June 27, 2010

History of Birth Control

By Stacy Lloyd
Created 06/24/2010 - 07:57

Family planning is not a new concept. The practice of birth control has been around a long, long time and in the early days, people made due with what they had. According to some researchers, in 3000 B.C., types of condoms were made from fish bladders or animal intestines.

The history of birth control began when humans discovered the connection between sex and pregnancy. The oldest forms of birth control include coitus interruptus. That’s when a man pulls out prior to ejaculation.

Pessaries, or vaginal suppositories, were other early birth control devices. The earliest record of birth control use is ancient Egyptian instructions on creating a pessary. It was made of various acidic substances and then lubricated with honey or oil.

The first spermicides were introduced around 1500 B.C. Condoms made from linen cloth sheaths were soaked in chemical solutions and dried before using.

Barrier methods have been popular throughout the centuries. Asian women may have used oiled paper as a cervical cap while Europeans are said to have used beeswax. It’s reported that in the 18th century, Casanova used assurance caps to keep from impregnating his mistresses. By the 1830s, vulcanized rubber was the material of choice for both condoms and diaphragms.

The first modern intrauterine device was marketed in a German publication back in 1909. The Grafenberg Ring, the first IUD to be used by a significant number of women, was introduced in 1928.

The rhythm method, a natural form of birth control, gained popularity in the early 20th century. That was when researchers discovered women only ovulate once per menstrual cycle. Couples would avoid intercourse on days identified as fertile ones. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when scientists better understood the menstrual cycle and the hormones controlling it, that methods of hormonal contraception were developed.

Thanks to the famous birth control advocate, Margaret Sanger and her efforts, the first oral contraceptive, Enovid (invented by Frank Colton), was approved by the FDA in 1960.

In the 1980s and 1990s, hormonal birth control methods expanded to implants, injectables and low-dosage pills. By 1992, emergency contraception became more widely available.

Today, we’re seeing a rapid expansion in different birth control methods as well as improvements in safety and effectiveness. New methods include the hormonal patch, vaginal ring, injectables, single rod implants, and transcervical female sterilization.

What does the future hold? Many say research should now focus on methods to protect women against sexually transmitted infections.

Stacy Lloyd is a writer and video producer in Phoenix, Arizona. A former television news journalist, she covered stories around the world. Currently, she produces corporate and non-profit videos and broadcast programming.
Source URL (retrieved on 06/27/2010 - 00:57): http://www.empowher.com/sexual-well-being/content/history-birth-control

from violet blue

FOX Goggles is going to be a new feature here on Tiny Nibbles: it’s shorthand for when a story about sex in culture hits corporate news media and gets spun wildly, often falsely, out of proportion to the point of misleading the public. It happens quite a bit: remember when all us ladies “lost” our G-Spots at the beginning of the year? We got them back, but the point is that until mainstream media starts doing the job of journalism about sex, they should be hung from the highest tree and ridiculed. We deserve so much better. And we all know that FOX is not just a media channel, it’s a noun and a verb. There will be FOX Goggles Awards at the end of this year. It’s like “beer goggles” for sex news; as in when you drink so much the skankiest piece in the bar looks like pure hotness.
The first official FOX Goggles sighting is the Planned Parenthood sex ed class news item from earlier this week. Sex acts with stuffed animals! Showing pornography to children! Demonstrations on male genitalia! Um… no. In your wet dreams, FOX-sturbators.
Sex education is required by law in Iowa schools, and kids can opt-out. At Shenandoah’s high school, young adults get their sex ed in biology class; student age range is 14-16. Until this year, biology classes were led by Bethany Christian Services, teching a federally funded abstinence education course called Keyed-In to Abstinence. The program focuses on teaching students the consequences of premarital sex as well as how to “resist sex,” and that abstinence enhances their future relationships. This year, the school combined the religious “biology lesson” with curriculum from Planned Parenthood. The PP materials included instructions on sexually transmitted infections, contraception and reproductive anatomy.
When some of the conservative parents heard from their teens about the classes, they flipped: and what important here is that only some of the parents were outraged. Conservative paper Omaha World Herald reported on it pretty fairly saying, “Despite the protests, Profit said he received an equal number of calls from parents and students who said the instruction they received the Planned Parenthood representative was appropriate and positive. Those students, and their parents, said they had neither seen nor heard of anything troubling happening in the classroom.”
A few hours later, I see FOX pop up in my Google News with this item: Graphic Sex Ed Class Under Fire. According to FOX, young teens were instructed on graphic sexual acts by sicko Planned Parenthood staff, and were shown “simulated sexual acts” with stuffed animals (bestiality!) that were somehow representing STD’s/STI’s. There was an “anatomically correct demonstration” on putting on a condom in a mixed gender classroom, and that parents believe the images shown to their kids (FOX Goggles: children) were “pornographic.” Almost the entire story is reported though quotes from one angry parent: Colleen Dostal queefed all over FOX on behalf of all parents, which was quickly copy/pasted by journalism hookers all over the internet.
FOX, you are one classy bitch. You go girl, and take your pregnant, STD-spreading teenage daughter with you.

