Video: More Babies and More Birth Control: American Jews and the Politics of Reproduction

Full transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: More Babies and More Birth Control-- American Jews and the Politics of Reproduction. February 29, 2024. 

ANN D. BRAUDE: Good afternoon and thank you for being here today for our first-- is it our first? No, it isn't. First WSRP lecture of the semester. Thank you. Thank you. Somebody's keeping track. 

We're very pleased to have Samira Mehta as our lecturer today. Before I introduce her, I just want to mention that we do have two more lectures coming up this semester. On April 4, I believe in this room at noon, for-- it may not be in this room. We're not sure. But somewhere on campus, there will be a scintillating lecture by Fareen Parvez, who's here today back, the back of the room, who will be speaking about her research this year on Women, Trauma, and the Islamic Sciences of Healing-- A Case Study of Jinn Possession in Morocco. And I know from reading her work-in-progress that it's really interesting material. 

And then our last one will be on April 18, Ashley Purpura, will speak about her work, Liberating Orthodoxy-- Feminism, Faith, and Divine Otherness. And unfortunately, I don't think Ashley is here today but we look forward to that lecture very much. 

It's been a great year so far in the Carriage House, talking about all these fascinating projects. And we're very happy to have as today's speaker an HDS alum back amongst us. I know her favorite reference librarians are here and other key people. And we reference librarians are the most important humans in the life of a scholar, so thank you for being here today. 

Samira Mehta, after graduating from the Divinity School, went on for her doctorate at Emory University, and she is now associate professor of Jewish Studies and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is also director of the Jewish Studies program. You probably all know her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah, which was based on her dissertation. She also has a recent book for a general audience that I commend to all of you, called, The Racism of People Who Love You from Beacon Press. 

In addition to the project she's going to present about today, she is also under contract for a book on A Mixed Multitude-- Jews of Color in the United States, which will draw on her major-- the work she is doing funded by the Pew Foundation, collecting oral histories of Jews of color throughout the country, which we look forward to. But today, we're going to hear about God Bless the Pill. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE] 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: So before I start talking about contraception, I want to thank all of you for being here. I want to particularly thank Anne and Tracy and my fellow Fellows. And I also want to ask you to indulge me for just a moment in wishing happy 288th birthday to mother Ann Lee, the founder of Shakerism. It's so rare that it's a February 29 that I just had to say it. So has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be talking about, but it was such a fun opportunity. 

So my talk today is drawn from my current book project, God Bless the Pill-- Contraception and Sexuality in Tri-Faith America. When I started, I wanted to write a triumphant feminist history of the pill, one that honestly grappled with its complicated racial legacies while celebrating the liberatory potential that it offered. Inspired by Elaine Tyler May's secular history, America and the Pill, and excited to discover that Planned Parenthood had a national clergymen's committee, I wanted to explore how despite evangelical and Catholic opposition, liberal Protestants and Jews, perhaps especially Jewish feminist women, had helped make contraception respectable, socially acceptable, and commonly available. 

In the archives, however, I found a story that was not particularly feminist. It's not that there are no feminists in it at all, but the major forces that expanded birth control access were actually remarkably establishment. They were hoping all along for tools to support the health and stability of the family rather than deliberate women. We might summarize their perspective as healthy women who were not worn out or dead from childbearing make better mothers. You're just realistically not a great mother if you're dead. 

Families with few enough children to have disposable income also better supported a capitalist economy. The book that has emerged from my research thus traces conversations about contraception between Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic leaders in the United States from 1940, which is when Planned Parenthood started to talk about forming its first national clergymen's committee, to the 1980s when the rise of the religious right led to the fusing of contraception with abortion in the national discourse. 

In looking at interactions between religious and medical leaders over this roughly 40-year period, I argue that we can learn at least four things that will likely surprise scholars of American religious and American Jewish history. First, my research demonstrates that many mid-century religious leaders supported the expansion of access to contraception and were in fact key players in that fight. This piece may not surprise Jewish Studies scholars but it may be more surprising to our colleagues who focus on Catholics and Protestants. 

Second, I think that most people assume as I did that the movement to make birth control accessible was a feminist movement. My research demonstrates that while there were always both women's voices and feminist voices involved in birth control battles, the power players were likely to be neither women nor feminists. For these men, family planning was not about women's rights but about family values, and the creation and maintenance of a particular kind of heterosexual, patriarchal, and upwardly mobile family. 

In their eyes, new contraceptive technologies were offered a way to create small, economically-stable families, which were particularly needed under the combined threats of the Cold War and population explosion. Religious voices provided moral weight to this vision and served to make it look timeless. These forces, which were instrumental to expanding contraceptive access, were inherently conservative. In fact, when the feminist possibilities created by contraception became widely apparent over the course of the 1970s, the religious coalitions that had been supporting this expansion just fell completely apart. 

Thirdly, this project thinks about how Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic leaders negotiated their positions relative to one another and in the eyes of the American public. My talk today is going to focus in on that piece of the project primarily. But lastly, the project demonstrates the ramifications of that early religious support for contraception. I show how the morals and logic of mid-20th century clergy animated apparently secular debates long after overt religious support for contraception had abated. 

Today, I will argue that when talking about contraception and working to expand access to it for all Americans, American Jewish leaders were always speaking to two audiences-- an internal Jewish audience and an external American audience. In doing so, they were balancing what they believed the community needed to hear with a larger attempt to shore up Judaism's status, not only as a legitimately American religion, but as a central part of the newly-emerging Judeo-Christian tradition. So for all the skepticism that we have today about a Judeo-Christian tradition, and I would be happy to talk about that skepticism later, for Jewish leadership in the decades after World War II, the term held immense promise. 

The Judeo-Christian tradition acknowledged Jews as important voices in the American religious and civil landscape, contraception discussions show how Jews often got and maintained this position of importance by creating alliances with Protestants in particular-- excuse me-- and by carefully curating an image of Judaism as a modern and scientifically-inclined tradition. At the same time, even as the Judeo-Christian formulation held value for Jewish communities, it also held a bit of a threat. In the birth control conversation, we can see Jewish leaders striving to distinguish Judaism from Protestantism in order to ensure that acceptance did not become assimilation. 

