Unearthing individual stories and statistical records from previously overlooked birth control clinics, Cathy Moran Hajo looks past the rhetoric of the birth control movement to show the relationships, politics, and issues that defined the movement in neighborhoods and cities across the United States. Whereas previous histories have emphasized national trends and glossed over the majority of clinics, Birth Control on Main Street contextualizes individual case studies to add powerful new layers to the existing narratives on abortion, racism, eugenics, and sterilization. Hajo draws on an original database of more than 600 clinics run by birth control leagues, hospitals, settlement houses, and public health groups to isolate the birth control clinic from the larger narrative of the moment. By revealing how clinics tested, treated, and educated women regarding contraceptives, she shows how clinic operation differed according to the needs and concerns of the districts it served. Moving thematically through the politicized issues of the birth control movement, Hajo infuses her analysis of the practical and medical issues of the clinics with unique stories of activists who negotiated with community groups to obey local laws and navigated the swirling debates about how birth control centers should be controlled, who should receive care, and how patients should be treated.

This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare. A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.

An examination of the complex interrelationship between charity birth control clinics and the commercial marketplace in the United States through the 1970s. The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World is the first book to chart the origins and evolution of the charity birth control clinic movement in the United States from the 1910s through the 1970s, a period that witnessed dramatic transformation in the goods and services such clinics provided. Rose Holz uncovers the virtually unexamined relationship between Planned Parenthood and the commercial marketplace sphere. Challenging more thanthirty years of historiography on birth control, Holz sheds new light on battles over reproductive rights through her analysis of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America within the context of the commercial birth control world. Revealing that it would be Planned Parenthood's engagement to charity -- the argument the organization once used to discredit the presumed profit-driven exploitation of the marketplace -- that would put precisely those women ithoped to assist in dangerous situations, she asks such probing questions as: What were the meanings attached to the provision of birth control and its commercial distribution? How in turn were these meanings used as sources of power? The project draws on rich primary sources to answer these questions and to examine the historical role of the local birth control clinic in modern America. Rose Holz earned her PhD in history from the University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is associate director of and associate professor of practice in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

When Margaret Sanger returned to Europe in 1920, World War I had altered the social landscape as dramatically as it had the map of Europe. Population concerns, sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use had entered public discussion, and Sanger's birth control message found receptive audiences around the world. This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's dramatic birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her tireless efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's contentious dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's own dramatic evolution from gritty grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat. A powerful documentary history of a transformative twentieth-century figure, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4 is a primer for the debates on individual choice, sex education, and planned parenthood that remain all-too-pertinent in our own time.

How did birth control become legitimate in the United States? One kitchen table at a time, contends Trent MacNamara, who charts how Americans reexamined old ideas about money, time, transcendence, nature, and risk when considering approaches to family planning. By the time Margaret Sanger and other activists began campaigning for legal contraception in the 1910s, Americans had been effectively controlling fertility for a century, combining old techniques with explosive new ideas. Birth Control and American Modernity charts those ideas, capturing a movement that relied less on traditional public advocacy than dispersed action of the kind that nullified Prohibition. Acting in bedrooms and gossip corners where formal power was weak and moral feeling strong, Americans of both sexes gradually normalized birth control in private, then in public, as part of a wider prioritization of present material worlds over imagined eternal continuums. The moral edifice they constructed, and similar citizen movements around the world, remains tenuously intact.

In Choosing to Care, Kyle E. Ciani examines the long history of interactions between parents and social reformers from diverse backgrounds in the development of social welfare programs, particularly childcare, in San Diego, California. Ciani explores how a variety of people—from destitute parents and tired guardians to benevolent advocates and professional social workers—connected over childcare concerns in a city that experienced tremendous demographic changes caused by urbanization, immigration, and the growth of a local U.S. military infrastructure from 1850 to 1950. Choosing to Care examines four significant areas where San Diego’s programs were distinct from, and contributed to, the national childcare agenda: the importance of the transnational U.S.–Mexico border relationship in creating effective childcare programs; the development of vocational education to curtail juvenile delinquency; the promotion of nursery school education; and the advancement of an emergency daycare program during the Great Depression and World War II. Ciani shows how children from families in unstable situations, especially children from Native American, Asian, Mexican-descent, African American, and impoverished Anglo families, challenged a social reform system that defined care as both social control and behavioral regulation. Choosing to Care incorporates a broader definition of childcare to include efforts by governmental and organizational bodies and persons to maintain and nurture the physical, mental, and social health and development of minors when parents and guardians cannot do so. It offers a more complex understanding of how multiple avenues and resources established social welfare in San Diego and other West Coast cities.