Abstract
This monograph by Ana Garner and Angela Michel reveals dominant themes in media coverage of contraception from 1873 to 2013. Ambitious in scope, the study provides a valuable and often fascinating bird’s eye view of this still-relevant topic. By examining the latent meaning in 3,604 newspaper stories, editorials, and letters to the editor, Garner and Michel create a picture—in broad brushstrokes—of contraception coverage as cultural narrative. They include enough well-chosen details about specific events and individuals to inspire future researchers. Ultimately, however, the biggest contribution of Garner and Michel’s work is to identify trends over time, although they do not analyze them in depth or detail.
The study focuses on coverage in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, newspapers that belong to the so-called “prestige press.” One problem with this approach is that it runs the risk of treating a narrow slice of the media pie as synonymous with “media coverage.” In fact, such studies give us at best a partial view of reality, one that reflects the structural biases of the prestige press: Male-dominated, elite, and privileging those in power. Garner and Michel acknowledge that many voices have been systematically omitted from “newspapers of record”: Women, minorities, working class, poor, immigrants, and so forth. Despite this recognition of bias and omission, they sometimes treat the results of their study as generalizable to a larger, more diverse, and inclusive population.
Although it’s essential to identify the constraints and perils of elite newspaper coverage of any given topic, it’s even more imperative with a topic like contraception, which is entwined with the politics of race, class, and gender. Perhaps the greatest peril lies in adopting a narrow frame of reference that is widely viewed as authoritative. Consequently, one runs the risk of reproducing the dominant rhetoric, along with existing power relations and blind spots.
Nevertheless, one can still ask how an overview of 140 years of birth control coverage in the prestige press helps us understand cultural narratives about contraception. What’s the takeaway, and how can it inform future research into birth control coverage in the media? This response will focus on (a) contraception as a cultural battleground, (b) the voices of women in contraception coverage, and (c) the relationship of birth control to eugenics and sterilization.
Battleground
Contraception has been (and remains) a cultural battleground, at least according to media coverage. As Garner and Michel note, news narratives favor “ready explanations” for complex issues. Their study shows that the battleground narrative (and sometimes its less violent cousin, the debate/divide narrative) has consistently dominated birth control coverage, overshadowing less dramatic, more complicated, and arguably more important issues like women’s health and sexual freedom. Unfortunately, framing the issue as a debate and a battleground pushes out and marginalizes issues that don’t fall neatly into the conflict frame.
By focusing on the battleground aspect of contraception, media coverage has highlighted a handful of forceful and colorful personalities, notably Anthony Comstock, an apoplectic, mutton-chopped crusader who created the antiobscenity laws that bore his name. Among birth control advocates, the most significant was nurse-turned radical activist Margaret Sanger, whose deliberate violations of Comstock laws propelled the movement into public consciousness. Her early publication, The Woman Rebel, bore the slogan, “No Gods, No Masters,” borrowed from the Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary labor union and ally of the early birth control movement. Sanger’s radicalism has been glossed over in collective memory, in part because of her later association with eugenicists, physicians, and the birth control pill. Yet for some Sanger remains controversial. For example, Garner and Michel remind us that in 2010 Fox News pundit Glenn Beck called her “one of the most horrible women in American history.”
If the birth control debate has been a battleground, then misogynist rhetoric has been a major weapon in the opposition’s arsenal throughout the period of this study. It’s instructive to examine similar rhetoric from different periods, in effect “connecting the dots” scattered throughout Garner and Michel’s study and highlighting continuities over time. In 1917, evangelist and former major league baseball player Billy Sunday lectured about women’s “dirtiness” and argued that women who used birth control were “guilty of taking unnatural or criminal means to escape the cross of maternity.” In 1927, a Catholic priest claimed that birth control advocates were “doing more moral damage than would the importation of a hundred harlots.” This overblown and somewhat bizarre rhetoric is rooted in (and perpetuates) binary and patriarchal thinking in which all good women must bear “the cross of maternity” and only evil women would reject it. Thus, the birth control debate has often provided a public forum for males to pontificate about women’s “proper” role in society and to rake over the coals (at least verbally) those women who would stray.
In 1989, 60 years after the priest’s “hundred harlots” speech, a Catholic bishop sounded the alarm about high school health clinics offering birth control information to students, calling them “sex clinics in disguise” that would promote free sex, contraception, masturbation, and abortion. Fears that birth control unleashed rampant sexuality were not limited to religious leaders. In 1992, defense lawyers in a New Jersey rape case cited the victim’s use of birth control pills as evidence of promiscuity. In 2012, conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh called contraception advocate Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” and argued that birth control was an excuse for women to engage in promiscuity and “sex for hire.” Also in 2012, with somewhat more restraint, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum called contraception supporters “radical feminists [who] succeeded in undermining the traditional family.”
These brief snippets from 140 years of media coverage of birth control demonstrate that the rhetoric was often hateful and divisive. They also show that prevalent voices belonged to male religious leaders, politicians, and pundits who feared the social effects of birth control and seemingly felt compelled to castigate the women who used or supported it. In short, the media’s battleground narratives amplified the voices of hostile and angry men.