In order to make my argument, which is located in the transition from chapter 2 to chapter 3 of my book, I wanted to provide you with a quick backdrop from the book's first chapter, which addresses the 1940s and '50s. In this first explanatory example, the formation of the national clergyman's advisory committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, you can see the dynamic of speaking about Jews to an American audience and how that played out. So the group's first official meeting took place at 7:00 PM on February 17, 1943, at the town hall club in Times Square over dinner. They had been kind of working on getting this up and running and had been essentially derailed by D-day-- not by D-day, by Pearl Harbor. And so they were trying to get things up and running again and there were rabbis on the guest list for this meeting from the very beginning. And the title of the organization used the ecumenical term "clergymen" to describe its members. 

Throughout the 1940s, however, all of the internal correspondents used the word ministers as a synonym for clergy. According to a letter that the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's assistant, Florence Rose wrote to Dr. Dwight Bradley, executive director of the Council for Social Action of the Congregational Christian churches. Planned Parenthood's hope was that the committee would develop among ministers a wider understanding and support for its program, as well as aid in offsetting organization on moral and religious grounds. He's talking about Catholics, or she's talking about Catholics. 

Jews were at the table. Indeed Rabbi Sidney Goldstein would end up on the committee's executive board. But they were only at the table as long as they fit into the models shaped by their Protestant colleagues. The conversation that then ensued did much to set the tone of the committee would take over the next two decades. The Reverend Mr. Trowbridge explained that from his location in deeply Catholic Massachusetts, Catholic opposition to birth control largely took the form of intimidation of the press, such that misrepresentation made it practically impossible to get the true facts before the public. 

That said, based on his experience in Massachusetts, Trowbridge did not think that the best way to approach ministers was to ask them to support public health and oppose their Roman Catholic colleagues. Rather, he argued for enlisting the interests of clergymen on the basis of their moral responsibilities in preserving the family and the home. His assumption was that they would get more allies by framing their agenda in positive terms around morality and family life, and that those allies would help combat the Catholic opposition that would naturally arise in response. 

And if you would like to talk during the Q&A about the diversity actually within Catholicism, I'm happy to address that. They're really aiming at the institutional church here. Rabbi Dr. Sidney Goldstein, associate rabbi of the Free Synagogue in New York City, took a slightly different approach in the meeting, arguing that it was the duty of ministers to take a stand that since birth control is a recognized public health procedure, it is undemocratic for any state or city health department to withhold such basic information. 

He argued that instead of being on the defensive with regard to Catholic opposition, they should force the issue of birth control as a public health service. And then when Catholic opposition became evident, do everything possible to expose such opposition as a denial of the people's civil liberties as well as a denial of a basic public health service. Goldstein is arguing that Catholic opposition to birth control threatens the separation of church and state promised in the Bill of Rights. He had been making versions of this argument since at least 1915 when his article Birth Control As A Moral Issue argued for contraceptive access based on a state interest in the health, morals, and general welfare of the public, the moral good of voluntary motherhood and the argument that birth control would not inherently lead to sexual immorality. Catholic opposition to contraception should not, he argued, shape public health services through municipal agencies because to do so was to deny the people-- Protestants, Jews, and Catholics, who disagreed with the stand of their church-- their rights. 

So Trowbridge and Goldstein's disagreement demonstrates the relative power of Protestants and Jews within the birth control debate. Trowbridge, Protestant minister and emissary of the majority, felt confident that the committee could shape public morality. Goldstein, rabbi and leader of a minority religious group, consciously based his advocacy on American rather than Jewish values, a traditional stance of minority religious groups until the recent corporate personhood act. 

The debate between Trowbridge and Goldstein demonstrates the two primary approaches that the committee would follow over the next 15 years, as well as the shape that debate would take. Protestants would advocate primarily for a moral stance, clergy could help people access birth control because it was a technology they needed to make the most moral and healthy choices for their families, and beyond that for sort of the national family, or even the global family. 

Jews framed the issue of contraception in terms of individual freedoms. No one person's religion could deny anyone else recourse to the best scientifically-informed medical practice. By leaning into a belief in the importance of medicine, leaders like Goldstein were also demonstrating to their Protestant colleagues on the committee and to the public readership of committee statements that Jews were a modern and scientifically-inclined religion. 

Jews-- sorry, I lost my place. A statement drafted in that 1943 meeting to be signed by leading clergymen cited a 1929 resolution from the Professional Association of Reform Rabbis framing the control of parenthood as an important method of coping with social problems. They also noted that most members of both religions are ready to accept the findings of science, and that contraception was often a scientific best practice. 

Both Trowbridge's Protestant moral argument and Goldstein's contrasting individual freedom argument persisted throughout the 1940s and '50s in ways in which I do not have time to address but would be delighted to talk about in the Q&A. Ask me about the diaphragm battles in New York City. In these cases, though, there was really a strong sense that Jews were a minority tradition. And although their moral views might matter to insiders, when speaking to a broader public, they would need to do so in modern American terms with appeals to science and to rights. 

By the 1960s, that discourse had begun to change. The concept of a Judeo-Christian America had really started to take root with help from Will Herberg's 1955 book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. There was space then for Jewish values in the national discourse as long as they stayed suitably modern and did not conflict with Protestant values too much. So by the late 1960s, it was not only that science approved of birth control and Judaism approved of science, birth control could be fervently defended as an explicitly Jewish right. That is exactly what two notable Jewish leaders who comprise my second example did. Alan Guttmacher, OB/GYN and president of Planned Parenthood wrote such a defense in 1967. And in 1968, so did David M. Feldman, rabbi, PhD, former US Air Force chaplain, member of the Law Committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, which is the Professional Association of the Conservative Movement of Judaism, and a United Synagogue representative to the New York State's legislative hearings on abortion. 

Both men wrote to assure their fellow Jews, as well as doctors, Jewish or not, that providing birth control to Jewish women was acceptable according to Jewish law, to Jewish teaching across all movements. They wanted to be clear that the reform and conservative movements had not simply accepted birth control because of their rejection of Jewish law or their desire to make Jewish law square with modernity. Rather, they claimed that birth control had always been acceptable in Jewish law. 

