Birth Control Movement Research Articles

The Abortion rights controversy in America: a legal reader

Beginning with the introduction of abortion law in the nineteenth century, this reader includes important documents from nearly two hundred years of debate over abortion. These legal briefs, oral arguments, court opinions, newspaper reports, opinion pieces, and contemporary essays are introduced with headnotes that place them in historical context. Chapters cover the birth control movement, changes in abortion law in the 1960s, Roe v. Wade, the Hyde Amendment and the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, state and federal regulation of abortion practices, and the freedom of speech cases surrounding anti-abortion clinic protests. The first section of each chapter sets the stage and explains the choice of documents. This rich, balanced collection is an indispensable reference tool for the study of one of the most passionate debates in American history. It brings together the writings of doctors, lawyers, scientists, philosophers, elected officials, judges, and scholars as few other legal readers do, and it is essential reading for those engaged in the ongoing debate about abortion law in the United States.

Any friend of the movement: networking for birth control, 1920-1940

Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920-1940 By Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004) (297 pages: $54.95 cloth, $9.95 CD) In Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920-1940, Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer studies the founding of the Maternal Health Association (MHA) of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928. Meyer uses the history of the MHA as a case study to explore the broader issues of family planning, the pioneering work of the women who founded the clinic, and the strategies they used to make birth control acceptable when it was considered illegal, immoral, and unnatural. The women of the MHA maintained their independent status from national birth control centers between 1928 and 1942. In 1942, however, the MHA affiliated with Planned Parenthood Federation of America and ended its reign of autonomy. Meyer presents an interesting, cogent story about how one local organization, established by women, provided birth control to families in the community. The reasons for establishing such a clinic ranged from the eugenics movement that espoused racial uplift and improvement of society to the more pragmatic reasons of the clinic's patients to control the number of their pregnancies and thus improve the life of their families. Throughout the text, Meyer provides comparisons between the local MHA and the national debate on birth control. The MHA sought its autonomy to avoid being tainted by the more radical ideas of the national organizations while still mirroring many of the same strategies in the management of the clinic. In keeping with other birth control centers around the country, an advisory board of physicians provided support for the mostly female staff of doctors, nurses, and social workers. The MHA sent their physicians and nurses to New York to study under the auspices of Margaret Sangers organization. As a result of this training, MHA clients experienced extensive history taking measures completed by public health nurses and physical examinations completed by physicians before receiving the birth control they sought. The diaphragm was the contraceptive of choice that allowed female control over family planning rather than the condom that carried a negative stigma associated with venereal disease, prostitution, and male control of fertility. The book provides a bird's-eye view of one birth control center in Cleveland, Ohio, and relates it to the broader discussion on the national level. It is well documented and provides excellent comments and resources for others interested in the birth control movement in the United States. …

Rethinking Boundaries: Feminism and (Inter) Nationalism in Early-Twentieth-Century India

his essay interrogates the boundaries within which we locate our his- torical narratives to suggest a move towards interconnected histories. I argue for the need to rethink the interactions among feminisms and their relationships to imperial and national politics. Drawing upon my research on the history of birth control in colonial India from 1871 to 1946, this essay demonstrates connections among the birth control movements in India, Britain, and the United States. 1 Recent feminist scholarship has moved toward such interconnected histories and dismantled the idea of hegemony of the nation as a historical category. Furthermore, feminists scholars have demonstrated that intellectual and social movements are interactive and evolve across national boundaries, thus linking interna- tional, national, and local politics, and public as well as private con- cerns. 2 Emphasis on interconnected histories also permits us to recognize how complex historical agencies operate within non-Western societies, and challenges the ubiquitous all-knowing Western subject. Within Indian his- toriography, this move will enable feminist historians to rescue the past from metanarratives of nationalism and from that of its other, communal- ism, making room for alternative narratives. To challenge the dominant metanarratives that restrict our under- standing of feminist history, however, the move toward interconnected histories is insufficient. We must also take seriously alternative imaginings, even if they sit uncomfortably with our own ideas or politics. Voices from the local fringes of Jaunpur, a tribal block in the Tehri Gaharwal district of Uttar Pradesh, allowed me to recognize the elitist assumptions that have shaped and continue to shape the project of determining and policing fer- tility behaviors. Moreover, Jaunpuri women's voices expanded my range of sources, allowing me to construct a more inclusive narrative for the history of birth control in India and elsewhere. I focus on the discourse of birth control to investigate the history of gender politics and its intersection with the emergence of the middle-class- dominated nationalist politics in colonial India. My research has shown me the limitations of trying to understand the discourse of birth control in colonial India in isolation from birth control movements in Britain and the United States. Therefore, I examine the dialogue between Indian birth control activists and their British and American counterparts to under-

