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Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights,
and nothing less. • Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)

powder that had been was tested in Britain.The powder choices. The history of birth control movement in India
was in use in some of the southern states in the United has bought to light the call of the Indian feminist leader
States. It was marketed in India too. There were com- Begum Hamid Ali for the sterilization of the “unfit” in her
plaints against the powder, however; in India women enthusiasm for controlling India’s population. Likewise
complained about vaginal irritation and also about the Puerto Rican scholars tell a sad history of Puerto Rican
difficulty in using this method given the lack of privacy in women who, without knowing and without giving con-
their working-class homes. In the face of these com- sent, became the guinea pigs used for testing the contra-
plaints,Pillay recommended condoms as the most reliable ceptive pill in the 1950s.These revisionist histories force
form of contraceptive. Stopes, in the meantime, claimed us to examine the real human costs that underwrote the
that she had discovered the ideal method for working- efforts to manage human fecundity.
class women of London and for poor women in India and
South Africa. The method Stopes was promoting was a Future Agenda for
cotton waste pessary dipped in olive oil.This method was Reproductive Health
not endorsed by Indian doctors and advocates. Feminist scholars working on reproductive health issues
In India, practitioners of Ayurveda, a traditional Indian are constantly asking themselves what the future agenda
system of medicine, advertised their products in vernac- for reproductive health should look like. Feminist
ular magazines such as Madhuri and Sudha in the 1930s, researchers, policy makers, and activists all agree that the
while biomedical journals such as The Indian Medical success of contraceptive technology in the future will lie
Gazette carried advertisements for various commercially in democratic approaches, attentive to local needs and
marketed contraceptives. Most of these advertisements beliefs, seeking to empower women in making informed
provided addresses of local chemists who carried these choices.
products, but some advertisements in Indian medical
Sanjam Ahluwalia
journals gave only a London address, which indicates
that birth control technologies circulated globally and See also Women’s Reproductive Rights Movements
that consumers shopped in a global market. However, it
should also be pointed out that consumers of these
global products, especially in countries such as India, Further Reading
were primarily members of social and economic elites Accampo, E. A. (1996).The rhetoric of reproduction and the reconfigu-
ration of womanhood in the French birth control movement, 1890–
who could afford to pay for the product and its interna- 1920. Journal of Family History, 21(3), 351–371.
tional postage cost. Ahluwalia, S. (2000). Controlling births, policing sexualities: History of
birth control in colonial India, 1877–1946. Unpublished doctoral dis-
sertation, University Of Cincinnati.
Counterhistories Anandhi, S. (1998). Rethinking Indian modernity: The political economy
of Birth Control of Indian sexuality. In M. E. John & J. Nair (Eds.), A question of
silence? The sexual economies of modern India. New Delhi, India: Kali
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, for Women.
scholars have shifted their focus away from celebrating Bullough,V. L. (Ed.). (2001). Encyclopedia of birth control. Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO.
the work of birth control pioneers and have begun exam-
Chesler, E. (1992). Woman of valor: Margaret Sanger and the birth con-
ining how this work was experienced by less powerful trol movement in America. New York: Anchor Books.
social and economic groups in different countries. Native Gandhi, M. K. (1947). Self-restraint versus self-indulgence. Ahmsdabad,
India: Navajivan Publishing House.
American groups in the United States have spoken out Ginsburg, F. D., & Rapp. R. (1995). Conceiving the new world order:The
against contraceptive technologies, which they argue global politics of reproduction. Berkeley and Los Angeles: California
University Press.
have been used to police their sexuality rather than to
Gordon, L. (1990). Woman’s body, woman’s right: Birth control in Amer-
empower native women to make informed reproductive ica. New York: Penguin Books.