Using Historical Research to Examine the Shaping of Family Planning Services through the Lens of Race, Class, and Gender

Background/Purpose: Social Work has a long history of providing services to women from marginalized communities. However, family planning, birth control, and services for unwed mothers were fraught with complications due to structural inequality. This study examines how social service organizations shaped family planning programs for white women and African American women in the 1940s-1950s American South. It examines the difficulty of social service provision within the confines of Jim Crow laws, and provides lessons learned on social service framing and subsequent utilization. This presentation illustrates the usefulness of historiography for informing current attempts to increase access and service utilization for women from historically marginalized populations.

Methods: Historiography, archival and document analysis, was used to examine various social services focused on family planning for white and African American women in the U.S., 1940s-1950s. Documents from the Sophia Smith Collection (SSC)- Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and the Social Welfare History Archives (SWHA)- University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota were analyzed. From SSC, Florence Rose Papers, Margaret Sanger Papers, Planned Parenthood of America Collection, and Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) archives were assessed. From SWHA, National Federation of Settlements Records, Association for Voluntary Sterilization Records, Florence Crittenton Collection, and American Social Health Association Records were assessed. Documents were summarized, coded, and analyzed using conceptually clustered matrices (Miles & Huberman, 1994) in order to determine common themes.

Results: Although some organizations were interested in integrationist agendas at the national level, their local affiliates in the South were much opposed, making it difficult for poor women, particularly African American women, to access services. The framing of motherhood and birth control in derogatory terms for poor women meant that when services did exist for this population, they tended to be underutilized. Service providers contributed to these problems by including only middle class women or men in the planning and leadership of these efforts, allowing for the alienation of the poor white and African American women they were attempting to serve.

Conclusions/Implications: Social Work and the social service organizations that are a part of the profession have developed within frameworks shaped by historical inequalities. It is important for researchers to explore how current problems, such as service utilization and targeted delivery of services in marginalized communities, can be informed by the historical record. This study explored how services for poor African American and white women related to family planning, birth control, and services for unwed mothers was framed differentially based on race and class. This framing led to differential access as well as under-utilization of these services, and in some cases elimination of critical women's health programs based on these problems. The need to ground services within the community, partnering with indigenous community experts in the shaping of those services: and the need to be attentive to diversity in class as well as race and ethnicity was, and still is, important when targeting services to marginalized or at-risk communities.