Inserting the Diaphragm In(to) Modern American Fiction: Mary McCarthy, Philip Roth, and the Literature of Contraception

Get yourself a pessary .... A female contraceptive, a plug. Mary McCarthy, Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself, 34. Fiction, in both its elite literary and popular pulp forms, provides a barometer measuring shifting attitudes in twentieth-century American culture. Today, magazines aimed at young female readers are filled glossy color advertisements for various forms of contraception. Indeed, birth control is so ubiquitous that advertisers often focus on side effects, such as clearer skin, to persuade savvy consumers to select their product. And yet, until 1936, Comstock Act criminalized distribution of lewd and lascivious material through US postal system, including medical information on birth control, pornography, and fiction that touched on subject. The long struggle of Margaret Sanger and other advocates for legal and social acceptance of contraception can be charted through American fiction, adding dimension to legal and historical documents. This article examines Mary McCarthy's 1954 story Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself and Philip Roth's 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus to argue for effects of contraceptive technology on sexual and romantic relationships and shifting power dynamics between men and women.1 To fully understand these complex effects, we must situate birth control in its social context as it slowly shifted from an illicit and dirty knowledge to a scientific and medically legitimized prescription. Margaret Sanger, perhaps bestknown figure in fight for birth control, sought support of medical profession in order to legitimize contraception, which had long been considered immoral as well as illegal.2 Sanger advocated a Doctor's Only bill that would enable physicians to prescribe contraception at their discretion. Several doctors, including Hannah Stone, William J. Robinson, and Robert Latou Dickinson, supported Sanger and published articles in her monthly Birth Control Review. However, most physicians opposed contraception, and indeed the predominant position among prestigious doctors was not merely disapproval, but revulsion so hysterical that it prevented them from accepting facts (Gordon, Politics 258). These physicians saw contraception as tainted by unscientific approach of radical politics, and viewed their own position as protecting American social morality. Thus, while a minority of sympathetic doctors secretly provided contraception to private patients, medical profession as a whole did not publicly support birth control until 1937, when American Medical Association passed a qualified endorsement. This acceptance came with little enthusiasm, but rather objective of checking spread of useless and possibly injurious techniques and of ensuring their control by physicians rather than quacks (Speert 161). Cultural acceptance of birth control by medical profession and general public was slowly gained during twentieth century. McCarthy and Roth can be read as examples of rhetorical function of fiction in American birth control movement, educating and influencing readers, and as artifacts of cultural memory, reenacting history. Fiction played an important role in birth control movement, as I argue elsewhere, providing another ground to explore rhetoric of cause and revealing new insights into American culture.3 By focusing on increasingly public and dominant role of contraceptive technology in modern heterosexual romance, these texts relocate female as both subject and object of birth control, foregrounding and erasing woman as womb and sexual being. This article argues that their narratives represent in fiction feminist claims that reproductive technology simultaneously oppresses and frees women. As Adele Clarke has shown, modern reproductive science is grounded in an ideology of control: control over materials, over bodies, and over life itself. …

