Birth Control Battles

Birth Control Battles PDF Author: Melissa J. Wilde
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520303210
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Conservative and progressive religious groups fiercely disagree about issues of sex and gender. But how did we get here? Melissa J. Wilde shows how today’s modern divisions began in the 1930s in the public battles over birth control and not for the reasons we might expect. By examining thirty of America’s most prominent religious groups—from Mormons to Methodists, Southern Baptists to Seventh Day Adventists, and many others—Wilde contends that fights over birth control had little do with sex, women’s rights, or privacy. Using a veritable treasure trove of data, including census and archival materials and more than 10,000 articles, statements, and sermons from religious and secular periodicals, Wilde demonstrates that the push to liberalize positions on contraception was tied to complex views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny among America’s most prominent religious groups. Taking us from the Depression era, when support for the eugenics movement saw birth control as an act of duty for less desirable groups, to the 1960s, by which time most groups had forgotten the reasons behind their stances on contraception (but not the concerns driving them), Birth Control Battles explains how reproductive politics divided American religion. In doing so, this book shows the enduring importance of race and class for American religion as it rewrites our understanding of what it has meant to be progressive or conservative in America.

Birth Control Battles

Birth Control Battles PDF Author: Melissa J. Wilde
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520303210
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
Conservative and progressive religious groups fiercely disagree about issues of sex and gender. But how did we get here? Melissa J. Wilde shows how today’s modern divisions began in the 1930s in the public battles over birth control and not for the reasons we might expect. By examining thirty of America’s most prominent religious groups—from Mormons to Methodists, Southern Baptists to Seventh Day Adventists, and many others—Wilde contends that fights over birth control had little do with sex, women’s rights, or privacy. Using a veritable treasure trove of data, including census and archival materials and more than 10,000 articles, statements, and sermons from religious and secular periodicals, Wilde demonstrates that the push to liberalize positions on contraception was tied to complex views of race, immigration, and manifest destiny among America’s most prominent religious groups. Taking us from the Depression era, when support for the eugenics movement saw birth control as an act of duty for less desirable groups, to the 1960s, by which time most groups had forgotten the reasons behind their stances on contraception (but not the concerns driving them), Birth Control Battles explains how reproductive politics divided American religion. In doing so, this book shows the enduring importance of race and class for American religion as it rewrites our understanding of what it has meant to be progressive or conservative in America.

The Battle for Birth Control

The Battle for Birth Control PDF Author: Jessica L. Furgerson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793643253
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
The Battle for Birth Control delves into the complex rhetorical history of the American birth control movement in its formative years. In just four decades, advocates, under the strategic guidance of Margaret Sanger, transitioned the fight for contraception from fringe radical movement to a respectable mainstream cause endorsed by powerful professionals and politicians alike. Eschewing their early ideological commitments to obtain widespread acceptance, birth controllers adopted a strategy of political accommodation characterized by deferential rhetoric and careful posturing. This strategy secured significant victories for the movement but at what cost? Informed by a deep commitment to reproductive justice, The Battle for Birth Control traces the duplicity of the movement’s early rhetoric and argues that their accommodationist strategy yielded increased contraceptive access solely because of their willingness to endorse the neoliberal regime of reproductive control largely responsible for the current threats to reproductive autonomy in the 21st century.

Church Control Or Birth Control

Church Control Or Birth Control PDF Author: Nicholas Kaminsky
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780985754334
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
The name Margaret Sanger is nearly synonymous with birth control in the United States. A controversial character even now, she founded the predecessor to today's Planned Parenthood and dedicated her life to working tirelessly for the legalization and promotion of birth control and abortion. While scholars have directed some attention toward Sanger's provocative statements on race and ethnicity, few have documented her vehement anti-Catholicism or shown the way she cleverly used anti-Catholic propaganda to promote her birth control crusade. Kaminsky has now done so. In this book, he demonstrates the way in which Sanger exploited powerful anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States to portray her fight for birth control as a struggle for American Freedom against a moral domination by the Catholic Church. As she phrased it, "All who resent this sinister Church Control of life and conduct - this interference of the Roman Church in attempting to dictate the conduct and behavior of non-Catholics, must now choose between Church Control or Birth Control. You can no longer remain neutral. You must make a declaration of independence, of self-reliance, or submit to the dictatorship of the Roman Catholic hierarchy." Kaminsky further demonstrates that Sanger did not choose this course as a matter of mere convenience, but that she genuinely viewed the Catholic Church as her arch-enemy in a battle to overturn the traditional moral order of western civilization and usher in a new era based upon a pragmatic moral code. Anyone seeking to understand the displacement of Judeo-Christian morality from the American public square should read this book.