Both Guttmacher and Feldman as leading Jews were also navigating the new emphasis on Judeo-Christian framing, testing its possibilities for Jewish public discourse while resisting its tendency to trade Jewish distinctiveness and lead to Jewish assimilation. Both defenses of birth control emphasized Jewish Defense from Christianity and asserted Judaism as a modern religion whose core values are sex positive in the context of marriage; pro-woman, in support for both her sexual pleasure, again, in marriage and her health; and scientifically progressive in their willingness to embrace new technology. And I should note here that I'm not primarily concerned with whether or not their read of the sources was correct or how it fit in with rabbinic debates as much as how their arguments framed that historical moment. 

Guttmacher defended birth control in a 1967 article in the journal, Judaism-- A Publication of the American Jewish Congress. He noted that the subject was relevant because what journalists call the population explosion has rendered the question of birth control even more urgent and pertinent, and he explored four primary modes of conception control-- celibacy, abortion, contraception, and sterilization-- to demonstrate that even for observant Judaism, there were no prohibitions against contraception, only against certain modes of contraception. And that in certain circumstances, contraception was actually the preferred approach. 

Guttmacher emphasized that rabbinic sources demonstrate positive attitudes toward sex within marriage, he pointed out that these sources stipulate how frequently a man must have sex with his wife based on the amount of travel required by his profession. And noting that these requirements set minimum, not maximum limits on intercourse. He extrapolated then that if pregnancy is not for some reason desirable such as the case of risk to maternal life, the Jewish answer cannot simply be to not have sex as it might be in Christianity. 

Interestingly, given that Jews were often in alliance with Protestants against Catholics, in this instance, Guttmacher and Feldman as well conflate the two into Christianity. And we can talk about that more if you'd like. Because of the importance placed on marital sex in Talmudic sources, the baseline permissibility of controlling one's fecundity is presented as an established fact, meaning that Jewish debate has centered on what forms of contraception are acceptable and under what circumstances. 

Guttmacher also drew examples of birth control in Jewish life from his own experience as a doctor. He had treated the wives of Orthodox rabbis in Baltimore, members of very traditional communities with large families and gendered expectations around modesty. And even in those communities, which might seem out of step with the zeitgeist of the 1960s, rabbis would allow women to use birth control if pregnancy posed a risk to their health. Even the most religious of his Jewish patients found birth control to be acceptable in those particular instances, precisely because it supported family life by safeguarding maternal health. 

Guttmacher was writing to a Jewish community that had been listening to debates about birth control in secular media largely designed for a Christian country. Many of these American Jews, particularly in the reform communities, were not likely to be deeply familiar with Jewish law, but Guttmacher was also, he was writing as a doctor and not necessarily as an authority on Jewish law. 

The most expansive Jewish responses to birth control in the 1960s was Rabbi David Feldman's Birth Control in Jewish Law-- Marital Relations, Contraception, and Abortion As Set Forth in the Classical Texts of Jewish Law, an encyclopedic treatise published in 1968. Feldman drew from traditional sources of Jewish law, the Talmud, codes and commentaries, mystic and moral literature, and hundreds of rabbinic responsa from the earliest times to the present to interpret the legal, moral teachings of Judaism on a wide range of topics related to marital sexuality. 

While Feldman was a Rabbi in the conservative movement, he positioned his text to speak not for a particular Jewish movement, but for kollel, Israel, for all of Judaism. He quoted rabbinic and biblical texts directly, and then noted the range of historical commentary and interpretations. His analysis agreed with Guttmacher-- Jewish tradition supported both sex and marriage and certain forms of contraception when necessary. 

Now beyond making that point, Feldman articulated two goals for his book. First, he sought to establish some fundamental differences between Jewish and Christian thoughts on sex, and therefore on contraception, implicitly pushing back against the very idea of a Judeo-Christian set of values. The Christian Bible argues, in Feldman's rendition, that it is better to marry than to burn-- a reference to the apostle Paul, who argues that while celibacy is the preferred mode for Christians, if you can't pull off celibacy, you should get married. Basically, the argument there. 

"Judaism," Feldman wrote, "views marital sex as integral to the relational side of marriage to shalom bayit, peace within the home, that is, as well as to the procreational. Therefore, a threat to the wife's health in connection with pregnancy must be balanced against that value of shalom bayit." Second, Feldman demonstrates that Judaism has long acknowledged the validity of contraception, mentioning ancient references to herbal remedies for pregnancy, referred to as a "cup of roots," and an object called a mokh. 

Debates around both ancient and modern forms of contraception were, again, not about whether contraception was acceptable, but instead about which forms of contraception were acceptable when, for instance, how severe did a threat to maternal health need to be to render pregnancy undesirable. If serious health concerns exist, and the only available birth control is problematic according to Jewish law, when may one decide to use that birth control anyway? 

For these reasons, though there is sometimes debate in Jewish communities over birth control, it just didn't take the same tenor that it sometimes takes in Christian communities. Underscoring these differences from Christianity served two purposes for Feldman-- first, even though he thought that Judeo-Christian America formulation opened up new space for Jews in American Public Life, he worried that the Protestant dominance in that framework subsumed Jewish particularity. By asserting that Jews agreed with Protestants on the morality of contraception, but for some different reasons, he was asserting Jewish difference without disrupting the alliance. 

By underscoring that birth control was valuable in the context of creating healthy marriages and families, he echoed the long-held Protestant position while asserting that Judaism had placed a higher premium on sexual pleasure within marriage than Christianity and demonstrating, again, that birth control had long been OK, which actually made Judaism by those the terms of that moment in his argument more American than Protestantism. So he's sort of trying to assert, like, we're actually cooler. 

Birth Control in Jewish Law received wide attention from both Jewish learned readers and the medical establishment, including high praise from the Journal of the American Medical Association. Feldman's book quickly became the canonical treatment of the Jewish position on birth control and sexuality more broadly, a position that it still holds today in many ways. 

So in the late 1960s, most non-Orthodox Jews had come to embrace birth control, and even Orthodox Jews were often particularly interested in forms of birth control like the pill, which could be used without posing the Halakhic problems raised by barrier methods, or some barrier methods. Jewish support for contraception also charted a particular Jewish path within Judeo-Christian America. Jews, in this reading, were theologically distinct from Protestants but could still ally with them to craft a social vision. Leaders like Guttmacher and Feldman asserted Judaism's status as a modern-- and therefore acceptably American-- religion, and it is important to note that their pro-birth control stance was articulated in terms of valuing marital sexuality, not non-marital sexuality, or, for example women using birth control so that they could pursue feminist goals such as education or careers. 

