God Bless the Pill
The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era.
In God Bless the Pill, Samira K. Mehta traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans. They hoped birth control methods would curb divorce rates by encouraging sexually dynamic marriages and families unstrained by “too many” children—thereby creating a postwar upwardly mobile middle class. Religious leaders also promoted this understanding of the family as tied to Cold War capitalism and encouraged neither racial nor gender equity.
But then came the backlash, both from the Right—which failed to anticipate the feminist potential of contraception—and from the Left, where women, particularly women of color, sought to ensure that birth control was a tool of liberation rather than one rooted in patriarchal and racial oppression. Ultimately, Mehta offers compelling new insights into the way religion accommodates itself to social, technological, and medical change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mehta (Beyond Chrismukkah), an associate professor of gender studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, traces in this fascinating account the convergence of contraception and the American religious left. In the 1950s, she writes, Cold War–era family values inspired a coalition of liberal Protestants and Jewish clergy to advocate for contraception, viewing it as a means of shoring up God-honoring marriages in which couples could enjoy sex and parent intentionally. As the diaphragm became a central part of the cultural conversation, some New York City clergy united with doctors to advocate for its availability in city hospitals—a measure that passed, though it was only available to married women. The 1970s saw contraception become aligned with women's liberation, however, and after the Supreme Court ruled that single women could also be prescribed birth control, the religious left receded from the conversation and the right's resistance soldified. The author robustly unpacks how the fight for contraception's availability was often far from a "tale of feminist victory," while teasing out the complex beliefs and histories motivating elements of the religious left, including those who didn't support contraception (parts of the Black church, for example, saw it as a possible means of controlling the Black population). It's an enlightening examination of the tangled intersection of faith, choice, and health in America.
