In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

4 From Private to Public Ishimoto Shidzue and the Birth Control Movement up to 1941 Millions of Japanese women have now come to realize that once they act as a unit [like the Tokyo Federation of Women’s Organizations], speaking their wishes with a single voice, they can make their influence a very powerful one in new Japan. It is this important development that gives significance to the movement now under way to solve the population problems by the radical methods of Western science. Ishimoto Shidzue, “Women’s Progress in Japan” Birth control is not a national problem only, but an international one, and we who belong to this civilization must all help each other. Letter from Margaret Sanger to Baroness Ishimoto, March 3, 1938 O f all the forms of social activism across the world in the period between the world wars, the birth control movement shed the most light on the fact that women’s privacy was constrained by the state. At its juncture with the woman’s body, the state regarded woman’s reproduction as a legitimate object of control, used to increase or to decrease its population; in opposition, birth control activists sought to empower women to control their own bodies and fertility. One early test of this came in 1916 in Brooklyn, New York, when Margaret Sanger opened her birth control clinic targeting working-class women. To avoid unwanted pregnancies she planned to provide information and methods for birth control to those women who had limited access to it. Awareness of the idea of spacing out childbearing and knowledge about how to go about it had so far only been disseminated by stealth among middle-class women, but Margaret Sanger wanted birth control for all. In response, to restrict this, the U.S. government enforced the antiobscenity Comstock Act of 1873 (named for the “social purity” crusader Anthony From Private to Public 83 Comstock), which banned sending contraceptive information through the mail. Opponents of birth control were against the fact that this would empower women to control their own sexuality by separating reproduction from sexual intercourse. In this obstructive environment Margaret Sanger made use of the popularity of neo-Malthusian ideas about controlling population to ensure adequate resources and of eugenics theories regarding improving the genetic health of the population to promote the cause.1 For example, quoting a eugenicist’s theory, she wrote, “Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit,”2 indicating that birth control was a means to decrease the number of the “unfit.” At a time when people were worried that the increasing number of poor immigrants to the United States threatened to overwhelm the Anglo-American population, Sanger used eugenics theory to promote birth control among poor immigrant women. In this way, she took advantage of elite Americans’ worries about “race suicide” and fears about the birth rate of their own “race” declining. In the historian Linda Gordon’s analysis, many middle-class reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accepted “racist” rhetoric as a strategy to pursue their goals. Likewise, birth control activists “were not attracted to eugenics because they were racists; rather they had interests in common with eugenicists and had no strong tradition of anti-racism on which to base a critique of eugenics.”3 The historian Ellen Chesler, whose work on Sanger’s complex character is more convincing , writes that “Margaret Sanger was never herself a racist, but she lived in a profoundly bigoted society” and she did not “repudiate prejudice unequivocally .”4 Sanger’s strategic choice seems clearly wrong from today’s perspective , but it can be argued both that Sanger was not alone among birth control advocates in linking the birth control cause with eugenics and that she was especially pragmatic. In Japan, meanwhile, it was not only working-class women who encountered obstacles to control their own reproduction and sexuality but all women across the social spectrum. The birth control movement was not officially illegal. However, policies aimed at increasing the population were socially and politically enforced by heavy pressure on women. To make Japan a strong imperial power, labor and military recruits were needed, and thus the government encouraged large families. This in turn made it difficult for working-class women to control their sexuality and reproduction, leaving many of them encumbered with children...

Share