Within a decade, some of these conversations would fall apart, not because Jewish communities found reasons to disapprove of contraception qua contraception, but because fears about Jewish continuity seized the communal imagination. Jewish leaders had been happy to support birth control in support of sexually-dynamic marriages and maternal and infant health, but they began to have concerns about two phenomenon that birth control had made possible-- Jewish women taking on new professional opportunities that made them less likely to have children sooner or at all, and the zero population growth movement, which very publicly appealed to young Jews. 

The same year that David Feldman published birth control in Jewish law, Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The latter created a controversial American conversation about zero population growth that had really been going on for about a decade, but this was the moment when it sort of hit the equivalent of Barnes and Noble. The latter created a controversial American-- oops-- or the goal of matching the birth rate to the death rate. So that's what "zero population growth" means. 

Support for family planning among the American middle class had been growing through the 1960s. Protestants had been advocating for responsible parenthood within their own communities for almost a decade, but after 1968, the conversation became prominent on college campuses. College students and recently-educated young Americans understood environmentalism and population limitation through birth control to be intimately connected. All college students were exposed to ZPG, but young Jews attended college at nearly double the national rate, and enough of them found population limitation compelling that Jewish leadership was worried. 

On January 24, 1974, the New York Times reported that Sol Roth, Orthodox rabbi and newly-elected president of the New York Board of Rabbis, had compared birth control to the Holocaust, arguing that Jewish families should have at least three children as zero population growth should find no application in the Jewish community. Roth saw the declining size of Jewish families as a threat to the, quote, "spiritual and cultural future of the American Jewish community." Directly referencing the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, he said, "the Jewish population in the United States is now the same as it was 30 years ago. There should have been, if we had merely kept pace, 12 million Jews in America today. But there are only 6 million." 

The article closed with the rhetorical question, is it not obvious that in terms of Jewish survival, the European Holocaust of the war's years and the Holocaust-size loss in America during the last three decades has produced the same results? Roth did not directly reference contraception, but it was the tool that made movements like zero population growth possible. Roth did not dispute the idea that the world population was growing and did not dispute necessarily that something must be done about it. He said, "I am not saying whether or not I oppose zero population growth for the rest of the human family." Rather, as he later observed to Time Magazine, "since Jews constitute only 3/10 of 1% of the world population of 4 billion, the Jewish community will not solve the world's problems by applying ZPG to itself." 

So the Holocaust lent gravity to Jewish discomfort with ZPG. Roth was not alone in the 1970s in linking the declining Jewish birth rate made possible by contraception to the Holocaust, but the move was relatively new. In the 30 years since the Holocaust had ended, the American Jewish birth rate had been lower than the Protestant birth rate-- not much, but a little bit-- but no one had invoked the Holocaust to discuss the difference. Doing so served two strategic purposes-- internally, it tugged at heartstrings, helping to convince Jews to have larger families, including, perhaps, Jewish families where wives and mothers found the opportunities posited by feminism to be appealing; externally, it allowed Jewish leaders to continue to believe that the burgeoning world population was a problem, as a modern religion must, and to believe that feminism was, generally speaking, OK, while providing a reason that Jewish communities might be exempt from a response to ZPG, and that Jewish women should make home and family-oriented choices. 

In the 1970s, rabbis and scholars saw a number of threats to the long term health of Jewry in the United States, and in many ways, globally. These included assimilation, interfaith marriage, increased acceptance of same-sex relationships, a decline in patriarchal authority, and the choice of many Jewish women to pursue careers outside of the home. All of these problems weakened the Jewish community, in their view, leading to what they saw as a crisis of Jewish continuity or the survival of the Jewish people. Ultimately, these thought leaders identified the declining Jewish birthrate as a primary threat to Jewish continuity. Jews were being lost to the community in many ways, but if we could just have enough babies, they argued, we could maybe make up for our declining numbers in other ways. 

And so, because the target was birthrate, the target was women. In 1975, Marshall Sklar, a leading Jewish sociologist, and Milton Himmelfarb, editor of the journal Commentary and director of research for the American Jewish Committee, referred to Jewish women as "contraceptive virtuosos" and characterized them as a survival threat. In 1976, the synagogue Council of America, an organization designed to promote cooperation between the various branches of Judaism, from Reform to Orthodox, held a symposium called "Zero Population Growth and the Jewish Community," and at this meeting social scientists worried that Jewish women were following the same trends as other American women, only more dramatically. 

If American women were increasingly likely to go to college, Jewish women were likely to pursue graduate education, and thus, more likely to join the professions. According to the researchers, young Jewish women were still saying they wanted three to four children, but pursuing a career appeared to get in the way. It was not yet clear to researchers whether these newly-educated Jewish women were choosing not to have children or were simply to delay childbearing. And so they found themselves asking things like, instead of having four children in four years, would they have four children in eight years, or instead of having them between 20 and 30, would they have them between 28 and 38? 

Even if educated, Jewish women were simply delaying childbearing. The slowdown would, however, increase the generational spread, from a 20-year spread to a 30-year spread, which then would slow the overall population growth rate. The bottom line-- both later marriage and access to contraception led to smaller families, and smaller families meant fewer Jews. These scholars argued that declining Jewish birthrates and women entering the professional workforce would turn out to be bad for the Jews, much as the social scientists whom I wrote about in my first book argued that interfaith marriage was bad for the Jews. Why? Because fewer children meant less need for Hebrew school classes, day schools, and all kinds of infrastructure that the Jewish community had heavily invested in. 

And similarly, women who worked in professions had less time than stay-at-home mothers of school-age children for activities that supported the Jewish community, like membership in the Sisterhood. The lives and needs of Jewish women were changing, but instead of understanding that the Jewish community might need to change to compensate for the loss of free women's labor, these social scientists hoped that the birthrate would simply reverse itself, and they kept trying to convince couples to have more children younger.