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution PDF Author: Jonathan Eig
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245942
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
A Chicago Tribune "Best Books of 2014" • A Slate "Best Books 2014: Staff Picks" • A St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Books of 2014" The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

The Politics of the Pill

The Politics of the Pill PDF Author: Rachel VanSickle-Ward
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190675373
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The announcement of a Health and Human Services (HHS) rule requiring insurance providers to cover the costs of contraception as part of the Affordable Care Act sparked widespread political controversy. How did something that millions of American women use regularly become such a fraught political issue? In The Politics of the Pill, Rachel VanSickle-Ward and Kevin Wallsten explore how gender has shaped contemporary debates over contraception policy in the U.S. Within historical context, they examine the impact that women and perceptions of gender roles had on media coverage, public opinion, policy formation, and legal interpretations from the deliberation of the Affordable Care Act in 2009 to the more recent Supreme Court rulings in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Zubic v. Burwell. Their central argument is that representation matters: who had a voice significantly impacted policy attitudes, deliberation and outcomes. While women's participation in the debate over birth control was limited by a lack of gender parity across institutions, women nevertheless shaped policy making on birth control in myriad and interconnected ways. Combining detailed analyses of media coverage and legislative records with data from public opinion surveys, survey experiments, elite interviews, and congressional testimony, The Politics of the Pill tells a broader story of how gender matters in American politics.

Textual Contraception

Textual Contraception PDF Author: Beth Widmaier Capo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814210598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Between the 1910s and 1940s, American women fought for and won the right to legal birth control. This battle was fought in the courts, in the media, and in the pages of American literature. Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction examines the relationship between aesthetic production and political activism in the birth control movement. It concludes that, by dramatically bringing to life the rhetorical issues, fiction played a significant role in shaping public consciousness. Concurrently, the potential for female control inherent in contraception influenced literary technique and reception, supporting new narrative possibilities for female characters beyond marriage and motherhood. Merging cultural analysis and literary scholarship, this compelling work moves from a consideration of how cultural forces shaped literary production and political activism to a close examination of how fictional representations of contraception influenced the terms of public discourse on marriage, motherhood, economics, and eugenics. By analyzing popular fiction such as Mother by Kathleen Norris, radical periodicals such as The Masses and Birth Control Review, and literature by authors from Theodore Dreiser to William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen to Mary McCarthy, Beth Widmaier Capo reveals the rich cross-influence of contraceptive and literary history.

My Fight for Birth Control

My Fight for Birth Control PDF Author: Margaret Sanger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780080187334
Category : Birth control
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description


Birth Strike

Birth Strike PDF Author: Jenny Brown
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629636533
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
When House Speaker Paul Ryan urged U.S. women to have more children, and Ross Douthat requested “More babies, please,” in a New York Times column, they openly expressed what policymakers have been discussing for decades with greater discretion. Using technical language like “age structure,” “dependency ratio,” and “entitlement crisis,” establishment think tanks are raising the alarm: if U.S. women don’t get busy having more children, we’ll face an aging workforce, slack consumer demand, and a stagnant economy. Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the protracted fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S. and that politicians only attack abortion and birth control to appeal to those “values voters.” But hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women’s reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women’s work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners. By some measures our birth rate is the lowest it has ever been. With little access to childcare, family leave, health care, and with insufficient male participation, U.S. women are conducting a spontaneous birth strike. In other countries, panic over low birth rates has led governments to underwrite childbearing and childrearing with generous universal programs, but in the U.S., women have not yet realized the potential of our bargaining position. When we do, it will lead to new strategies for winning full access to abortion and birth control, and for improving the difficult working conditions U.S. parents now face when raising children.

Sweetening the Pill

Sweetening the Pill PDF Author: Holy Grigg-Spall
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 178099608X
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Millions of healthy women take a powerful medication every day from their mid-teens to menopause - the Pill - but few know how this drug works or the potential side effects. Contrary to cultural myth, the birth-control pill impacts on every organ and function of the body, and yet most women do not even think of it as a drug. Depression, anxiety, paranoia, rage, panic attacks - just a few of the effects of the Pill on half of the over 80% of women who pop these tablets during their lifetimes. When the Pill was released, it was thought that women would not submit to taking a medication each day when they were not sick. Now the Pill is making women sick. However, there are a growing number of women looking for non-hormonal alternatives for preventing pregnancy. In a bid to spark the backlash against hormonal contraceptives, this book asks: Why can't we criticize the Pill? ,

A Companion to American Women's History

A Companion to American Women's History PDF Author: Nancy A. Hewitt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 047099858X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
This collection of twenty-four original essays by leading scholars in American women's history highlights the most recent important scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field. Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including the colonial family, marriage, health, sexuality, education, immigration, work, consumer culture, and feminism. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Includes expanded bibliography of titles to guide further research.