This book places the intimate experience of fertility control at the heart of political and social approaches toward womens bodies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Womens History Review.
This book places the intimate experience of fertility control at the heart of political and social approaches toward womens bodies.
Across the globe, women have always controlled their fertility through intimate efforts ultimately tied to larger political processes and gendered power dynamics. Womens biological reproductive capabilities have been contested sites of power struggles, shaping the formation, rule, and dissolution of political regimes throughout history. Yet these intersections between the intimate and the political remain understudied in the historical literature. This book explores these questions from the perspective of multiple time periods, geographic locations, actors, and methods. Chapters analyze how womens individual practices of fertility control, including contraception, abortion, and infanticide, alongside methods for achieving conception and birth, intersected with larger political, economic, and cultural trends. Others problematize the ideas of control in history. What did it mean to control ones fertility in different historical periods and geographical regions? How did historical actors understand and practise what we now call fertility control? How can we expand conventional definitions of fertility control to interrogate ideas related to infertility, menstruation, and heteronormativity? Contributors also highlight how race, ethnicity, and class intersect with gender to shape if, and how, women and men approached fertility control. This book will be of great value to students and scholars of history including the history of the body, womens rights, and health equity, as well as the intersectionality of gender and health.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Womens History Review.
Introduction
1. Fertility control in ancient Rome
2. Whos in control?
Varying and changing translations of birth control in Japan
3. Performing
public piety: Infanticide and reproductive agency in Reformation Spain
4.
The many meanings of aborto: Pregnancy termination and the instability of a
medical category over time
5. Debates on family planning and the
contraceptive pill in the Irish magazine Womans Way, 19631973
6. Bringing
the law home: Abortion, reproductive coercion, and the family in early
twentieth-century China
7. In the family way: Incest, fertility control, and
the power of the patriarchal family in Brazil
8. It is impossible to judge
the extent to which the crime is prevalent: Infanticide and the law in
India, 18701926
9. Embodied sources: abortion, medicine, and the law in
early twentieth-century British Guiana Afterword: Governing reproduction
Cassia Roth is Associate Professor in the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She is the author of A Miscarriage of Justice: Womens Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil and articles in Gender & History, Journal of Womens History, Slavery & Abolition, Medical History, and História, Ciźncias, Saśde Manguinhos, among others. She has an MPH in Epidemiology and a PhD in History.
Diana Paton is William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. Her books include No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870, and The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World.
