The monk could no longer be considered a virgin, since he has been ‘polluted…through masturbation’.
Medicine and Sexuality
CFP: The History of Venereal Disease
What role have venereal diseases played in the history of sexuality?
Out in the Open: Rural Life, Respectability, and the Nudist Park
Brian Hoffman In the early 1930s, after attending a showing of This Nude World at the Castle Theater in Chicago, Alois Knapp and his wife Lorena decided to convert their 200-acre farm located in Roselawn, Indiana into a nudist camp. Although they had never dreamed that they would go into […]
The Sacred Precincts of Marital Bedrooms: Religion and the Making of Griswold
In our final installment of Notches’ series commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, Heather Munro Prescott invites us to reconsider the significance of Griswold by focusing on the ways in which liberal clergy helped build a broad popular consensus on birth control. In so doing, Prescott foregrounds how liberal religion […]
The Conservative Roots of the Reproductive Rights Revolution
In our second installment of Notches’ series commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision, Beth Bailey invites us to complicate progressive narratives of the sexual revolution by analyzing the conservative underpinnings of Griswold and to re-focus our attention on women’s hard-fought struggles to redefine their roles in American society. Beth Bailey When I teach […]
Too Little, Too Late: The Path To Griswold v. Connecticut
It had taken fifty years to defeat the repressive, prudish and sexist ban on birth control.
Astrological Birth Control: Fertility Awareness and the Politics of Non-Hormonal Contraception
Donna J. Drucker Astrological birth control was an outgrowth of increasing interests in the late 1960s and early 1970s in horoscopes and astrology, self-advocacy and self-knowledge in the women’s health movement, and in the management of reproduction without artificial means. Pope Paul VI declared in the 1968 encyclical Humane Vitae […]