Feminism, Family Planning and National Planning

Abstract

This paper identifies family planning as a key arena of women’s movement activity during the 1950s and early 1960s. Focusing on the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI), I argue that organised women helped to make family planning a component of national planning for development. While they joined other policymakers to promote the idea that controlling population was necessary for the new nation’s economic progress, the AIWC and FPAI also made a distinct case for family planning as a part of national development that was conducted by women, for women. In doing so, they created a new terrain of public activity for middle-class family planners, who claimed to mediate between ordinary women and national development goals. However, the women targeted for family planning services did not always acquiesce to this nation-building logic, and sometimes offered alternative interpretations of their reproduction. The result was often a tense negotiation between the family planners who claimed to speak for women, and the women who refused their claims.

Keywords:

• All India Women’s Conference
• development
• family planning
• Family Planning Association of India
• feminism
• population control

In 1952, the Government of India became the first state in the world to support family planning as a means of controlling population growth. When taking this momentous step, the state situated the logic of family planning firmly within its logic of planning for economic development. As the National Planning Commission declared in its First Five-Year Plan, ‘population control can be achieved only by the reduction of the birth rate to the extent necessary to stabilize population at a level consistent with the requirements of national economy’.¹ To align birth rates with economic requirements, the plan document called for the state to conduct research on contraceptive methods, provide its citizens with access to birth control, and encourage them to plan their families. Accordingly, the First Five-Year Plan allocated an initial budget of Rs6.5 million for family planning services. While this allocation was a relatively small proportion of the health budget, the decision to include family planning as a component of development planning would have lasting and important consequences throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In subsequent Five-Year Plans, state spending for family planning rapidly increased, and efforts to control population intensified. By the mid 1960s—well before the notorious years of the Emergency—population control programmes were a key part of India’s development regime and the drive to reduce birth rates became an important element of the state’s claims to planning and fostering economic growth.

Feminists played a critical, but often overlooked, role in this turn toward family planning as a component of national planning. I use the term ‘feminist’ broadly here, to include activists, organisations and ideas aligned with the Indian women’s movement. Linking feminism and state-supported family planning in this way may seem a surprising juxtaposition since, as is well known, the Indian government’s family planning programmes were not notably pro-women. In fact, state efforts at family planning were part of population control initiatives that disregarded—and sometimes violated—the rights and reproductive autonomy of the women and men they targeted. Eventually, by the 1970s, Indian feminists were among those who challenged the direction of state-sponsored family planning and population control.² So why, during the 1950s and early 1960s, were some Indian feminists so committed to family planning as part of their advocacy on behalf of women? This article aims to answer this question by examining how, and with what implications, activists in the women’s movement worked with state institutions to make family planning a key component of national development planning. As I argue, their efforts advanced a family planning agenda that was justified in the name of women’s development and progress, but ultimately did little to challenge women’s oppression.

Specifically, I focus on the efforts of organised women, many of whom were involved with the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI). The AIWC, which was founded in 1927, was a leading voice of the all-India women’s movement during the last decades of colonial rule and offered an early and influential endorsement of birth control in 1932. After Independence, several of its leading members turned to birth control and family planning as an important part of their work. Some of these AIWC members, including Dhanvanthi Rama Rau and Avabai Wadia, were among the founders of a newer organisation, the FPAI, which was established in 1949 with the goal of spreading knowledge and methods of family planning. Through their work within these organisations, women became some of India’s first family planners. They established family planning clinics that offered contraceptive information and advice, leveraged national and international contacts to obtain birth control supplies, and travelled to rural and urban neighbourhoods hoping to spread the message of family planning to other women. Thus, when the Government of India officially endorsed population control in 1952, feminist women were well-positioned to join—and shape—India’s emerging family planning bureaucracy.

