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The availability of the Pill precipitated a transformation in sexual mores. It involved three innovations: reliability, widespread publicity, and large-scale modern distribution. Rising rates of pre-marital sexual activity were leading to sharply increasing illegitimacy. Unmarried mothers were highly stigmatized. The advent of the pill created a new practical alternative and gave rise to debate about the need for a new sexual morality which increased intellectual support for change. The media encouraged comments on sexuality from the likes of J. A. T. Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, Alex Comfort, Martin Cole, and Helen Brook. The pace of change was astonishing and by the 1970s the debate had narrowed to concerns about ‘school girl’ sex.

The public debate and legislative changes generated by women's demand for an acceptable female controlled method of contraception resulted in a huge increase in availability of all methods of birth control. This chapter considers the role of population control fears, women's rights, eugenics, and lobbying groups such as the Family Planning Association. The passing of legislation in 1973 to make contraception available to all men and women over the age of sixteen, married and unmarried, from 1975 was a watershed in the history of English sexuality. It occurred in the context of an erosion of deference throughout the society.

This chapter explores Native women’s quest for reproductive self-determination from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The chapter documents Native women’s diverse attitudes toward and engagement with federal family planning services, while dedicating particular attention to growing concerns regarding unethical and even coercive sterilizations in the 1970s. Native nurses, community health representatives, and other activists struggled in various ways for women’s reproductive autonomy, collectively ensuring the centrality of reproduction to Red Power politics and the ongoing struggle for Native sovereignty. By the end of the decade, activist pressure resulted in the adoption of new federal regulations that provided some protections for Native and other women. Native women also founded grassroots organizations that pursued reproduction-related agendas such as a return to Native midwifery.

This chapter explores why Nixon initially chose to save Johnson’s War on Poverty and also why he tried to launch his own bold antipoverty gambit, in the form of the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). In doing so, the chapter charts the disagreements in the Nixon White House, particularly those between aides Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Arthur Burns. Overall, in failing to pass FAP, the chapter argues that Nixon misread his own party, which had no interest in such a grand anti-poverty initiative. Moreover, his own poor party leadership was also to blame for FAP failing in Congress.

This chapter examines the politics of poverty and welfare in the United States during the 1970s, from the time of Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter. It begins with an overview of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, introduced in 1935 as a section of the Social Security Act, and then turns to Nixon's proposed radical improvements in the welfare system, including a guaranteed income. In particular, the chapter discusses Nixon's Family Assistance Plan, and its pros and cons. It considers the reasons for the success of conservatism, which, along with resistance to the welfare state, was associated with the Republican Party. Instead of stumbling due to Nixon's Watergate resignation, Republicanism received a boost from the economic crisis of the 1970s. The chapter also explains the role of the Vietnam War fiasco, race issues, and the limits of liberalism's consensus economics in rebuilding the Republican Party. Finally, it analyzes the growth of the welfare state between 1972 and 1976.

Drawing upon and defining a sex-gender-sexuality framework, Chapter 1 explores why an analysis of men and masculinities have been historically omitted from science-based HIV prevention interventions. This chapter traces the conceptual progression of gender relations research within family planning and HIV prevention research in order to lay the groundwork for a critical analysis of gendered vulnerability and risk. Chapter 1 situates HIV prevention programming with heterosexually active men as a specifically feminist research enterprise.

This chapter discusses President Richard Nixon's welfare-reform proposal, the Family Assistance Plan (FAP). It provided an income guarantee—an amount of money that every American family with children would receive—and a low tax or takeaway rate on welfare benefits. The proposal included all poor families with children, as well as families with a working parent. In particular, the aged, blind, and disabled would receive a minimum of $90 a month. Despite this reassurance, the representative of the National Federation of the Blind protested that the proposal might be disadvantageous to the blind given the benefits received by the elderly and others with disabilities.

This chapter explores the fertility levels in China and how government-sponsored family planning programs have affected total fertility rates. The government is seen as a big factor in Chinese fertility rate, as is seen in their implementation of the “one child per family” program. The issue of whether fertility in China has truly dropped remains a subject of controversy, however, due to statistical problems from the State Family Planning Commission affected by underreporting. The objective of China is clear in that there is a desire to slow population growth, which in turn has made China into an “aging society,” making it the first major country to grow old before growing rich. There are increasing concerns as to the negative effects that low fertility may have on China, and talks on modifying China’s family planning regulations have been more rigorous as of late, as these policies will indeed influence China’s economy and social institutions.