Canadian Physicians’ Role in Contraception from the 19th Century to Now

Birth control techniques were widely available in 19th-century Canada, despite the fact that they were illegal. Most physicians remained silent about contraception, with a small minority vocally opposed to the practice of birth control. Canadian physicians were influenced by the social, economic, legal, and political values of their time, and their support of birth control initially lagged far behind public interest and need. At later points in Canadian medical history, physicians actively supported increased access to contraceptive services, and played a significant role in the legalization of contraception in this country. The Canadian birth control movement made tremendous strides in the 1930s with the dissemination of contraceptive information to the public and the opening of the first public birth control clinic. The Canadian Medical Association supported contraceptive practice as part of preventive medicine in the 1930s, and the legalization of contraception in the early and mid 1960s. Contraception was formally legalized in Canada in 1969 and has become a significant aspect of medical practice. In Canada, current medical controversies in contraception include issues of public education, advertising, contraceptive research, and the integration of contraception with other aspects of reproductive and sexual health in medical practice.

Malthus, Medicine and Morality: Malthusianism after 1798. Edited by Brian Dolan. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Pp. 232. $53.00.

Malthus, Medicine and Morality is a collection of essays marking the bicentenary of the publication of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. They vary considerably in subject matter, as is inevitable given the nature of Malthus's work. The Essay managed to be both a scientific investigation into demographic history and an intervention into the political debates on the French Revolution. It built its argument on a particular theory of mind and human behavior. Because it linked wealth and poverty to population, the Essay became part of the political economy of the time. Malthus gave his name, though not his imprimatur, to the birth-control movement in the nineteenth century. Not only were the Essay's arguments widely and approvingly quoted at the time, they also provoked a resolutely anti-Malthusian current of thought. Though the Essay's argument is apparently simple, this obscures a wealth of ambiguity and dense argumentation in the text, made more so by the constant revisions Malthus carried out for subsequent editions. What this collection does is to begin to deconstruct Malthus and unravel all the various elements that make up the phenomenon of “Malthusianism.â€

A Lifetime of Campaigning: Ettie Rout, Emancipationist beyond the Pale

H.G. Wells called her 'that unforgettable heroine'. But she was forgotten, most particularly in New Zealand, where she was banned from mention in the newspapers under the War Regulations for her 'safe sex' work during the First World War - a very hypocritical move as it happened just as her work was officially taken on by the army. For this work she was dubbed the 'guardian angel of the ANZACs' by a French venereal disease specialist and awarded the Reconnaissance Franaise by the French. After the war she settled in London, marrying her long-time friend and wartime colleague, physical culturist Fred Hornibrook. Rout went on with her venereal disease prophylaxis campaign after the war. She also entered the birth control movement in the 1920s, playing a major role in the last big birth control court case, a role often attributed to Dora Russell, while Rout again is 'forgotten'. In her books, like the best selling Safe Marriage, a safe sex guide (which was banned in New Zealand), she encouraged women to own their own bodies and take responsibility for their own sexual health. She linked exercise and sex, arguing in books like Sex and Exercise, that exercise would enhance women's sex lives. She and Hornibrook, who wrote a best-selling book entitled The Culture of the Abdomen, presaging the current obsession with rocklike 'abs', made a pair, teaching fitness techniques, holding 'native dance' evenings, and being hailed as modern dance proponents. Rout also wrote books on vegetarianism, wholemeal cookery and Maori culture. The word most commonly used by people describing her throughout her life was 'energy'. She herself was very fit. But she did not fit in. Once her marriage to Hornibrook was over, in 1936, she returned to New Zealand, was rebuffed by former friends. She sailed for Rarotonga and died there, of a self-administered overdose of quinine that September. As she had remarked to H.G. Wells, 'It is a mixed blessing to be born too soon'. She anticipated many of the enthusiasms of our own time - in diet, in dance, in ideas about exercise and sexuality. But because she was so far ahead of her own time in her 'safe sex' campaign, she became persona non grata in her own country. With the advent of AIDS her contribution snaps into focus - and the AIDS clinic in the city of Christchurch where she used to live has been named after her.

