scholarly journals Contraception in Aotearoa: Shaped by and Shaping Family, Morality, Religion, Science, and Women's Reproductive Rights

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russyl Gilling

<p>Throughout the history of contraception in Aotearoa, the position of women as contraceptive users has been shaped by society and legislation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the racial fears of the time, legislators banned contraceptive use from the feared mortality of white New Zealanders. The eugenic and racial logics that drove the original prevention of access to contraceptives were also influential in the establishment of organisations like the New Zealand Family Planning Association that was able to work towards establishing birth control clinics. Family and religious morality played a major role in how people responded to contraceptive use. In 1954, they were mobilised in the Mazengarb Inquiry, condemning parents who did not fit into the narrow roles expected of them by the Inquiry members. They appeared again throughout the 1977 Royal Commission into Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion. Family and religious morality not only shaped these investigations, but also the ways individuals responded to different aspects of contraception and the surrounding conversation. The personal morality of individual Members of Parliament shaped their position in the debate of the 1977 Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Bill and with how doctors and other medical professionals responded. This culminated in decision-makers and individuals in the public sphere imposing their own morality to justify conflating abortion and contraception, which resulted in doctors and other medical professionals controlling access to contraception. In Aotearoa, women’s ability to access contraception and contraceptive information, controlled and restricted by these political, legal, and moralistic forces as exemplified and focused by these key events, has shaped their position as contraceptive users.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russyl Gilling

<p>Throughout the history of contraception in Aotearoa, the position of women as contraceptive users has been shaped by society and legislation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the racial fears of the time, legislators banned contraceptive use from the feared mortality of white New Zealanders. The eugenic and racial logics that drove the original prevention of access to contraceptives were also influential in the establishment of organisations like the New Zealand Family Planning Association that was able to work towards establishing birth control clinics. Family and religious morality played a major role in how people responded to contraceptive use. In 1954, they were mobilised in the Mazengarb Inquiry, condemning parents who did not fit into the narrow roles expected of them by the Inquiry members. They appeared again throughout the 1977 Royal Commission into Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion. Family and religious morality not only shaped these investigations, but also the ways individuals responded to different aspects of contraception and the surrounding conversation. The personal morality of individual Members of Parliament shaped their position in the debate of the 1977 Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Bill and with how doctors and other medical professionals responded. This culminated in decision-makers and individuals in the public sphere imposing their own morality to justify conflating abortion and contraception, which resulted in doctors and other medical professionals controlling access to contraception. In Aotearoa, women’s ability to access contraception and contraceptive information, controlled and restricted by these political, legal, and moralistic forces as exemplified and focused by these key events, has shaped their position as contraceptive users.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-67
Author(s):  
Dijana Alic

On 6 april 1992, the european union (eu) recognised bosnia and hercegovina as a new independent state, no longer a part of the socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia. The event marked the start of the siege of sarajevo, which lasted nearly four years, until late february 1996. It became the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, outlasting the leningrad enclosure by a year. During its 1425 days, more than 11,500 people were killed. The attacks left a trail of destruction across the city, which began to transform it in ways not experienced before. This paper explores how the physical transformation of sarajevo affected the ways in which meaning and significance were assigned to its built fabric. I argue that the changes imposed by war and the daily destruction of the city challenged long-established relationships between the built fabric and those who inhabited the city, introducing new modes of thinking and interpreting the city. Loosely placing the discussion within the framework of ‘Thirdspace', established by urban theorist and cultural geographer edward soja, i discuss the relationship that emerged between the historicality, sociality and spatiality of war-torn sarajevo. Whether responding to the impacts of physical destruction or dramatic social change, the nexus of time, space and being shows that the concept of spatiality is essential to comprehending the world and to adjusting to and resisting the impact of extraordinary circumstances. Recognising the continuation of daily life as essential to survival sheds light on processes of renewal and change in a war-affected landscape. These shattered urban spaces also show the ways in which people make a sense of place in relation to specific socio-historical environments and political contexts.


