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Introduction Birth Control, the Moral Property of Women This book offers a general history of birth control politics in the United States. It stresses the unity and development of political thinking about birth control during the past two centuries. It shows that the campaign for birth control was so broad that at times during its history it constituted a grassroots social movement and that it was frequently a controversy involving fundamental and embattled ethical and political values. The acceptability of birth control has always depended on a morality that separates sex from reproduction. In the nineteenth century, when the birth control movement began, such a separation was widely considered immoral. The eventual widespread public acceptance of birth control required a major reorientation of sexual values. This book tells that story from the point of view of those at the center of the conflict, namely, women seeking sexual and reproductive self-determination. The Moral Property of Women surveys this movement in its largest sense: its ideas, its constituency, the motivations and needs of its advocates and its opponents. It is a movement with a continuous history from the mid-nineteenth century, when feminists attacked unwanted pregnancies in the name of sacred female chastity, through the early twentieth century, when contraception hastened the breakdown of traditional standards of chastity, to the end of the twentieth century, when birth control was again intensely controversial. The movement began in the 1870s as a campaign for “voluntary motherhood,” the slogan for a program that condemned contraception and proposed long periods of sexual abstinence for married couples as the remedy for unwanted children. The most recent expressions of that movement grew from the revival of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s and produced, notably, a campaign for the legalization of abortion and promotion of contraception on a mass scale by govern00 .INTRO.1-4/Gord 9/25/02, 10:42 AM 1 2 / Introduction ments all around the world. Clearly, such large changes not only reflect but have also nurtured parallel changes in sexual attitudes and practices. From the Introduction to the First Edition This book argues that birth control has always been primarily an issue of politics , not of technology. Effective forms of birth control were used in nearly all ancient societies; in the modern world, restrictive sexual standards forced birth control underground. The re-emergence of birth control as a respectable practice in the twentieth century was a process of changing sexual standards , largely produced by the women’s rights movement and the rejection of Victorian prudery. As a piece of history, this book rests within two new fields—women’s history and the history of sexuality. In comparison with work done in historical fields where there are strong, tested methodologies, a study about women and/ or about sex will necessarily be naïve. The weakness and newness of these fields are related. The lack of adequate history about sexual behavior and attitudes is a result of the inattention to women in history, because sex itself cannot be comprehended except as a facet of the relations between the two sexes. (This is because sex has been primarily , though not exclusively, defined in terms of relations between men and women.) The relations between the sexes cannot, in turn, be analyzed productively except with an understanding of the subordination of women and their resistance and accommodation to it. Not having incorporated an analysis of this subordination, no historical tradition can yet produce sophisticated work on human sexual behavior. It seemed to me, thinking that we must start somewhere, that a major factor in the development of women’s sexuality was birth control. My premise was that birth control represented the single most important factor in the material basis of women’s emancipation in the course of the past hundred years—that contraception promised the final elimination of women’s only significant biological disadvantage. (The capacity to reproduce is not a disadvantage, but lack of control over it is.) So I began to study birth control—and rather quickly had to question my original premise. It is true that the technology of contraception provided women with a valuable tool, but why did the technology develop when it did? And why did some women seize it more eagerly than others? I discovered that there is a complex, mutual, causal relationship between birth control and women’s status. Birth control has been as much a symptom as a cause of larger social changes in the relations between sexes...

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