Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and "the Problem of Sex.".

Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and "the Problem of Sex." By Adele E Clarke. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998, 421 + xxvi pages. Cloth, $45.

This is a historical sociological analysis of the disciplining of reproduction between 1910 and 1933. By disciplining, the author means several things. The first is a sense of disciplinary formation, that is, the scholarly specialty in reproduction essentially initiated after 1910. Several reproductive problems increasingly came to be addressed by identifiable workers and centers of research in the professional contexts of biology, medicine, and agriculture. But disciplining also has another connotation, namely that of exercising control over or policing and enforcing particular perspectives and, by implication, in exercising control over reproduction. What the consumer (primarily regarded as female) wanted was not always what the experts thought they should have, nor was it necessarily what some of the organizations felt they needed. These threads are interwoven throughout the book.

Clarke dates the beginning of modernity in reproductive studies in the U.S. to a book by E H. A. Marshall, The Physiology of Reproduction, first published in 1910. Marshall asserted that the scope of the physiology of reproduction in its own right provided a more than adequate problem structure for research. Who should do the research then became the issue. Three emerging disciplines entered into competition (and cooperation) to expand the science of reproduction. It became part of the domain of the emerging science of biology, which had appeared as a separate discipline in the major universities between 1870 and 1900. The new biology was independent of medicine and was conceived in order to take biology beyond medicine, an action about which medicine was very ambivalent. Medicine for its part was attempting to raise the levels of medical education and to create both better and fewer physicians. Part of this effort involved the development of specialties such as gynecology and obstetrics, in the process medicalizing childbirth, pregnancy, menopause, and even menstruation; in short, making them part of the disease process. Some of the early obstetricians were rather vehement in their insistence on pregnancy as a pathological condition. Initially, training in this area often emphasized the physician's virtuosity in surgical intervention rather than a basic study of reproduction, because it was the ability to intervene which distinguished the physician from the midwife. Though medicine entered the research field reluctantly, it was this very research which began to give a "scientific" basis for obstetrics and gynecology. The third thread Clarke discusses is that of agriculture, particularly animal husbandry and the effort to better understand breeding. Each of these threads were independent but gradually came together, in large part through the Rockefeller-funded Committee for Research in the Problems of Sex (CRPS).

The CRPS, which operated under the direction of the National Research Council (NRC), had been conceived by its founders to do basic sexological research (i.e., on humans in the real world). When the members of the committee sought the umbrella of the NRC to make such research more respectable, however, the only division of that body which would take it was the Medical Science Division. Once established there, the research focus of the group was basically captured by the biological, medical, and agricultural interests, which though interested in unexplored areas of reproduction, were not interested in the social applications of their research nor necessarily even in the problems of human reproduction. Although the CRPS grantees did significant (and Nobel quality) research, they ignored the "human side" until about 20 years later, when the reorganized Rockefeller Foundation intervened enough to encourage some sexological research. One of the beneficiaries of this was Alfred Kinsey. So unwilling was the committee to do research on population and human reproduction that the Rockefeller interests and the other foundations set up separate organizations to do research, and even had to go abroad to Scotland to get a testing of spermicides because none of the establishment scientists in the U.S. would do so.

Important in helping redirect research was the growing pressure of the planned parenthood groups, which agitated for more effective contraceptives. Although the basic research for the pill had been available earlier, the final research which brought the product to market went on outside of the organized funding organizations, and was done by scientists who were often on the fringe of the establishment. By the 1960s, however, reproduction in the words of Clarke had been disciplined to be accepted by the disciplines, particularly because it had proven remarkably successful in attracting private funding and support. Still, the efforts of the scientists per se are not always in agreement with the targeted consumers--women--who have created their own reproductive agendas around the world.

The general outlines of these developments have been told by others, including this writer. Clarke has gone into greater detail, amplifying here, modifying there, basically not changing the overall picture but certainly giving the reader a better understanding of the issues involved. The changing relations and often uneasy collaborations among scientists and the "key social worlds" outside of Science (i.e. the foundations and philanthropists) and a wide array of feminist and medical birth control and eugenics advocates have not been so thoroughly explored before, and give a new dimension to the efforts of the twentieth century's drive to rationalize reproduction, human and nonhuman, in order to control life itself. Foucault is referred to, but fortunately is not a driving force in the "conception" of the book, and for the most part he is ignored, as he should be. The book is extremely well documented. Its sources range from archival materials in the Universities of

Chicago and Johns Hopkins to those at the Rockefeller Archival Center, as well as special collections at many universities. There is a lengthy bibliography and two helpful appendices.

REFERENCE

Marshall, F. H. A. (1910). The physiology of reproduction. London: Longmans, Green.

Vern L. Bullough, Department of Nursing, University of Southern California, Center for Health Professions, 1540 East Alcazar St., Los Angeles, CA 90033; e-mail: [e-mail].