Gospel of Family Planning
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€29.99
A01=Nicole C. Bourbonnais
Activism evolution
Author_Nicole C. Bourbonnais
Birth control
Category=VF
Coercion
Cold War
Colonialism
Community outreach
Contraception
Decolonization
Development
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eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Everyday practices
Feminism
Frontline workers
Global health
Global movement
Grassroots activism
Ground-level operations
Healthcare workers
Historical influences
Humanitarianism
Intervention
Intimate interactions
justice
Liberation
Missionary work
Nurses
Personal relationships
Population control
Population policy
Public health
Racism
Reproductive
Reproductive health
Reproductive lives
rights
Social change
Social justice
Social workers
State programs
Volunteers
Women's rights
Product details
- ISBN 9780226840802
- Weight: 367g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 May 2025
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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An engaging, insightful history of the family planning movement and its connection to broader social and political developments across the globe.
In the twentieth century, the idea that people should consciously plan (and limit) the size of their families became a global cause. Historical accounts of the global family planning movement have largely focused on the most prominent activists and those at the helm of international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and government programs. In The Gospel of Family Planning, however, historian Nicole C. Bourbonnais shifts our attention to frontline workers—doctors, social workers, nurses, fieldworkers, consultants, church groups, and volunteers—who, she compellingly shows, played a central (if complicated) role in preaching contraception around the world.
Through a mix of collective biography and microhistory, Bourbonnais visits clinics, doorsteps, and bedrooms, revealing the everyday, ground-level workings of grassroots family planning campaigns, state population control programs, and the movements for reproductive rights and justice that arose to contest them. Throughout the book, Bourbonnais invites readers to consider how the intertwined histories of missionary work, humanitarianism, feminism, decolonization, and international development shaped intimate interventions into people’s reproductive lives around the world.
In the twentieth century, the idea that people should consciously plan (and limit) the size of their families became a global cause. Historical accounts of the global family planning movement have largely focused on the most prominent activists and those at the helm of international organizations, philanthropic foundations, and government programs. In The Gospel of Family Planning, however, historian Nicole C. Bourbonnais shifts our attention to frontline workers—doctors, social workers, nurses, fieldworkers, consultants, church groups, and volunteers—who, she compellingly shows, played a central (if complicated) role in preaching contraception around the world.
Through a mix of collective biography and microhistory, Bourbonnais visits clinics, doorsteps, and bedrooms, revealing the everyday, ground-level workings of grassroots family planning campaigns, state population control programs, and the movements for reproductive rights and justice that arose to contest them. Throughout the book, Bourbonnais invites readers to consider how the intertwined histories of missionary work, humanitarianism, feminism, decolonization, and international development shaped intimate interventions into people’s reproductive lives around the world.
Nicole C. Bourbonnais is associate professor of international history and politics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva. She is the author of Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean.
