the Female Body GOVERNING

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He was fl atly contemptuous of working-class people in Puerto Rico
(and elsewhere) and their ability to help themselves. Of a contraceptive
program carried out through home visits, he wrote that “the jibaroes
[sic] may not have enough energy to use the method, but if this doesn’t
persuade them I feel that nothing will” (C. Gamble to W. Wing, personal
communication, May 23, 1955). At the same time, he could urge the
reproduction of the educated few as crucial to the well-being of the
world. As Gamble (1947) wrote in the Journal of Heredity:
In this intricate technological age, highly trained specialists in
large numbers are required to man the great complex of delicate
organizations, industrial, political, educational, etc. that constitute
a modern nation. The greatest single reservoir of those possessing
the requisite abilities, the ability to plan, to guide, to execute with
intelligence, is the group of college-trained citizens. . . . By reason of
these considerations, the fecundity of this group is a matter of great
signifi cance. Since children tend to inherit the intellectual capacity of
their parents, the average of the children of graduates will be above
that of the nation as a whole. (p. 11)
With this kind of eugenic logic producing a bifurcated account of
contraception, in which working-class and non-White people should
use it a lot and affluent and well-educated people should use it very
little, it confounds matters to think of the testing of the Pill in Puerto
Rico as simply an experiment on women qua women, albeit particularly
vulnerable ones. Rather, we need a more subtle account of what we
might call “race/gender,” or more awkwardly but more accurately,
race/nation/class/gender—the ways that in this case Puerto Rican
women became a keystone in a narrative that held that people colonized
for decades by the United States were impoverished, not because
of international politics, tariffs, trade, and economy, but because of
their reproduction.
Precursors to the Pill
Gamble and the Puerto Rican context were not unique. A tradition
of thinking of certain birth control methods as more appropriate for
some populations than for others, what Patricia Hill Collins (1999)
describes as the eugenic rhetoric of birth control, stretches back to
the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Currently in
the United States, we fi nd that contraceptives such as Norplant and
Depo Provera are overwhelmingly used in clinics and hospitals that