History of Contraception

Angus McLaren was born in Vancouver, Canada. He completed his first degree at the University of British Columbia, and his graduate studies at Harvard University. He has taught in North America, at the University of Calgary, and in Britain, where he was a Senior Associate Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is currently Professor of History at the University of Victoria. The author lives in Vancouver with his wife Arlene Tigar McLaren, Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University, with his eleven year old son Jesse.

"Scholarly, comprehensive, but sprightly and readable ... a major piece of historical reclamation and discovery which will interest socioloists, historians and social anthropologists as well as less specialist readers ... He is mercifully free from the domination of French doctrinaires like M Foucault ... As McLaren shows with a mastery of his material that never palls, there have been attempts at fertility control since the era of the Greek city states. The emphasis he gives to women's experience of contraception, and to women's own efforts at fertillity control before the twentieth century, is particularly sensitive, shrewd and salutary." Nature >"A seasoned and sensitive scholar ... Angus McLaren deserves our thanks for integrating recent scholarship in demographic, family and gender history, to set the politics of procreation within its wider rationales." TLS "... clear and compelling ... strongly challenging the reader's commonsense idea of effective contraception as a product of modern times. McLaren, a Canadian historian, makes excellent use of both primary sources and British and American secondary work as well as his own research". Choice

• Introduction 1. 'As Many Women are Always Doing, Doctoring Themselves': The Patterning of Fertility in Ancient Greece 2. 'For a Woman Forbids Herself to Conceive and Fights Againt It': Fertility Control in Rome 3. 'Use Which is Against Nature': Abortion and Contraception in the Christian West 4. 'Moore for Delit than World to Multiplye': Procreation in the Middle Ages 5. 'Cheating Nature': Fertility Control in Early Modern Europe 6. 'From 'Moral Restraint' to 'Criminal Propaganda': Neo-Malthusianism and the Fertility Transition 7. 'An Education for Women': The Triumph of Family Planning Conclusion.