Contraception Books

Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books for 2004 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.
Gordon puts today's reproduction control controversies--foreign aid for family planning, the abortion debates, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, stem-cell research--into historical perspective and shows how the campaign to legalize abortion is part of a 150-year-old struggle over reproductive rights, a struggle that has followed a circuitous path. Beginning with the "folk medicine" of birth control, Gordon discusses how the backlash against the first women's rights movement of the 1800s prohibited both abortion and contraception about 130 years ago. She traces the campaign for legal reproduction control from the 1870s to the present and argues that attitudes toward birth control have been inseparable from family values, especially standards about sexuality and gender equality.
Highlighting both leaders and followers in the struggle, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of well-known reproduction control pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, as well as lesser- known campaigners including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the three doctors Foote--Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote--the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and the daring Jane project of the 1970s, in which Chicago women's liberation activists performed illegal abortions.

"This book is the most comprehensive book to date to help teachers and community health educators understand the 'how' and 'why' of effective HIV/AIDS prevention and sexuality education."

The emergence of the AIDS pandemic has forced a sea of change in the debate over sexuality education. Even schools previously reluctant to offer sexuality education now face HIV/AIDS education mandates.

Teaching About Sexuality and HIV provides professionals with an integrated, accessible text on the principles, methods, and special issues surrounding sexuality education today. Chapters discuss such subjects as Effective Sexuality and HIV Education: What Works and Why, Creating a Productive Learning Environment, and Introspective Methods: Helping Learners See Relevance, and Methods for Helping Learners Develop Skills. This practical, original, and user-friendly guide will be invaluable to anyone whose work is connected with health and sexuality education.

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, John Riddle showed, through extraordinary scholarly sleuthing, that women from ancient Egyptian times to the fifteenth century had relied on an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal abortifacients and contraceptives to regulate fertility. In Eve's Herbs, Riddle explores a new question: If women once had access to effective means of birth control, why was this knowledge lost to them in modern times?

Beginning with the testimony of a young woman brought before the Inquisition in France in 1320, Riddle asks what women knew about regulating fertility with herbs and shows how the new intellectual, religious, and legal climate of the early modern period tended to cast suspicion on women who employed "secret knowledge" to terminate or prevent pregnancy. Knowledge of the menstrual-regulating qualities of rue, pennyroyal, and other herbs was widespread through succeeding centuries among herbalists, apothecaries, doctors, and laywomen themselves, even as theologians and legal scholars began advancing the idea that the fetus was fully human from the moment of conception.

Drawing on previously unavailable material, Riddle reaches a startling conclusion: while it did not persist in a form that was available to most women, ancient knowledge about herbs was not lost in modern times but survived in coded form. Persecuted as "witchcraft" in centuries past and prosecuted as a crime in our own time, the control of fertility by "Eve's herbs" has been practiced by Western women since ancient times.

In the capital of Ghana, a teenager nicknamed “Condom Sister” trolls the streets to educate other young people about contraception. Her work and her own aspirations point to a remarkable shift not only in the West African nation, where just a few decades ago women had nearly seven children on average, but around the globe. While world population continues to grow, family size keeps dropping in countries as diverse as Switzerland and South Africa.

The phenomenon has some lamenting the imminent extinction of humanity, while others warn that our numbers will soon outgrow the planet’s resources. Robert Engelman offers a decidedly different vision—one that celebrates women’s widespread desire for smaller families. Mothers aren’t seeking more children, he argues, but more for their children. If they’re able to realize their intentions, we just might suffer less climate change, hunger, and disease, not to mention sky-high housing costs and infuriating traffic jams.

In More, Engelman shows that this three-way dance between population, women’s autonomy, and the natural world is as old as humanity itself. He traces pivotal developments in our history that set population—and society—on its current trajectory, from hominids’ first steps on two feet to the persecution of “witches” in Europe to the creation of modern contraception. Both personal and sweeping, More explores how population growth has shaped modern civilization—and humanity as we know it.

The result is a mind-stretching exploration of parenthood, sex, and culture through the ages. Yet for all its fascinating historical detail, More is primarily about the choices we face today. Whether society supports women to have children when and only when they choose to will not only shape their lives, but the world all our children will inherit.

When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex--and Sex Education--Since the Sixties "It is difficult to imagine a juicier subject, or a more thoughtful, fluent, trustworthy guide for its exploration."—San Francisco Chronicle

A chronicle of the two decades that noted sociologist Kristin Luker spent following parents in four America communities engaged in a passionate war of ideas and values, When Sex Goes to School explores a conflict with stakes that are deceptively simple and painfully personal. For these parents, the question of how their children should be taught about sex cuts far deeper than politics, religion, or even friendship.

"The drama of this book comes from watching the exceptionally thoughtful Luker try to figure [sex education] out" (Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review). In doing so, Luker also traces the origins of sex education from the turn-of-the-century hygienist movement to the marriage-obsessed 1950s and the sexual and gender upheavals of the 1960s. Her unexpected conclusions make it impossible to look at the intersections of the private and the political in the same way.

