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  3. Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean
  • Cited by 18
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2017
Print publication year:
2016
Online ISBN:
9781316339930
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316339930
Subjects:
Area Studies, African Studies, Regional and World History: General Interest, History
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

'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 Source: Journal of Interdisciplinary History

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