‘A Prey on Normal People’: C. Killick Millard and the Euthanasia Movement in Great Britain, 1930–55

Few issues in medicine and society today are more controversial than euthanasia, the term derived from the Greek word for ‘easy death’ and often called ‘mercy-killing’. Current debates raise questions about the past and what euthanasia has meant to earlier generations. The most infamous example of a state euthanasia programme occurred between 1939 and 1945 in nazi Germany when thousands of handicapped men, women and children were murdered. But little is known about the history of Anglo-American euthanasia. This article, based on an examination of documents from a variety of archival collections in England and the USA, explores the early history of the unsuccessful movement to legalize euthanasia in Great Britain, as embodied in the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society (VELS). By focusing on the career of C. Killick Millard (1870–1952), the founder of the VELS, this article argues that although the VELS tried to convince the public that it sought the legalization of only mercy-killing with consent, there was a tendency within the VELS to obscure the distinctions between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia. There is even some evidence of VELS sympathy for nazi euthanasia. At the same time, VELS members also tended to be involved in the eugenics, birth control and public health movements or belong to liberal religious groups like the Unitarians, or they were physicians radicalized by the experience of watching patients die in protracted agony. It is this complex constellation of motives — some murky and some indisputably humane — that warrants attention nowadays, at a time when courts and legislatures are being asked to rule on such literally life and death issues.

Undomesticated ground: recasting nature as feminist space

From Mother Earth to Mother Nature, women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to distance themselves from nature. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space. Her analysis of a remarkable range of feminist writings-as well as of popular journalism, visual arts, television, and film-powerfully demonstrates that nature has been and continues to be an essential concept for feminist theory and practice.Alaimo urges feminist theorists to rethink the concept of nature by probing the vastly different meanings that it carries. She discusses its significance for Americans engaged in social and political struggles from, for example, the Indian Wars of the early nineteenth century, to the birth control movement in the 1920s, to contemporary battles against racism and heterosexism. Reading works by Catherine Sedgwick, Mary Austin, Emma Goldman, Nella Larson, Donna Haraway, Toni Morrison, and others, Alaimo finds that some of these writers strategically invoke nature for feminist purposes while others cast nature as a postmodern agent of resistance in the service of both environmentalism and the women's movement.By examining the importance of nature within literary and political texts, this book greatly expands the parameters of the nature writing genre and establishes nature as a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism.

Nursing, social contexts, and ideologies in the early United States birth control movement.

Using historical discourse analysis, this study provides a thematic analysis of writings of nursing and birth control as found in The Birth Control Review from 1917 to 1927. The author contrasts this publication with the official journal of the American Nurses Association, the American Journal of Nursing from the same years to explore nursing voices and silences in early birth control stories. In dialogue with social contexts, nursing endeavors and inactivity have played important yet conflicting roles in the birth control movement in the United States. Nursing writings from the early twentieth century reflect eugenic beliefs, national fears of immigrants, and ambivalence about women's roles in society and the home. Nurses simultaneously empowered women to choose when to become pregnant and reinforced nativist and paternalistic views of the poor.

Reversing the discourse of sexology: Margaret Higgins Sanger's what every girl should know

This essay offers an analysis of the interplay between the writings of the “father of sexology,” Henry Havelock Ellis, and the leader of the birth control movement in the United States, Margaret Higgins Sanger. Utilizing the theories of Foucault and Burke, the author argues that Sanger engages in the process of “reverse discourse,” appropriating language that initially functioned to maintain power over working‐class women in order to speak on their behalf. Sanger's efforts were limited, however, due to the pentadic structure she appropriated from the original texts.

