2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Over the course of the 20^th century, the rise of birth control movements, new technologies, and state family planning policies enabled dramatic declines in fertility and empowered women to seize control over their bodies across the globe. But the history of birth control also has a darker side, shaped by racist eugenics policies and coercive international population control programs aimed at limiting reproductive choice along class, race, and national lines. These complicated histories continue to haunt contemporary transnational activism and many aspects of reproduction remain politically contested well into the 21^stcentury, imposing critical limitations on women’s lives. As a result, both historians and activists alike have found it difficult to separate the past from the present, the local from the international, and politics from practice.

This roundtable provides the opportunity for early/mid-career scholars whose research starts from different locales (India, South Africa, the Caribbean, and Taiwan) to engage with advanced researchers/activists who have played a pioneering role in the American context and have closely watched the evolution of the field internationally. Questions for discussion will explore how activist frames have shifted over time (from “birth control” to “family planning” to “reproductive justice”) and the impact this has had on academic work, how scholars and activists have attempted to incorporate international and local levels of analyses, the challenges of researching controversial subject matter (such as abortion), and new frontiers in the history of reproductive politics/practices in the twentieth century.