source

June 24, 2010

кусог из книги

«Женщина и новое поколение»,

впервые вышедшей в 1920 году.
Перевод В. Водо
Феминизм в общественной мысли и литературе. – М.: Грифон, 2006.


Не существует общих статистических данных, которые могли бы представить полную картину физических недомоганий женщин в результате частых родов. Кое-какой свет на это проливают данные о материнской смертности, составленные д-ром Грейс Л. Мейгс для детского отделения Департамента труда Соединенных Штатов. Правда, эти данные не исключают женскую смертность в результате болезней, осложненных беременностью.

«В 1913 в США по крайней мере 15 000 женщин умерли от послеродовых осложнений; примерно 7000 из них умерли от родильной горячки, а остальные 8000 от болезней, которые в современных условиях можно вполне предотвратить или вылечить – отмечает д-р Мейгс в своем заключении. Врачи и статистики считают, что эти данные сильно занижены».
Подумайте об этом – смерть пятнадцати тысяч женщин по «сильно заниженным» данным! Однако даже приведенные цифры говорят о том, что практически ежечасно, днем и ночью, две женщины умирают в результате родов в самой здоровой и, очевидно, самой прогрессивной стране мира.

Очевидно, что д-р Мейгс оставляет за рамками своего исследования тысячи больных туберкулезом беременных женщин, умирающих ежегодно… В исследовании д-ра Мейгс не учитываются также сифилис, различные болезни почек и сердца и многие другие, приводящие к роковому концу беременных женщин…

Каковы же социальные условия жизни женщин, умирающих во время родов? Большинство из них, не имея в достаточной мере еды, в домах, где отсутствуют элементарнее социальные условия. Именно в этих условиях наиболее часты заболевания туберкулезом, другими болезнями, осложняющимися во время беременности.

По мере требований женщин будут появляться все новые, более совершенные противозачаточные средства. -- я был прав, написав demand side :)....
Все увеличивающие требования неизбежно приведут к лабораторным исследованиям и экспериментам. Такие исследования уже ведутся, и в самом ближайшем будущем мы сможем ожидать значительных успехов в области контрацепции.


В ЖЖ sadcrixivan был и перевод про Сару, умершую от аборта

June 23, 2010

Let the Pill Go Free

Last month, the 50th anniversary of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the birth control pill was marked by a lot of discussion about the ways in which the pill has failed to deliver on its promises. It did not solve women’s problems juggling work and family life — nor did it end gender discrimination or eliminate unintended pregnancies. Clearly, approving the use of the pill was only the beginning of the effort to meet women’s contraception needs.

The pill remains part of the solution, but its usefulness has been limited because it’s available only by prescription. As every woman who has run out of pills on a Sunday or forgotten to take them along on vacation knows, refills are not always easy to come by.
What’s more, the difficulties involved in obtaining a pill prescription, especially for women without access to a doctor, can cause gaps in contraceptive use. And the birth control methods that are available without prescription — condoms, spermicide and the sponge — have higher failure rates than the pill.

But there is something we could do to help the pill live up to its potential: let women purchase it over the counter. A half-century of evidence shows us that it’s safe to dispense the pill without a prescription.

The pill meets F.D.A. criteria for over-the-counter medications. Women don’t need a doctor to tell them whether they need the pill — they know when they are sexually active and want to avoid pregnancy. Pill instructions are easy to follow: Take one each day. There’s no chance of becoming addicted. Taking too many will make you nauseated, but won’t endanger your life, in contrast to some over-the-counter drugs, like analgesics. (There are even side benefits to taking the pill, like reduced risks of ovarian and uterine cancer.)

