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Review
| The American Religious Debate Over Birth Control, 1907–1937, by Kathleen A. Tobin. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2001. 226 pages. $39.95, paper.
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| Kathleen Tobin sets out to explore the reasons why only some religious denominations in the United States accepted birth control and how the Catholic Church came to be viewed as its main opponent. She shows how doctrine and theology intertwined with specific historical events, sparking a public debate on birth control. The book is divided into seven chapters with the first, "1907–1921: The Cultural Environment," serving as an introduction to the topic. Here Tobin sketches out a brief history of contraception in the United States, the changing roles of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, religion in America, and contemporary theories of Malthusianism, scientific racism, and eugenics. She introduces some of the leading figures involved in the birth control debate, including Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and Anthony Comstock. This chapter lays the foundation for Tobin's arguments about the doctrinal complexities of the many religious denominations and the fear that many Americans had of the Catholic Church. |
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Next, Tobin provides a history of Judeo-Christian attitudes toward birth control, ranging from the teachings of St. Augustine to Martin Luther and John Calvin. By the mid-1800s, staunch Victorian morals had virtually silenced any discussion of birth control in any church. The religious debate over birth control, Tobin argues, began with the rising popularity of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. Prominent "social gospellers" promoted eugenics as an answer to a variety of social ills, encouraging religious leaders to take up the cause. But at the 1908 Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops, both Anglican and Episcopalian ministers issued a proclamation stating that "deliberate tampering with nascent life is repugnant to Christian morality," a position that highlighted procreation as the fundamental purpose of marriage. (p. 52) The Catholic Church also weighed in with its opposition, which Tobin illustrates with Monsignor John A. Ryan's writings against birth control and eugenics. |
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During the first half of the 1920s, the discussion became public. On November 13, 1921, New York City police prevented Margaret Sanger and two others from speaking on the topic "Birth Control: Is It Moral?" The police shut the meeting down because of a request, they said, from Patrick J. Hayes, New York's archbishop, and Sanger readily believed that the Catholic Church was behind the police action. Debates on birth control and morality subsequently appeared in the New York Times, then spread to other periodicals. As Sanger attempted to control publicity on the birth control movement, some religious denominations began to address the issue, laying the foundation for a liberal interpretation. The second half of the decade launched a struggle between liberal and conservative wings of various denominations. By 1930, proponents of birth control were winning more supporters within the religious communities. The Lambeth conference of that year signaled that change: Anglican bishops agreed that birth control was moral, as long as it was practiced with "Christian principles." (p. 156) This statement prompted Protestant publications to finally begin running articles and editorials on the topic. Also, it had become apparent that more people were using birth control, so religious leaders could no longer ignore it. Throughout the 1930s, birth control supporters lobbied Congress to change laws to provide easier access to the devices, and Tobin concludes that many denominations "recognized that there was substantial moral ground for legalization." (p. 210) |
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Tobin has written a solid piece of intellectual and religious history, neatly intertwined with social history. This book would be appropriate for undergraduate classes in religious history, the history of sexuality, gender history, and twentieth-century United States history. Undergraduates would benefit from the book's strong narrative, clear argument, and lack of jargon. In graduate seminars, the book could be used in conjunction with works by Janet Farrell Brodie, Ellen Chesler, and Linda Gordon. However, instructors and graduate students would be frustrated by Tobin's lack of explanation of how public and widespread this religious debate over birth control became. Many of the publications she quotes from are religiously based, and she says nothings about their readership or circulation. While Tobin also refers to articles from more mainstream magazines, including The Ladies' Home Journal and Harper's Weekly, she does not indicate how often the subject of birth control came up. A debate implies give and take, and there is no sense of how readers reacted to these articles and editorials. Such an analysis would have opened up this topic a bit more and would have made a good book truly wonderful. |
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| University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point |
Theresa Kaminski |
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