Author(s):  
Ann Sherif

The company history of a newspaper company raises new questions about the genre of company histories. Who reads them? What features should readers and researchers be aware of when using them as a source? This article examines the shashi of the Chûgoku Shinbun, the Hiroshima regional newspaper. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were significant because of their perceived role in bringing World War II to an end and in signaling the start of the nuclear age. Most research to date has emphasized the role of national newspapers and the international media in informing the public about the extent of the damage and generating a framework within which to understand. I compare the representation of three key events in the Chûgoku Shinbun company history (shashi) to those in two national newspapers (Asahi and Yomiuri), as well as the ways that the Hiroshima company’s 100th and 120th year self-presentations reveal important concerns of the region and the nation, and motivations in going public with its shashi. These comparisons will reveal some of the merits and limits of using shashi in research. This article is part of a larger study on the work of the influence of regional press and publishers on literature in twentieth-century Japan.   


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-326
Author(s):  
BISHNUPRIYA DUTT

These three essays on distinct research areas and case studies cover a broad history of educational institutions in India, their focus on theatre and cultural education, and their role in creating citizens active in the public sphere and civic communities. The common point of reference for all the three essays is the historical transition from pre- to post-independence India, and they represent three dominant genres of Indian theatre practice: the amateur progressive theatre emerging out of sociopolitical movements; the State Drama School, which has remained at the core of the state's policy and vision of a national theatre; and college theatre, which comprises the field from which the National School of Drama sources its acting students, as well as new audiences for urban theatres.


PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (5) ◽  
pp. 1231-1246
Author(s):  
Michael Rothberg

The trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, is generally considered a turning point in the history of Holocaust memory because it brought the Holocaust into the public sphere for the first time as a discrete event on an international scale. In the same year, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's film Chronicle of a Summer appeared in France. While absent from scholarship on memory of the Nazi genocide for over forty years, Chronicle of a Summer contains a scene of Holocaust testimony that suggests the need to look beyond the Eichmann trial for alternative articulations of public Holocaust remembrance. This essay considers the juxtaposition in Chronicle of a Summer of Holocaust memory and the history of decolonization in order to rethink the “unique” place that the Holocaust has come to hold in discourses on extreme violence. The essay argues that a discourse of truth and testimony arose in French resistance to the Algerian war that shaped and was shaped by memory of the Nazi genocide.


Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.


Ambix ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-200
Author(s):  
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (03) ◽  
pp. 335-341
Author(s):  
Steven G. Medema

The history of economics, properly read, is very much a history of economics in the public sphere. Sir William Petty developed his most important insights in the process of providing advice on taxation to the monarch. Adam Smith wrote with a view to influencing the habits of thought of both the educated layman and policy makers. Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau brought early classical political economy to the masses. David Ricardo formulated foundational elements of the nineteenth-century classical system writing policy pamphlets and then entered Parliament with a view to putting policy making on a solid economic footing. Karl Marx’s intended audience was anything but the practitioners of the emerging science of political economy. Alfred Marshall buried his technical analysis in appendices to maximize the exposure of his work. John Maynard Keynes’s influence can be ascribed, without too much injustice, as much to his effectiveness outside the walls of Cambridge as within them and to the use by others of his ideas in that same public realm. Yet, despite this lengthy history of economists’ engagements with various publics, including those pulling the levers of policy, those writing on the history of economics have focused far more intently on the history of theory and the implications for the construction of a body of thought known as “economic analysis” than on the interplay among economists, economic ideas, and the public realm. It is as if the economic conversation went on solely within the space of academic departments of economics, even though those spaces are very recent creations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-621
Author(s):  
Arne Lorenz Gellrich ◽  
Erik Koenen ◽  
Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz

PurposeThe article discusses findings from a research project on the communication history of the League of Nations. It departs from the League's normative goal of “open diplomacy”, which, from an analytical standpoint, can be framed as an “epistemic project” in the sense of a non-linear and ambivalent negotiation by communication of what “open diplomacy” should and could be. The notion of the “epistemic project” serves as an analytical concept to understand this negotiation of open diplomacy across co-evolving actors' constellations from journalism, PR and diplomacy.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs a mixed-method approach, including hermeneutic document analysis of UN archival sources and collective biography/prosopography of 799 individual journalists and information officers.FindingsIt finds that the League's conceptualisations of the public sphere and open diplomacy were fluent and ambivalent. They developed in the interplay of diverse actors' collectives in Geneva. The involved roles of information officers, journalists and diplomats were permeable, heterogenous and – not least from a normative perspective – conflictive.Originality/valueThe subject remains under-researched, especially from the perspective of communication studies. The study is the first to approach it with the described research framework.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document