Traces the controversy over birth control in the United States from mid-nineteenth-century furtiveness to current abortion arguments, contending that the issue has always been more social and political than technological

The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history Woman's Body, Woman's Right, originally published in 1976. Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, The Moral Property of Women shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values. In three new chapters and updates throughout, Gordon addresses birth control and public policy, the intense abortion debates of the past thirty years, and a host of issues that extend from abortion controversies, including sterilization, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, and stem-cell research. Illuminating the conflicts and politics at the core of birth control issues through a historical lens, The Moral Property of Women places today's "choice" versus "right-to-life" movements in the context of the campaign that first prohibited abortion in the mid-nineteenth century and the campaign that legalized contraception in the early twentieth century. From the earliest attempts of women to organize for the legal control of their bodies to the effects of second-wave feminism, Gordon defines the role that birth control has played in society's attitudes towardwomen, sexuality, and gender equality. Highlighting the leaders of the struggle and their actions, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of notorious reproductive control activists such as Margaret Sanger as well as lesser-known pioneers including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the three doctors Foote -- Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote -- the anarchists Ezra Heywood and Emma Goldman, the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and abortion rights advocates of the 1970s.

In Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920 to 1950, Atina Grossmann reconstructs the complicated history of a movement that has been romanticized as the harbinger of 1960s sexual radicalism and demonized as a precursor to Nazi racial policy, but mostly buried and obscured by Nazi bookburnings and repression. Relying on a broad range of sources - from police reports, films and personal interviews to sex manuals unearthed from library basements and secondhand bookstores - the book analyzes a remarkable mass mobilization during the turbulent and innovative Weimar years of doctors and laypeople for women's rights to abortion and public access to birth control and sex education. Reforming Sex takes on questions of international context and comparison as well as continuity and discontinuity in twentieth century German history in a manner that other studies have not. The book follows Weimar sex reformers into the Third Reich, to exile around the world, and into both the Eastern and Western zones of postwar Germany. It demonstrates how deeply rooted eugenics ideology and American and Bolshevik models of modernity were in the Weimar movement. It also examines the drastic rupture between sex reform notions of social health and National Socialist population policy. The story of German sex reform provides a new perspective on post-World War II family planning programs; it sheds light on the long and lively background to current controversies about abortion, the role of doctors and the state in determining women's right to control their own bodies, and the possibilities for reforming and transforming sexual relations between men and women.

Glasgow 1915. Set against the background of rent strikes, anti-war sentiment and a revolution brewing in Russia, a young Jewish woman from the Gorbals gains her first taste for protest and female solidarity. But it is her own rape that galvanises her even further as she capmaigns to introduce birth control to the women of the city.