ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the twentieth century's more significant contraceptive technologies. From animal experimentation to international development programs, jungle laboratories to global markets, the production and consumption of contraceptive technologies has touched nearly every part of the world. The chapter will emphasize the diversity of the tools and techniques that have been deployed in the name of eugenics, feminism, neo-Malthusianism, family planning, population control, reproductive rights, and consumerism, and the inequalities that are often amplified by technological change. Oral contraception was rapidly and widely adopted by white, middle-class women in the affluent West, but different nations produced different national pills and contraceptive cultures to go with them. Birth-control activists were invariably disappointed when women failed to renew their prescription for smelly, sticky products, so the search for the ideal scientific method continued in the 1930s and 1940s with the financial backing of the Rockefeller Foundation and Procter and Gamble.
