# WSRP Research Associate Samira Mehta on ‘Contraception and Sexuality in Tri-Faith America’ June 28, 2024 2023-24 WSRP Research Associate Samira K. Mehta’s research and teaching focus on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Mehta, who also served as Colorado Scholar and Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and North American Religions, received her Master of Divinity degree at Harvard Divinity School in 2005 and valued the opportunity to return to HDS as a visiting scholar and professor. Mehta’s research project at the WSRP was “God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in Tri-Faith America.” Below, she talks about her project, which traces the intertwined history of religion and contraception in the United States from the founding of Planned Parenthood’s first Clergy Committee in 1942 to the present, as well as her HDS course, “Religion and Reproductive Politics in the United States.” **Academic Background** I am Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I have also served as the director of Jewish Studies. My PhD is in religious studies, which I received from Emory University, where I focused on American religious history with a sub-specialization in American Jewish history. The program was actually called American Religious Cultures, but my work is largely as an archival historian, although sometimes I do some ethnographic and cultural studies work. I'm a post-World War II American historian thinking predominantly about the interactions between Jews, Protestants, and Catholics in their negotiation of the American landscape from World War II to the present. My first book explored that negotiation in domestic spaces through the experiences of interfaith families, namely, Christian-Jewish interfaith families. Originally, I thought that I would be writing more about Protestant-Catholic marriages as well. But in the end, because I was mostly writing about a post-Vatican II time period, the sources really addressed relationships between Christians and Jews, rather than marriages across the Protestant-Catholic divide. Vatican II changed what that looked like for Protestant and Catholic couples because all of a sudden, it was OK to do things like eat meat on Friday. So, if you look at interfaith marriage concerns from the 1940s, there's a lot of Catholic worry about if a Catholic woman marries a Protestant man, will he as the patriarch allow her to not eat meat on Friday? Will he insist that she cook a roast on Friday? Will he let her raise the kids sort of following that set of rules and vice versa? **Returning to Harvard Divinity School** I received my bachelor's degree in English, religion, and women's studies at Swarthmore College, and I received my MDiv here at HDS. I was really interested in the idea of the academic life as vocational, and I was interested in building the time into my degree program to think about that. My very first semester of my MDiv, I took a class with Marie Griffith, who is now at Washington University in St. Louis, and that class changed the trajectory of my career. It didn't do it immediately. It took me a long time to sort of move into doing sexuality studies in the twentieth century. But in the end, that class changed the arc of my study. [Ann Braude](https://hds.harvard.edu/people/ann-d-braude), director of the WSRP, held a conference my first semester that would later produce the book, *Transforming The Faiths of Our Fathers*. I had never been to an academic conference before and it was all of these leaders in second-wave feminism coming to talk about their relationship with religion. I asked my first ever question at an academic conference. I remember I was sitting behind Marie Griffith, who was my professor, and sitting next to a friend of mine, who was a second year MTS candidate. I was shaking as I stood up to ask my question. I was holding my friend's hand and had my hand on the back of Marie's chair. Marie could see that my hands were shaking, and she turned around and put her hand on top of the hand that was on the chair, and I asked my question. In my second year, I was having a personally challenging time, and Ann Braude invited me to go along with her to a conference—my first academic conference outside of HDS—at the University of Chicago, run by [Catherine Brekus](https://hds.harvard.edu/people/catherine-brekus) (who is now here at HDS), and she found a way to pay for me to go. So, it was really through the Women's Studies and Religion Program here that I was introduced to the world of what it would look like to be an academic in community. So coming here to teach, to be in the program this past year where this really important class happened—to be a fellow in the community that cultivated my academic life—is a magical experience for me. I also have to say, I loved Swarthmore. Swarthmore was an amazing place to be an undergraduate, but my three years here at HDS were the best times in my own education. It was everything that was wonderful about Swarthmore in terms of this tight community without that dining hall food and distribution requirements. Or rather, there were distribution requirements here, but they were already within my niche. I also made friendships here that have carried me through my career with the other people who went on to get PhDs in religious studies. So in addition to the specific Women's Studies and Religion Program having been so important to me, being here feels like being at home. **Pursuing Research Through WSRP** I have had a very productive scholarly time this past year and was able to do a lot of good research. My book project is called *"*God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion," and it is a history of contraception from World War II to the Reagan administration. I will actually be submitting my manuscript to UNC Press (and to go out to the peer reviewers) looking, for instance, at the early 1940s, when Planned Parenthood created their National Clergymen's Committee. “Clergymen” is in the title without any sense of irony because the committee was made up of Protestant ministers and rabbis, and there were no women on the committee. There were a few denomination ordaining women, but by and large, clergy were men. There were also no Catholic priests, and the committee was largely looking to combat the threat that they believed Catholicism posed to contraception access in the United States. They were interested in expanding contraceptive access for a range of social reasons. I think that today, many of us assume that feminists fought to get birth control access for reasons tied to the liberation of women. While some of that happened, for sure, it is also the case that much of the push to expand birth control access was surprisingly conservative. It wasn’t about the sexual liberation of women—people were really worried that contraception was going to result in sex outside of marriage, and so ministers and doctors initially framed birth control as a tool for marriage. It is this conservative strategy, where we want contraception, not so that women can go to law school, but so women are not forced into the workplace when they have more children than they can feed on their husband's income. But also, there are moments of real anxiety about what contraception will mean. You can see that particularly in debates about Jewish continuity in the 1970s, or after Eisenstadt versus Baird makes it illegal to deny contraception to single people, when more conservative Protestants worry about what they see as declining moral standards. **Teaching at HDS** The class I taught in fall 2023 was “Religion and Reproductive Politics in the United States,” and it was really meaningful to be teaching a class here. The students bonded a lot, and I think often classes do this, but they have a texting chain. Many also came to my public talk at HDS, and I just adore them. Our coursework consisted of reading the part of my book that had been written for the final class, the book *Catholics and Contraception*, as well as a collection of articles about Jews and birth control and abortion. We also read a book called *Black Women, Black Lov*e by Dianne Stewart, which thinks about how structural racism has undermined Black women's abilities to find the kinds of families that are held up as American ideals. We covered some articles about conservative backlash and pieces from *Moral Combat*, which was written by Marie Griffith, who taught that meaningful class, my first semester at HDS. **Reflecting on Religious Background** I grew up Unitarian, and I wasn't positive whether I wanted to be a professor or a minister. I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professor, so I applied to a whole bunch of master's programs. Harvard was the only place where I applied to the MDiv because it is absolutely the best place to train for both Unitarian ministry and an academic life. I ended up actually converting to Judaism while I was in graduate school, which was very personally meaningful to me, but I came in really believing that what I wanted was to combine both of those things. In the end, I think that getting an MDiv was really central to making me the kind of professor that I wanted to be, but I do not think I needed ordination to do that. I needed the training that I got here by being an MDiv. I owe the UUA immensely for giving me the opportunity to experiment with what ministry might mean. HDS was a wonderful place to train, both as a scholar and as someone who sees both scholarly knowledge production and teaching as vocational work. I am so grateful for the education I received here and for the year of conversation and community that I have just had at the WSRP. —*Interview conducted and edited by Rachel Mallett* See also:- [ Alumni News and Activities ](/news-category/alumni-news-and-activities) - [ Faculty News and Research ](/news-category/faculty-news-and-research) - [ WSRP ](/news-category/wsrp)