God Bless the Pill

Most people today understand contraception as central to womens 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 Gods plana tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the postWorld 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 childrenthereby 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 Rightwhich failed to anticipate the feminist potential of contraceptionand 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.