scholarly journals The Contraceptive Pill in Ireland c.1964–79: Activism, Women and Patient–Doctor Relationships

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Kelly

The twentieth-century history of men and women’s attempts to gain access to reproductive health services in the Republic of Ireland has been significantly shaped by Ireland’s social and religious context. Although contraception was illegal in Ireland from 1935 to 1979, declining family sizes in this period suggest that many Irish men and women were practising fertility control measures. From the mid-1960s, the contraceptive pill was marketed in Ireland as a ‘cycle regulator’. In order to obtain a prescription for the pill, Irish women would therefore complain to their doctors that they had heavy periods or irregular cycles. However, doing so could mean going against one’s faith, and also depended on finding a sympathetic doctor. The contraceptive pill was heavily prescribed in Ireland during the 1960s and 1970s as it was the only contraceptive available legally, albeit prescribed through ‘coded language’. The pill was critiqued by men and women on both sides of the debate over the legalisation of contraception. Anti-contraception activists argued that the contraceptive pill was an abortifacient, while both anti-contraception activists and feminist campaigners alike drew attention to its perceived health risks. As well as outlining these discussions, the paper also illustrates the importance of medical authority in the era prior to legalisation, and the significance of doctors’ voices in relation to debates around the contraceptive pill. However, in spite of medical authority, it is clear that Irish women exercised significant agency in gaining access to the pill.

Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Linda K. Kerber

The old law of domestic relations and the system known as coverture have shaped marriage practices in the United States and have limited women's membership in the constitutional community. This system of law predates the Revolution, but it lingers in U.S. legal tradition even today. After describing coverture and the old law of domestic relations, this essay considers how the received narrative of women's place in U.S. history often obscures the story of women's and men's efforts to overthrow this oppressive regime, and also the story of the continuing efforts of men and some women to stabilize and protect it. The essay also questions the paradoxes built into American law: for example, how do we reconcile the strictures of coverture with the founders' care in defining rights-holders as “persons” rather than “men”? Citing a number of court cases from the early days of the republic to the present, the essay describes the 1960s and 1970s shift in legal interpretation of women's rights and obligations. However, recent developments – in abortion laws, for example – invite inquiry as to how full the change is that we have accomplished. The history of coverture and the way it affects legal, political, and cultural practice today is another American narrative that needs to be better understood.


Author(s):  
Jim Phillips

The 1984-85 miners’ strike in defence of collieries, jobs and communities was an unsuccessful attempt to reverse the change in economic direction driven in the UK by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments. The government was committed to removing workforce voice from the industry. Its struggle against the miners was a war against the working class more generally. Mining communities were grievously affected in economic terms by the strike and its aftermath, but in the longer run emerged with renewed solidarity. Gender relations, evolving from the 1960s as employment opportunities for women increased, changed in further progressive ways. This strengthened the longer-term cohesion of mining communities. The strike had a more general and lasting political impact in Scotland. The narrative of a distinct Scottish national commitment to social justice, attacked by a UK government without democratic mandate, drew decisive moral force from the anti-Thatcherite resistance of men and women in the coalfields. This renewed the campaign for a Scottish Parliament, which came to successful fruition in 1999.


2019 ◽  
pp. 144-165
Author(s):  
Mary Augusta Brazelton

This chapter investigates the role of mass immunization in Chinese medical diplomacy programs during the 1960s and 1970s. While most scholarship has stressed the influence of barefoot doctor and other paraprofessional training programs in the emergence of the People's Republic of China (PRC) as a global model for rural health services, mass immunization programs in China had measurable results—in terms of lowered incidence of disease—that helped legitimize these training efforts and the nation's program of rural health care more broadly. Ultimately, the global popularization of Chinese public health was a consequence of regional competition within East Asia. During the Cold War era, the PRC used medical aid to foreign countries to compete for power and influence with the Republic of China on Taiwan, where institutions and personnel that the Nationalist Party brought to the island after 1948 built upon practices established during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). The involvement of Taiwan in medical diplomacy reflected the expansionist agendas of its Western allies in the Cold War as well as competition with the PRC for recognition as the legitimate government of mainland China.


Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-745
Author(s):  
Nomi Dave

AbstractThis article considers the role of embodied experience in promoting revolutionary ideology in Guinea. The Republic of Guinea has long held close ties with China, and in the 1960s and 1970s the country pursued its own Cultural Revolution. While Chinese songs and aesthetics had little direct artistic influence, the Guinean state embraced Maoist ideals of social and self-transformation and discipline. Such ideals were translated into daily life through the regulation of bodies, including practices of dance, movement and physical gesture that sought to create revolutionary subjects. I show here how embodied practices, including the circulation of dancers and official delegations, cultivated Guinea's relationship with China; and how practices of movement and dance were inwardly experienced within Guinea during its own Cultural Revolution. In so doing, I address some of the contradictions of the Revolution and of Guinea–China relations. While the regime pursued its goals through violence and brutality, former revolutionary subjects today remember the moment for both its pain and its pleasures – for the hardships the body had to endure and for the nationalist pride that many still feel today.


2006 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard H. Steckel ◽  
Jayanthi Krishnan

Author(s):  
Florence Bernault

The article considers a large region comprising Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea.1 From the 1880s onwards, Central Africa was colonized by Spanish, French, German, Belgian, and Portuguese powers. Here Africans generally suffered a harsher kind of rule than in West Africa, as colonialism brought little capital and investments, and imposed brutal forms of extractive economy. Foreign powers, moreover, proved reluctant to dialogue with African elites. Yet, the colonial era was also a moment when Central Africans initiated radical political revolutions and capacious social changes, achieving independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the period under consideration, moreover, important cultural creations in the form of music, popular painting, photography, and fashion became influential in the rest of Africa and beyond.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Dong-Choon Kim

In the 1950s, Christianity and educational achievement were the primary means for Koreans to break through the misery and powerlessness that the conflict from June 1950 to July 1953 had caused. Along with education, religion was a promising route in securing familial welfare for South Koreans. Among the several religions and denominations, Protestant churches were more popular for the uprooted people residing in urban areas. These two privately motivated daily activities—education and religion—captured the concern of the Korean people who had lost everything during the war. Under President Syngman Rhee’s “police state” and infrastructural ruin, religious and educational institutions filled the vacuum in the Republic of Korea that the Korean War had left in civil society. The Korean “habitus” of family promotion in the 1950s foretold the fast economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper will show how South Korea, during that decade, witnessed the formation of a new familialism, which tended to focus on the family’s fortune and money as a final goal. Ethical understandings and political decisions were secondary to the main priority of family promotion.


Diálogos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-258
Author(s):  
Handerson Joseph

The Guianas are an important migratory field in the Caribbean migratory system, whereby goods, objects, currencies, and populations circulate for different reasons: geographical, cultural proximity, climatic, geopolitical and socioeconomic factors. From the 1960s and 1970s, Haitian migration increased in the Guianas. Five decades later, after the January 2010 earthquake, the migratory spaces were intensified in the region, Brazil became part of them as a country of residence and transit to reach French Guiana and Suriname. In 2013, the routes were altered. Some migrants started to use the Republic of Guyana to enter Brazil through the border with Roraima, in the Amazon, or to cross the border towards Suriname and French Guiana. This article is divided into two levels. First, it describes the way in which migrants' practices and trajectories intersect national borders in the Guianas. Then, it analyzes the migratory system, documents and papers, and the problems that the different Haitian migratory generations raise in space and time. The ethnographic research is based on the Triple Border Brazil, Colombia and Peru, but also in Suriname, French Guiana and Haiti.


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