Description
Book SynopsisThe battle for legal contraception challenged key tenets of Irish identity: Catholicism, large families, traditional gender roles, and sexual puritanism. It is a story of gender, religion, social change, and failing efforts to reaffirm Irish moral exceptionalism.
Trade Review'A magisterial survey, rich in archival material and full of surprises while deftly charting the various players and high stakes in the battle to control female fertility. Essential reading for those who want to understand why the 'Irish solution to an Irish problem' prevailed for as long as it did.' Alana Harris, King's College London
'Mary Daly's book is substantially more than an extended case history, examining as it does developments which reflected underlying currents and factors of social and political change in what had been, up to the mid-twentieth century, a society and a polity hall-marked by the regressive forces of poverty, emigration and overarching institutional power.' John Hogan, Dublin City University
'The Battle to Control Female Fertility in Modern Ireland offers a brilliantly detailed examination of the history of family planning in independent Ireland. Professor Daly rightly casts Ireland's convoluted and often controversial birth control reform process as a long contest between church, state, the medical profession, moral conservatism and individualism.' Diane Urquhart, Queen's University Belfast
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Late marriages and large families: 'the enigma of the modern world'; 2. The pill, the Pope and a changing Ireland; 3. 'A bitter blow: humanae vitae and Irish society, 1968–1973; 4. Contraception, access and opposition, 1973–80; 5. 'Against sin': an Irish family planning bill, 1973–79; 6. The 1983 Pro-Life Amendment; 7. 'Bona-Fide family planning': the 1980s and 1990s; Conclusions.
