Intimate Politics
Fertility Control in Global Historical Perspective
- 208 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Only available on web
About This Book
This book places the intimate experience of fertility control at the heart of political and social approaches toward women's bodies.
Across the globe, women have always controlled their fertility through intimate efforts ultimately tied to larger political processes and gendered power dynamics. Women's biological reproductive capabilities have been contested sites of power struggles, shaping the formation, rule, and dissolution of political regimes throughout history. Yet these intersections between the intimate and the political remain understudied in the historical literature. This book explores these questions from the perspective of multiple time periods, geographic locations, actors, and methods. Chapters analyze how women's individual practices of fertility control, including contraception, abortion, and infanticide, alongside methods for achieving conception and birth, intersected with larger political, economic, and cultural trends. Others problematize the ideas of 'control' in history. What did it mean to 'control one's fertility' in different historical periods and geographical regions? How did historical actors understand and practise what we now call fertility control? How can we expand conventional definitions of fertility control to interrogate ideas related to infertility, menstruation, and heteronormativity? Contributors also highlight how race, ethnicity, and class intersect with gender to shape if, and how, women and men approached fertility control. This book will be of great value to students and scholars of history including the history of the body, women's rights, and health equity, as well as the intersectionality of gender and health.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- Citation Information
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I: Concepts and Categories
- Part II: Law, Medicine, and Religion
- Part III: States and Families
- Part IV: Imperial Power and Local Realities
- Afterword: Governing reproduction
- Index