The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America [Hardcover]

Linda Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 6, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0252027647 | ISBN-13: 978-0252027642 | Edition: 3 Sub

The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, "The Moral Property of Women" is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history "Woman's Body, Woman's Right", originally published in 1976. Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, "The Moral Property of Women" shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values. In three new chapters and updates throughout, Gordon addresses birth control and public policy, the intense abortion debates of the past thirty years, and a host of issues that extend from abortion controversies, including sterilization, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, and stem-cell research. Illuminating the conflicts and politics at the core of birth control issues through a historical lens, the book places today's "choice" versus "right-to-life" movements in the context of the campaign that first prohibited abortion in the mid-nineteenth century and the campaign that legalized contraception in the early twentieth century. From the earliest attempts of women to organize for the legal control of their bodies to the effects of second-wave feminism, Gordon defines the role that birth control has played in society's attitudes toward women, sexuality, and gender equality. Highlighting the leaders of the struggle and their actions, the book chronicles the contributions of notorious reproductive control activists such as Margaret Sanger as well as lesser-known pioneers including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the three doctors Foote - Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote - the anarchists Ezra Heywood and Emma Goldman, the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and abortion rights advocates of the 1970s.

Editorial Reviews

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About the Author

Linda Gordon, a professor of history at New York University, is the author of numerous books, including Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935, and The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, which won the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Prize.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press; 3 Sub edition (November 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252027647
• ISBN-13: 978-0252027642
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,329,420 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of numerous books including Dorothea Lange and Impounded, and won the Bancroft Prize for The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. She lives in New York.