The demographers of the Institute for Jewish policy planning and research found reason to hope that some of the trends leading to lower birth rates would disappear. For instance, in his 1976 article "Fertility Trends and Their Impact on Jewish Education," Harold S. Himmelfarb speculated that since the country was entering an economic downturn, there were soon to be more college graduates than jobs requiring college degrees, and so it would no longer make sense for women to go to college. Therefore, there was a "positive" to the 1976 recession, as declining subsequent financial values going to college mounts, women may be less likely to postpone starting a family in favor of getting more education. 

Now the entry of women into the workplace had its own repercussions for politicization of women. Many women went to work because of a feminist desire to have an intellectually-satisfying career, but many came to feminism because of gender discrimination that they experienced in the workplace. And it was a workplace that recession had meant that they had entered out of financial necessity, so there's sort of a mismatch of what the Jewish demographers are hoping and what's happening economically on the ground.

Their conversations, though, were emblematic of conversations in the Jewish community at the time, in which the lion's share of the labor of Jewish continuity, both the literal production of children and the labor that maintained the institutions, set squarely on the unpaid shoulders of women. These leaders maintained that the difference between a couple having two children or three was the difference between the Jewish people continuing and the Jewish people dwindling eventually down to zero. So they encouraged women to be pro-natal, and they saw women's value primarily in the gifts that their uteruses could give, rather than in their intellect, their earning capacity, or anything else. 

Social changes had markedly improved the self-determination of women, their ability to experience professional success, to support themselves and their children, to leave unhappy or abusive marriages, and to control their own bodies-- but these were not marked as positive changes, but rather problems for the Jewish community. It's really tempting to see these debates as problems of male leadership in the Jewish community asking women to be solutions to the larger demographic realities, but there were women's voices involved as well. 

On April 25, 1977, Blu Greenberg warned the women's division of the American Jewish Congress about the dangers of delaying childbirth, or worse, of ZPG. "The Jewish community has the lowest birth rate of any religious or ethnic group in the country, yet many Jewish women put off having children until their middle seconds so they can pursue careers," she stated. "For the rest of the world, ZPG is a wonderful thing. For the Jewish people, in view of the huge losses our people have suffered in our own lifetime, it is a form of suicide, a death wish. Perhaps the Jewish thing to do in light of our community's population needs would be to begin our families early, with part-time or delayed career for husband or wife. Starting a family 10 years earlier would add a new generation of Jews every 30 years." 

Just a few years later, Greenberg wrote On Women and Judaism, a View from Tradition, and in the late 1990s, she founded the Jewish Orthodox feminist alliance. Today, she is widely considered the mother of Orthodox feminism. Perhaps we might see a glimmer of her emerging feminism in her suggestion that husbands might shoulder some of the burden of the challenge facing the Jewish community, but she still placed the burden of Jewish continuity largely on the shoulders of Jewish women and the blame for Jewish population problems largely on women's selfishness, their desire to put a career ahead of their maternity, and their failure to sacrifice their professional needs on the altar of community growth in light of the decline of European Jewry during the Holocaust. 

Greenberg was not the only Jewish feminist to support population growth over other priorities for precisely this Holocaust-based reason. Now, there were also feminist voices who were more critical, both of ZPG and the Jewish response. In 1978, Shirley Frank, managing editor of the feminist press's Women's Studies newsletter, argued in the Jewish feminist Magazine Lilith that while what was really upsetting Jewish leaders was feminism, as much or more than they were upset by the Holocaust. She maintained that although Jews had always been and were still a small percentage of the global population, there were more Jews in the 1970s than there had been at many other points in Jewish history. 

She looked at several decades of data showing that the Jewish birth rate had long hovered slightly below that of Protestants and Catholics, and pointed out that the Holocaust did not appear in discourse until the rise of the feminist movement-- a generation after the Shoah itself. Feminism, she argued, was not a lifestyle trend, but rather a movement reshaping modern life. She critiqued Jewish leaders for maintaining that women and not men be asked to sacrifice the pursuits of personal careers and other indulgences over the more traditional joys of family life and the transmission of Jewish heritage to the next generation. Frank called out opposition to ZPG as institutional Jewish opposition to feminism and the ways in which the feminism of Jewish Women was changing their communities. 

For her, Holocaust rhetoric made it possible for the institutional Jewish community to sidestep her calls for feminist change. For an internal Jewish audience, Holocaust rhetoric stirred deep fear, which leaders would hope would spur people to do what one colleague of mine referred to as "have as many children as you want, and then one more to stick it to Hitler." You will remember, however, that Jewish conversations about birth control were always aimed at two audiences-- internal and external. 

Externally, Holocaust rhetoric served a different purpose. It helped explain to the American mainline Protestants, who were Jews' primary political allies, why they, despite global panic about population explosion, should be OK with Jews continuing to have large families. In a moment when Protestants and secular Americans more broadly were worrying mightily about the population explosion, there was a strong cultural mandate to educate people to have smaller families. Protestants aimed quite a bit of criticism at Catholics for having a birth control policy that ignored the growing population, which is to say birth control is not OK. Jewish leadership had worked hard to present Judaism as a modern religion willing to take its cues from science. They did not want to undo that work. And at the same time, the scientific consensus was that overpopulation was a problem a problem equivalent to nuclear threat. 

I don't want to undercut the fears that these leaders had about dwindling population with all of the impacts that I've outlined, but I do want to suggest that one of the effects of mobilizing the Holocaust in conversation was that it made it possible for Jews to remain modern and scientific to an external audience while exempting them from the need for smaller families. And at least, on one sense, this strategy worked. Protestant leaders never criticized Jewish leaders the way they did Catholic leaders, in part because of the power of invoking the Holocaust. 

The Jewish debate around birth control occasioned by the population panic of the 1970s dramatizes several of my book's most salient points. The push for contraceptive access was not primarily a feminist movement. This was the case for Jews as it was for other Americans. In the 1960s and '70s, conversations about birth control among Jewish leadership and in public settings had male clergy, scholars, and the occasional woman throwing their support behind contraception, but not necessarily for reasons that were feminist. 

We do not, for instance, hear calls for women's sexual, intellectual, or economic liberation. Instead, we hear arguments about the right to make decisions based on science, to be free from the moral restrictions of someone else's religion, or about contraception as a tool that can create stronger and healthier families. In my book, I also think about how leaders imagined those stronger and healthier families would, in turn, create stronger and healthier communities and a stronger and healthier nation. 

