Laura Kelly, Contraception and Modern Ireland: A Social History, c. 1922-1992. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. ISBN 978-1-108-83910-5 Hardback; ISBN 978-1-108-96977-2 Paperback.

Reviewed by Cara Delay

The most recent monograph from talented historian Laura Kelly (University of Strathclyde) and, remarkably, the first book-length history of contraception in Ireland, is nothing short of an outstanding accomplishment that promises to transform our understandings of gender, sexuality, and fertility in twentieth-century Ireland. In a manuscript that covers seventy years of political, economic, and cultural transformations, Kelly deftly documents the ‘intense and lasting social change’ (p. 1) that characterised the twentieth century while also bringing to light ‘continuities across the history of the twentieth century’ (p. 322) and keeping her focus on the ordinary and everyday sexual lives of Irish women and men. 

Organised into two main parts, one focusing on people’s everyday experiences with sex, reproduction, and fertility control and the other on activists who agitated for and against contraceptive reform and access, this book provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis that will become a model for future scholars studying similar topics and essential reading for anyone interested in Irish social or cultural history.

Overall, it is Kelly’s sources and methodology that make Contraception and Modern Ireland unique and valuable. While she adroitly analyses an extensive array of archival and published sources, including newspapers, correspondence, court records, educational manuals and pamphlets, and women’s magazines, her innovative oral history methodology is particularly noteworthy. As Kelly notes, oral history remains an underutilised method in studies of Ireland, particularly in works focusing on sex or sexuality. Over several years, Kelly embraced the challenges involved in such a momentous undertaking, conducting an impressive 145 oral histories with both activists and ‘ordinary’ Irish women and men in order to shed light on how they attempted to regulate fertility and/or advocate for or against contraceptive access.

Kelly’s oral history interviews allow her to center the words, experiences, and emotions of Irish men and women born in the first half of the twentieth century. Their frank and honest remembrances (a testament to the skill of Kelly as interviewer) at times transcend the book’s focus on contraception, including valuable information as well about adolescence and puberty, courtship and marriage, pregnancy and parenthood, sexual knowledge and communication, reproductive decision-making, religion, social class, community organising, and more. Particularly moving are the emotions that Kelly so carefully teases out of her narrators: the palpable shame, guilt, and fear that so many experienced when questioning the teachings of the Church-state system as well as the very real stresses that a lack of family planning options placed on relationships. (chapter 2)

Some of what Kelly’s research demonstrates may not be surprising: the pervasive ignorance about sex and reproduction that narrators reported; the significant influence and power of the Catholic Church, the medical profession, and the government (and indeed the links between these); the difficulty that Irish people faced accessing contraception; and the stigma that followed some who chose to seek out contraception: ‘nearly the same as having leprosy’ according to one narrator. (p. 140) Other revelations, however, help us shift the conversation on Irish sexual and reproductive history. The very real struggles that some physicians faced in attempting to uphold the law while providing care, and the ‘anguish’ (p. 157) that sympathetic priests experienced when attempting to serve parishioners needing birth control, particularly afterHumanae Vitae and Archbishop McQuaid’s 1971 pastoral, are surprisingly moving. The persistence of so-called ‘natural’ fertility methods through the late twentieth century is noteworthy as well. Significantly, Kelly also effectively demonstrates how and why some Irish Catholics born before 1950 changed their views on contraception, evolving to a more flexible view as society changed as well (chapter 5) even as she demonstrates that the Family Planning Act of 1979 was not a turning point for most people, with ‘shame and stigma around sexual matters more generally, persist[ing]until at least the 1990s, if not beyond’. (p. 20)

Kelly’s arguments are strengthened by her comparative analysis: by placing Ireland within a European context and making links with other Catholic states, Kelly is able to both demonstrate the uniqueness of Ireland (work on Britain has suggested that within marriage, male partners took the lead in seeking birth control, but Kelly’s narrators suggest that in Ireland, women were mostly responsible for such decisions) and challenge the notion of Irish sexual exceptionalism. Indeed, argues Kelly, twentieth-century Ireland had much in common with Francoist Spain, a comparison that remains understudied. Hopefully, Kelly’s revelations will inspire more comparative work.

In chapters focusing on pro-contraception activism, Kelly shows how organised and extensive such efforts were, affirming other recent scholarship that has emphasised the impact of the history of feminist activism in Ireland. These chapters of the book dive into the activist methods employed by groups such as the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM), Irishwomen United (IWU), and the Contraception Action Programme (CAP)—including the infamous Contraceptive Train organised by the IWLM in 1971. Here Kelly illuminates the diversity of individuals and groups, outlining the very public debates that troubled Irish society by the 1970s. Exploring the motivations of those who became involved in the pro-contraception movement, Kelly again turns to emotions, revealing the outright anger and disgust that many felt, especially after the disappointment of Humanae Vitae. In Kelly’s skilful hand, the emotional toll that such work took on activists who faced both protests and personal attacks comes through clearly as well. It is important that Kelly also includes a chapter (chapter 8) on those who campaigned against contraceptive liberalisation in the 1970s and 80s, including the Association for the Protection of Irish Family Life and the Irish Family League. Here Kelly affirms what other scholars have argued: that anti-contraception activists underscored the dangers of a ‘permissive society’ as well as the so-called ‘foreign’ secularising influences on Ireland that would lead to moral decline, and that campaigners linked contraception with other ‘vices’ including divorce and, especially, abortion.

Kelly’s interviews with pro-contraception activists detail how their work attempting to provide birth control and importing contraceptives alongside the establishment of family planning clinics directly challenged prohibitions on contraception. Activists were not the only ones who took risks and defied the Church-state consensus, however. Indeed, this book is most impactful in bringing to light the agency and resistance of ordinary Irish women and men—a point that Kelly articulates in her introduction and through almost every chapter. While most Irish people lacked knowledge about sex or reproduction, that did not stop them from attempting to control their fertility, even if it meant circumventing or even defying Church dictates. We should view such attempts within the decidedly pro-natalist Irish state, affirms Kelly, as acts of resistance. As Aoife, born in 1946, told Kelly about her struggle to convince her physician to prescribe her the pill: ‘“I had to fight. [..] I had to learn to fight”’. (p. 144) For those unable or unwilling to fight, the striking and often devastating real-world effects of recurring pregnancy for women, which Kelly lets her narrators explain in detail, are sometimes shocking but always moving.

Recent analyses of the referenda in 2015 and 2018 that paved the way for legal same-sex marriage and abortion have demonstrated the value of personal stories in creating empathy and garnering support for liberalisation and modernisation in the Republic. Contraception in Modern Ireland promises to expand these perspectives by featuring ordinary people’s experiences, actions, and emotions in relation to sex and fertility control in the past. 

As Kelly summarizes, power is a central theme of her book: the power of Church, state, and medical officials but also of the activists and birth control-seekers who defied them, and the power of oral histories to shed light on the experiences and worldviews of ordinary people. This book itself, a stunningly remarkable achievement, will certainly prove to be a powerful force in enhancing our understandings of Irish history and culture in the modern age.

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Cara Delay, Professor of History at the College of Charleston, holds degrees from Boston College and Brandeis University. Her research analyzes women, gender, and culture in modern Ireland, with a particular focus on the history of reproduction, pregnancy, and childbirth. Her award-winning body of scholarship includes more than 30 scholarly journal articles and chapters. She is also author or co-author of Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850-1950 (Palgrave), Irish Women and the Creation of Modern Catholicism, 1850-1950 (Manchester), Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford), and Catching Fire: Women’s Health Activism in Ireland and the Global Movement for Reproductive Justice (Oxford, 2023).