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Pregnancy and power: a short history of reproductive politics in America by Rickie Solinger

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Pregnancy and power: a short history of reproductive politics in America Rickie Solinger
Language: English
Page: 303
Format: pdf
ISBN: 0814798276, 9780814798270
Publisher: NYU Press

From Publishers Weekly

This succinct, highly readable political and cultural history of a wide range of reproductive issues is a near-perfect primer on the topic. Independent historian Solinger (Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade) writes from a broad, multi-issue, feminist perspective, placing the struggle for reproductive freedom at the center of a variety of political battles. This approach yields unique new insights. Detailing antimiscegenation laws and common assumptions about family life and reproduction in Chinese-American communities, Solinger shows how immigration laws favoring Chinese merchant-class women over poor women "shaped the demographics of Chinatowns around the country." Similarly, she discusses how the relationship between civil rights and reproductive rights in the 1960s gave different cultural meanings to the "fertile body of women of color" in the eyes of the white establishment and within the African-American community. Solinger succeeds in moving the discussion of the social and legal politics of reproduction out of a confining category of "women's issues" and into the broader sphere of U.S. history and national politics, and her study will be helpful to anyone interested in how current debates about abortion, the morning-after pill and sex education were historically formed. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Readers will find within this book a deeply researched and fine analysis of reproductive politics spanning 250 years. It definitely should be of interest to legal scholars and law students and also to political and social historians.”
-The American Journal of Legal History

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&8220;Solinger is impressively optimistic about America's potential not only to evolve into 'a country of reproductive justice,' but also to overcome centuries of the sex, race, and class prejudice that have literally built our society.”
-Bitch

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&8220;A concise historical overview. . . . Based primarily on a vast array of well-documented secondary sources, this book is a well-written and useful overview of the politics behind pregnancy in the U.S. . . . Highly recommended.”
-Choice

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“This succinct, highly readable political and cultural history of a wide range of reproductive issues is a near-perfect primer on the topic.&8221;
-Publishers Weekly

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“The book is well documented and well written... I expect this book to find a place in many classrooms.”
-The Journal of American History

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