Intimate Politics

This book places the intimate experience of fertility control at the heart of political and social approaches toward women's bodies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Women's History Review.

Cassia Roth is Associate Professor in the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She is the author of A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil and articles in Gender & History, Journal of Women's History, Slavery & Abolition, Medical History, and História, Ciências, Saúde - Manguinhos, among others. She has an MPH in Epidemiology and a PhD in History. Diana Paton is William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. Her books include No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870, and The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World.

Introduction 1. Fertility control in ancient Rome 2. Who's in control? Varying and changing translations of 'birth control' in Japan 3. 'Performing public piety:' Infanticide and reproductive agency in Reformation Spain 4. The many meanings of aborto: Pregnancy termination and the instability of a medical category over time 5. Debates on family planning and the contraceptive pill in the Irish magazine Woman's Way, 1963-1973 6. Bringing the law home: Abortion, reproductive coercion, and the family in early twentieth-century China 7. In the family way: Incest, fertility control, and the power of the patriarchal family in Brazil 8. 'It is impossible to judge the extent to which the crime is prevalent': Infanticide and the law in India, 1870-1926 9. Embodied sources: abortion, medicine, and the law in early twentieth-century British Guiana Afterword: Governing reproduction