After fighting in World War II, American soldiers coming home faced another duty of sorts to their country: get happily married, have a baby, and nurture a stable, healthy family. Among those encouraging that wartime effort was Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). The birth control organization published illustrated pamphlets aimed at veterans as well as women that provided firm, authoritative guidance on how to best prepare to start a family. They gave them titles like “The Soldier Takes a Wife” and “For the Man who comes back — and for all his generation,” and included quizzes in their pages such as, “As a prospective mother — what’s your score?”
Librarians at New York Academy of Medicine recently found examples of these illuminating documents in their archives, coinciding with a free lecture series it’s hosting with the Museum of the City of New York titled, “Who Controls Women’s Health? A Century of Struggle.” Notably, this dated literature emerged right at the time when the Federation had undergone a critical rebranding. Originally known as the American Birth Control League (ABCL), it adopted, in 1942, the gentler-sounding name of “Planned Parenthood.”
While the movement continued to champion older ABCL principles (including Margaret Sanger’s support of eugenics), it also became much more family-centered, arguing that strategic family planning was part of the nation’s commitment to a healthy and strong society. As one pamphlet from the 1940s claims, “The fact remains that having a baby is still the most important single event in any woman’s life — important to herself and her husband and to the future of her country.” The role of birth control was to ensure this event would happen properly, and at the optimal time.