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 mobilised around reproduction. In her latest book (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Nicole Bourbonnais, Assistant Professor of International History at the Institute, explores how a variety of actors translated this movement into practice on four islands (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and Bermuda) from the 1930s to the 1970s. She has kindly answered our questions.
Is your new book the result of a long research or is related to a specific event?
In the summer before I started graduate school, I was assisting a professor with her research on the history of radio in the Caribbean. I was reading a Jamaican newspaper from the late 1930s and kept getting distracted by the large number of articles, editorials and letters to the editor discussing birth control. I was already interested in Caribbean history and reproduction (having spent a summer in Guyana one year as a youth volunteer on an sex education project), so the subject really grabbed my attention. The newspaper debate became the focus of my Master’s thesis and then expanded into a larger project for my PhD dissertation, covering four islands over a broader period of time while also moving beyond politics to explore the practice of early birth control clinics set up in the region. The book is based on that research, so it’s really been over a decade in the making!
How did women react to the development of birth control? Their responses and perceptions were probably different depending on their social situation.
Most of the early clinics I looked at focused on providing contraceptives (diaphragms, sponges, condoms, spermicidal foams and tablets and, from the mid-1960s onwards, the pill and IUD) at cost or free of charge for lower-middle-class and working-class women (upper-class women were assumed to have access to services on their own). But even within this social group – indeed, even within a single village or neighbourhood block – I found a wide diversity of experiences. Some women eagerly seized on the resources the clinics provided and became enthusiastic advocates of the cause; some women attended once or twice and then disappeared; some women closed the door on family planning fieldworkers who visited their homes. Public debates often expressed polarising views of how women would react to these campaigns: birth control advocates argued that all working-class women would choose to use birth control if given the opportunity, while opponents argued that it went against Caribbean culture and would be resisted tooth and nail. In practice, women’s engagement was shaped by a much more complex set of factors: their beliefs and desires, yes, but also their economic situations, state of health, the support (or not) of their sexual partners, the quality and safety of different methods on offer, their past experiences, their work patterns, advice of friends and family, and, at times, basic issues like whether they could get transportation to the clinic or childcare on the day of their appointment.
Is the history of birth control in the Caribbean a way to understand the political aspect of decolonisation – or vice-versa?
Debates over birth rates, population growth and family planning became linked in this period to larger questions surrounding the legacy of colonialism, continuing race/class/gender inequality on the islands, and competing visions for a postcolonial future. The region’s most prominent leaders all weighed in on the subject of birth control, exposing us to new aspects of their political thought and allowing us to see how their nationalist agendas were shaped by concerns surrounding sex and reproduction. But these debates also drew in a much wider diversity of actors beyond the usual suspects, perhaps because they touched on such intimate aspects of individual health, family life and community wellbeing. Doctors, social workers, nurses, early feminists, women’s organisations, international birth control advocates, members of transnational pan-Africanist organisations, local community leaders, and a whole host of anonymous commentators from a wide variety of social positions wrote to newspapers, published pamphlets and delivered speeches on birth control, providing some particularly astute analyses of political, social and economic life and fuelling some surprising alliances. As a result, examining debates over reproduction provides us with a much richer understanding not only of the roots of contemporary reproductive politics, but also of the broader social and political landscape of decolonisation in the Caribbean.
Can you tell us about your new project, “The Gospel of Birth Control: Prophets, Patients, and the Transnational Family Planning Movement”, which seems to be an extension of the first phase of your research?
While exploring the papers of family planning activists and associations in the Caribbean, I was struck by the deep-rooted faith in birth control and tight ideological and personal bonds that formed between local advocates and those who lived thousands of miles away. Actors coming from quite different social and political contexts envisioned themselves as part of a transnational community based on their shared passion for family planning work: indeed, some explicitly referred to themselves as missionaries of “the gospel of birth control”. In recent years, scholars have begun to focus in on the transnational dimension of twentieth century reproductive politics, primarily through examining international population conferences and the global vision of high-profile advocates like Margaret Sanger and the leaders of several new organisations (Pathfinder Fund, IPPF, Population Council, etc.) created in the late 1950s. For my next project, I’m interested in exploring the networks that formed amongst (and frictions between) those who worked on a more quotidian level towards this vision: namely, the mid-level fieldworkers who spanned out across the globe armed with birth control pamphlets and new contraceptives, and the local doctors, nurses and social workers they encountered along the way. I think focusing in on these “middle” men and women will provide us with a more complete picture of family planning activism in the twentieth century and a better understanding of the way global projects intersect with local dynamics.
Full reference: Bourbonnais, Nicole C. Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Illustration: Young Mothers by Karl Parboosingh, 1965, excerpt from the cover of Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970.