3 - Old Habits Are Hard to Break

Summary

When turning to the charity clinic movement's activities in the 1940s and 1950s, it is hard not to appreciate what Linda Gordon had to say about the period in the groundbreaking Woman's Body, Woman's Right (1976): these years constituted the third major shift in the birth control movement more generally, one that the organization's new name—which changed from the Birth Control Federation of America to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942—made plain. As Gordon explained, “The radical associations of the term ‘birth control’ seemed inescapable to many in the movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Opponents still called Sanger a free-lover, a revolutionary, [and] an unwed mother.” Consequently, despite the charity birth control movement's efforts to contain the term “birth control” and transfer notions of sexual impropriety to commercial entrepreneurs, it couldn't quite shake the term's radical associations and the charity organization's radical past. Thus the significance of adopting a new term altogether. Gordon noted that a number of terms were proposed, but it was “Planned Parenthood” that won out. All contained, however, a similar message. As Gordon explained, they “took the focus away from women and placed it on families or children.” The terms were also “designed to have as little sexual connotation as possible.”

Gordon's interpretation has had an enduring effect, and most accounts depict the rise of family planning as the organization's final effort to shed the vestiges of radicalism embedded in birth control, both entering into and creating a safer discourse revolving around children and family rather than feminism and sexuality.