Contraception in the prepill era

Although medical history has documented the desire to control fertility since ancient times, safe and effective contraception did not exist until this century and has not been equally available to all people. Strong moral sentiments, economic and social class factors, religious beliefs, familial and gender relations, and political as well as legal constraints have often limited the ability of physicians in favor of contraception to provide advice and methods of birth control to their patients. By the early 1900s, a constellation of factors—in particular, the large influx of poor immigrants, and feminist groups advocating women’s rights—helped to move forward a birth-control movement in this country and abroad. In the early 20th century, Margaret Sanger became one of the most avid proponents of contraception in the United States. By 1950, she and Katharine McCormick had contracted with biologist Gregory Pincus to develop an effective birth control pill. A collaborative effort by Pincus and other researchers led to trials of the pill in Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Mexico between 1956 and 1957, which provided the basis for an application to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of the first oral contraceptive.

Marie Stopes, Eugenics and The English Birth Control Movement. Edited by Robert A. Peel. Pp. 110. (The Galton Institute, 1997.)

<b>Marie Stopes, Eugenics and The English Birth Control Movement.</b> Edited by Robert A. Peel. Pp. 110. (The Galton Institute, 1997.)

The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (review)

Reviewed by: The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought Pauline M. H. Mazumdar Marouf Arif Hasian, Jr. The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought. University of Georgia Humanities Center Series on Science and the Humanities. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. x + 265 pp. $40.00. This book tries out a new twist on an amply documented and much-discussed subject, the public discourse in English on eugenics. Hasian uses the vocabulary and concepts current in a Department of Speech and Communication, where rhetoric is the central matter of study, to reexamine the attempts at persuasion and dissuasion of the eugenists, their friends and fellow-travelers, and their enemies. Rhetoric, he states, plays a central part in the construction of scientific knowledge. A postmodern consciousness has promoted it from a mere epiphenomenon to an important means of conquering ideological terrain and keeping it under control. The idea is attractive. It leads the author to identify a set of so-called ideographs, which he finds represented over and over in the rhetoric and narrative tales of both the eugenists and their opponents. These include “biological necessity,” “nature,” and “struggle for existence.” The word eugenics itself might mean the preservation of the germ plasm of an individual, a nation, or the white race, either directly by selective breeding or environmentally, by getting rid of race poisons such as alcoholism. In terms of numbers, it might mean the promotion [End Page 729] of the “fit” as well as the repression of the “unfit,” or the control of the “unfit” by the “fit.” The ideograph “eugenics” could be interpreted in many different ways, which, says Hasian, accounts for its mass appeal. The application of this approach is successful in some instances, less successful in others. It is most apposite in the case of liberal and leftist reactions to eugenics, where acceptance shades into attack with little change in vocabulary. The chapter on black reactions to eugenics is both a good example of Hasian’s technique in action and also, as far as I know, new material. He shows that some American blacks refused to accept the white eugenists’ attacks on their humanity, and adapted the eugenic concepts of nature and struggle to their own use. Many agreed on the importance of race betterment. One black writer claimed in 1924 that “eugenics is interested in breeding for tomorrow a better Negro, one more anxious, more capable and more courageous to assume a larger share of our economic, political and social responsibilities. No one now doubts the unusual abilities of the individual Negro. . . . What the Negro . . . needs now is more attention given to the group” (p. 64). The chapter on women is less convincing. Here the author says—and I agree with him here—that women, especially feminists and progressives, were among the primary social actors on the eugenics scene. He suggests, however, that the ideograph “voluntary motherhood” was used by feminists who saw themselves as the victims of hard-line eugenics. Unlimited motherhood in the name of the state and of “biological necessity” could no longer be accepted by the New Woman. I would like to rearrange this argument. I think the feminists of the period, in England and in Canada at least, were very often hard-line eugenists themselves. The call for “voluntary motherhood” was a device to promote birth control and thus limit the breeding of undesirables of the pauper class: we know that the birth control movement in Britain was subsidized under the table by the Eugenics Society. It is a mistake to read the feelings of today’s feminists into remarks made in the years between the two world wars. Women of the period felt that reproduction was their special “biologically necessary” area of power and responsibility, and a popular movement that was concerned with reproduction was important and empowering. They wanted to be part of it. In this case, Hasian’s explicit use of a confusion between pro and contra in the use of the same ideographic elements lets him down. Hasian’s final section is on the Human Genome Project. Is this eugenics too? he asks. His method of seeking out a set of telling ideographs is...

