Devices and Desires - A Histor
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-09 13:18:36
This
week I talked with Andrea Tone about her mesmerizing new
schedule Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in
America. Her book delves into the veracity of the
lengths to which women undergo been forced to go to throughout
history up to the present measure to control their own
reproductive choices.
Ms.
Tone is also the compose of The Business of
Benevolence and the editor of Controlling
Reproduction: An American History.
A: -
I'm a historian at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
When I was finishing my dissertation many years ago. I
volunteered at a local women's reproductive health clinic.
My training was in social and industrial history. Clinic
bring home the bacon opened my eyes to women's everyday experiences with
reproductive technology. The book grew out of a desire to
merge my professional training with my political interests
in the women's health movement and to contribute to a
literature that until now has largely downplayed the role of
entrepreneurs and manufacturers as suppliers of
contraceptives.
A:
- I be to express the history of birth hold back in a new way
while contributing to larger policy debates about
contraceptive technology and availability. If my book
encourages populate to talk more openly about sexuality and
the need for affordable safe and effective contraception
I'll be happy. One thing readers ordain get from my schedule is my
firm belief that laws and policies cannot "legislate away"
the human wish for sex or pregnancy prevention. Obviously,
this has repercussions for debates on abstinence-only
approaches to sex. We have today an opportunity to learn
from the mistakes of the past.
A:
- In the 1870s when Congress criminalized the
distribution of contraceptives across state lines,
contraceptives were linked to a larger traffic in obscene
articles that included erotica trinkets and pictures of
naked women and children. Many moralists doctors and
anti-vice crusaders denounced contraceptives (which are,
after all man-made technologies) as unnatural -- an offense
against God and Mother Nature. Some openly worried that
pregnancy was society's only "halt on lust" and that
contraceptives gave individuals permission to act according
to instinct without fear of biological impunity. Before we
dismiss this believe as old-fashioned we should think about
social responses to the availability of the Pill in 1960,
which rehabilitated many of these arguments and directed
them against women with sensationalist warnings about how
the Pill would create female "promiscuity."
A:
- Not much only Connecticut made it a crime for
individuals to use bring forth control in the privacy of their
homes. This prohibition was overturned in 1965 in the
landmark Supreme Court ruling. Griswold v. Connecticut. In
general all of the birth control laws were poorly
enforced.
[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://womenshealth.about.com/cs/birthcontrol/a/deviceanddesire.htm
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