Nicole C. Bourbonnais. Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930–1970.

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.

Bourbonnais’s work adds significantly to other research on the British Caribbean that undermines caricatures of genocidal imperialists and activists, dictatorial local elites, or naturally pronatalist working women and men. It also stands in an interesting relationship to scholarship on similar issues in Puerto Rico, the best-documented Caribbean case. Many scholars, notably Laura Briggs (Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico [2002]), have noted the policies and practices of top-down population control pursued by U.S. imperial officials and birth control companies, U.S. and Puerto Rican doctors and activists, and elite politicians—especially from the political party that led Puerto Rico into post–World War II industrialization and that repackaged colonialism. Without denying this context, other scholars, notably Iris López (Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom, [2008]), have explored Puerto Rican women’s agency around issues of reproduction. Bourbonnais’s book can enable a systematic comparison between the British Caribbean and Puerto Rico, illuminating what dynamics enhanced the likelihood of women and their allies shaping birth control policy and practices. Such insights could begin to place different Caribbean colonies on a global spectrum of cases.

Bourbonnais documents that Grantley Adams, Norman Manley, and Eric Williams, of Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago respectively, were either open to or advocated birth control; they led labor-based, militant but non-militarized nationalist movements, and negotiated constitutional decolonization and then flag independence with an increasingly willing Britain. No such configuration of forces existed in Puerto Rico, where in the 1950s and 1960s women faced still-colonized local leaders who partnered with U.S. actors to push top-down birth control. Their British Caribbean counterparts often faced leaders who were more responsive to bottom-up visions of birth control policy and practice, and who, as Bourbonnais shows, were tempered by labor, race, and church-based movements that were hostile to or suspicious of birth control. Adding Dutch, French, and other British colonies to the comparative discussion will be important work.

Bourbonnais offers some comparative analysis of her four colonies but could delve into comparison of political process more deeply. Bermuda lacked a nationalist movement, but its labor movement was led by Dr. E. F. Gordon, a pro–birth control “colored” physician (48) who confronted the white elite with a notably progressive view of women’s rights. The colonial government opened one of the world’s first state-funded clinics in 1937. In the 1940s, nationalist leaders in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago backed away from commitments to birth control due to electoral and civil-society opposition, while Barbados had a bipartisan consensus in favor of birth control by the 1950s; private clinics opened in each from 1953 to 1956. Readers would also benefit from a finer-grained comparison of the four colonial systems of governance, and from consideration of whether the beginning of women’s suffrage shaped the politics of birth control in the context of decolonization.

Bourbonnais has invaluable evidence of working-class, peasant, and lower-middle-class women’s experiences with and perspectives on pregnancy and birth control—including Indo-Trinidadian women’s—and even of their successful resistance to doctors’ preferences for prescribing IUDs over the pill. Her work begs the question of possible connections between working women’s birth control politics and the militant labor movement of the late 1930s to the early 1950s that sought an independent socialist West Indian Federation of America. The Caribbean Labor Congress (CLC, 1945–1952) advocated universal suffrage, and Gordon, Adams, and Manley were all involved. Did it take a position on birth control, and if so was it shaped by women labor activists? More importantly, how did the early Cold War overthrow of the CLC and deradicalization of Adams, Manley, and Williams shape engagements on birth control between the citizens and governments of new dependent capitalist nations in the 1960s? Bourbonnais points to the distinctly British Caribbean tradition of advocating for birth control “on the grounds of health, welfare, and rights” (215) as able to contend with both colonial and neocolonial states.