Birth Control
Birth control as a movement in the US has had a very uneven relationship to movements for women s rights. Discuss early birth control reform efforts in relationship to issues of gender and class power.
Birth control was an early-twentieth-century slogan, but it has become the generic for all forms of control of reproduction. With the spread of agriculture and the economic advantages of large families, religious and in some cases secular law increasingly restricted birth control, with the result that there appears to have been an increase in reliance on abortion while contraceptive technology and use declined. Both practices were legal in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century.
Birth control as a movement in the US has had a very uneven relationship to movements for women s rights. Discuss early birth control reform efforts in relationship to issues of gender and class power.
Birth control was an early-twentieth-century slogan, but it has become the generic for all forms of control of reproduction. With the spread of agriculture and the economic advantages of large families, religious and in some cases secular law increasingly restricted birth control, with the result that there appears to have been an increase in reliance on abortion while contraceptive technology and use declined. Both practices were legal in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century.
Starting in the 1830 s, a state-by-state drive to prohibit abortion developed and was largely successful by 1880. It was spurred by a backlash against the women s rights movement that reflected anxieties about women deserting their conventional position as mothers, and specializing physicians eager to restrict their competition from irregular practitioners, many of them offering abortion services. Then in 1873 all birth control information was specifically included within the definition of the obscene and was therefore barred form interstate commerce by the federal Comstock Act.
Birth control was an early-twentieth-century slogan, but it has become the generic for all forms of control of reproduction. With the spread of agriculture and the economic advantages of large families, religious and in some cases secular law increasingly restricted birth control, with the result that there appears to have been an increase in reliance on abortion while contraceptive technology and use declined. Both practices were legal in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century.
Birth control as a movement in the US has had a very uneven relationship to movements for women s rights. Discuss early birth control reform efforts in relationship to issues of gender and class power.
Birth control was an early-twentieth-century slogan, but it has become the generic for all forms of control of reproduction. With the spread of agriculture and the economic advantages of large families, religious and in some cases secular law increasingly restricted birth control, with the result that there appears to have been an increase in reliance on abortion while contraceptive technology and use declined. Both practices were legal in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century.
Starting in the 1830 s, a state-by-state drive to prohibit abortion developed and was largely successful by 1880. It was spurred by a backlash against the women s rights movement that reflected anxieties about women deserting their conventional position as mothers, and specializing physicians eager to restrict their competition from irregular practitioners, many of them offering abortion services. Then in 1873 all birth control information was specifically included within the definition of the obscene and was therefore barred form interstate commerce by the federal Comstock Act.