Abstract
Historians once regarded the passage of the Comstock Laws in 1873 as a death knell for the public discourse on gender, sex, and reproduction that thrived in the early nineteenth-century United States, but this view has given way to a more complex appreciation of the strategies available to actors seeking knowledge about the body. I examine some of these strategies in late-century health and hygiene manuals. Although certain discourses about sex became closed off, others persisted and evolved in the interstices of Comstock's regulatory state. Readers' demand for information did not abate in 1873; savvy publishers found different ways to meet it, utilizing suggestion, allusion, and nontextual cues from which active readers could extract useful knowledge. A once-public debate about the morality, effectiveness, and appropriate use of contraception had become coded in the pages of health and hygiene manuals, pointing readers to the burgeoning mass market for contraceptive devices as a locus of reproductive control.
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A leading journal in its field for more than three quarters of a century, the Bulletin spans the social, cultural, and scientific aspects of the history of medicine worldwide. Every issue includes reviews of recent books on medical history. Recurring sections include Digital Media & Humanities and Pedagogy. Bulletin of the History of Medicine is the official publication of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) and the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine.
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Review: The History and Politics of Birth ControlReviewed Works: Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Con-Control in America by Linda Gordon; From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 by James Reed
Review by: Elizabeth Fee , Michael Wallace
Feminist Studies
Vol. 5, No. 1, Women and Power: Dimensions of Women's Historical Experience (Spring, 1979)
, pp. 201-215 (15 pages)
Published By: Feminist Studies, Inc.
//doi.org/10.2307/3177555
//www.jstor.org/stable/3177555
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Feminist Studies, first published in 1972, is the oldest continuing scholarly journal in the field of women's studies published in the U.S. Contents of the journal reflect its commitment to publishing an interdisciplinary body of feminist knowledge, in multiple genres (research, criticism, commentaries, creative work), that views the intersection of gender with racial identity, sexual orientation, economic means, geographical location, and physical ability as the touchstone for its intellectual analysis. Whether drawn from the complex past or the shifting present, the work that appears in Feminist Studies addresses social and political issues that intimately and significantly affect women and men in the United States and around the world.
Publisher Information
Founded in 1972, Feminist Studies was the first scholarly journal in women’s studies and remains a flagship publication with a record of breaking new ground in the field. Whether drawing from the complex past or the shifting present, the pieces that appear in Feminist Studies raise social and political questions that intimately and significantly affect women and men around the world.
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Feminist Studies © 1979 Feminist Studies, Inc.
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