In fact, women leaders in the FPAI and AIWC had been among those who pushed the state to make birth control a key component of national economic planning and development, and to include family planning in the First Five-Year Plan. To make this case, they argued that contraceptive knowledge was not only important for women, but would also reduce the birth rate, control population, and thus free up resources for the nation’s economy as a whole. This economic benefit, they claimed, brought family planning into the purview of state-led planning. In making this claim—that controlling population via birth control was essential for economic development—the women of the AIWC and FPAI were not alone. They participated in a much broader mid twentieth-century eugenic and Neo-Malthusian development discourse that included economists, demographers, public health officials and policymakers who called for state action to reduce fertility rates. Thus, although among the first, organised feminists were not India’s only family planners; they influenced an emerging consensus that family planning was critical to national development.

This article investigates the connections between feminists and family planning in three parts. As I argue in the first section, women in the AIWC and FPAI worked alongside other family planners but also mobilised as women. Drawing upon the colonial-era women’s movement’s claim to represent all women within the nation, organised women insisted that family planning programmes could bring Indian women into the nation’s development regime, and their participation helped to legitimise the new programmes as a vehicle for women’s development and progress.³ Due in part to feminists’ efforts, family planning thus became understood as a form of national planning for women. At the same time, as the second section demonstrates, organised women carved out a new terrain of public activity for themselves through their involvement with family planning. By claiming to mediate between ordinary women and the development goals of the newly independent state, they insisted that family planning was a nation-building project best conducted by women. However, the women targeted for family planning services and propaganda did not always acquiesce to this nation-building logic. As I suggest in the third section, women sometimes offered alternative interpretations of their reproduction, and challenged the family planner’s insistence that reproductive regulation was a necessary foundation of national planned development. The result was often a tense negotiation between feminist family planners who claimed to speak for all women, and the women who refused their claims.

Attention to these connections between feminists and family planning challenges the common historiographical assumption that the 1950s and 1960s were a period of quiescence for women’s movements in India, and that feminist activists were ‘co-opted’ by the state.⁴ This article aims to complicate these assumptions about co-optation, which are simultaneously too hard, and too easy, on feminist movements. They are too hard because they can overlook points where activists did challenge patriarchal closures in the creation of the state. They are too easy because they ignore how feminists did not passively accept state policies but were active agents in crafting frameworks of development within a state that was in formation. In other words, activist women who joined or worked alongside the state after 1947 did not just set aside their own ideas to suit some pre-existing model of development. Instead, their ideas helped to create the terrain of family planning as ‘women’s development’ during the post-Independence decades.

Family planning and national planning

Organised women were early and influential supporters of birth control and family planning. The question was first brought before the AIWC at its annual meeting in 1931, when Lakshmibai Rajwade introduced a resolution calling for a committee of ‘medical women’ to educate ‘the public to regulate the size of their families’.⁵ Although Rajwade’s initial attempt was unsuccessful, the AIWC did officially endorse birth control the following year, in 1932, and in 1935, the organisation invited the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger to India. The AIWC’s contraceptive advocacy during this period, as Sanjam Ahluwalia argues, was premised on the ‘elite subject locations’ of the AIWC leadership, which called for birth control as a means to uplift and improve the lives of women of lower classes and castes.⁶ The common assumption was that the AIWC’s endorsement of birth control would have little impact on its own membership since, in the words of Rameshwari Nehru, ‘it is the ignorant and poor who have no such means [of contraception] at their disposal who are crushed under the weight of frequent births and who need our guidance and advice’.⁷ This notion that poor women were most in need, either because they were unaware of birth control methods, or because their poverty increased their need to limit childbirth, was widely shared both within the AIWC and among other birth control advocates in India and abroad during this time.⁸