Hull House and the Birth Control Movement: An Untold Story

The residents of Jane Addams's Hull House were in the vanguard of those supporting reproductive alternatives for all women. They were instrumental in bringing family planning services to Chicago and actively opposed the withholding of abortion services. This article discusses the work of two longtime Hull-House residents, Alice Hamilton and Rachelle Yarros, in the birth control movement and presents the implications of their approach for improving the delivery of services to and ensuring reproductive freedom for women today.

Ishimoto Shizue: The Margaret Sanger of Japan

Post-1945 Japan is known for its remarkably low birth rate and a heavy reliance on abortion for birth control purposes. What may be less well known is the extensive use of contraceptive methods as well to limit or regulate births and the role played by the prewar birth control movement in making the concept of birth control socially acceptable. The prewar movement owed its origins and much of its success in changing attitudes toward birth control to the efforts of an individual feminist – Ishimoto Shizue. Ishimoto, in turn, owed much support and guidance to the American birth control leader, Margaret Sanger. A study of Ishimoto and the prewar Japanese birth control movement highlights the importance of international cross-currents in feminist thought and practice, for Ishimoto's meeting of the dynamic and controversial American leader focused her energies on birth control as a means to bring about women's liberation in Japan. Ishimoto's relationship with Sanger continued and grew throughout the following decades, ending only with Sanger's death in 1966. The way in which Ishimoto promoted birth control in Japan shows a strong influence from Sanger, but at the same time it was not a simple replication of Sanger's approach. Ishimoto's strategies for gaining support appear to have been shaped by her own social background, and also by the constraints of the interwar Japanese social and political environment. Ishimoto and her arguments for birth control therefore provide an insight into social trends of the pre-1945 period and an example of ways in which Japanese have accommodated Western ideas in the twentieth century.

Ishimoto shizue: The margaret sanger of Japan

Abstract Post-1945 Japan is known for its remarkably low birth rate and a heavy reliance on abortion for birth control purposes. What may be less well known is the extensive use of contraceptive methods as well to limit or regulate births and the role played by the prewar birth control movement in making the concept of birth control socially acceptable. The prewar movement owed its origins and much of its success in changing attitudes toward birth control to the efforts of an individual feminist – Ishimoto Shizue. Ishimoto, in turn, owed much support and guidance to the American birth control leader, Margaret Sanger. A study of Ishimoto and the prewar Japanese birth control movement highlights the importance of international cross-currents in feminist thought and practice, for Ishimoto's meeting of the dynamic and controversial American leader focused her energies on birth control as a means to bring about women's liberation in Japan. Ishimoto's relationship with Sanger continued and grew throughout the following decades, ending only with Sanger's death in 1966. The way in which Ishimoto promoted birth control in Japan shows a strong influence from Sanger, but at the same time it was not a simple replication of Sanger's approach. Ishimoto's strategies for gaining support appear to have been shaped by her own social background, and also by the constraints of the interwar Japanese social and political environment. Ishimoto and her arguments for birth control therefore provide an insight into social trends of the pre-1945 period and an example of ways in which Japanese have accommodated Western ideas in the twentieth century.

Population control I: Birth of an ideology.

Population control, as a major international development strategy, is a relatively recent phenomenon. However, its origins reach back to social currents in the 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in an organized birth control movement in Europe and the United States. The conflicts and contradictions in that movement's history presage many of today's debates over population policy and women's rights. Eugenics had a deep influence on the U.S. birth control movement in the first half of the 20th century. After World War II private agencies and foundations played an important role in legitimizing population control as a way to secure Western control over Third World resources and stem political instability. In the late 1960s the U.S. government became a major funder of population control programs overseas and built multilateral support through establishment of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities. At the 1974 World Population Conference, Third World governments challenged the primacy of population control. While their critique led population agencies to change their strategies, population control remained a central component of international development and national security policies in the United States.

