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Over the course of the twentieth century, campaigns to increase access to modern birth control methods spread across the globe and fundamentally altered the way people thought about and mobilized around reproduction. This book explores how a variety of actors translated this movement into practice on four islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Bermuda) from the 1930s–70s. The process of decolonization during this period led to heightened clashes over imperial and national policy and brought local class, race, and gender tensions to the surface, making debates over reproductive practices particularly evocative and illustrative of broader debates in the history of decolonization and international family planning. Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean is at once a political history, a history of activism, and a social history, exploring the challenges faced by working class women as they tried to negotiate control over their reproductive lives.
Over the course of the twentieth century, campaigns to increase access to modern birth control methods spread across the globe and fundamentally altered the way people thought about and mobilized around reproduction. This book explores how a variety of actors translated this movement into practice on four islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Bermuda) from the 1930s–70s. The process of decolonization during this period led to heightened clashes over imperial and national policy and brought local class, race, and gender tensions to the surface, making debates over reproductive practices particularly evocative and illustrative of broader debates in the history of decolonization and international family planning. Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean is at once a political history, a history of activism, and a social history, exploring the challenges faced by working class women as they tried to negotiate control over their reproductive lives.
List of tables and figures; Preface; Acknowledgements; List of acronyms; Introduction; 1. The answer, an aid, a right: birth control debates and social movements in the interwar years; 2. From politics to practice: the Colonial office, foreign activists, local advocates, and the structure of family planning clinics; 3. Beyond culture or choice: working class families and birth control clinics; 4. A matter of cost: reproductive politics, state family planning programs, and foreign aid in the transition to independent rule; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
This book is a comprehensive history of reproductive politics and practice in the twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean.
Nicole C. Bourbonnais is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.
'Nicole C. Bourbonnais tracks the complex politics of birth control
in the decolonising Caribbean, illuminating the way that local
contingencies shaped broad global population policies. Deftly
navigating competing interpretations of birth control as liberation
or as coercion, her study encompasses both the debates surrounding
the provision of contraception and the lives of those affected by
it. This is a work of profound importance.' Philippa Levine,
University of Texas, Austin
'This book provides a riveting and comprehensive account of the
grassroots, pro-feminist and cross-class/race/gender movements for
birth control in the twentieth-century colonial English-speaking
Caribbean. It locates the genesis of these movements in the demands
by women for assistance to control their births and chronicles the
later incorporation of these movements into state-led programs and
neo-Malthusian and eugenicist population control strategies. This
publication is a must-read for all including health and social and
reproductive rights advocates, scholars and practitioners. It is a
timely contribution to an issue that continues to demand our
attention.' Rhoda Reddock, University of the West Indies
'Nicole C. Bourbonnais's important book advances our understanding
of the history of birth control in the British Caribbean during the
decades leading to decolonization. This thoughtful and fascinating
work tells us about the struggles and victories of ordinary women
in the Caribbean, and its sensitive engagement with international
developments ensures its appeal to scholars and others interested
in the intertwined histories of reproduction, politics and gender
globally.' Juanita De Barros, McMaster University, Ontario
'Exhaustively and impeccably researched in archives and special
collections across the Atlantic, Bourbonnais visited no less than
six countries for this study - an impressive feat. The finished
history is an excellent interdisciplinary study that will make its
mark within a multitude of historical discourses.' Colleen A.
Vasconcellos, Journal of Interdisciplinary History
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