It’s true that the pill could be dangerous for women with certain conditions. Women who are 35 or older and smoke, and those with high blood pressure, are at greater risk of a heart attack or stroke if they take oral contraceptives that combine estrogen and progestin. But these are not complicated conditions to identify; women already have to tell their doctor about their health problems when they get a prescription, and research shows that women can screen themselves for contraindications almost as well as providers do.

Progestin-only pills, or minipills, might be an ideal option for an initial over-the-counter switch since they have fewer (and rarer) contraindications and potential complications. Along with the change, the pharmaceutical company, nonprofits and the government should collaborate on an educational campaign, including pamphlets packaged with the pills and public service announcements that would give women information about how to use the pill, deal with side effects, recognize serious complications and of course remind them to get regular checkups for preventative care like Pap smears.

The United States has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, and better access to the pill is part of the solution to this problem. During the debate leading up to F.D.A. approval of the emergency contraception pill called Plan B for over-the-counter sale, some people expressed concern about expanding access to contraception for young women without doctors’ oversight, and they might say the same about the birth control pill. But there are no special health risks for younger women on the pill, and sexually active women, whatever their age, should have freer access to the full range of options to prevent pregnancy.

We also need to address the problem of pricing. Plan B became more expensive when it went over the counter. If that happened to the pill, it could be unaffordable for many women on Medicaid whose prescriptions are now covered. In some states Medicaid already covers over-the-counter contraception like condoms; Medicaid coverage in all states should be extended to all over-the-counter methods, including the pill.

Women don’t need a doctor to tell them if they need cold medicine or condoms, and they shouldn’t need a doctor’s permission to take the pill. Over-the-counter sales would expand access to safe, effective contraception, and help women take control over their sexual and reproductive lives.

Source: Kelly Blanchard, New York Times, 21 June 2010

June 21, 2010

соревнование 2х систем

Джозеф Хейн РЕЙНИ
Joseph Hayne RAINEY (1832 ≈ 2.8.1887),
бывший раб, первый негр, избранный в Палату представителей Конгресса США (1870≈79).

