GHIL Lecture

Maud Bracke

Inventing Reproductive Rights:

Sex, Population, and Feminism in Europe, 1945–1980

Summer Lecture Series: Feminist Histories

15 July 2020

(1:10 h)

GHIL Lecture

Maud Bracke

Inventing Reproductive Rights:
Sex, Population, and Feminism in Europe, 1945–1980

This lecture presents an interpretation of the emergence, following the Second World War, of the notion of ‘reproductive rights’. Drawing on critical understandings of reproductive biopower, it focuses on the ways in which the introduction and legalisation of the contraceptive pill across Western Europe in the long 1960s produced new, gendered discourses on family planning, responsibility in reproduction, sexual morality and bodily autonomy. The lecture situates France and Western Europe in the transnational developments that enabled the emergence of reproductive rights discourse following the war. Bracke particularly considers two key moments in the genealogy of reproductive rights discourse in France, corresponding to two instances of legislative change and intense public debate. The first is family planning activism in the 1950s and 1960s, which was key in leading to the legalisation of contraception through the Loi Neuwirth of 1967. The second is the ‘new’ feminism that exploded onto the political scene in France in 1970, and crucially contributed to legal reform on abortion through the Loi Veil of 1975.  She argues that the ‘invention’ of reproductive rights relied crucially on the introduction of new discourses and political practices by feminists of a reproductive subject – that is to say, an individual endowed with knowledge, agency, and rights – and that this reproductive subject was increasingly explicitly presented as a woman. At the same time, however, not all women became reproductive subjects to the same extent, as reproductive bodies continued to be hierarchised according to social class, race, migration status and ability. 

Maud Anne Bracke is a historian of 20th-century European social, political, and gender history. A graduate of the European University Institute, Florence, she has published two monographs, three edited collections, and over 20 articles on feminism, gender and work, translation, ‘1968’, and European communism. She co-directs Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History and is a former editor of the journal Gender & History.