Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion by Melissa J. Wilde (review)

The early twentieth-century battle to legalize birth control in the United States is an area ripe for continued scholarly attention. Melissa J. Wilde’s new book, Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion is a good addition to the fold, and aims to expand our knowledge of how various American religious groups approached the idea of birth control access in the early twentieth century. She argues that this particular battle represented one of the first schisms over the politics of sex and gender that still divide religious groups in our own time. Wilde finds a “watershed moment” between 1929 and 1931, as nine of the most prominent religious groups in the country proclaimed birth control to be a duty and not a sin (2). This support, she finds, was founded not in a concern for privacy or women’s rights, but rather because of these groups’ beliefs in eugenics, the threat of race suicide, and white supremacy. The liberalization of some religious groups’ promotion of birth control is rooted, as Wilde argues, in a term she phrases as “complex religion.” Her definition of complex religion emphasizes that religion is not set apart from but instead is twinned with racial, ethnic, class, and gender inequality. In other words, “one cannot explain early birth control reform within the American religious field without understanding how race was seen at the time” (5).

A work of “comparative-historical sociology,” Birth Control Battles draws its evidence from a sample of thirty-one religious denominations beginning in the year 1926, the year of the last government census of religious organizations. Ninety percent of Americans who claimed membership in a religious group in the 1926 census were members of these denominations and many had more than 400,000 members at the time (12). Using the periodicals published by these religious groups (many on a weekly basis), Wilde treats them as representative of the general beliefs and opinions of each denomination,” although she “do[es] not claim nor assume that every member who was reading these periodicals agreed with the views expressed in them (or indeed, with the official stances of the denomination)” (19). She then divides the denominations into “early liberalizers” (those who supported birth control and promoted legalization), “unofficial supporters” (groups who did not make an official statement but published at least one supportive article per year), “critics” (those groups who officially condemned contraception or publicly criticized it), and “silent” (those who said nothing on the subject between 1929 and 1932).

In analyzing this data, Wilde divides her study into three parts, examining religious responses to historical precursors to the birth control movement in Part I, the responses of religious groups to the emerging birth control movement itself in Part II, and the legacy of these responses in Part III, as the birth control pill was developed.

Birth Control Battles is deeply researched and presents a new and much-needed religious component of our historical understanding of the birth control movement’s wide impact on American society. The book has several key issues, however, that detract from its full impact. There is a distracting amount of passive voice throughout. Further, the author uses large block quotes of text from the primary sources, sometimes three to four to a page, with little to no analysis in between. A stronger interpretive voice would have made these findings more meaningful and improved the flow and readability of the text, especially for nonspecialists and the public.

Wilde aptly illustrates that religious denominations who came to support birth control were mobilized by the American Eugenics Society, which deliberately collaborated with religious groups to bring “legitimacy and visibility” to the eugenics movement (66). Yet the book gives little overview of the complexities of eugenics in this period, and while it differentiates between “positive” and “negative” eugenics, it casts the religious support for birth control between the 1930s and 1960s...