June 18, 2010

Geopolitics and the Pill

Mistaken prophecies about the impact of oral contraception

America + The Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, by Elaine Tyler May, Basic Books, 199 pages, $25.95
When the Food and Drug Administration approved oral contraception in 1960, everybody understood that it was a big deal. But according to Elaine Tyler May, author of America + The Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, an awful lot of people were wrong about why it was a big deal. Contrary to the expectations of the time, the Pill did not 1) defuse the population bomb, 2) end the Cold War, or 3) turn American women into sexually ravenous maneaters.
When it appeared on the market, American women, who during the previous decade had been marrying young and spawning vigorously, went on the Pill in droves; 6.5 million of them were taking a daily dose by 1964. But high-level debate over the contraceptive’s potential impact involved far more masculine concerns. The Pill would prove decisive in the twilight struggle against the Soviets. The Pill would prevent overpopulation. Optimists argued that if men were freed to have more sex there would be fewer wars. Pessimists pondered the dangerous social effects of unleashing female sexuality. All those big thinkers were so busy analyzing the ways the Pill was going to change the world that they missed the real revolution.
But there were two women who knew from the beginning what the Pill’s real impact would be. In the early 1950s, word of scientific research involving Mexican yams and a bunch of infertile rabbits reached the ears of crusaders Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick. Sanger, a political firebrand who had coined the phrase birth control, was the grand dame of the contraception movement. McCormick was the purse (and the brains) of the duo. They made contact with chemist Carl Djerassi, who had discovered that Mexican yams could be a cheap source of synthetic progesterone, a hormone used to inhibit ovulation. Djerassi didn’t have contraception in mind when he undertook his research; his lab was simply looking for inexpensive ways to make a bunch of different biologically relevant compounds. But another Sanger scientist, Gregory Pincus, quickly saw the potential of the new, cheap progestin.
McCormick, the first woman to get a science degree from MIT, used the fortune of her schizophrenic husband to drop about $2 million—$15 million in today’s money—on the Pill project during the next several years. While Sanger’s interest was linked to her geopolitical concerns (she had a sideline in eugenics), she and McCormick were mainly aiming to liberate married women from the drudgery of bearing and rearing an unpredictable number of children. But the people, mostly men, who worked on the actual development and promotion of the Pill weren’t too interested in how it would affect individual women. They had agendas of their own.
Elaine Tyler May’s previous book was about family life during the Cold War, which gives her a slightly different approach to the topic than the usual feminist interpretation. A professor of history and American studies at the University of Minnesota, May touches on women’s reactions to the Pill, but her best passages describe the male counterpoints to those feminine conversations. In the 1960s, in many ways, the male chatter still mattered more. America + The Pill is slim, and it relies heavily on secondary sources. But it is packed with the words of bewildered men so desperately trying to use the Pill to alleviate geopolitical concerns that they failed to understand the private revolution under their noses.
Change came more slowly than you might think. In 1967 only 45 percent of the nation’s colleges had health services that were prescribing the Pill for female students. At the University of Kansas, the Pill was only on offer for married students over the age of 18. According to May, when Lawrence, Kansas, officials finally approved the Pill for single women, they did so not to support female empowerment but on the grounds that it would put a dent in overpopulation.
The population bomb was the global warming of the 1960s and ’70s. The problem was urgent, no one quite knew how to fix it, and the proposals offered by the most radical reformers, such as forced sterilization, made the general public understandably squeamish. Still, there was a wide consensus that there were too many people on the earth and that we were barreling toward global starvation and resource war.
And as with carbon dioxide emissions, Americans who felt uneasy about their own production—of babies, in this case—could comfort themselves by looking to an even more egregious situation abroad. World population increased by half a billion people in the 1950s, with more than half of that growth in Asia. Lyndon Johnson raised funding for domestic family planning from $8.6 million to $56.3 million as part of his War on Poverty. But making fewer children at home was deemed less important than making fewer children overseas. U.S. funding for international birth control jumped from $2.1 million in 1965 to $131.7 million in 1969.
Those population fears eventually faded. To the extent that they linger, the Pill is rarely the method of choice for Western-funded birth control initiatives in the developing world. Even in the 1960s, the IUD—which could be put in place and remain effective for years without any attention on the part of the woman or her doctor—was the favored option. This was especially true in Third World countries where population control strategies took a more coercive form; better a one-time operation than a daily private choice.
In public rhetoric, the population bomb was linked closely to the hydrogen bomb. Before Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which sold 2 million copies between 1968 and 1974, there was Hugh Moore’s 1954 pamphlet “The Population Bomb.” Moore, who ran the Dixie Cup corporation, thought “voluntary sterilization” could be a weapon in the Cold War. His pamphlet, which was widely distributed by the Hugh Moore Fund for International Peace, declared: “We’re not primarily interested in the sociological or humanitarian aspects of birth control. We are interested in the use…which the Communists make of hungry people.” Overpopulation leads to hunger, Moore argued, and “hunger brings turmoil—and turmoil, as we have learned, creates the atmosphere in which the communists seek to conquer the earth.
Moore may have been an extremist, but as May notes, even Margaret Sanger, who wasn’t shy about her extreme left-wing views, advocated “national security through birth control.” Not every Cold Warrior cared for contraception; Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) worried that the promotion of birth control in America was a plot to spread immorality. But the skeptics were in the minority.
Since healthy, happy people were thought less likely to go red, some alert citizens favored birth control at home to sow good cheer. As early as 1940, a statement from Planned Parenthood declared: “A nation’s strength does not depend upon armaments and manpower alone; it depends upon the contentment…of its people. To the extent that birth control contributes to the health and morale of our people, it makes them less receptive to subversive propaganda, more ready to defend our national system.” The worry then was about Nazis, not communists, but activists had no trouble updating the rhetoric when the Cold War followed World War II. By 1965 this view had percolated up to the mainstream, with President Johnson declaring in his State of the Union address that year, in a section entitled “The Non-Communist World,” that “I will seek new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity of world resources.”
Even when people did discuss the prospect that liberating women from the paralyzing fear of conception might help them enjoy sex a bit more, the focus remained on the geopolitical implications of ladies’ relaxing into nookie. The same year that Moore was warning against the communizing effect of high birth rates, one of the clinical researchers who developed the Pill, John Rock, declared, “The greatest menace to world peace and decent standards of life today is not atomic energy but sexual energy.” For Rock, uncontrolled breeding was a threat to civilization. The oral contraceptive, he thought, could fix all that, and if it were developed quickly enough “the H-bomb need never fall.”
Rock wasn’t alone in comparing sexuality to an explosion. Moore called the burgeoning population “as disruptive and dangerous as the explosion of the atom, and with as much influence on the prospects for progress or disaster, war or peace.”
While Rock and Moore looked to protect America’s shores, Hugh Hefner was maintaining the defense of America’s bachelor pads. During much of its first decade in the 1950s and early ’60s, Playboy largely ignored the question of contraception. As Hefner made his case for no-strings sex, he initially did not focus on the interior lives of the women involved. When the magazine did acknowledge the topic, it did so by running letters in the mid-1960s from men and Freudian psychologists freaked out at the prospect that, freed from the fear of pregnancy, the women of America would suddenly become sexually rapacious while the men of America would discover that they were unable to satisfy their wives and girlfriends. One expert explained that the American husband was coming home “mentally and physically spent—in no mood to satisfy his newly libidinous, pill-taking wife.”
As the 1960s wore on and the Pill became more commonplace, Hefner came around to the male upside. He became increasingly insistent, in May’s words, that female conscientious objectors to the Pill were “neurotic, prudish, hostile to men, or unwilling to take responsibility for contraception.”
But adoption of the Pill, while rapid for married women, was slower for the singles who interested Hefner most. Throughout the 1960s, premeditated sex (as evidenced by taking precautions such as the Pill) was considered a worse cultural crime than sex committed in the heat of passion. Birth control technology changed, but for at least a decade after the release of the Pill, women were more likely to be gatekeepers than maneaters.
The sexual revolution was the result of a complex convergence of circumstances, not a chemical reaction and a biological response. As Gloria Steinem put it in 1962, “the pill is obviously important to the sexual and contraceptive revolutions but it is not the opening bombshell of either one.”
Steinem’s observation can be extended to the other revolutionary hopes people had for the tablet. The fantasy of a single pill that offers a quick fix for the problems of modern life is powerful and enduring, and when a new form of birth control appeared it was easy to overestimate the ways it might fix the most stubborn problems of the day. The big thinkers were so obsessed with the sweeping geopolitical changes they saw on the horizon that they missed what was happening in front of the medicine cabinets of America millions of times a day: individual women engaging in a small act that gave them more control over a vital, personal area of their lives.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (kmw@reason.com) is a senior editor at reason.

