Synopses & Reviews
Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Recently, historians have begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause.
Broadcasting Birth Control builds on this new scholarship to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning at home in the United States, and in the expanding international arena of population control.
Mass media, Manon Parry contends, was critical to the birth control movementandrsquo;s attempts to build support and later to publicize the idea of fertility control and the availability of contraceptive services in the United States and around the world. Though these public efforts in advertising and education were undertaken initially by leading advocates, including Margaret Sanger, increasingly a growing class of public communications experts took on the role, mimicking the efforts of commercial advertisers to promote health and contraception in short plays, cartoons, films, and soap operas. In this way, they made a private subjectandmdash;fertility controlandmdash;appropriate for public discussion.
Parry examines these trends to shed light on the contested nature of the motivations of birth control advocates. Acknowledging that supporters of contraception were not always motivated by the best interests of individual women, Parry concludes that family planning advocates were nonetheless convinced of womenandrsquo;s desire for contraception and highly aware of the ethical issues involved in the use of the media to inform and persuade.
Review
andquot;Parry's clear, compelling, meticulously researched, and accessible book is the first to specifically examine the extensive use of mass media to garner support for the legalization of birth control during the twentieth century.andquot;
Review
andquot;By showing how the popular media helped win over a skeptical public, Parry deepens our understanding of the history of birth
control . . . a subtle and persuasive reinterpretation.andquot;
Review
andquot;To examine the broadcasting of birth control information from the silent era to the Internet, Parry thoroughly researched extensive media archives. Highly recommended.andquot;
Review
andquot;Manon Parryandrsquo;s engrossing book,
Broadcasting Birth Control, takes readers through the arguments early sexual and reproductive health advocates had when deciding what would be the best messaging to gain popular support for the use of contraception in America.andquot;
Review
andquot;
Broadcastingand#160;Birth Control is jam-packed with surprising historical tidbits on ways the media has been used by the family planning movement since its inception. Manon Parry has done a major service to the family planning field by capturing the history of its early engagement with the media and the evolution of that engagement with all the pitfalls and challenges along the way.andquot;
Review
"Parry reveals to us many important parts of the [birth control] story we have for too long overlooked."
Conscience: The News Journal of Catholic Opinion
Review
andquot;Innovative, well written, and persuasively argued, Brain Culture is the most accessible book on the sociology, rhetoric, and culture of cognitive neuroscience.andquot;
Review
andquot;Thornton's captivating cultural study provides an insightful analysis of the brain's impact on our contemporary understandings of identity, subjectivity, and agencyandmdash;a fascinating and important read!andquot;
Review
andquot;Captivatingly written, intelligently argued, and refreshingly grounded, Brain Culture offers an essential blueprint to becoming better-informed consumers of cognitive science and, perhaps more importantly, having a healthier relationship with our own brains and our expectations of them.andquot;
Review
andquot;Sharply written, acutely insightful, often grimly hilarious, and quite persuasive. As thoroughly researched as it is accessible, this is a book for every brain. Highly recommended.andquot;
Review
andquot;Parry reveals to us many important parts of the [birth control] story we have for too long overlooked.andquot;
Review
andquot;[A] fine survey of the meditation of birth control.andquot;
Review
“With a transatlantic approach that yields fascinating results, Layne Craig’s
When Sex Changed adds nuance, new insight, and fresh ideas to previous historical and literary studies of the birth control movement.”
Review
"In
When Sex Changed, Craig breaks new ground by establishing the transnational nature of the 'political ascendance and gradual institutionalization of birth control as a family planning model' with a well-researched history of birth control politics. She succeeds in bringing to light new meanings buried in texts well combed-over by literary scholars."
Review
andquot;The lucidity and vibrancy of its major claims make Abortion in the American Imagination a first-rate book. Weingarten provides a fascinating reconception of modernist and contemporary battles with abortion and offers a huge contribution to this critical topic.andquot;
Review
andquot;Weingarten provides a rich analysis of literary representations of abortion and the problem of pitting 'life' against 'choice' that will appeal to scholars of literature, reproductive cultures and politics, and feminists situated across the disciplines.andquot;
Review
andquot;This absorbing, well-argued book presents a compelling survey of late-19th- and early-20th-century literary and cultural documents that reflected and shaped attitudes toward abortion. Weingarten offers fascinating readings of well-known works...and studies them alongside less-known works...and various films. In addition to providing illuminating close analyses of particular scenes in these works, Weingarten carefully contextualizes contemporary politics. Highly recommended.andquot;
Review
andquot;In a time when there are daily threats to womenandrsquo;s reproductive rights, Weingartenandrsquo;s Abortion in the American Imagination is prescient and needed, reminding us all to question our discursive assumptions about a notoriously divisive issue.andquot;
Synopsis
Traditionally, the history of the birth control movement has been told through the accounts of the leaders, organizations, and legislation that shaped the campaign. Historians have recently begun examining the cultural work of printed media, including newspapers, magazines, and novels in fostering support for the cause. This book builds upon this new scholarship on the womenandrsquo;s reproductive health movement to explore the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by twentieth-century birth control advocates to promote family planning in the U.S. and internationally.