This chapter examines the political struggles over welfare, leading to several failed attempts to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with a guaranteed income program in the 1960s and 1970s. Kennedy and Ed Johnson’s antipoverty policies undoubtedly helped the poor, but their impact was limited. The backlash against welfare and civil rights gains reshaped electoral politics. The Richard Nixon administration urged Congress to pass a revised Family Assistance Plan (FAP) bill in order to put “a floor under the income of every family with children in America.” Liberal Democrats’ policy innovations in the 1960s were too little too late. Declining support for New Deal policies, the failure of politicians to create a popular alternative, and the absence of a vibrant welfare rights movement created a political vacuum that was quickly filled by the Republican Right, whose rise to power unleashed even greater attacks on welfare mothers.

This chapter looks at the voluntary vasectomy campaigns headed by Dr. Lee Hui-Yong at Seoul National University hospital, concurrent with ongoing family planning campaigns for much of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the surgery was first tested on a range of civilian subjects before becoming specifically attached to the Home Reserve Army (Yebigun), a body created in the late 1960s in the aftermath of a North Korean incursion and direct assault on the Blue House, or presidential residence. In a wonderful bit of irony, the hyper-masculinist rhetoric of the period asked South Korean males to stand for the nation, to father children and nurture them, and at the same time, to curb their reproductive urges after a proscribed number of children. Carrying into the 1970s, reservists received additional incentives (access to apartments, education for children, reduced reserve periods) for compliance with the “voluntary program. The logic and zeal of the program was such that numbers continued to peak into the 1980s and early 1990s, even as South Korea underwent democratization and the transition to pro-natal initiatives.

This chapter discusses sterilization as birth control for rural women in India. In 1970s, female sterilization had been a popular and preferred way to institute birth control. Eighty-one percent of rural Indian women received the service in government-run camps. They were sterilized serially in temporary operation rooms, which were converted from classrooms for schoolchildren. After their surgeries the women rested in the camp for a couple of days in order to be observed for any complications that might develop. While acknowledging that sterilization camps did not meet the standards of quality care, the Family Planning Division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare continued to endorse them and provided detailed information on how to set them up.

This chapter describes the US Congress’s attempts to pass a universal basic income scheme in 1970. It details the work of Nixon Administration operatives, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, to accomplish this effort. It describes the sociological experiments that proved that decoupling income from work actually had a positive effect.

This chapter contains an analysis of a sample of Films Division documentaries that instruct the viewers to adopt a lifestyle perceived by government leaders as one conducive to development. Through the scrutiny of films on family planning, on the “uplift” of Adivasis and on civic education, the chapter shows that the Films Division advocated a “modern” lifestyle that impinged on the civil liberties of the citizens and discouraged popular debate on the form of development to be adopted, thus seeking to polarize Indian society between “experts” and “laymen.” The chapter also contains a discussion of the use of animation in service of government film as a tool designed to perfect the visualization of development and future progress, as well as a discussion of the portrayal of gender in Films Division films.

Chapter four examines the emergence of a revolutionary left in Chile in the first years of Eduardo Frei’s presidency. Although this process would not dominate left-wing politics at a national level until later in 1960s, it resonated soon after Allende’s 1964 electoral defeat, influenced both by reformist projects and repressive efforts to contain them. By 1966, Beatriz was part of a weak but emergent revolutionary wing of the Chilean Socialist Party, inspired by local circumstances and international influences. These first years of the Frei government were dynamic, and productive. Beatriz and her cohort of medical students and socialist militants came into direct contact with the state’s new approach to healthcare, family planning, women, agricultural reform, and poverty. Beatriz benefitted from, and was shaped by, the reformist environment she inhabited, emerging like many of the radical left as a product of combined frustrations and opportunities it provided. By 1967, Beatriz had her first formal job in a community health center, epitomizing many of the Christian Democrat’s reformist goals. Closer to home, she had also fallen in love and married a young Socialist Party militant, Renato Julio, involved in effervescent student politics.

Katherine Kendall was an important executive, fulfilling leadership roles in the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) for nearly 60 years. She experienced migration to the USA, the disruption of war, family disability and her own disability in her early life. As a young woman, she travelled in Europe with her husband in the 1930s, taking up social work training on their return. During World War II, she took up US government international liaison posts. Later, she researched international social work education for the United Nations, contributing to her PhD. Taking up executive posts in the US Council on Social Work Education, she became honorary, then executive secretary of IASSW, fulfilling consultancies and international visits, particularly in Latin America. She led a significant international social development project on family planning, and completed publications on issues in social work education and international social work, including historical overviews and biographical tributes to leaders in these fields, drawing on her experience.