Broadcasting Birth Control: Family Planning and Mass Media, 1914-1984
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: BROADCASTING BIRTH CONTROL: FAMILY PLANNING AND MASS MEDIA, 1914-1984 Manon Sian Parry, Ph.D., 2010 Directed By: Professor Sonya Michel, Department of History The history of the birth control movement in the United States is traditionally told through accounts of the leaders and organizations that campaigned to legalize the distribution of contraception. Only recently have historians begun to examine the “cultural work” of printed media including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause. This dissertation builds on this scholarship, to examine the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by birth control advocates, and the communications experts they increasingly turned to for guidance, over the course of the twentieth century. As advocates tried to mimic the efforts of commercial advertisers to “sell” health-related behaviors to a wide audience, they crafted the new academic specialty of health communication. I argue that mass media was central to the campaign to transform the private subject of fertility control into one fit for public discussion in the United States. Moreover, the international family planning movement played an instrumental role in establishing and expanding health communication in the promotion of contraception around the globe. As they negotiated for access to cinema and radio platforms from which to promote their cause, birth control advocates toned down their feminist rhetoric of sexual liberation. After the legalization of contraception, censorship and broadcasting conventions affecting educational messages further diluted the kinds of representations they could promote over the radio and on the nation’s television sets. As commercial media became increasingly explicit in the 1960s and ‘70s, family planning promoters conversely expunged sex from their broadcasts for domestic and foreign audiences. In this way, media helped to shape the messages of the movement. Seeking greater creative freedom, some of the family planning community began to cultivate informal partnerships with entertainment media producers, perfecting a strategy abroad that would be brought home to the U.S. The Mexican “education-entertainment” approach has since become the most influential model of family planning communication, replicated around the world in efforts to reintroduce the context of sex and relationships to the promotion of contraceptive use. This history is thus a transnational narrative of the dissemination of messages and the technologies and techniques that delivered them. BROADCASTING BIRTH CONTROL: FAMILY PLANNING AND MASS MEDIA, 1914-1984 By Manon Sian Parry Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor Sonya Michel, Chair Professor Nancy Struna Associate Professor Psyche Williams-Forson Associate Professor Saverio Giovacchini Dr. Elizabeth Fee © Copyright by Manon Sian Parry 2010 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Elizabeth Fee and Patti Tuohy at the National Library of Medicine for providing the encouragement and support needed to complete this project. Nancy Dosch helped me identify and view material from the library’s film collections, and my colleagues in the Exhibition Program kindly accommodated my schedule during the writing phase, and cheered me on throughout. I am also especially grateful to Hugh Rigby and Anwar Singletary for their assistance during their time at the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Communication Programs. Both made extraordinary efforts to locate vital materials and rescue films and documents in danger of being permanently lost. Archivists at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College and the Schlesinger Library, Harvard helped me to navigate complicated unprocessed collections and pointed me to additional sources. Matthew Connelly also directed me to useful materials at the headquarters of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in London, where Sarah Shaw arranged for me to have complete access to their onsite resources. Gail Gilbert and May Miculis organized a rewarding visit to the Airlie Conference Center to allow me to rifle through their storage facilities. Katherine Bliss, Peter Engelman, Johanna Schoen, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga generously shared pre-publication drafts of their work, and Devin Orgeron offered invaluable feedback on my first draft chapter. Finally, the members of my dissertation writing group, Anna Bedford, Amy Corbin, Henrike Lehnguth, and Amber Nelson gave up a great deal of their time to share their enthusiasm and ideas. I truly appreciate the efforts of everyone who helped me along the way. ii Epigraph “Should we allow the women to continue to use injurious, health-ruining measures to prevent conception, or, what is still worse, hurry themselves to their graves by repeated abortions – or should the knowledge of sage and hygienic anticoncepts – for there are such – be spread broadcast?” Socialist physician William J. Robinson, Limitation of Offspring , 1904 iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... ii Epigraph ....................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... iv List of Figures .............................................................................................................. vi Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Private Life and Public Health .............................................................................. 8 Sources and Methods .......................................................................................... 16 Overview of Chapters ......................................................................................... 18 Chapter 2: Battling Silence and Censorship ............................................................... 23 “Pictures with a Purpose” ................................................................................... 25 Promoting Birth Control on the Big Screen ........................................................ 30 The Limits of Propaganda ................................................................................... 40 A Second Chance at the Cinema ......................................................................... 46 The Shift to the Radio ......................................................................................... 51 Banning Birth Control from the Airwaves.......................................................... 55 Education versus Commercialism....................................................................... 59 Storytelling Replaces the Lecture Format ........................................................... 65 Opposition on the Radio ..................................................................................... 67 “Helping a Nation at War” .................................................................................. 70 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 75 Chapter 3: The Medium Shapes the Message ............................................................. 79 Diffusing the Population Bomb .......................................................................... 81 Moving Into the Mainstream .............................................................................. 90 “A Giant Leap in Public Approval” .................................................................... 96 Family Planning Advertising ............................................................................ 104 Putting Abortion on the Air .............................................................................. 111 Planned Parenthood Enters the Abortion Wars ................................................ 119 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 124 Chapter 4: “Most of the World’s People Need Planned ........................................... 127 Parenthood”............................................................................................................... 127 From Population Control to Female Empowerment ......................................... 134 Launching International Family Planning: India Leads the Way ..................... 138 The “KAP-gap” ................................................................................................. 147 Turning Point - “No-one ever planned their family with a poster” .................. 154 The Transformation of Family Planning Film .................................................. 159 The Failures of Film.......................................................................................... 167 Moving into Folk Media ................................................................................... 172 Feminism and New Media Strategies ............................................................... 181 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 185 Chapter 5: Soap Opera as Soap Box: Family Planning and....................................