"Banned in Boston": the battle over birth control in the last state to legalize it, 1879-1972
Embargo Date
2025-12-09
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
For nearly a century Boston’s upper-class residents sought to keep what they believed was “pernicious and dangerous” sexual health knowledge from poor, nonwhite, and working-class citizens. Access to sexual health resources, especially information about contraception, operated on a two-tiered system. By tacitly endorsing the use of substandard contraception under the guise of “feminine hygiene” for some while willfully turning a blind eye to medically sound usage by others, Bostonians tried to both restrict knowledge and simultaneously pretend as though that knowledge did not exist. “Banned in Boston”: The Battle over Birth Control in the Last State to Legalize It, 1879-1972 explores how and why birth control proponents proved unsuccessful at overturning this status quo for so many years. This study centers two major sexual health organizations, the Massachusetts Society for Social Hygiene and the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and examines their diverging ideologies. Based on extensive research in the archival collections of the American Social Hygiene Association, the Birth Control League of Massachusetts, the Boston Council of Social Agencies, the Massachusetts Society for Social Hygiene, the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, and the Parents’ Aid Society, as well as the papers of Blanche Ames Ames, Bill Baird, Lester W. Dearborn, and Lucile Lord-Heinstein, Banned in Boston argues that birth control advocates had multiple opportunities to nullify the state’s laws banning contraception but were unable to sufficiently marshal their forces to do so. As this dissertation demonstrates, each organization sought to consolidate its own control over public reproductive knowledge while also fending off challenges from a powerful cadre of rivals. Set against the backdrop of a rapidly diversifying greater Boston, Banned in Boston incorporates analyses of the city’s philanthropic, racial, social, and sexual landscapes to explain how and why Massachusetts became the last state in the Union to legalize contraceptive information for all adults.
Description
2023