I decided to write my third book, God Bless the Pill, about the mid-twentieth-century history of birth control in 2011. The topic seemed less controversial than abortion, allowing for more nuanced analysis. It also seemed satisfyingly feminist. As a historian of women in American religion, I knew that this time period saw both massive advances in the acceptability and availability of birth control, and an increase in denominations ordaining women: the Methodists and Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1956, the Evangelical Lutherans in 1970, and Episcopal Church in 1976-1977. I hoped and assumed that there would be a link.
I had read, and loved, Elaine Tyler May’s America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. Though May takes seriously the “peril” part of her title, the promise and the liberation are the parts of the book that excited me. When religion comes up in her book, it is conservative religion: institutions like the official Catholic Church that were opposed to birth control, or worried that if it became available to the unmarried, it would change the moral patterns of the nation. What would happen if one looked instead at liberal religion, like the collection of denominations that came to ordain women in the generation after World War II? Surely feminism, or at least an increasing understanding of the importance of bodily autonomy for women, had animated the support that these denominations showed for birth control.
A link also seemed to be present in studies of religious engagement with queer politics. Ever since we first met while in graduate school, Anthony Petro has been one of my primary intellectual companions; he was then writing the dissertation that would become his first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. It was through Petro’s work that I first came to be interested in religion and medicine. Petro’s work does not shy away from demonstrating the immense homophobia that animated the religious right in the 1980s. But he also shows that their faith caused some Christian ministers to advocate for people with AIDS. Petro also read aspects of secular AIDS organizing through a religious-studies lens, demonstrating that those moments were not, perhaps, quite so secular after all. The fact that May did not talk about liberal religion, but did talk about the feminist implications of the pill, and that Petro traced Christian support for people with AIDS made me hope, and even believe, that I would find myself writing a history of religious feminists.
Reader, I did not.
In retrospect, I should have thought more about a key piece of Petro’s argument: those Christian ministers who thought that it was important to care for people with AIDS were not necessarily operating from a liberatory lens. They had sympathy for the suffering of those with AIDS, sure, but they also believed that Christ had called upon Christians to minister to the least of humanity—thieves, moneylenders, prostitutes. And so they cared for people with AIDS in the 1980s because they saw them as the least of the American (and international) community. Religious leaders saw people with AIDS as “least” because of the terrible illness and the stigma associated with it, but also because AIDS was associated with gay men, people who were often seen by the communities that these ministers came from as degenerate, sinners, worthless, deserving of their disease.
It is not so much that birth control advocates saw women as degenerate. It is true that John Rock, one of the doctors who helped develop the contraceptive pill (“the Pill”), argued against the prevailing fear that contraceptives would lead to sexual immorality–by observing that “good girls” would not have sex outside of marriage anyway; so the Pill wouldn’t change their behavior. And if only “bad girls” would have sex outside of marriage, well, at least contraception would keep them from becoming bad mothers.
But beyond such notions, women’s bodies became tools through which American moral leaders–clergy, politicians, scientists, and doctors–could shape the nation’s society. Birth control was not made socially acceptable and readily available because the men who were its gatekeepers believed in women’s bodily autonomy or their right to chart their own educational, professional, sexual, relational, or reproductive destinies.
Instead, birth control was seen by these leaders as a tool to regulate women’s bodies, allowing the creation of the ideal American family–a social unit built around a sexually dynamic marriage between a husband who provided and a woman who could stay home, practicing increasingly resource-intensive parenting and acting as the family’s principle consumer. In Cold War rhetoric, this kind of family became one of the nation’s most important weapons against the godless Communist menace. Accompanying theologies of “responsible parenthood” wove this view of the family into American religious life–making the “appropriate choices” into moral responsibilities before God, as well as the state.
With birth control, family sizes could be kept small enough to turn American families into productive consumers of everything from KitchenAid stand mixers to automobiles to suburban homes themselves. Male leaders apparently did not assume that women would use contraception to access the professions, but rather that they would be fulfilled by homemaking and mothering. Responsible Americans should also have these small families, this theology contended, in order to better steward the earth’s resources. The nation also began to export this vision of the moral and upwardly mobile family abroad, as we battled the Soviet Union for spheres of influence. This narrative was inherently conservative and committed to the heteronormative nuclear family.