June 17, 2010

Women’s courage

I have been encouraged to respond from a woman’s perspective to the letter in the June 14 Independent Mail regarding lasting change and how it is brought about. Change comes about when individual courage is evidenced and radical action ensues.
Little was being done about changing the status of women in our society until the early years of the 20th century when a fragile young woman who was a Quaker realized her sex would never achieve equality until they could vote. Alice Paul screwed up her courage and left the comfort of her home in New Jersey for the tumultuous life of a suffragist in Washington, D.C. Radical behavior — riots, parades, demonstrations and picketing of the White House — were all unheard of before the city was besieged by quiet, courageous Alice Paul.
The only woman to equal — maybe even excel — the courage and tenacity of Alice Paul might be Margaret Sanger, a public-health nurse who fought the United States Post Office, the Catholic Church and much of the male population in this country to establish family limitation through Planned Parenthood. Were it not for Margaret Sanger and the birth-control movement, our worldwide over-population problem would be far greater than it is.
My hope in writing is to encourage qualified women to run for office and to congratulate courageous women like our own Jane Dyer.
Thelma Spencer, Anderson

June 15, 2010

приз мелкомяхкаму

William H. Gates Sr. was once head of Planned Parenthood in the US and that International Planned Parenthood Federation won the population award in the institutional category in 1985.

The 2010 United Nations Population Award goes to Bill and Melinda Gates.


надо попробовать у Билла

June 13, 2010

excellent phrase

Despite the stringent anti-obscenity laws that were prevalent at the time, the movement’s leaders advocated that women had the right to control reproduction.

from here

In 1920, as a result of the suffrage movement, women gained the right to vote.