Women’s Voices
Given the predominance of the “birth control as battleground” paradigm, it should come as no surprise that women’s voices were scarce in Garner and Michel’s study of 140 years of key moments in contraceptive history. Let’s take a look at the women whose voices were present. Who were they and what did they do? What did their voices add to the stories? Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne garnered coverage for direct action campaigns (distributing information and devices in defiance of the Comstock Act), jail sentences, and hunger strikes. When the prestige press told Sanger’s story, however, they omitted her own words and other vital information, sometimes for legal reasons. For example, some of Sanger’s biggest contributions to the birth control movement (early publications like The Woman Rebel) violated obscenity laws, so they could not be discussed openly in newspapers like the New York Times. This highlights a limitation of birth control coverage of the prestige press. It also points to the need for researchers to examine the dissident press (feminist, suffragist, and socialist) for a fuller understanding of birth control as a movement for social change. (Linda Lumsden’s 2014 book Black, White, and Red All Over: A Cultural History of the Radical Press in Its Heyday, 1900-1917 provides a good summary.)
A handful of women journalists are cited in Garner and Michel’s study, notably Robin Abcarian, Los Angeles Times columnist and blogger; the bibliography includes three of her columns about birth control published in 2012. Here’s an instance where the monograph’s bird’s eye view can leave readers wanting more. Closer readings of Abcarian’s columns about birth control would help us understand how female columnists’ voices compared with those of their male counterparts. (Scholarly conventions present structural challenges for feminist researchers and others trying to unpack gendered discourses. American Psychological Association [APA] style gives the author’s first initial only, not the complete name. This is arguably an attempt to level the playing field and move us closer to gender neutrality, but I prefer to know the author’s name.)
In short, women’s voices have indeed been scarce in media coverage of contraception. Even when women’s voices were present, that was no guarantee that women’s interests would be represented. As feminist histories of birth control have shown, the birth control movement moved away from its early focus on women’s sexual emancipation as it allied itself with physicians and eugenicists. In other words, growing public acceptance meant moving away from working-class and feminist politics.
Garner and Michel at times employ feminist language (on p. 1 they say, “The female body is the terrain on which these men fight”) but do not often support it with a strong feminist analysis. It would be helpful, for example, to ground their textual analysis of the birth control movement with references to the work of key feminist scholars in this area. Carole McCann and Linda Gordon are included in the bibliography, but they do not seem to inform the monograph. The need for a feminist analysis is nowhere more apparent than in the discussion of eugenics.
Eugenics and Sterilization
The birth control debate has given rise to other heated debates, including eugenics, the movement to increase births among groups perceived as mentally and physically superior and decrease births among the poor and “unfit.” Eugenics was popular for much of the 20th century and led to the involuntary, state-supported sterilization of tens of thousands of women. If prominent women like Margaret Sanger had a limited voice in media coverage of birth control, then the marginalized women who were sterilized against their will (and often without their knowledge) were the most voiceless of all.
Contrary to Garner and Michel’s assertions, eugenics and sterilization were not tangential or peripheral to contraception. Instead, these government-sanctioned programs were directly related to other patriarchal attempts to control women’s bodies. Unfortunately, eugenics and sterilization have been misunderstood and misrepresented in the prestige press—and this monograph perpetuates cultural blind spots about a shameful and tragic chapter in American history. A telling example is the reference to Buck v. Bell, the 1927 United States Supreme Court case upholding forced sterilization of intellectual disabled women. Sadly, we do not learn the name or the story of the young woman in question (Carrie Bell), who was sterilized and later determined not to be feeble-minded.
The overblown rhetoric surrounding eugenics often devolved into racism and xenophobia. Because of the monograph’s chronological structure, discussions of eugenics were dispersed, making the narrative that emerged hard to follow. So “connecting the dots” may be helpful in showing continuities along a 140-year timeline of hateful rhetoric.
Eugenics supporters believed in making contraception available to prevent the proliferation of society’s “undesirables.” Not surprisingly, much of the eugenics rhetoric cited by Garner and Mitchell reveals thinly veiled race and class prejudice. For example, in 1932 Judge Ben Lindsey explained that he supported birth control in certain cases because “the majority of defectives and criminals come from large, unwanted families.” Similarly, in 1940 a physician recommended birth control for migrants: “Quality, not quantity, in human beings is the crying need of a punch-drunk world make so by its imbeciles.” Four decades later, xenophobia and class prejudice continued to fuel and inform discussions about selective contraception for eugenics. A 1989 advice column by Ann Landers included a letter from a reader who argued that women on welfare or in “underdeveloped countries” should be given contraception so they would “not be breeding like animals out of ignorance.” The persistence over time of dehumanizing rhetoric about poor people and immigrants is disheartening.
Implications for the Contemporary Moment
“The Birth Control Divide” stands as a powerful reminder that, despite changes in contraceptive technology and widespread public acceptance of birth control as an everyday practice, some things remain the same. Despite a culture that openly manipulates and exploits sexuality for entertainment and advertising, American society remains bound by sexual stigmas. Bitter debates over the place of contraception in the Affordable Care Act showed the continued instability of public policy toward reproduction.
In some ways, the cultural divisions over birth control are worse than ever. The number of birth control clinics reporting threats and targeted intimidation has increased from about 25% to more than 50% since 2010, Bryce Covert and Mike Konczal report in “Born, Not Free” in The Nation (January 11/18, 2016). The Republican’s congressional crusade to defund Planned Parenthood would deprive poor women not only of access to abortion but also of access to contraception and other services. October 2016 marks the 100th anniversary of Margaret Sanger’s first birth control clinic. This is cause for celebration, as well as thoughtful reflection on how much work remains to be done in the struggle for women’s rights to reproductive self-determination.