God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion - Softcover

Mehta, Samira K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469693437 ISBN 13: 9781469693439

Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era.
In God Bless the Pill, Samira K. Mehta traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans. They hoped birth control methods would curb divorce rates by encouraging sexually dynamic marriages and families unstrained by “too many” children—thereby creating a postwar upwardly mobile middle class. Religious leaders also promoted this understanding of the family as tied to Cold War capitalism and encouraged neither racial nor gender equity.

But then came the backlash, both from the Right—which failed to anticipate the feminist potential of contraception—and from the Left, where women, particularly women of color, sought to ensure that birth control was a tool of liberation rather than one rooted in patriarchal and racial oppression. Ultimately, Mehta offers compelling new insights into the way religion accommodates itself to social, technological, and medical change.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samira K. Mehta is associate professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also serves as the director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1469693437
• ISBN 13: 9781469693439
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar