Suchergebnisse

Women's medicine explores the key role played by British female doctors in the production and circulation of contraceptive knowledge and the handling of sexual disorders between the 1920s and 1970s at the transnational level, taking France as a point of comparison. This study follows the path of a set of women doctors as they made their way through the predominantly male-dominated medical landscape in establishing birth control and family planning as legitimate fields of medicine. This journey encompasses their practical engagement with birth control and later family planning clinics in Britain, their participation in the development of the international movement of birth control and family planning and their influence on French doctors. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published medical materials, this study sheds light on the strategies British female doctors used, and the alliances they made, to put forward their medical agenda and position themselves as experts and leaders in birth control and family planning research and practice.

Le dossier dirigé par Samuel Dolbeau et Martin Dutron sur les liens entre le catholicisme et les pratiques médicales s'inscrit dans un renouveau de la recherche historique qui voit les relations entre catholicisme, médecine et sexualité faire l'objet d'études approfondies. En témoignent le récent numéro spécial de Medical History dirigé par Laura Kelly et Agata Ignaciuk (2020) qui éclaire les interactions entre catholicisme, pratiques contraceptives et médecine dans une perspective transnationale, ou encore l'ouvrage collectif dirigé par Alana Harris qui explore la réception de l'encyclique Humanae Vitae en Europe (2018).

The transition from the baby boom to the baby bust has never been studied with a particular focus on the increase in the relative costs of children. This article uses this explanation and applies it to Lausanne and Fribourg, two Swiss cities characterized by different institutional contexts and by strikingly divergent trends in terms of fertility. This article conjectures that new rights for children and models of parenthood that appeared during the 1960s increased the cost of child rearing and are key explanations for the transition from the baby boom to the baby bust.

This special issue adopts a comparative approach to the politics of reproduction in twentieth-century France and Britain. The articles investigate the flow of information, practices and tools across national boundaries and between groups of experts, activists and laypeople. Empirically grounded in medical, news media and feminist sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, they reveal the practical similarities that existed between countries with officially different political regimes as well as local differences within the two countries. Taken as a whole, the special issue shows that the border between France and Britain was more porous than is typically apparent from nationally-focused studies: ideas, people and devices travelled in both directions; communication strategies were always able to evade the rule of law; contraceptive practices were surprisingly similar in both countries; and religion loomed large in debates on both sides of the channel.

Cette contribution historiographique se concentre sur les apports de l'économie politique de la fécondité pour éclairer les motivations et les mécanismes des transitions de la fécondité. Elle se focalise sur les travaux entrepris en Europe et aux États-Unis couvrant la période 1850-1980, en s'intéressant plus particulièrement aux études qualitatives. Dans une première partie, nous retraçons la genèse de cette approche. Comprendre ses liens de filiation permet de saisir non seulement le chemin parcouru à travers les paradigmes dont elle s'est nourrie et continue de se nourrir, mais aussi de percevoir ce dont elle doit se libérer pour proposer des analyses toujours renouvelées. Dans une deuxième partie, nous appuyant sur des travaux qui ont éclairé les contextes dans lesquels se situent les prises de décisions des hommes et des femmes, nous montrons qu'ils permettent de cerner les ressorts des motivations individuelles à maitriser les naissances et leur calendrier. En conclusion, nous invitons à prolonger cette approche et suggérons quelques pistes de recherches.