Synopsis
Brain Culture investigates the American obsession with the health of the brain. Davi Johnson Thornton looks at familiar messages, tracing how brain science and colorful brain images produced by scientific technologies are taken up and distributed in popular media. She tracks the message that, andquot;you are your brainandquot; across multiple contemporary contexts, analyzing its influence on child development, family life, education, and public policy. Our fixation on the brain is not simply a reaction to scientific progress, but a cultural phenomenon tied to values of individualism and limitless achievement.
Synopsis
Brain Culture investigates the American obsession with the health of the brain. The brain has become more than a bodily organ, acquiring a near-mystical status. The message that this organ is the key to everything is everywhere--in self-help books that tell us to work on our brains to achieve happiness and enlightenment, in drug advertisements that promise a few tweaks to our brain chemistry will cure us of our discontents, and in politicians' speeches that tell us that our brains are national resources essential to our economic prosperity.
Davi Johnson Thornton looks at these familiar messages, tracing the ways that brain science and colorful brain images produced by novel scientific technologies are taken up and distributed in popular media. She tracks the impact of the message that, andquot;you are your brainandquot; across multiple contemporary contexts, analyzing its influence on child development, family life, education, and public policy. Brain Culture shows that our fixation on the brain is not simply a reaction to scientific progress, but a cultural phenomenon deeply tied to social and political values of individualism and limitless achievement.
Synopsis
In When Sex Changed, Layne Parish Craig analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain.
Discussion of contraception and related topics (including feminism, religion, and eugenics) changed the way that writers depicted women, marriage, and family life. Tracing this shift, Craig compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, reflected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, to concern about the movement’s race and class implications suggested in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications, as in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.
While these texts emphasized birth control’s potential to transform marriage and family life and emancipate women from the “slavery” of constant childbearing, birth control advocates also used less-than-liberatory language that excluded the poor, the mentally ill, non-whites, and others. Ultimately, Craig argues, the debates that began in these early political and literary texts—texts that document both the birth control movement’s idealism and its exclusionary rhetoric—helped shape the complex legacy of family planning and women’s rights with which the United States and the United Kingdom still struggle.
Synopsis
Abortion in the American Imagination takes us back to the early twentieth century, when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. Putting authors like Wharton and Faulkner into conversation with the eraandrsquo;s films and non-fiction, Karen Weingarten uncovers a vigorous public debate decades before Roe v. Wade. Along the way, she discovers not only how discourses on abortion have changed dramatically, but also how theyandrsquo;ve shaped our very sense of what it means to be an American.and#160;and#160;and#160;
Synopsis
and#160;The public debate on abortion stretches back much further than Roe v. Wade, to long before the terms andldquo;pro-choiceandrdquo; and andldquo;pro-lifeandrdquo; were ever invented. Yet the ways Americans discussed abortion in the early decades of the twentieth century had little in common with our now-entrenched debates about personal responsibility and individual autonomy.
Abortion in the American Imagination returns to the moment when American writers first dared to broach the controversial subject of abortion. What was once a topic avoided by polite society, only discussed in vague euphemisms behind closed doors, suddenly became open to vigorous public debate as it was represented everywhere from sensationalistic melodramas to treatises on social reform. Literary scholar and cultural historian Karen Weingarten shows how these discussions were remarkably fluid and far-ranging, touching upon issues of eugenics, economics, race, and gender roles.
Weingarten traces the discourses on abortion across a wide array of media, putting fiction by canonical writers like William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, and Langston Hughes into conversation with the eraandrsquo;s films, newspaper articles, and activist rhetoric. By doing so, she exposes not only the ways that public perceptions of abortion changed over the course of the twentieth century, but also the ways in which these abortion debates shaped our very sense of what it means to be an American.and#160;and#160;and#160;
About the Author
and#160;KAREN WEINGARTEN is an assistant professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York.and#160;