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Book Review
| Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer, Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control, 1920–1940, Ohio State University Press, Columbus Ohio, 2004. pp. viii + 296. US $54.95 cloth.
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| The struggle for reproductive rights for women has taken on new significance in the last decade since the resurgence of conservative attempts to reign in hard-won gains. It is salutary therefore to recall the historical process of making the 'personal political'. Wilkinson Meyer's meticulous analysis of the Maternal Health Association (MHA) of Cleveland Ohio in the interwar years of the twentieth century offers a window into the work of the women and men who initiated birth control clinics. Although the focus is quite specific and this study explores the MHA in considerable detail, the relevance is wider than may be thought. Wilkinson Meyer notes the influence of the Cleveland-based MHA on developments in other parts of the USA and especially its close clinks with Margaret Sanger's movement in New York. As the title suggests, the focus is on the processes of strategic networking that enabled the social movement for birth control rights to become established. After several years of slowly building a base of support in the early 1920s, the MHA was finally established in 1928. As in other places it was primarily a movement of like-minded white upper middle-class citizens, those sufficiently concerned to improve women's wellbeing that they were prepared to work around the legislation at both state and federal level restricting dissemination of contraceptives. Some nice stories emerge in Meyer's account of 'respectable' women going on business trips with their husbands in order to carry what were in effect, illicit contraceptive devices back to Cleveland in their suitcases! |
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By the 1930s the MHA's clinics were providing not only medical advice and family planning information, and artificial contraceptives, but social welfare support to many distressed women during the difficult years of the Depression. After using archival sources extensively to chart the organisational developments, Wilkinson Meyer provides a splendid chapter drawing on the voices of women, and of a few men, who used the MHA's services. The letters kept are only a selection of clients' stories, but they reveal the human reality behind the organisational and political struggles. They also indicate a theme central to the argument of the book that the search for effective ways to prevent conception was overwhelmingly motivated by economic and social hardship. The intersection of gender, class, and 'race'/ethnicity here is no abstract theoretical construction. The MHA's clientele was drawn from both the middle and the working class and included, at least in its earlier years, a relatively high proportion of black women. It is clear that the eugenic interests of the founders of the movement were at odds with the much more practical concerns of clients trying to juggle competing family and personal needs in the face of intermittent work or unemployment. |
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The central argument of the book is sometimes difficult to disentangle amongst all the complex detail of MHA organisational developments. While the meticulous documentation will be a boon to medical and social historians, the book also makes a larger contribution. Meyer gives ample evidence for her claim that the actions of specific individuals, groups and organisations are the stuff of making history. By detailing the patterns of networking amongst family and friends within Cleveland and nationally, she demonstrates aspects of white upper middle-class women's working lives as volunteers in their communities. As Meyer notes, this was a time between the suffrage movement and middle-class women's movement into paid work, and these maternalist reformers directed enormous energy into the 'movement'. Through such philanthropic and health work, they secured class-based networks but also challenged accepted ideas of the appropriate scope of women's activities. Their courage in doing so, although limited by their eugenic motives and reliance on professional surveillance of women, was inspired also by commitment to the cause of improving women's health care and life choices. |
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| La Trobe University |
KERREEN REIGER | |
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