Furthermore, when Jewish women did start to use contraception for feminist purposes for forms of self-actualization, they were met with communal backlash. Women were framed as the solution to broader problems that the community faced and when they failed to be the solution, they became the problem itself. As scholars like Lila Corwin Berman, Kate Rosenblatt, and Roni Stahl have pointed out, the question at the time was, How can women serve Judaism, not, How can Jewish communities serve women? 

This moment of population panic also demonstrates how Jewish discourse on contraception was intended as much or more for external Protestant and Catholic audiences as it was for internal Jewish audiences. Having the right attitudes towards birth control and marital sex told American audiences that Judaism was a modern and even hip religion. Let's be clear, though, that "hip" part was probably also aimed at Jewish 20-somethings. 

When Jewish leadership's aims differed from those of science-- that is, when they wanted Jews to not have smaller families-- they needed a compelling discourse that would be encouraging-- that we encourage Jewish Americans to act as Jews, rather than as, Americans without calling their actual Americanness into question and an exemption that would be valid in the eyes of their ecumenical partners. In reproductive health, as in many other areas, Jews were always talking to Jewish audiences and to American audiences well beyond Judaism. In the larger book project, I moved from this moment of Jewish discomfort about birth control in the 1970s to the backlash against contraception that would come from the Christian right just a few years later. 

The religious right has been undeniably successful in conflating abortion and birth control for its anti-feminist ends. Jewish and liberal Protestant voices were unable to mount a strong opposition to this political move. This is unsurprising when we understand that the bigger power players fighting for birth control access among Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, as this talk has shown, we're not actually doing so on feminist grounds. Dubious about the feminist implications of birth control, many of them carefully advocated a version of birth control that was a tool for strong marriages. 

But as I will show in Chapter 4 of my book, after the Supreme Court case Eisenstadt v. Baird made contraception available to everyone, regardless of marital status, in 1972. It became harder for religious groups to make cases about contraception as tools in marriage and only in marriage. Jewish leadership had presented Jews as firmly pro birth control as a support for marital sexuality, but they worried that the combination of birth control and feminism creating a decline in the Jewish birth rate couldn't be advocated for, and so rhetorically boxed in, they could not change tactics quickly enough to mount a strong defense against attacks on family planning. Thank you. 

[APPLAUSE] 

ANN D. BRAUDE: Some people have 2 o'clock commitments and may have to leave before questions, but we do have for those of you who are able to stay. Will you take questions yourself? 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: Yes, I'm happy to take questions myself. 

ANN D. BRAUDE: OK. All right. The floor is open. 

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: Yeah, we're recording, so-- 

AUDIENCE: This was very enlightening. Thank you so much, first of all, and for making it so engaging, too. I had a-- I'm curious about the dynamic of the halakhic conversations that are happening. It's coming from my own perspective of the halakhic conversations usually being a little bit more siloed within the branches, and maybe that's a specifically conservative Judaism perspective. 

But I'm wondering, I would have thought that they had been siloed, in terms of trying to figure out, with each halakhic perspective, how it fits, how the idea of birth control fits or not. How did that happen across? You touched on it a little bit, but I wanted to understand preaching it as Judaism versus preaching it within the same halakhic grounding. 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: Yeah. So I mean, I think that, first of all, it's really important to note that the halakhic defenses are not really coming from the reform movement, right? On some level, the reform movement doesn't care. Like, if the halakhic argument will work well in public, they're happy to let the conservative movement make it and they're not going to argue with them about it. But they don't really actually care. 

And it's less clear to me, from what I've found in the archives, what the Orthodox movement actually thinks about these books. Like, it's very clear-- Alan Guttmacher specifically talks about a rebbetzin so the wife of an Orthodox rabbi in Baltimore, and Baltimore has a fairly large, very Orthodox community, and she has really severe varicose veins and they have a very large family. And they write to a beth din in New York to get permission for her to go on the pill. 

And so you see-- and so he's using that. He's saying, see, the Orthodox will do this. But it's the conservative movement having a conversation, and I think that part of what's going on is that the reform movement has done a really good job of branding Judaism as an American religion, but they're doing it by acting like Protestants, if you're coming from a conservative perspective. And the conservative movement wants to say, actually, we are every bit as American, despite our commitment to this legal framework. 

And I think that's why they're speaking externally, and they're trying to say, look, the reform movement may or may not care about this, but look at what is here in Jewish law. And I think also it's important that this is happening in the 1960s, so the birth control pill is widely available. So I kept making references to kinds of birth control that are not acceptable, halachically. Condoms are not acceptable halachically. It is a problem to-- essentially, any ejaculation that does not take place in a vagina is problematic, so masturbation is also problematic. And so condoms are framed as problematic in the same way that masturbation is. 

Diaphragms are OK because the diaphragm is internal enough to the body, but the pill is really just-- like, it's fine. Everybody agrees that it's OK to have sex when you can't get pregnant, and the pill is just creating a body that can't get pregnant. And so it's not, I don't think, surprising that this is the moment when the conservative movement really kind of launches their argument because it's the first time that there's a birth control form that nobody can get, from a Jewish standpoint, too uncomfortable with. 

Yes? Emily, right? 

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 

Thank you so much. This was amazing. I just had a question about-- you talked a lot about Jewish continuity being, I mean, Jewish continuity is the thing that we're looking for, as opposed to the Protestants, who are looking for a state continuity that doesn't depend on huge families, but it's a good, capitalist, small family that's going to have disposable income and bring up the nation. 

I'm just wondering if you came across places where-- and I know I heard you say that Jewish continuity, they have the Holocaust, so they're able to bracket it and not be in opposition to the Protestants in certain terms, but I'm wondering if there was any anxiety about a growing Jewish population and if this Jewish continuity getting bigger and bigger and more and more powerful, and becoming a bigger voting bloc and all of these things, if there was anxiety about the Jewishness of America, or the growing Jewishness. Just, if those things were ever in opposition, even if some of the rhetoric was, like, chill for the Protestants vis a vis the Holocaust? 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: You know, there's a book coming out-- there's going to be a Book Talk in April at the Harvard bookstore on American Jewish novels and thinking about the role of how they navigate anti-Semitism in the post-war era. I think this is a moment when there's a lot of work on the part of a lot of different kinds of Jewish cultural producers to really emphasize their Americanness, rather than their sort of ethnic particularity. 