The Art of Sex Coaching: Expanding Your Practice A guidebook for professionals seeking sex-positive approaches for their clients. Britton shows therapists and counselors how to move their practices into sex coaching or integrate sex coaching techniques into their existing therapeutic work. The emphasis is on encouraging sexual self-understanding, growth, and pleasure. Topics covered include: learning the basic models informing sex coaching, developing a sex coaching mindset, and addressing clients' desire for sexual enhancement.

The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us Cure for cancer? End to world hunger? What's left to do after the publication of Felice Newman's definitive guide to lesbian sex? Drawing on a wide range of published sources as well as her own notoriously graphic questionnaire circulated by e-mail--stunning mild-mannered office workers as it reeled across their computer screens--Newman has compiled an exhaustively thorough how-to guide for practices as exotic as play piercings and as pedestrian as oral sex. Along the way, she offers a primer in sexual politics and lesbian manners at the turn of the century. The S/M hanky code is laid out once and for all. There is even a (brief, happily brief) section on celibacy.

Highlights include descriptions of sex writer Tristan Taormino's private consultation with Betty Dodson, the author of Sex for One described as "the mother of masturbation": "I was so excited about this adventure that I nearly peed in my pants," recalled Taormino, "I was going to touch myself for Dr. Betty Dodson!" (In the end, Newman reports, "Tristan earned an A+ in pelvic thrusting, but got a big 'needs improvement' in the breathing department.") Although it sometimes skimps on the details, especially with regard to women's health, The Whole Lesbian Sex Book is so rich, inclusive, and authoritative that it invites challenge. Now inventive lovers can ask each other: "Is it in Whole Lesbian?" --Regina Marler Witty and personal, this is the first post-sex wars sex guide for lesbians, offering information and support for all lesbian lifestyles. It speaks to lesbian and bisexual readers of diverse experiences - young and old, partnered and single, trans- and traditionally gendered, sexually experienced and naive. The Whole Lesbian Sex Book offers basic information, techniques, advice, support, and playful discourse on the subject of lesbian sex, including: where to find partners, G-spot stimulation, oral sex, vaginal fisting, dildos for fun and fashion, dynamics of butch/femme sex, anal sex, the pleasures of lube and latex, where to cop the best cybersex, and leather, piercings, tattoos, high heels, and other fetishes.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race The plans of Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis to create a Nordic "master race" are often looked upon as a horrific but fairly isolated effort. Less notice has historically been given to the American eugenics movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although their methods were less violent, the methodology and rationale which the American eugenicists employed, as catalogued in Edwin Black's Against the Weak, were chilling nonetheless and, in fact, influential in the mindset of Hitler himself. Funded and supported by several well-known wealthy donors, including the Rockefeller and Carnegie families and Alexander Graham Bell, the eugenicists believed that the physically impaired and "feeble-minded" should be subject to forced sterilization in order to create a stronger species and incur less social spending. These "defective" humans generally ended up being poorer folks who were sometimes categorized as such after shockingly arbitrary or capricious means ! such as failing a quiz related to pop culture by not knowing where the Pierce Arrow was manufactured. The list of groups and agencies conducting eugenics research was long, from the U.S. Army and the Departments of Labor and Agriculture to organizations with names like the "American Breeders Association." Black's detailed research into the history of the American eugenics movement is admirably extensive, but it is in the association between the beliefs of some members of the American aristocracy and Hitler that the book becomes most chilling. Black goes on to trace the evolution of eugenic thinking as it evolves into what is now called genetics. And while modern thinkers have thankfully discarded the pseudo-science of eugenics, such controversial modern issues as human cloning make one wonder how our own era will be remembered a hundred years hence. --John Moe

In War Against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early 20th century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in 27 U.S. states, and the supporters of eugenics included progressive thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes against humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst — with many important lessons for the impending genetic age.

Gay Sex: A Manual for Men Who Love Men, Second Edition We live in a world obsessed with (and appalled by) sex. Open any magazine--certainly any gay male magazine--and you will find it clogged with sexualized images. But a fundamental, hardcore American puritanism still prevents open, honest, and useful discussions of sexuality. While this is true for heterosexuality, it is even more so for gay men and lesbians. Jack Hart's Gay Sex is a fine, witty, and eminently reasonable guide to being a sexually active gay man in the world today. Like Felice Picano and Charles Silverstein's The New Joy of Gay Sex (a classic in the field), Hart's book is an all-purpose guide to living a sexually energetic and fulfilling life. Gay Sex gives gay men all they need to know, from tips on how to meet men (in bars, on the Net, in the street) to negotiating safe sex (from talking to finding the right condom) to dealing with relationships (be it sex-buddy or monogamous). There are also discussions on the mental-health aspects of masturbation, fantasy, dating, bondage, S/M, recreational drugs, role-playing, and general physical well-being. Hart's writing is clear, concise, and informative; he never overloads the reader with too much scientific information or confusing detail and never adopts a patronizing or moralizing tone. By treating sex as a vital and exhilarating aspect of everyday life, he manages to both introduce these topics to the novice in unthreatening and helpful ways and inform and enlighten those who have been out and about for years. --Michael Bronski

Recommended Books on Contraception