99% Effective: How We Talk About Birth Control

We looked at this kind of difference between a history and a historiography, and I actually really struggle with saying historiography.

Historiography is a terrifying word, isn't it? Yeah, I'm still not sure I know what it means.

Apologies to my supervisor.

I'm in four years of a PhD, right? It's a really scary word that I thought when I started always sort of made me conjure up images of learned academics in ivory towers talking about concepts and ideas and not necessarily the pill, which is what I was doing.

But it really just means, yeah, history.

how we've used historical narratives and stories at the end of the day, stories about the past, to make sense of fertility control today and, I think importantly, to sort of shape the appeal of different contraceptive technologies and how contraceptive policy should work in different contexts.

Seeing as this is, as you said, you're working on the edge of your field...

What kind of secondary literature did you look to initially? Was that the place that you were supposed to be looking or you found yourself? It was useful to look and yeah.

What like sections or fields have you drawn on then?

I mean, I should make clear, obviously, historians have drawn on the work of their predecessors.

That's just how one does good history.

And so there's a lot of interesting stuff that people have kind of revised and formal works.

The kind of the big sort of paradigm shifting shift when it came to histories of contraception was in the 1970s when an American social historian called Linda Gordon.

Listeners may be familiar, she's a legend, you should read all of her stuff if not.

But she built on a book, A History of Contraception, that was written in the 1930s called A Medical History of Contraception by an American sociologist called Norman E. Himes.

And while he was pretty positive about modern contraception and came to this conclusion that knowledge of modern contraception had been democratised, that was a phrase he was kind of in the process of coining, this idea of democratised knowledge, She recovered a slightly different history in which birth control had been a hell of a lot more controlling for anyone in that history who had not had the privilege of being rich and white and able-bodied.

And she rather horrified some conservative historians of the time that she kind of really inspired different ways about thinking of the past.

And it was, I mean, combined with histories of childbirth and lots of other wonderful work, really sort of forged foundational frameworks for thinking about the history of reproduction as we do today.

So I had, you know, a great body of fantastic work on that.

And there's been some historians of contraception and reproduction recently, including my long suffering supervisor, Nick Hopwood, who has done a lot of work sort of looking at how we came to talk about the history of reproduction and looking at the sort of foundation of those kind of academic paradigms in the 1970s.