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  • The Body Politic and the Politics of the Body
  • Margaret Marsh (bio)
Lisa Forman Cody. Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth–Century Britons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. vii + 353 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–19–926864–9 (cl).
Tom Davis. Sacred Work: Planned Parenthood and its Clergy Alliances. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. ix + 245 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–8135–3493–3 (cl).
Judith A. Houck. Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ix + 328 pp. ISBN 0–674–02740–X (cl).
Jennifer Nelson. Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2003. ix + 224 pp. ISBN 0–8147– 5821–5 (cl).
Rickie Solinger. Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America. New York: New York University Press, 2005. vii + 301 pp. ISBN 0–8147–9827–6 (cl).
Alexandra Minna Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. vii + 247 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–520–24443–6 (cl).
D. Kelly Weisberg. The Birth of Surrogacy in Israel. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005. vii + 291 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–8130–2809–4 (cl).

Consider the following six stories: Surrey, England, 1726: Farm worker Mary Toft finds herself pregnant. A few months later, she claims to have given birth to rabbits after having dreamed of them during her pregnancy, a claim verified by two reputable physicians. A credulous public provides her with a brief period of notoriety, but soon, she confesses to having abetted a hoax. Although the circumstances—the young woman was poor and passive, and had been manipulated by greedy acquaintances—were as sad as they were bizarre, she is vilified and jailed for having perpetrated a scandal. [End Page 181]

Sacramento, California, 1909: Legislators enact the third sterilization bill to be passed in the United States, following Indiana by two years and the state of Washington by only a few weeks. The law authorizes the medical superintendents of asylums and prisons to “asexualize” inmates or patients if the superintendent believes that sterilization would improve their “physical, mental, or moral condition.” By 1921, more than two thousand Californians would be sterilized, amounting to about eighty percent of all sterilizations nationwide.

Charlottesville, Virginia, 1920: Carrie Buck, the daughter of a single woman labeled as both a prostitute and “feebleminded,” becomes homeless when the state assigns her mother to the Colony of Epileptics and Feebleminded in 1920. Sent as a housekeeper to the home of a local citizen, Buck is raped and becomes pregnant in 1923. She herself is now declared feebleminded and the state rules that she should be sterilized. Buck sues, losing in the Supreme Court in 1927. A long era of legal involuntary sterilization in the United States ensues.

Durham, North Carolina, 1949: Duke University endocrinologist Edwin Hamblen, in a popular book called The Change of Life, assures women that their postmenopausal years could be among their most productive. The end of a woman’s reproductive life, he tells them, would open up a new age of creativity. Menopause and its aftermath, he declares, provides women with the opportunity to realize their own hopes and dreams. Freed from burdensome reproductive functions, women could look forward to a time of freedom. Every woman could enjoy the prime of her life (and have the time of her life) in the postmenopausal years.

New York City, 1958: A young married woman suffering from complications of diabetes is admitted to Kings County Hospital. While there, she asks to be fitted for a diaphragm, since she and her physicians agree that another pregnancy would endanger her life. Her physician makes the appointment with her, but then his superiors order him not to proceed. It is the policy of public hospitals in New York, the doctor learns, not to provide contraception to any woman, married or not, because of the opposition of the Catholic Church to birth control. Elected officials in New York are fearful of inflaming Catholic opinion by providing birth control to any users of public hospital services, no matter what their personal beliefs.

Phoenix, Arizona, 1962: Twenty...

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