The birth control movement before Roe v. Wade

This essay synthesizes the history of the birth control movement in the US and describes changes in sexual behavior, social values, and public policy in order to provide a context for the changes in human reproductive public policy. After an introduction, the essay outlines the history of contraception from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Part 3 covers the period of World War I to the Depression when civil libertarians and eugenicists began to question the suppression of contraception and Margaret Sanger organized her clinics. The fourth part of the essay carries the history forward to the end of World War II, a period in which Dr. Clarence J. Gamble began to expose the marketing of defective contraceptive methods and to illustrate the willingness of poor women to accept contraceptives. The social changes which began in the 1950s are the subject of the fifth section of the essay. During this period, Roman Catholic opposition to contraception lessened, and social scientists began to focus world attention on overpopulation. Frank Notestein was appointed the first head of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, and John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council which conducted research into the IUD and began to attempt to influence population growth in nonindustrialized countries. This period also saw the development of the oral contraceptive. The changes of this era were institutionalized in 1967 when the federal government took a positive stance towards family planning in its Social Security Amendments. The decade of the 1970s is the subject of the last part of this essay. This period saw the Supreme Court assign a constitutionally protected right to abortion and Congress pass the Helms Amendment which denied the use of foreign aid funds for abortions. Challenges to the right to individual birth control practice continued during this period, and debate centered around the specter of overpopulation, the threat of adolescent pregnancy, and perceptions of "family values."     

Making room for rubbers: Gender,technology, and birth control before the pill

Before the Food and Drug Administration approved in 1960 the distribution of oral contraceptives, the most popular form of birth control in the United States was the condom. Scholars have often downplayed men's involvement in the history of birth control, relegating knowledge and use of contraceptive technology to a separate "female domain." This article explores the role of condoms in the evolution of the American birth control business, attitudes toward public health, and everyday sexual behavior, and suggests why the full complexities of the history of birth control are best captured by an approach that is attentive to broad gender dynamics as well as to the diversity of technological change.     

The origins of the birth control movement in England in the early nineteenth century

The origins of the birth control movement in England in the 19th cen tury are discussed. The impact of Malthus's "Essay on the Principle of Population" and the activities of such thinkers and reformers as Jermy Bentham, James and John Stuart Mill, Francis Plance, Richard Carlile, Robert Dale Owen, and Charles Knowlton are discussed. The social debate that arose during the century is discussed.     

"Pictures with a purpose": the birth control debate on the big screen

In the first half of the twentieth century, birth control advocates used the mass media to reframe contraception from a private, secret matter to an acceptable part of life fit for public discussion. Although their campaign began in print, they quickly embraced the more far-reaching medium of film to deliver their message. This article argues that birth control advocates circumvented the Comstock Act in the early decades of the twentieth century by taking up this new medium as part of a long-running strategy to publicize the birth control movement. Their efforts shaped both the public debate on the topic and the development of motion picture censorship.     

Economic integration and industrial location: the case of Spain before World War I

During the second half of the 19th century, Spain's industrialgeography underwent radical change. In Jordi Nadal's words,‘Catalonia became Spain's factory’. This gradualgeographical concentration of industrial activity coincidedwith another process: the integration of the Spanish economy.The purpose of this paper is to analyse the determinants ofthe localization of industrial activity in Spain during thesecond half of the 19th century and the effects of economicintegration on Spain's industrial geography. To this end, wefirst review the historical analysis of these changes and presentevidence on the process of market integration and industrialconcentration by constructing a range of measures of industrialspecialization and geographical concentration. Second, we performan econometric analysis of the determinants of industrial locationat two points in time, 1856 and 1893, using spatial econometricstechniques. Our results are consistent with the hypotheses oftrade theories. During the second half of the 19th century,Spain became an integrated economy and industrial activity wasconcentrated in a limited number of territories characterizedby a comparative advantage in human capital endowments, a favourablegeo-economic position, and initial specialization in sectorsshowing scale economies.     

Anglican Evangelical Theology,c. 1820–1850: The Case of Edward Bickersteth

The period between the 1780s and the 1830s is widely acknowledged to be a formative one for Anglican Evangelical identity. It was the age of Simeon, Wilberforce, and the Clapham Sect, a time when polite culture became imbued with moral seriousness, and when pious causes came to the centre of the political stage. Yet while it is equally well known that the late 1820s witnessed a significant change in mood and direction, prompted by the passing of an earlier generation of leaders, missionary failure and theological fragmentation, the Anglican Evangelical movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century has received comparatively little attention. Evangelicals appear frequently in work on the Oxford Movement and Broad Church, but often only as two‐dimensional reactionaries ripe for the protagonists to trample. Edward Bickersteth (1786–1850) is therefore a particularly interesting figure, having risen to prominence in the 1810s and 1820s but in the 1830s and 1840s becoming one of the movement's acknowledged leaders. By showing how the coming man of the earlier period negotiated rockier territory later on, this article seeks to explore not just the changes but also the striking continuities in Evangelical thought. For even if, as Grayson Carter has argued in an excellent recent study, the ecclesiastical changes of the 1820s and 1830s forced Anglican Evangelicals, like others, to reconsider their place in the Church of England, Bickersteth was among the most prominent of the majority who, while unhappy with developments in politics and theology, remained loyal to their Church.