June 8, 2010

history of the white male

кино: Iron Jawed Angels which is a fantastic movie about suffragist Alice Paul

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony started the fight for women's rights back in 1848 at the Senecca Falls convention where they declared that women needed to have certain rights. (At this point in US history, it was legal for a man to beat his wife, among other things.) In 1920, over 70 years later, women gained the right to vote. The amendment passed by one vote. Women were not granted the right to vote. They fought for it with their blood, sweat and tears.

Our great-grandmothers, grandmothers, and mothers fought for every freedom that we enjoy today. Currently, I have the right to vote, open my own bank account, have control over my reproductive capacity, get an education and even play on sports teams. A married women could not open her own bank account until the 1960's. Women were not admitted to Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale etc. until the late 1970's. When Margaret Sanger began advocating for birth control, it was illegal for her to open a clinic or disseminate any information via the mail. Congress had passed a law in 1873 which defined birth control as obscene material, so it became illegal to distribute it. The Supreme Court declared laws against birth control as unconstitutional in 1965 (Griswald v. CT) b/c these laws violated a woman's right to privacy (no shit). But again it took 60 years for women to have the ability to control her own body.

надо посмотреть также:
Alice Paul, Elizabeth Cady Stanton etc

источник

June 6, 2010

they menstruate

But if they menstruate, no one ever mentions it; and if they visit a family planning clinic, they do it off the page, well out of sight of the gentle reader. In The Group, however, biology, and how to pull a fast one on it, are centre stage.

Когда я ещё был в невинном возрасте, тоже сильно удивлялся -- почему в кино не сикают и не какают. Поскольку все фильмы были про войну, самым большим ужасом войны мне казалось терпеть несколько лет, по кр. мере год, как в Гуссарской балладе

  • a "pessary" (this is American for a diaphragm)
  • Now, 21st-century women's novels deal with the IVF clinic, not contraception.
  • (From time to time, of course, the odd relic will bemoan its effect on our morals, usually at the behest of the Daily Mail. Last month it was the turn of Raquel Welch on CNN. The pill has destroyed marriage, she said: "Seriously, folks, if an ageing sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it's gotta be pretty bad."
  • In the 20-24 age group, two-thirds of British women take it every morning
  • people who worked in the clinics fitting them were rather unfriendly and punitive
  • People were very afraid of abortion; it threatened you. The pill also meant people were able to keep the integrity of the family. Of course people had affairs before the pill, but with more anxiety, and there were mixed children, and some told, and some didn't tell. Afterwards that was no longer the case.
  • !!!
  • thanks to Joe McCarthy's war on communism, birth control was widely regarded as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy
  • "You caused this," she told her father, over the coffin. "Mother is dead from having too many children."
  • when he was declared legally insane, was awarded control of his estate), and one wholly committed to the cause of finding a way to help women limit their families, with or without their husbands' help.
  • As Lara V Marks points out in her 2001 history of the pill, Sexual Chemistry, this was complex work.
  • The American feminist Gloria Steinem has always insisted that the pill's effect on the wider sexual revolution was overstated, and perhaps she has a point (social mores changed for a variety of complex reasons, of which the pill was only one). Germaine Greer believes its advent meant that "a morally neutral reason" for refusing penetrative sex had ceased to exist: "Women no longer had an acceptable reason for refusing the kind of sex that was most likely to be brutish and short. Once they had made the investment in sexual activity by taking a daily medication in order to be available, there was no sense in being unavailable. Having accepted the idea of themselves as sexually active, they had to be sexually active or be failures." In other words, she believes that it benefited men far more than it did women.
  • "The pill only suits a woman who is on a regimen, who has a regular sex life. And who does have a regular sex life? Basically that means the middle classes. The rest [of the population], that's a lot of women. I just don't think the pill has reached, or will reach, everybody. I never used it because I was having an irregular sex life. Some people don't expect to have sex that often. Sex just… comes up [occasionally]. Those women don't take a pill every day.  (Susan Brownmiller)
  • Brownmiller feels that it is those who can't get pregnant who now dominate the media. "This pro-natalism. I haven't seen anything like it since the 1950s. Everything is baby, baby, baby." In this context, she believes, abortion rights become more vulnerable, and abortion itself more taboo. 
  • some 3.75 million are currently using it in the UK alone (worldwide, more than 200 million have used it since it was first approved).
  • Last March the Royal College of GPs published the results of research which studied 46,000 women over almost 40 years. It found that women who have taken the pill were also less likely to die from cancer, heart disease or stroke.