From this vantage point—of family planning as a welfare measure for less fortunate women—the AIWC called for birth control for multiple reasons. Activists claimed it would improve women’s health, curb population growth, address the economic crisis of the global depression, and promote eugenic improvement of the ‘race’. Their claims generally aligned with other contraceptive advocacy during the inter-war decades. Globally, the 1930s witnessed the rise of eugenic discourses, and supporters of birth control argued that regulating reproduction would produce eugenic improvement. In India particularly, these eugenic concerns often fused with anxieties about the growth of population, a fear that crystallised with the publication of the 1931 census. At the same time, a growing awareness of India’s dismally high rates of maternal and infant mortality in comparison with other countries pushed feminists and others to argue that Indian mothers ought to have fewer children, and have them less frequently.⁹ In short, during the 1930s, AIWC women constructed a multipurpose rationale to support birth control, arguing that it could simultaneously address the public health, economic and population concerns of the emergent nation, while also improving the welfare of its most disadvantaged women.

As Independence approached, one key strand within this rationale gained in strength: that family planning was a prerequisite for national development. This argument, which the Indian government would eventually adopt in successive Five-Year Plans, suggested that birth control would curb Indian ‘overpopulation’, thereby bringing population numbers into line with national economic capacity, and creating the conditions for future growth. Activists in the women’s movement connected this rationale to their claims about women’s welfare within the new nation, arguing that family planning was essential to bring women into this national economic project. Making this claim was not necessarily a shift among AIWC women as birth control resolutions in the 1930s had similarly linked family planning to national economic progress and welfare. However, in the 1940s and 1950s, women brought this argument directly into the institutions and structures of national planning, and as we shall see, family planning became one way that organised women inserted their voices and aims into the planning process.

An early example of this move is the report, Woman’s Role in Planned Economy (WRPE). The WRPE was an outcome of the Congress Party’s National Planning Committee (NPC), established in 1938 under Jawaharlal Nehru’s chairmanship to create a programme for India’s planned development. The NPC’s subcommittee on women, which published the WRPE in 1947, was led by Lakshmibai Rajwade and included many leading figures of the women’s movement, such as Aruna Asaf Ali, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Rameshwari Nehru, Hansa Mehta, Sarojini Naidu, Begum Sharifah Hamid Ali and Muthulakshmi Reddi.¹⁰ In a chapter on ‘Birth Control or Limitation of the Family’, the WRPE made its case for connecting family planning to national development. The authors begin from a Neo-Malthusian premise that increasing population numbers would lead to impoverishment, and suggest that limiting the number of children would ‘help to relieve the people of poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, and other miseries due to over population’. Therefore, family limitation is in the interests of ‘the children, the parents as well as the nation’.¹¹ The report also adopts a ‘eugenic point of view’ to add, ‘the Indian stock is definitely deteriorating’. To remedy this racial deterioration, the WRPE calls for the ‘right kinds of persons [to] marry’, that they properly space their children, and that they limit their children to suit their family income. The report concludes these goals ‘can be achieved if men and women have sufficient knowledge of the methods of birth control’.¹²

In the WRPE, birth control thus emerges as a kind of welfare measure, designed to alleviate poverty and improve health. This argument for birth control, as I have argued elsewhere, moves away from the WRPE’s own critiques of reproductive oppression and familial patriarchies that appear in other parts of the text.¹³ But if the birth control recommendations were at odds with these more radical critiques, they were aligned with other NPC subcommittees that addressed population and family planning. The subcommittee on population, for instance, lamented the ‘dysgenic’ practices of the Indian population and its excessive increase.¹⁴ The subcommittee on health called attention to ‘too many and too frequent births’, which added to the ‘prevailing poverty’ of the country.¹⁵ However, in contrast to the other reports, the WRPE consistently highlighted the critical role of women within this nexus of population, health and poverty. Birth control was a measure to improve women’s health, they argued, and a means to support women’s roles within national economic planning. This laid the groundwork for the AIWC to claim—as it would throughout the 1940s and 1950s—that family planning was a critical terrain for women’s leadership in national planning.