It was also racist: framing these small, upwardly mobile families as “moral” also meant pathologizing people who could not achieve these families–often because of structural racism and income inequality.
The clergy who were creating theologies of responsible–which is to say planned and limited–parenthood did not think of themselves as racist. In their context, they were liberal, perhaps even progressive. Rather than seeing, for instance, Black families at home and abroad as innately incapable of maintaining good and moral family structures, they believed that they were in fact capable of making these moral choices.
Similarly, while their idealized nuclear family structure pathologized the family structures that African American communities had resiliently created in the face of racial discrimination, and the complicated kinship structures that characterize many cultures, the people framing this theology did not see themselves as advancing white supremacy when they pushed for nuclear families headed by a providing father and a homemaking mother. Similarly, they did not think of their views as oppressing women. They were concerned about maternal health, and believed that women were forced into the workforce by having more children than they could feed and educate on their husband’s salary. They believed they were liberating women from cycles of childbearing, not that they were creating a rhetoric that guarded against the actual liberatory potential of birth control.
I do not think these people were monsters, and I think that it is important to read them as liberal in the context of their time. But they are not the inspiring feminist forebearers that I imagined. And so, as interesting as I found this material, I struggled mightily to write this book. I had all of the material arranged, all of the research done, and eventually, an entire year to write. And yet, I felt continuously stuck. I did what I always do when I feel stuck. I whined to Anthony Petro. Probably a lot.
At some point in my decade of whining, Anthony diagnosed the problem, which was: I did not actually like anyone that I was writing about. I did not want to spend time with them. My first book had thought about interfaith families in a variety of settings, and while many of those families made choices that I do not think would work for me, I believed strongly that they were all trying to do what was best. While there are wrong approaches to interfaith family life, those choices are wrong because they are based on coercion. Any mutually agreed-upon choice made with respect and care seems like a good and healthy choice to me, so I was on the side of every family that I studied. My second book was about me and facets of my story. But in God Bless the Pill, I just did not really like the majority of the people about whom I wrote, or their agendas.
I think that it is terribly important that we understand the conservative impulses that shaped what we think of as liberal advances. For one thing, it complicates the idea that what we are now experiencing is simply backlash–the last, if terrible, gasps of an old order, dying, as we progress to something more liberatory. Instead, it demonstrates that some of what we see as conservative backlash is actually course correction by a non-feminist, non-anti-racist, imperialistic center.
Women did not achieve our collective liberation, such as it is, because men in power helped us to get there. We achieved our collective liberation by appropriating birth control, a tool that they had intended for the perfection of the family, for feminist ends. I believe that changing this narrative will make us more clear-sighted as we remobilize to regain lost ground and continue to fight for our societies to recognize our full humanity.
I think the story that my scholarship uncovers is important. But here is the thing: I do not want to have to fight for my humanity, as women before me have done. I do not want American history, or American society, to be like my father: simultaneously telling me that he was proud of me and that I could be anything that I wanted to be and also expecting me to cook his dinner whenever my mother was not there to do it. Especially if he expected vegetarian me to cook him meat that I cannot eat! I do not want that social dynamic to play out in my life, or in the lives of my friends, or in the lives of their daughters.
Just this month, the United States became the only country that refused to sign the resolution of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which addresses diversity, equity, and inclusion; links the oppression of women and girls to climate change; takes progressive stances towards gender identity; and addresses reproductive autonomy.
I knew that the past was not feminist. But I hated that the actors who brought about this feminist tool did it, essentially, by accident, and that women had to make it feminist. It depresses me. And writing my book depressed me. I am glad that my book is now out in the world. I think it offers tools to think about how we got here, what truths are embedded in the narratives that we have accepted as feminist, and how we might need to create new narratives to come to a truly feminist future.
Despite the horrible state of the world, because of the book, I was recently asked to speak at a local synagogue for Repro Shabbat, a collaboration between synagogues and the National Council of Jewish Women to advance reproductive health. And because it was a sermon, I felt obligated to offer people some way forward. So what I said there was this: when I get paralyzed by the extent of the horror around me, and worry that I do not know what to do and that I will make mistakes, in a time when everything seems so crucial, I remember that these extremely flawed actors–particularly ministers and rabbis–managed to create a tool that I, and many women, have been able to use as a tool of our liberation–even if they did not mean to do it. And I am choosing to see that as a hopeful precedent.
