Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, an historian and author of On the Pill, a social history of oral contraception, will present a lecture, "Birth Control and Controlling Birth: Struggles Over Reproductive Rights in the 20th Century," on Thursday, Nov. 15, at 8 p.m. in Kirner-Johnson Auditorium, Hamilton College. The lecture is free and open to the public. Watkins' lecture is sponsored by the Kirkland Project as part of its Body in Question series, and co-sponsored by the Levitt Center and Sociology department.
Watkins is a visiting associate professor in the department of history at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned a Ph.D. at Harvard and is a Spencer/National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellow.
Women's efforts to control their fertility date back thousands of years. In the 20th century women sought to make reproductive decisions without interference from law, politics, religion or society and with access to the safest and most effective methods available. This talk presents the history of the movement to legalize birth control, and the resistance these efforts met from legislators, judges, religious leaders, doctors and others who sought to make women's reproductive decisions for them. It also addresses the use of birth control for social purposes, the shaping of public policies to control births, and the impact of these policies on women's reproductive freedom.
The Kirkland Project is an on-campus organization committed to intellectual inquiry and social justice, focusing on issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and other facets of human diversity. Though educational programs, research and community outreach, the Kirkland Project seeks to build a community respectful of difference.