Hansa Mehta, a member of the NPC’s subcommittee on women, connected family planning, national planning and women in this way in her presidential address to the AIWC in 1946:

Woman shall have a right to limit her family. It is the woman who has to suffer bearing children, looking after them and bringing them up in a civilized way. The right to decide the family should therefore belong to her. Woman should be conscious of this right which she must learn to exercise for her own good, for the good of the family and for the good of the country. India is over-populated and its population is going up while her resources are limited. Unless something is done to check this upward curve of the population, poverty, starvation and all the evils that follow in their train will be our lot.¹⁶

In Mehta’s terms, birth control is a woman’s right because of her responsibilities toward her children; women’s reproductive labour is thus at the centre of her analysis of contraception. However, Mehta also harnesses this labour to the service of the nation, and specifically to national problems of overpopulation. Women’s right to birth control is thus of national benefit since they can bring into balance the relationship between resources and population within India. The cause of expanding women’s rights, and of easing their reproductive burdens, is thus perfectly aligned with national population policies. Mehta leaves little room for these interests to diverge since she insists that women must exercise their reproductive rights for the ‘good of the family and for the good of the country’.

Mehta’s assumption of unity among women, family and nation differed from a more radical and anti-patriarchal call for birth control that had been advanced by some in the women’s movement during the 1930s. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, for instance, had condemned a ‘masculine-dominated society [that] always stresses the importance of women as a breeder’, and called for birth control to free women ‘from the penalty of undesired motherhood’.¹⁷ Outside the women’s movement, organisations like the anti-caste Self Respect Movement had similarly supported contraception as a means to challenge the patriarchal family.¹⁸ While these voices never became dominant within Indian debates on birth control, they do point toward a more radical conception of rights that distanced contraception from women’s duties to either family or nation.

Yet, as Independence approached, the AIWC continued to connect women’s right to birth control and the nation’s need for population control as the central framework for its contraceptive advocacy. A few months after Mehta’s address, the organisation drafted the ‘Indian Woman’s Charter of Rights and Duties’ with the aim of securing for women their rights within the national state. The charter contained a specific provision for birth control: ‘Woman shall have a right to limit her family. It will be the duty of the state to provide the necessary knowledge to married women who desire to have it for health and economic reasons only through recognised hospitals or maternity homes’.¹⁹ As in Mehta’s address, the AIWC document takes a significant step to frame ‘family limitation’ as a component of rights for women. But in contrast to Mehta’s emphasis on women exercising these rights for familial and national benefit, the charter introduces the state as the guarantor of women’s contraceptive rights via a system of ‘hospitals’ and ‘maternity homes’. Moreover, in turning the focus from women onto the state, the charter narrows the reasons for state intervention in birth control. The government’s responsibilities are limited to ‘married women’, who are assumed to need contraception for ‘health and economic reasons’. Within the context of the AIWC contraceptive discourse, the ‘health’ reasons refer to high rates of maternal and infant mortality and call for contraception as a means for women to space births. The ‘economic’ reasons, as we have seen, reference Neo-Malthusian claims about the dangers of a growing population, which was marked as a cause of poverty and as an impediment to national development.

On one level, the AIWC’s turn toward nation and state could be read as a savvy political move designed to link contraceptive advocacy to an emergent development regime, and thus advance the cause of birth control. Reading historical intent is always difficult, and it is certainly possible that some AIWC activists seized upon development to promote their own, independent, birth control priorities. Yet, on another level, the AIWC did not take the meaning of ‘development’ as fixed, and then insert birth control into a pre-existing development agenda. Rather, the organisation actively aimed to shape development priorities around its own arguments. In other words, AIWC efforts to include birth control as a means to support citizens’ health and the nation’s economy helped to redefine national development by implying that its success or failure would rest, in part, on regulating reproduction to control population. Perhaps even more importantly, the connection to development also redefined the meaning and purposes of birth control. That is, the AIWC’s insistence that contraception was necessary to develop the nation’s economy implied that poverty and prosperity were linked to reproduction, and framed birth control as a tool for poverty alleviation. Consequently, as Mehta and other AIWC leaders inferred, the state ought to provide birth control not only as a component of women’s rights to control their reproduction, but also as a means to promote its own economic development agenda.

