In Broadcasting Birth Control, Manon Parry departs from the traditional narrative of contraceptive history, which focuses on leaders and organisations, to shed light on an underexamined aspect of the story of family planning: its treatment in mainstream American popular culture, specifically in the media. One would imagine that such a private aspect of women’s lives would not have had media exposure, especially in the pre-Second World War era, when the Comstock Laws, for all intents and purposes, had enacted a moratorium on the discussion and sharing of contraceptive knowledge. Yet, as Parry illustrates, birth control has a media history that spans the twentieth century, although not always self-evident or evenly documented.
By examining cultural sources such as the printed media (newspapers, magazines, journals and even fiction), films, radio and television broadcasts, Parry traces the marriage between birth control advocates and communication experts, both of whom worked in unison to make contraception a public, national cause. This process reclaimed birth control from the margins and shadows of society, positioning it back into mainstream discourse where it had existed prior to the enactment of federal and state Comstock Laws in the late nineteenth century. Initially (between the 1920s and 1940s), media efforts focused on the delivery of conservative educational messages and persuasive techniques that minimised Margaret Sanger’s ‘rhetoric of female sexual liberation’. However, once the feminist origin of birth control reasserted itself in the 1960s, the nature of media coverage also changed, with contraceptive media campaigns shifting from the pedantic to the empowering. Unfortunately, around the same time, another strand of the early twentieth-century birth control movement resurfaced, eugenics, this time in the form of global population control. The deployment of the media to ‘sell’ international family planning exposed a whole host of ethical concerns that had been overlooked previously; namely, the ways in which the media could be manipulated to fit, at best, questionable agendas masquerading as international aid and, at worst, outright racism, sexism and classism against women of colour (imposed by mostly white, middle-class, ‘western’ men and women) in developing countries.
The strong suit of Parry’s work (a doctoral dissertation that was revised for publication) is its ability to elucidate how the birth control movement’s shifting political strategies shaped, and were shaped by, the media. She presents a nuanced ‘two-way’ analysis of how the contraceptive media in the post-Second World War era simultaneously ‘empowered’ birth control users while imposing their own social values, even if this meant eliding gender, racial and class inequalities. African American women, in particular, became sensitised to this phenomenon given the history of white control of black bodies. By the 1960s, African American women began to assert agency by challenging the contraceptive media, resisting family planning policies that were designed to limit the size of the black family. However, the other side of the coin, the ‘pronatalist’ rhetoric of black nationalism, was equally subordinating, compelling African American women to negotiate a middle ground for themselves with respect to the birth control media. Likewise, as family planning programs expanded overseas during the late 1960s and early 1970s (the height of the Vietnam War), they were often accompanied by racist, paternalistic and imperialistic media representations that underscored many of the criticisms of population control in general, and the control of bodies of colour in particular. Yet, as Parry’s research conveys, such media campaigns were not always exploitive, nor were they always ‘value free’, thereby illustrating how an analysis of birth control media can construct a more accurate picture of the movement’s shifting political agenda.
Another strength of Parry’s work is the way in which it unearths a wide array of ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ sources, in particular birth control films, weaving them together into a compelling historical narrative. Broadcasting Birth Control begins with one such film, a 1967 Walt Disney production, starring Donald Duck, entitled Family Planning, which was distributed in Asia and Latin America. Discussions of other birth control ‘propaganda’ films enrich the rest of the text, including Sanger’s melodramatic Birth Control (1917), starring Sanger herself and depicting pivotal moments in her career, such as her arrest for violating the federal Comstock Act, and Lois Weber’s The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1917). These films were countered by The House without Children (1919), an anti-birth-control production which deployed pronatalist images and messages to encourage eugenically ‘fit’ (i.e. white, middle-class, Anglo Saxon Protestant) families to reproduce in order to stem the rising ‘undesirable’ immigrant tide and the so-called ‘race suicide’ that was allegedly descending upon the nation. Broadcasting Birth Control also includes an interesting chapter on family planning in Mexican telenovelas which supplements Parry’s analysis of the transnational expansion of the American birth control movement and its intersection with global population control.
Clearly, Broadcasting Birth Control not only makes a significant contribution to the history of birth control in the United States and its transnational repercussions, but also to American media studies. Thus, Parry’s work represents an important interdisciplinary intervention and is sure to be of interest to scholars in numerous fields ranging from women’s studies, to the medical humanities, to communications.
