Contraception and Reproduction in Global Conversation

To study the history of reproduction is to be asked regularly about Margaret Sanger. Sanger's activism in the United States and abroad has cast a long and complicated shadow over the history of contraception in the first half of the twentieth century, prompting debates in both academic circles and the public sphere about the intersections of feminism, eugenics, population control, and imperialism. Thus, the need to engage her legacy continues to be important. However, as illustrated by a wave of local, national, and global studies published in the last decade, there is more to the early birth control movement (both globally and within the United States) than Margaret Sanger, and there is more to reproduction than birth control. The recently published books reviewed here incorporate but also move past the most well-known advocates and points of political friction, allowing us to see the broader landscape of activism, interests, and individual actions that shaped the reproductive continuum in the twentieth century. They take us from the level of world conferences down to the bedroom, providing us with a richer understanding of the dynamics of transnational exchange, the nuances of state power and inequality, the confrontation between "modernity" and "tradition," and the complexities that shape women's and men's agency in the intimate sphere.

Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci's Contraceptive Diplomacy opens with Sanger's visit to Japan in 1922. While this approach would seem to maintain Sanger's dominance within the historiography of the movement, looking at her from the perspective of the Japanese movement—from the outside in—has a decentering effect. As Takeuchi-Demirci shows, although many Japanese intellectuals were interested in Sanger's advocacy, they did not embrace it naively or uncritically; rather, they engaged selectively with her ideas, integrating the elements they agreed with into preexisting national discussions of socialism, feminism, eugenics, and birth control. Local doctors translated her text Family Limitation into Japanese, but added their own critiques and commentary and taught it alongside local medical texts. These interactions went both ways: Japanese advocates traveled to the United States and contributed to American publications, and Sanger drew on Japanese advocates for emotional and political support. Indeed, Takeuchi-Demirci argues that in spite of the "imperialist logic" (67, my emphasis) with which birth controllers like Sanger approached activism abroad, the actual relationship between advocates in Japan and the United States is better described as one of "mutual interactions and influences" (6).

Contraceptive Diplomacy begins but does not end with Sanger's involvement in the country. Instead, Takeuchi-Demirci uses her activism as a launching point for a broader discussion of Japanese-American intellectual and political exchange in the twentieth century. She explores how the subject of birth control animated transpacific relations during the American occupation of Japan, in debates over Japanese immigration within the United States, and during the fifth conference of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) held in Tokyo, where early findings from research on the birth control pill were presented. In the last case, it is not clearly evident that transpacific relations are the most relevant frame of analysis; the vision of the IPPF and research on the pill presented in Tokyo arguably had more to do with the global dynamics of the family planning movement than anything particular to the Japanese-American relationship. Still, Takeuchi-Demirci's book provides a rich example of how we can...