Birth Control and American Modernity

MacNamara, Trent

doi:10.1017/9781108650465

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 197 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These voices, which could be conservative or reformist, secular or religious, gained momentum during the last decades of the 19th century. By the 1920s, an identifiable birth control movement set out to shape governmental policies and sought to provide advice to men and women about the benefits of controlling reproduction (Grossmann, 1995;MacNamara, 2018;Rusterholz, 2018;Soloway, 1982). Sexological organizations and networks, including the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, the World League for Sexual Reform, and the Institute of Sexology in Berlin, actively participated in conversations around birth rates, including discussions about whether and how the numbers of births might be managed to the advantage of both the individual couple and society as a whole (Matte, 2005).…”

Section: Non-reproductive Sex and Human Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology

Fisher,

Funke

2023

History of the Human Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores the relationship between sexual science and evolutionary models of human development and progress. It examines the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexual scientists constructed the sexual instinct as an evolutionary force that not only served a reproductive purpose, but was also pivotal to the social, moral, and cultural development of human societies. Sexual scientists challenged the idea that non-reproductive sexualities were necessarily perverse, pathological, or degenerative by linking sexual desire to the evolution of sociality, often focusing on forms of relationality and care that exceeded biological kinship. As a result, non-reproductive sexual expressions, including homosexual and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviours, were interpreted as manifestations of a sexual instinct operating in the service of human development. These claims were reliant on cross-cultural and historical comparisons of sexual values, behaviours, and customs that rehearsed and reinforced imperial narratives of development premised on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies. Sexual scientists mapped diverse sexual behaviours in terms of their perceived evolutionary benefits, contributing to colonial narratives that distinguished between different cultures according to imagined trajectories of development. These contestations around the sexual instinct and its developmental functions played a vital role in allowing sexual science to authorize itself as a field of knowledge that promised to provide expertise required to manage sexual life and secure the global development of human civilization.

show abstract

Section: Non-reproductive Sex and Human Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%