ABSTRACT
As historians have grown increasingly sensitive to the value of integrating class, ethnicity, gender, and race into their analyses of social structures and functions, they have begun to investigate more carefully the confluence of public and private social relations and activities. These efforts to extend the parameters of what is relevant and retrievable have added a new complexity and depth to the history of fertility and birth control. The pioneering efforts of demographers to describe and explain the fertility transitions that have marked Western industrialized societies, and the attempts of social scientists to explore the relationship of fertility patterns to modernization, have more recently been complemented by studies of the history of birth control that have been strongly influenced by two other groups of scholars. The first is feminist historians, who look at the interaction of women's biological experience, their economic and political roles, and their social and material circumstances; the second is a new generation of sexual theorists who attempt to define the historical and social roots of sexuality. What has emerged is an increasingly sophisticated body of work that firmly locates the history of reproduction and birth control within the larger weave of social, economic, and political changes.
