| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Religious Debate over Birth Control, 1907–1937. By Kathleen A. Tobin. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. vi, 226 pp. Paper, $39.95, ISBN 0-7864-1081-7.)

Kathleen A. Tobin brings considerable research to this largely unexplored subject. She is primarily concerned with the official institutional response of religious leaders to birth control. Her study covers the years from 1907 to 1937; why these specific dates were chosen is not exactly clear, other than the end of the book mentioning that the American Medical Association voted to recognize contraception as a proper medical procedure in 1937.

Tobin presents a revisionist argument, which will be questioned by many scholars, that Margaret Sanger played on religious prejudices of the day by singling out the Catholic Church in its opposition to birth control, even though Protestant and Jewish religion bodies opposed artificial contraception as well. Furthermore, she argues that eugenicists, neo-Malthusians, and birth control advocates formed an alliance in support of artificial contraception as an instrument to preserve the "social, economic and political dominance of northern European white races in the world and of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the United States" (p. 11).

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