There's an excellent book called Roots Too written by a Yale Professor that talks about a slightly later era sort of-- as multiculturalism becomes more prominent, how that becomes a way of being kind of clearly ethnically Jewish. But this is really a historical moment when Jews are trying to be waspy as well. And I don't think-- I think there's a lot of Jewish anxiety about these things, and there are absolutely anti-Semitic comments about financial markets and the press. It's not that those ever totally go away. 

But Jews are such a tiny piece of the American population, so when people are getting anxious about religions having too much power, they're getting anxious about Catholics having too much power. Catholics are one of the major American-- right, there are more Catholics than there are any kind of Protestant in the United States, and so when Protestants are working together, they kind of can balance out. But as it gets harder and harder, as you get more of a divide, a liberal versus conservative divide in Protestantism, you can see anxiety about Catholics ratcheting up in certain places. And I think that takes the energy that might otherwise have gone sort of in the mainstream to Jews. 

I think these are also-- the mainline Protestant communities were really isolationist in the era leading up to World War II, and they feel very guilty about that at this point, and that's part of what the Holocaust rhetoric is doing, right? They are aware that they put-- because of World War I, they put a lot of pressure on the United States government to stay out of Europe's wars, and you can-- the Holocaust really works in that social dynamic to diffuse anxiety, ability to express anxiety about Jews. 

Fran? 

AUDIENCE: Ah, now it's working. Hello, Professor Mehta. Thank you so much for this talk. It was so helpful to hear the kind of historical sweep across several decades. The part that I had a question about is this the very dramatic statement that you uttered, the very powerful statement from the rabbi who compares younger Jewish acceptance of zero population growth to the Holocaust, looking at the kind of 6 million number. 

And in another class that I'm in right now, we're talking a lot about the construction of Holocaust memory and the kind of realist versus anti-realist ideas of the Holocaust in the sense of, can it ever be compared to something else. And so I just was I'm curious to know if that Holocaust rhetoric around zero population growth, if there was ever pushback to that in terms of, how could you invoke this in this way, like, from within Jewish community? 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: Not yet. So the Holocaust also gets invoked in talk about interfaith families. One of my favorite things in my first book is there's a television show called Bridget Loves Bernie, and it's a half-hour sitcom. It stars the mom from Family Ties, just for the people who were young in the '80s, rather than young in the '70s. But somebody writes into the New York Times, "to make a sitcom about interfaith marriage is like making a sitcom about the merry adventures of a family on their way to the gas chambers." 

And I thought for a long time about whether I could even reprint that. It seemed so horrifying to me. But it was not really out of step with a lot of the feedback that they got at the time. There's a scholar at Pitt working on Jewish responses to abortion, and she writes about how one of the lead architects of Jewish pro-choice argument compared anti-choice rhetoric to Nazis, right? Basically, not how Nazis treated Jews, but how Nazis treated Germans. You must have babies, you must have babies. 

But when the Catholic Church started using the Holocaust to talk about the unborn, aborted fetuses-- He was also an ecumenical leader and so he worked with the church in a lot of times, and so he didn't want to say the Catholic Church is wrong to do this. Instead, he started arguing-- and this is in the 1980s-- that nobody should use the-- I think it's the 1980s. It might be the later '70s. It's not my research, and she hasn't published about this yet. I've heard her give conference talks. 

So he doesn't want to say, you can't use this language, you bad Catholics, because he cooperates with Catholics on lots of things. So he instead says nobody should use the Holocaust rhetoric ever. And I don't know that he's the start of the "it's never appropriate to make a comparison," but he really, despite the fact that he's been doing that, goes hard on that line. The criticisms of the Catholic Church for using Holocaust rhetoric when the Catholic Church had been sort of not so great on the Holocaust itself, all of those really strong critiques, at least initially, come from within the church-- priests saying to their hierarchy, what are you doing? 

And so, yeah, that objection is really a new and strong objection in a lot of ways, when he's making it, about abortion a little bit later. 

AUDIENCE: I have two questions. The first is about the traditional healing system of that time among Jewish people. Did they have any resistance against this story of contraception event, or they advocated these things? There should have been some kind of what Farin is doing, the healing system in traditional medicine. How did they react toward this contraception event at those days? Is there any information about their share in the formation of this contraception event? 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: So really, in this sort of 1950s, 1960s, 1970s American Jewish moment, it's not that in a generation or two before, that there weren't folk traditions and it's not that there aren't still folk traditions about ways in which chicken soup might cure a cold, or something like that. But the American Jews that I'm thinking about right here, I'm not really talking, in this example, about, for instance, Hasidic communities. And I actually just don't know that much about what's going on in those communities.

But Reform and Conservative Jewish communities in the United States are going to be not really different in terms of their responses and attitudes towards medicine towards the American mainstream. Medicine is actually a really common career for a lot of these folks who are getting access to higher education for the first time, through the GI Bill. So the United States gives people who serve in World War II access to higher education. And for many, many American Jewish and Catholic families, that educational opportunity puts them into the middle class, and being a doctor is, I think, a really sort of-- it's something that everyone in the community understands, and so it's an appealing higher education path to take, right? 

It's not like becoming a professor, in which your family is never going to totally get what you do. Everyone understands what the doctor does, right? And so it becomes-- it's a very sort of first step of higher education move in a lot of immigrant families and communities. And so they're really kind of all on board with this modern, scientific medicine project. 

AUDIENCE: Thank you. And may I have another question? Thanks to Hossein, I know that there had been a Muslim community, a very small Muslim community, in America at that time. And because I have read more parts of your book, is there any information about the reaction of that Muslim community toward these contraception events at that time? 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: So it depends on what you mean by "Muslim community." So in this moment, because I'm really talking about this public dialogue, this is a moment when Catholics and Jews are let in to the public dialogue for the first time. But Muslims, there's a Hindu community, there's certainly a Sikh community in California. There's a huge, or at least sizable Chinese community, particularly in California. They're not being kind of "led into the public debate" public square in quite the same way. 