This framing of women’s rights and responsibilities regarding contraception to align with the emerging developmental priorities of the state is evident in the creation of the Family Planning Association of India. According to its founding members, the FPAI emerged out of concerns for women, which the new organisation connected to scientific and policy expertise on birth control. As Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a former AIWC president who would become the FPAI’s first president, recounts, the inspiration to create the FPAI arose from her visit to a Bombay (now Mumbai) ‘tenement’ in 1947. Shocked by the poor health and poverty she found there, Rama Rau concluded that ‘however much our social workers tried to improve conditions, nothing could be accomplished while unlimited numbers of children continued to be born in crowded houses where expansion was impossible’. In Rama Rau’s telling, this realisation provoked her lifelong commitment to family planning as a means to control population growth and promote national development:

I knew then that I had found a new purpose in life. There was no question in my mind that I should work for family planning single-mindedly and intensively. The limiting of our population was a fundamental and pivotal necessity if we were to make the gigantic task of social and economic improvement successful.²⁰

To launch this task, the FPAI aimed to bring women’s activists together with demographers, medical practitioners and other scientific ‘experts’. Rama Rau thus invited Avabai Wadia, who was editor of the AIWC magazine, Roshni, and Mithan Lam, who served as AIWC president, into leadership roles in the FPAI. At the same time, she argued, ‘it was important to have men on the new committee’.²¹ The scientific ‘experts’ who helped found the FPAI included several prominent men—physicians, demographers and birth-control advocates. Among the organisation’s joint directors were the Bombay gynaecologist, V.N. Shirodkar, and the renowned eugenicist and sexologist, A.P. Pillay.²² The executive committee included R.D. Karve, a long-time birth-control advocate, social reformer, eugenicist and former professor of mathematics.²³ In this way, the FPAI linked the personnel and frameworks of the AIWC with emerging population and medical science to mark family planning as aligned both with the women’s movement, and with national population, health and development goals.

Soon after its founding, the FPAI lobbied the National Planning Commission to include family planning in its plans for national economic development. Avabai Wadia, tasked with drafting a memo presenting the organisation’s views, aimed to ‘express our ideas about the need for family planning—to promote the health of mothers and children, and also as a means by which population growth could be slowed—and to outline some of the ways in which this could be done’.²⁴ The resulting FPAI document, ‘The Growth of Population in Relation to the Growth of Economic Development’, outlined a programme of propaganda, clinics, training, field studies and research. It insisted that voluntary organisations operate alongside the state in order to ‘prepar[e] the minds of the people for the practice of family spacing and limitation’.²⁵ The planning commissioners were apparently willing to consider these ideas, which resonated with the Congress Party’s earlier planning exercises, with a growing transnational interest in population control as a component of planned development, and with rising concerns about population growth as documented in the 1941 and 1951 censuses.²⁶ The National Planning Commission invited Rama Rau and Wadia to sit on its Advisory Health Panel and Advisory Social Welfare Panel, respectively.²⁷ When the Planning Commission announced its First Five-Year Plan, as discussed above, its vision of family planning brought birth control into its logic of development, suggesting that contraception would help people to align their reproduction with the development goals of the Five-Year Plans.

