Fertility, gender and war: The 'culture of contraception' in Zimbabwe, 1957-1980

In this project, I examine the social dynamics which attended the introduction of new means of fertility control, specifically the pill and the Depo-Provera injection, into Shona communities in Zimbabwe during the dying days of white rule. I argue that issues of meaning construction, power, conflict and resistance are central to any changes in the social organization of fertility control, and that the Zimbabwean case provides examples of such conflicts across several dimensions. Most demographic theory about fertility has not addressed these issues, although under challenges from feminist and "culturalist" scholars, these questions are beginning to enter the demographic mainstream.; I examine these issues through an analytic framework of four social domains which radiate outward in geographic and social space from the embodied individual--the body as social construction, the heterosexual dyad, the extended family and face-to-face community, and the nation or imagined community. Using in-depth interviews with former family planning workers as well as non-family planning workers, complemented by archival work, I examine the dynamics which were created or attenuated by the arrival of these new methods. I concentrate on conflicts across gender, generational, and political lines. I conclude that the social relations surrounding access to the new contraceptives created connotations of destabilization and subversion of gender and generational authority. The political context within which they were proffered, the colonial history of projects of regulating and controlling Africans, meant that the pill and the injection were associated with the physical and cultural degradation of the Shona "body politic" by members of the nationalist liberation struggle and their sympathizers. Nonetheless, despite the negative connotations and the complex and ambiguous role that the pill and the injection played in these white projects, young women perceived them as a means of enhancing their own personal autonomy vis a vis their husbands and elders. These experiences suggest that sociologists and other social scientists need to rethink their notions of power, resistance, biomedicine and gender in order to accommodate the insights derived from studying how people use new means of fertility control and how they assign meanings to these methods.