June 2, 2010

Elaine Tyler May

June 1, 2010
New Book "America and the Pill" Traces the Pill's Influence on Women Wash. Post: In "America and the Pill," Elaine Tyler May traces the pill's influence on women, by Elaine Tyler May:
AMERICA AND THE PILL: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation
Book (2) "I would be perfectly happy if not for the same old thing -- too many babies too close together," wrote a young mother to birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger in a letter Sanger included in her 1928 book "Motherhood in Bondage." Like many women seeking Sanger's advice about contraception, this mother was probably poor, uneducated and, by her own admission, desperate. One pictures her at her kitchen table, pen in hand, a child in each arm and on a knee. "My third baby was born a week after the first one's third birthday," she went on. "Just three babies in three years and I am only twenty-two years old. . . . I am also so nervous sometimes I don't know what to do." . . . 
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341bfae553ef0133ef52bb3e970b
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference New Book "America and the Pill" Traces the Pill's Influence on Women:

Kennedy and population aid

Prof Elaine Tyler May дала пару ссылок на политику Кеннеди:
  1. You might look at a book by Matthew Connelly, FATAL MISCONCEPTIONS, which has an explanation of Kennedy's decision to include birth control in foreign aid on pages 197-199. 
  2. Sheldon Segal, UNDER THE BANYAN TREE. 

June 1, 2010

Mussolini

image:mussolini2.jpg
Mussolini, Benito. (1883-1945).
Mussolini, Benito born, Dovia, Predappio, July 29, 1883; died Giulino di Mezzagra, April 28, 1945.

Mussolini began his political career as a revolutionary Socialist Party (PSI) member and leader who went to prison for his anti-war activities during the 1911-12 Tripolitan War with Turkey and participated in the expulsion of reformists from the PSI in 1912. When war erupted in 1914, Mussolini - now a PSI city councilman in Milan and editor of the party's nation-wide paper, Avanti! - initially opposed Italy's entry in the conflict. However, by October 1914 Mussolini called for a reassessment of the situation and argued that Socialists, and Italy, could not simply remain passively neutral.

Shortly thereafter, with the surreptitious aid of money from Italian industrialists and then the French, Musssolini broke with the PSI and founded his own paper, Il popolo d'Italia, which called for Italy's intervention on the side of the Entente. He was expelled from the party and thereby joined others of the Left, such as the revolutionary syndicalists Alceste De Ambris and Arturo Labriola, in calling for revolutionary war.

Mussolini's Il popolo d'Italia became an important voice among the leftist and democratic interventionist campaigners of 1914-15. His arguments even had an impact for some time on future Communist leaders such as Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti. Eclipsed for a time because of his own absence in the army following intervention, the newspaper regained influence after the Italian military disaster at Caporetto galvinized public sentiment against defeat.

In the postwar period, Mussolini played heavily upon the interests of veterans, espoused the elitism of the Arditi (the Daring Ones) assault troops, and assailed the failure of parliamentary politicians to win the peace, i.e., the Italian war aims. On these elements, plus a shift to the employers' side of labor disputes, Mussolini began to build the Fascist movement.

References:
Renzo de Felice, Mussolini, 5 vols, Turin: 1965-81
Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A Biography (New York: 1982)
Eric Palmer Hoyt, Mussolini's Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Fascist Vision (New York: 1994)

секретаршей, любовницей или х.з кем его была тов. Балабанова

источник

Вчера обнаружил в закладках ресурс по истории первой мировой, гдк упоминается Сэнгер. Надо было сразу ковать железо -- ибо щас уже не могу найти ни хрена :(
поэтому просто запомним ресурс

из него:
EF -- Elizabeth Foxwell is an editor and writer in Washington, DC. Her master's thesis on women pacifists in World War II (1990) focused largely on Vera Brittain and received distinction from Georgetown University. A presenter at the 1993 "A Testament to Vera Brittain" conference at McMaster University (Canada), she will have an essay on Testament of Youth in a forthcoming volume from Popular Press.

ещё 1 шыкарный источник = интернет архив