Women as family planners

The First Five-Year Plan centred its implementation of family planning on women. It called for middle-class women volunteers to meet family planning goals and situated peasant and working-class women as their targets. Following middle-class assumptions about women’s dependent roles in both family and economy, the planning commissioners largely ignored subaltern women as producers, and mentioned them primarily as recipients of social welfare.²⁸ Simultaneously, the document distanced the state from such welfare activities, noting that ‘the main burden of organized activities for the welfare of women is to a large extent borne by voluntary agencies’ rather than by central or state governments directly.²⁹ Accordingly, in 1953, Nehru’s government approved the creation of a Central Social Welfare Board, a largely autonomous body tasked with co-ordinating collaboration between the state and non-governmental or voluntary organisations. It was headed by former AIWC president and Planning Commission member Durgabai Deshmukh, who understood ‘social welfare’ to include ‘services intended for individuals or groups in need of special attention’.³⁰ By the Second Five-Year Plan (1956–61), this focus on women and social welfare was further entrenched, and activities supporting women were located entirely under the Central Social Welfare Board.³¹ Health was included among these ‘welfare’ activities, and here the focus was on ‘family planning and other supporting programmes for raising the standard of health of the people’.³² Family planning, alongside maternal and child health more broadly, thus occupied a space between state control and the work of voluntary actors and organisations.³³ This approach, I argue in this section, opened up a new field of national activity for middle-class women, who claimed it was their right and responsibility to bring contraceptive information and technology to their needier ‘sisters’.

Women were involved at multiple levels in creating the new family planning infrastructure. At the highest levels were leaders in the FPAI and the AIWC. These women, such as Rama Rau, Wadia, Deshmukh, Raksha Saran, Renuka Ray and M.S.H. Jhabvala joined, and in some cases led, the organisations and institutions that shaped family planning. Women’s presence within these spaces meant they had a voice at the table; it also facilitated their receipt of government grants to support family planning work.³⁴ Beyond the high-level leaders who influenced policy, many other women were involved. Notable among them were ‘Honorary Family Planning Education Leaders’, who were appointed by the state to support outreach and voluntary efforts in family planning. The government drew upon organisations like the FPAI and AIWC to select these voluntary workers, who were tasked with spreading information about birth control. One example of these volunteer workers was Padmini Sengupta, who reported to the AIWC about her activities in West Bengal in 1959. Sengupta met with jute-mill workers and sweepers in the ‘slum of Barrackpore’; she also appointed a number of women family planning educators to continue outreach projects.³⁵ Her colleague, K. Meenakshi Amma, honorary family planning education leader for Kerala, reported that in April 1960 she held group meetings at Kozhencherry, Kummannoor and Kottayam. She also visited fifty houses, formed a voluntary corps for family planning at a Social Welfare Centre in Kummannoor, addressed a meeting of women’s organisations, and inaugurated a family planning camp of 300 women and 100 men.³⁶ Similarly, Prem Lata Gupta of Andhra Pradesh addressed numerous meetings in Hyderabad and in rural areas.³⁷ Other volunteer workers engaged in similar tasks. For instance, Krishna Agarwal of the AIWC worked in the Indore region. Since her husband was a doctor, Agarwal claimed, she had a greater ‘connection with the people’. In a pilot project with the FPAI, she worked with four clinics in a ‘slum area’ inhabited by 500 mill families.³⁸

These accounts, and many others like them, do not represent volunteer family planning workers as requiring specific training or expertise. Instead, literacy and an understanding of the purposes and mechanisms of birth control were the implicit qualifications.³⁹ Perhaps most important, as Agarwal suggests, was the ability to forge a ‘connection’ to the subaltern targets of family planning—figured in much family planning discourse as an undifferentiated mass of women in rural areas, or as the working-class inhabitants of urban ‘slum’ neighbourhoods. As such, volunteer family planning work opened up a potentially vast terrain of activity for literate middle-class women, who were assumed to be familiar with birth control in their own lives, to have the requisite understanding of national development goals, and to be able to reach the ordinary women whose childbearing decisions would shape the national population.

