Abstract
The differences in ideologies between the two wings of the birth-control movement — eugenists and maternalists — became even clearer when their ideas were put into practice. The two main birth-control groups, the Race Welfare Society (RWS) and the Mothers’ Clinic Committee (MCC), each opened their first clinic in February 1932. Aside from their timing, the two groups also shared a thoroughly medicalized approach to contraceptive services. However, this chapter is concerned with their differences rather than their commonalities, for they had distinct degrees of success in attracting and maintaining users. As this and the subsequent chapter argue, these successes and failures were determined by the two groups’ different motives for opening birth-clinics in the first place.
The trouble with birth control was that the wrong people were using it. The people who could provide the best stock were limiting their families … while the people over-breeding and producing an excess of inferior children were the very people, such as drunkards and “poor whites,” whom it was practically impossible to induce to use contraceptives.
Anonymous letter to the Cape Times, 1930
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Notes
A. Leathard, The Fight for Family Planning: The Development of Family Planning Services in Britain 1921–1974 (London: Macmillan, 1980).
P. A. Buckner and C. Bridge, “Reinventing the British World,” The Round Table, 368 (2003), p. 77.
E. Brink, “The Afrikaner Women of the Garment Workers’ Union, 1918–1938,” (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1986), p. 29;
S. Parnell, “Public Housing as a Device for White Residential Segregation in Johannesburg,” Urban Geography, 9 (1988), pp. 584–602.
S. Parnell, “Slums, Segregation and Poor Whites in Johannesburg, 1920–1934,” in R. Morrell (ed.), White But Poor: Essays on the History of the Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880–1940 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1992), p. 121;
E. Koch, “Without Visible Means of Subsistence: Slumyard Culture in Johannesburg, 1918–1940,” in Belinda Bozzoli (ed.), Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), pp. 151–76.
S. Kark, “The Economic Factor in the Health of the Bantu in South Africa,” The Leech, 5, 3 (1934), pp. 11–22.
J. Hyslop, “White Working-Class Women and the Invention of Apartheid: ‘Purified’ Afrikaner Nationalist Agitation for Legislation Against ‘Mixed’ Marriages, 1934–9,” Journal of African History, 36 (1995), pp. 62–3.
L. Marks, Metropolitan Maternity: Maternal and Infant Welfare Services in Early Twentieth Century London (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), p. 279.
I.J. Block, “Observations from the Work of a Birth Control Clinic,” South African Medical Journal, 8 (1934), p. 490. Block, who joined the RWS’s executive in 1933, presented the report to the 1933 meeting of the South African Medical Council Conference in Cape Town.
N. Mandy, A City Divided-Johannesburg and Soweto (Johannesburg: Macmillan South Africa, 1984), pp. 44–47.
I. Berger, Threads of Solidarity. Women in South African Industry 1900–1980 (London: James Currey, 1992).
M. E. Rothmann, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family. Vol. 5. The Poor White Problem in South Africa. Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa (Stellenbosch: Pro Ecclesia, 1932), p. 213.
In 1932, the Chief Inspector of Factories reported that, “There is a growing tendency for women to remain in or return to factory work after marriage,” cited by M. L. Ballinger, “Social and Economic Problems of the Bantu,” Report of the National Conference on Social Work (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1936), p. 357. See also Brink, “The Afrikaner Women of the Garment Workers’ Union,” p. 83.
M. Lock and P. Kaufert, “Introduction,” in M. Lock and P. Kaufert (eds), Pragmatic Women and Body Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 2.
E. Koch, “Doornfontein and its African Working Class, 1914–1935; A Study of Popular Culture in Johannesburg” (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1983), p. 103.
K. Fisher, “She Was Quite Satisfied with the Arrangements I Made’: Gender and Birth Control in Britain 1920–1950,” Past and Present, 169 (2000) 161–93;
S. Klausen, “Doctors and Dying Declarations: State Regulation of Abortion in British Columbia, 1917–1936,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadien d’Histoire de la Medecine, 13 (1996), pp. 53–81.
N. Haire, Birth-Control Methods (Contraception, Abortion, Sterilisation) (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1936), p. 120.
H. Cook, “Unseemly and Unwomanly Behavior: Comparing Women’s Control of their Fertility in Australia and England from 1890 to 1970,” Journal of Population Research, 17, 2 (2000), p. 129. Cook’s article is a useful overview of primary and secondary sources on this issue.
M. Fielding, Parenthood: Design or Accident? A Manual of Birth Control, 3rd edn (London: Williams and Norgate, 1934), pp. 105–6.
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© 2004 Susanne M. Klausen
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Klausen, S.M. (2004). Women’s Resistance to Eugenic Birth Control. In: Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910–39. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230511255_5
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