority of testees were young women hoping for a negative result, many others were older, menopausal women as well as those anxious to conceive. By following the practice of pregnancy testing, I show that, at the grassroots level, local women’s centres were in the vanguard of not only access to contraception and abortion rights, but also awareness about infertility and menopause.
Highlights
This article restores pregnancy testing to its significant position in the history of the women’s liberation movement in 1970s Britain
Sue Jones was on her way to be interviewed for the Bolton Women’s Liberation Group Oral History Project when, passing the back of the town’s historic Market Hall, she thought to herself, ‘“I must tell them about the pregnancy testing” because we started off,’ she later explained at the interview: opposite there, and I think it’s a nightclub or part of a nightclub
By the time of the interview, some thirty-seven years after she had joined the group as a young mother in 1972, Jones did not remember where they ‘got the kit from,’ but she did remember that ‘you had to do one or two things with the kit; it wasn’t like the ones you get from Boots where you just wee on a stick!’ ‘We did pregnancy testing,’ she told the interviewer, ‘and it was very important to us in those days.’[1]
Summary
As with the networks of birth-control and family planning clinics that went before, the pregnancy testing services set up in the 1970s served women who were trying to conceive.[120] Nor were such services obviously part of a broader women’s health movement, as it was in America. Rather, they were offered alongside a jumble of activities—from yoga and karate to bicycle repair and women’s studies. In the hands of lay activists the pregnancy test kit became, at least for a time, a feminist technology.[129]
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