Eventually, as the scope and goals of the family planning bureaucracy became more ambitious, paid workers began to join the volunteers. For instance, the FPAI reported that while ‘voluntary members’ continued family planning outreach, in 1961, the organisation hired a full-time ‘trained social worker, Mrs. Pramila Thakore, BA’. Thakore was tasked to conduct an ‘educational programme of meetings, lectures, film shows, etc. for audiences drawn mainly from the lower income groups’. In her first year in the position, Thakore ran 349 meetings with a total attendance of more than 73,000 people, both in the city of Bombay and in the outskirts and rural areas, using the FPAI’s mobile unit.⁴⁰ Alongside social workers like Thakore, the ‘lady doctor’ was another critical paid worker in the family planning bureaucracy. Both government and private organisations lamented the scarcity of women medical practitioners and sought them to staff clinics.

Whether volunteer or paid, family planning workers claimed a gendered sphere of activity. So long as subaltern women were the targets of reproductive regulation, literate, middle-class women volunteers and paid social workers and doctors were essential mediators between these women and the state. Middle-class family planners thus represented their labours as a form of national service that called for women’s leadership. They claimed to serve those figured as less fortunate, a task deemed essential for national progress. Thus, according to Prem Lata Gupta, speaking as president of the Andhra Pradesh Branch of the FPAI, women’s voluntary service would bridge the gap between national goals—which required the ‘control of population’—and the ‘welfare of the individual and the family [in which] women can and have to play the most vital and intimate role’.⁴¹ Women volunteers could best explain to other women the benefits and methods of family limitation, thus ‘educating them properly’ into appropriate reproductive roles. AIWC members insisted that these efforts to spread the message of family planning ultimately benefitted poor women and, indeed, ‘would usher in a new age for the women of India…. Instead of merely slaving in the name of family, love, wifehood and motherhood, women gain better health, self respect and leisure’.⁴²

Yet, as women volunteers reminded themselves, poor women could never gain these benefits through control over their own reproductive capacities; they required the gendered service of middle-class family planners. As Dr. Aleyamma George of the AIWC argued:

Honestly speaking the educated and well-to-do class need not require any advice at all…. But it is in the slum areas among the poorer classes that this message has to be spread. We have seen women with bitter tears coming to us and talking to us about their miserable lives. They are not able to give proper clothing for their children…. [Family planning] is really an uplift of the population. We are trying to bring them to a certain standard which is not the animal standard, if I may be excused such a word.⁴³

George’s comments demarcate two groups of women: those whose duty was to serve by offering family planning advice, and those in need of service to control their reproduction. This divide between the middle-class family planner and her subaltern service targets highlights a ‘bifurcation of the female subject’ that Asha Nadkarni locates in the aftermath of Indian Independence. In Nadkarni’s terms, even as ‘bourgeois rights for women [were] written into the Indian Constitution’, working-class women were ‘forgotten as productive subjects, [and] targeted instead under the purview of education, maternal and child health, and family planning’.⁴⁴ Family planners represented themselves as citizen-subjects within this bifurcated regime, drawing upon their new legal rights as women alongside new opportunities for higher education and professionalisation. Family planning offered middle-class women a terrain to assert their authority and professionalism as volunteers, social workers and doctors who could spread the message of family planning. To enact this new citizenship and service, however, they depended upon poor, less educated urban and rural women. In short, the middle-class family planner’s ability to represent herself as a dutiful citizen-supporter of national progress depended upon her representation of subaltern women as recipients of social welfare whom she could bring into national development through reproductive regulation.

