Contraception: A History

"A fascinating, detailed and well-researched insight into the social, cultural and religious influences that have influenced knowledge, attitudes, acceptance and use of fertility control throughout history."
Family Planning Association newsletter

"A carefully researched survey that will provide useful material for those interested in comparing ideas about contraception in diff erent places and times."
English Historical Review

"Robert Jütte’s extraordinary history of contraception enables us to look in an entirely new way at the claim of the 1960s generation that theirs was the first sexual revolution. The struggle for the control of sexual reproduction from the ancient world through the Middle Ages is as important to Jütte's story as are the rise of sexual science in the nineteenth century and the introduction of the pill in the twentieth. Indeed how 'modern' means exist side by side with 'traditional' means of birth control (some more efficient than others – but which?) haunts this entire history. A readable and fascinating account of woman’s age-old struggle."
Sander Gilman, Emory University

"The publication of an English version of Robert Jütte's Lust ohne Last is greatly to be applauded. This extremely thoughtful and engagingly written study substantially exceeds earlier attempts to set down histories of contraception. Jütte has produced a chronologically wide-ranging cultural history and adopts a Foucauldian framework in which the issues of power and knowledge loom large throughout. As a result it is a work of great interest to social and cultural historians, demographers, historically minded social scientists, and historians of ideas, medicine and science."
Richard Smith, University of Cambridge