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Anne S. Macpherson, Nicole C. Bourbonnais. Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 273–274, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.273
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Nicole C. Bourbonnais’s research on birth control debates and practices in Bermuda, Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago is pathbreaking; Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970, will be indispensable to historians of the Caribbean, international birth control and population control, modern colonial reform and decolonization, and anticolonial nationalisms. Bourbonnais argues that activism and debates about birth control, and a variety of birth control policies and practices were prominent in social and political life in these four British Caribbean colonies in the forty-year period running from the Depression and labor uprisings of the 1930s to the beginning of flag independence in the 1960s. She argues that “reproductive politics and practice” were relevant and even central to British colonial policy, middle-class-led populist/nationalist political parties, diverse strands of Afro-Caribbean organizing, and working-class and lower-middle-class people, especially women.
Drawing on extensive, original, and innovative research in previously under-explored or unexplored sources, Bourbonnais clarifies a number of misconceptions. British imperialists discussed population control extensively but took almost no practical measures for fear of provoking race- and class-based nationalism. International birth control advocates, largely from Britain and the United States, were individuals whose complexities mattered; they had sometimes progressive agendas and could get nowhere without the active and nuanced collaboration of local doctors, nurses, and community leaders, many of them Afro-Caribbean. This pivotal cadre of actors was concerned with women’s health and rights, not merely the “threat” of their fertility, and frequently balanced interests in short-term relief from poverty and long-term economic development to reduce poverty. Many Caribbean women sought birth control to improve their health, space their pregnancies, and focus on their existing children; they were no mere victims of local elites or foreign birth control companies. Without whitewashing the more autocratic, racist, and profit-driven motivations of some actors, Bourbonnais sensitively renders the tensions of structure and agency by examining power relations from above and below.