Questioning family planning

Although family planners claimed to provide social welfare to women, the women whom they targeted for these welfare services sometimes questioned this logic. Although archival evidence of the encounters between family planners and their targets is limited, we may find some trace of this questioning in the records kept by family planners themselves. These records, which were transmitted in sporadic fashion to the FPAI and AIWC throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, document the day-to-day work of family planners. They list the places they travelled to, the meetings they held, the homes they visited and the classes they conducted. These accounts are not, of course, an unmediated record of targeted women’s voices, which are reported here within the language and ideological frameworks of the family planner herself. Moreover, their voices only appear in a fragmented form, and often only in the aggregate; reports note that women of a particular village, and occasionally of a specific caste or religious group, questioned or refused the family planner’s message.⁴⁵ Thus, without assuming that these texts reveal the targeted women’s full experiences with family planners, I read them to examine the on-the-ground negotiations that attended the FPAI’s and AIWC’s family planning efforts. I suggest that the fragments of women’s responses appearing in these texts disrupt family planners’ attempts to connect birth control to women’s welfare on the one hand, and to national development on the other. They also challenge family planners’ claims to represent women’s interests within development logics and point to alternative meanings that women assigned to their own reproduction.

Several family planning accounts lament the difficulty of reaching and communicating with women. For instance, Visakha Dixit, the AIWC’s member in charge of family planning in Madhya Pradesh, reported that she convened a meeting of village women in Sanver in Indore district to explain the ‘importance of family planning’. About eighty women attended, and Dixit ‘had personal talks with them about their health problems’. However, she concluded glumly, ‘there was very little response to family planning. Mostly the women seemed to be against it’.⁴⁶ Dixit’s AIWC colleague in West Bengal, Aroti Dutt, confronted additional difficulties when working in Darjeeling district. She was unable to arrange any large meetings due to bad weather and was reduced to speaking only to smaller groups of women. Moreover, as a Bengali speaker, Dutt found it difficult to communicate with her target audience. She wrote that it was ‘important to know the local language Nepali to be able to speak to the women directly’, and she decided that she would learn the language before visiting Darjeeling again in six months.⁴⁷ Both Dutt and Dixit voice an anxiety that the targets of their efforts are uninterested in what they have to offer and may even be actively opposed to it. Representing family planning as a form of service to such unwilling and uninterested women thus became a deeply problematic exercise, and family planners’ reports reveal a tense negotiation between justifying their efforts while grappling with limited results. Some family planners claimed to tackle this problem through their own persistence and innovative methods. An AIWC worker in Belgaum, for instance, acknowledged that the ‘villagers…at first felt shy’, but eventually discussed the subject with her. Because they were ‘not ready’ to attend government dispensaries and hospitals, she herself began to carry and distribute contraceptives. Due to these efforts, she suggested, ‘village women were very keen to know the methods and they also demanded the means for Family Planning’.⁴⁸

Nevertheless, although some women seemed to accept contraceptive advice and techniques, many others questioned the need to limit their childbearing, and thus challenged the very basis of a development logic that made fertility reduction essential to economic growth. Rama Rau reported on these challenges when describing her attempts to persuade ‘village women’ to adopt contraception; they refused, arguing that children were necessary in every household because they could tend the fields and help with domestic work. Moreover, they insisted, children were an absolute necessity to their parents in old age.⁴⁹ These claims resonate with the findings of feminist scholars, who have since shown that the economic value of children within agrarian households was a crucial factor in driving families’ childbearing decisions. Since children in these households produced more than they consumed from an early age, and since adult children provided the only available form of care and support for the elderly, large families were a rational choice for many agrarian households. In some cases, they were foundational to the household’s survival.⁵⁰ Rama Rau herself seemed somewhat persuaded by these women’s ‘reasoned and thoughtful’ comments. She admits that her ‘only answer to these arguments was that spacing children would result in healthier mothers and children, and such large families would no longer be necessary’.⁵¹ Yet these assertions about an imagined future of healthy mothers and small families, as even Rama Rau acknowledged, had limited bearing on women’s choices in the present, where they confronted high rates of child mortality and an absence of welfare supports for the elderly.

In urban contexts as well, family planners were confounded by women who rejected the connection between large families and poverty. For instance, Visalakshi Narayanswamy, a family planning worker in Tamil Nadu, reported on three days spent in Madurai, where she led a disappointingly small meeting of ‘only’ a dozen people in an industrial workers’ neighbourhood. There, one woman ