Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920-1940 (review)

In the years since James Reed and Linda Gordon published their path-breaking works on the history of the birth control movement, several scholars (myself included) have delved into the history of contraception in hopes of shedding light on changes in sexuality, family dynamics, women's social roles, medicine and public health, and reproductive law and public policy. These works take a variety of approaches: some examine a particular contraceptive method, some trace developments in legislative actions and judicial rulings, some focus on a specific period of time. Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer makes an important contribution to this body of literature with her fascinating case study of a single birth control provider, the Maternal Health Clinic of Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1920s and 1930s.

This is much more than a local institutional history. Meyer's beautifully written, nuanced telling of the founding and operation of the Maternal Health Clinic parallels and intersects the history of the national birth control movement, fleshing out the strategies undertaken by women determined to help other women control their fertility. The stories of the founders and board members who started and sustained the clinic illuminate the larger history of women's voluntarism and philanthropic work; the participation of female physicians and nurses in the provision of birth control services reveals much about the roles available to women in health care in the early twentieth century. Meyer locates her account of the Cleveland Maternal Health Clinic in the broader context of national economic and social trends, such as the Great Depression and the eugenics movement.

Any Friend of the Movement shows how the efforts to establish a birth control clinic in Cleveland during the Comstock era cut across lines of gender and age, as the young founders enlisted the support of their husbands and their mothers. They also cut across class lines, as upper-class women sympathized with the less privileged—although this relationship was complex and, at times, contradictory, because the well-to-do board members often based their rationale for providing contraceptive services on eugenic motives. Meyer does a fine job of elucidating these contradictions in intentions and rhetoric, along with the inconsistencies that emerged as the clinic tried to serve both the needs of individual clients and the larger interests of scientific research. The clients also feature prominently here, as Meyer makes use of a cache of letters written to the clinic. Other historians have relied on similar kinds of correspondence, but this primary source is still a very effective way to include the voices of the women served by the clinic.

Although the main emphasis of Meyer's study is on the two decades from 1920 to 1940, she sets the stage for the founding of the clinic with an introductory chapter on the earlier history of birth control and eugenics in the United States, and specifically in Ohio. She also brings the story of the Maternal Health Clinic (renamed Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland in 1966) into the twenty-first century in a brief, but interesting, epilogue. Meyer situates the history of birth control in early twentieth-century Cleveland in a larger national and chronological framework, but the real significance of this volume lies in her skillful analysis of how the birth control movement played out on the local level at a particular historical moment. I am a big fan of Margaret Sanger, but it was refreshing to read a history of birth control in which she played a minor supporting role. This engaging book is a welcome addition to historical scholarship on contraception, and it deserves a wide audience.