Inventors and Other Great Women: Toward a Feminist History of Technological Luminaries

Review Essay INVENTORS AND OTHER GREAT WOMEN: TOWARD A FEMINIST HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGICAL LUMINARIES JUDITH A. MCGAW Any American schoolchild can tell you that the history of technol­ ogy is the history of invention.1 And, as any SHOT member can at­ test, the focus on invention has not been confined to technology’s popular history. Until quite recently, by contrast, women’s inventive activity had few chroniclers. Indeed, as late as 1982, when I surveyed the literature on women and the history ofAmerican technology for Signs, although I was delighted to find an abundance of scholarship treating technology and women’s work both outside the home and within it, I was surprised to learn how little had been written about women’s relationship to that traditional staple of technological his­ tory: the history of invention. In one sense, of course, this is hardly surprising. Like many of the new histories that proliferated once the students of the sixties came of scholarly age in the seventies and eighties, much of women’s his­ tory emerged from the “new social history” with its concern for ordi­ nary people and everyday occurrences. It has been suspicious ofand, occasionally, even hostile to work that focuses on the elite or excep­ tional “great person.” Dr. Mc.Gaw is associate professor in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She thanks Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Mary Kelley, Karen Spilman, and Rita Wright for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this review, and Atsushi Akera for lending his expertise to some of her assessments. Opinions expressed are, of course, her own. ‘Books reviewed in this essay: Phyllis J. Read and Bernard L. Witlieb, The Book of Women’s Firsts: Breakthrough Achievements ofAlmost 1,000 American Women (New York: Random House, 1992); Anne L. Macdonald, Feminine Ingenuity: How Women Inventors Changed America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992); Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1993); Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek, Mothers ofInvention: From the Bra to the Bomb, Forgotten Women and Their Unforgettable Ideas (New York: William Morrow, 1987); Lynn Sherr andjurate Kazickas, Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women’s Landmarks. (New York: Times Books, 1994).© 1997 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/97/3801-0009JS0.1.00 214 Inventors and Other Great Women 215 More recently, though, times have changed. The youth of the six­ ties have arrived at midlife, many a young radical has achieved suc­ cess within the establishment, and the once-new social history is something current students receive as the teachings of the elders, something to be challenged. Then, too, we live in conservative times: war epics and tales of heroism are very much the fashion. Under these circumstances, feminists have also had good reason to seek role models and distinguished precursors. For example, recent fine biographies with special relevance for the history of technology in­ clude Susan Ware, Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Searchfor Mod­ em Feminism,2 Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America,3 and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise ofWomen’s Political Culture, 18301900 .4 As Anne L. Macdonald recounts in Feminine Ingenuity, feminist de­ bates over how best to acknowledge women’s technological creativity date at least to the 1876 centennial celebration’s planning stages. One camp, conventionally denominated radicals, emphasized “the prodigious output of unrecognized industrial women,” while their more conservative sisters argued that focusing on female inventors “would, in the long run, reflect well on women as a whole” (p. 76). Those who share the second sentiment can take heart that technolo­ gy’s history now includes three book-length treatments of women inventors, whereas none existed less than a decade ago. Moreover, unlike most books in our field, two of these, Macdonald’s book and Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek’s Mothers ofInvention, were treated to New York Times book reviews, while Autumn Stanley, author of Mothers and Daughters ofInvention, was interviewed by the Ymcswhen she...

The rhetoric of reproduction and the reconfiguration of womanhood in the French birth control movement, 1890-1920.

Birth control movements that emerged in Europe and the United States during the last third of the nineteenth century lost their emancipatory and feminist potential in the twentieth century as they succumbed to control by the medical profession, eugenicists, and institutionalized goals of planned parenthood. The neo-Malthusian movement in France, however, retained a radical character and became a focal point for the convergence of libertarian, feminist, and anarchist concerns. By emancipating women from their "biological destiny" and separating sexuality and reproduction, neo-Malthusian rhetoric reconfigured womanhood and established the basis for women's development as full individuals and citizens.