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Abstract:
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This dissertation suggests that burgeoning public discourse on contraception in Britain and the United States between 1915 and 1940 created a paradigm shift in perceptions of women’s sexuality that altered the ways that women could be represented in literary texts . It offers readings of texts by women on both sides of the Atlantic who responded to birth control discourse not only by referencing contraceptive techniques , but also by incorporating arguments and dilemmas used by birth control advocates into their writing . The introductory chapter , which frames the later literary analysis chapters , examines similarities in the tropes Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes , the British and American “Mothers of Birth Control” used in their advocacy . These include images such as mothers dying in childbirth , younger children in large families weakened by their mothers’ ill -health , and sexual dysfunction in traditional marriages .
In addition to this chapter on birth control advocates’ texts , the dissertation includes four chapters meant to demonstrate how literary authors used and adapted the tropes and language of the birth control movement to their own narratives and perspectives . The first of these chapters focuses on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland , a 1915 political allegory about a nation populated only by women who have gained the ability to reproduce asexually . Gilman adopted pro -birth control language , but rejected the politically radical ideas of the early birth control movement . In addition to radical politics , the birth control movement was associated with racist eugenicist ideas , an association that the third chapter , on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand examines in detail by comparing birth control and African -American racial uplift rhetoric . Crossing the Atlantic , the fourth chapter looks at the influence of the English birth control movement on Irish novelist Kate O’Brien’s 1931 Without My Cloak , a novel that challenges Catholic narratives as well as the heteronormative assumptions of birth control discourse itself . The final chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs . Dalloway (1925 ) and Three Guineas (1938 ) , illuminating Woolf’s connections between feminist reproductive politics and conservative pro -eugenics agendas .
Acknowledging the complexity of these writers’ engagements with the birth control movement , the project explores not simply the effects of the movement’s discourse on writers’ depictions of sexuality , reproduction , and race , but also the dialogue between literary writers and the birth control establishment , which comprises a previously overlooked part of the formation of both the reproductive rights movement and the Modernist political project . |