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Reviewed by:
  • The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World by Rose Holz
  • Rebecca M. Kluchin, Ph.D. (bio)
Keywords

birth control, Margaret Sanger, clinics.

Rose Holz. The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World. Rochester, New York, University of Rochester Press, 2012. 235 pp., $80.00.

The history of the American birth control movement and its leader Margaret Sanger continues to intrigue historians of women, social movements, and medicine. Rose Holz’s The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World contributes to the rich literature on this topic and expands our understanding of the clinic in two critical ways. First, like Andrea Tone in Devices and Desires (Hill and Wang, 2001), Holz approaches her subject from a business perspective. Whereas Tone explored the business of underground contraception during the Comstock era and beyond, Holz focuses on the birth control clinic and identifies the myriad ways in which the charity clinic not only engaged with the marketplace it tried so hard to distance itself from, but also at times became “commercially mainstream” (46). Second, The Birth Control Clinic in the Marketplace World extends beyond the usual ending date of studies of the birth control movement: around 1942, when Planned Parenthood was established and family planning replaced birth control as the terminology used to describe contraception. Holz begins her study of local clinics in the 1920s and extends it through the 1970s, identifying continuities and changes over time between activists and clinic workers from the 1920s through the 1970s. Holz’s study focuses primarily on local clinics in Illinois, those in Chicago, Danville, and Champaign, but also includes references to clinics in Rhode Island, Texas, and New York, among others, and this seminarrow focus allows her to neatly track changes and evolutions in business, marketing, consumption, and ideological practices.

Holz begins her analysis by noting similarities between radicals like Sanger and underground contraceptive entrepreneurs in the 1910s as both lacked mainstream credibility and operated on the legal margins. By the [End Page 697] 1920s, however, Sanger began to promote the authority of science and medicine and her clinics and those she inspired reflected the Progressiveera politics of their supporters. These clinics prescribed diaphragms, which were fitted by physicians (and thus reinforced Sanger’s efforts to gain respectability and put contraception in the hands of medicine) and emphasized female control (which underscored Sanger’s priority of putting contraceptive decision making in the hands of women). Early clinic workers promoted conservative ideas about sexuality, refusing to treat unmarried women, and cast their institutions in opposition to the marketplace, especially the potentially dangerous contraceptive underground. Charity allowed clinics to gain financial support while retaining their respectability and helped to shift public perception of the birth control movement from one led by radicals to a reputable movement run by middle-class women (29). The Great Depression ushered in an expansion of birth control products and clinics that pushed existing clinics to redefine themselves and their services. They did this by reinforcing physicians’ authority over contraception and thus taking contraception out of the general marketplace, as well as highlighting the charitable mission of their institutions and the ways in which this made them superior to the other commercial options.

Unlike many scholars who end their stories after the Great Depression, Holz continues her analysis through the 1940s and 1950s. She covers the well-known transition from birth control to family planning, adding to this analysis an emphasis on intraorganization conflict between local affiliates and national Planned Parenthood, as the national began to deemphasize the need for clinics and focus its attention on lobbying medical and public health institutions to include family planning in their existing services. Holz concludes that despite national office efforts to change, the clinics of the 1940s and 1950s continued to resemble those of the 1920s and 1930s. Holz’s biggest contribution to the study of this period, however, involves highlighting Planned Parenthood’s use of commercial advertising to promote the alleged benefits of planned families to individual families and the nation, thus blurring the line between charity and business that Planned Parenthood sought to maintain.

The real change to clinics, Holz argues, came in the 1960s and 1970s when Planned Parenthood shifted...

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