What I will say-- and this is not immigrant Islam, this is American Islam-- Malcolm X gets into a conversation with Planned Parenthood in 1962. And I have come to the conclusion that Malcolm X is like consistently one of the smartest and most reasonable people in any room he walks into, because what he says to Planned Parenthood-- he's meeting with the director of the Harlem Planned Parenthood clinic, whose name is, I think, Mrs. Hernandez, and he says, OK, first of all, from a marketing-- he doesn't use the word "marketing," but he gives them marketing advice. He says, you should not call this birth control. You should call it family planning. People are not going to appreciate white doctors trying to control them. They're going to appreciate, however, a tool that they can use to plan their lives. 

The other thing-- and these are notes Planned Parenthood-- there are three people in the meeting, and one person writes up notes and sends it to Alan Guttmacher, who's the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The other thing that Malcolm X says, the other thing that the notes say, is that Malcolm X is really unhappy with concern about population explosion, which is being targeted largely at post-colonial and still colonial countries. He wants to know why they're targeting Black and Brown people. 

He is, however, really interested in the possibilities that birth control offers for maternal and infant health within African-American communities, and for the economic mobility that birth control provides. So I haven't really been looking at Muslim responses, but Malcolm X-- I have been looking at Black responses, mostly Black Christian responses. But Malcolm X is there. 

AUDIENCE: Yeah. You very briefly alluded to this at one point in your talk, but I was wondering if you could speak more about the diaphragm debates in New York and how that fits into your broader argument, because I think it's a really cool part of the narrative and I want people to hear about it. 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: I didn't actually ask her to do that, everyone. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So basically, in 1958-- one of my big failures as a historian is that I can't remember dates. I had to memorize, like, 35 dates in American religious history for my comprehensive exams, and apparently, Ann Lee's birthday stuck. But in 1968, there is a moment in the New York City public hospital system in which there's sort of a precipitating event. And what happens is a Protestant woman who has diabetes, her Jewish doctor wants to fit her for a diaphragm. 

She has almost died during a pregnancy, so they do not want her to have more kids. But it's 1958, and so they really believe that science is going to cure everything, and so they think they're going to be able to fix diabetes before she hits menopause, and she wants more children, so they don't want to give her a hysterectomy. 

And there's a clause that says maybe public hospitals can give birth control for desperate medical reason, but they don't have any birth control available in the hospital pharmacy. And so it's unclear what happens if you write the prescription because the diaphragm needs to be fit. You have to have your cervix measured. So her doctor, who is Jewish, writes to the hospital commissioner, who is also Jewish. And the hospital commissioner says, no. The hospital commissioner, while Jewish, is appointed by a Catholic mayor, who is publicly on record as being against birth control. 

And basically, they go back and forth a little bit, and in the end, the doctor does not fit the woman for a diaphragm, but he does call the New York Times. And for the next-- this happens in April, and all summer, Jewish and Protestant clergy take to their pulpits and call the press to humiliate the New York City hospital system. It creates amazing headlines, like "Orthodox Rabbinical Committee and Harlem Pastors Association condemn Jacobs," who is the hospital commissioner. 

And you get the newspaper interviewing Catholic girl on the street, and you get Catholic women saying things like, I'm Catholic and therefore, I don't want to use birth control, but the rest of the world isn't Catholic. It should be in the public hospital. There are lots of questions about Catholic-- New York is almost 50% Catholic, can you use Catholic tax dollars to pay for diaphragms in a city hospital. Nobody ever says, can you use Quaker tax dollars to pay for war, other than Quakers? I mean, Quakers say that all the time, but right? So you get this whole big debate. And in the end, the hospital commission caves. 

Now I cannot find-- I've looked in Planned Parenthood's records. I've looked in-- I haven't checked the papers of everybody everywhere. I can't find evidence that Planned Parenthood was behind this, although it has this sort of patina of a sting, partly in that Alan Guttmacher, who, at this point, is the head of the New York Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, has been pointing out this problem. Like, OK, maybe it's all right to have these prescriptions written in public hospitals, but they don't have the technology so they can't do anything about it. Like, what happens. So it looks like it might be a sting. 

There's a rabbi named Roland Gittleson, who's a Boston-based suburban Boston rabbi. In his papers, there is a letter from somebody at Planned Parenthood saying, we just-- she doesn't say "pulled this stunt," but basically, we just pulled this stunt in New York. Do you want to try to pull this stunt in Boston? I can't find-- I mean, I kind of assume she's telling the truth, but maybe Planned Parenthood just sort of wanted to take credit for it, or maybe they got it coordinated once it got up and running. I can't prove it. 

And Boston doesn't pull a similar stunt, possibly because of the timing. Griswold v. Connecticut, which is the Supreme Court case that gives all married people the right to contraception-- and in my favorite intersection of life and work, it's the New Haven Planned Parenthood clinic, and I was a teenager in New Haven, so it was my Planned Parenthood clinic-- is working its way through the courts, and so it may be that they basically moved their energy somewhere else. It may be that they decide not to disrupt the apple cart. It never happens, and I don't know why. 

I do know, not from our official archival record, and I kept waiting for somebody to publish, but the 50th anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut, the medical historians association met at Yale. And I went, and they had people telling their stories, and there was a couple that-- part of the Planned Parenthood Griswold case was basically a sting. Somebody went in, or-- that's probably the wrong word, but some Yale Law students, Yale Law students and PhD students, married couples, went in. Someone went in, she told a story about she bought a diaphragm, or she got went and got fitted, left with the diaphragm and the spermicide, went to the police station to turn herself in, and the police said, it's not illegal to own a diaphragm. It's illegal to use a diaphragm. 

And so the next day-- and they were like, don't wash it-- the next day, she comes back with the unwashed diaphragm and the dented bottle of tube of spermicide and her husband, because she's so embarrassed, to turn herself in. So this was the story that was told. I don't have it, like-- I don't have it in any way that I can cite, but this story was told at that conference. And so it's definitely the case that they were agitating to get-- they were trying to challenge the laws. So that-- Is that what you were looking for in the diaphragm story? Did you already-- Had I already told you the Yale part? OK. 

[APPLAUSE] 

Olivia, did you have a question? 

AUDIENCE: No, [INAUDIBLE]. 

SAMIRA K. MEHTA: OK. 

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Women's Studies and Religion Program. 

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.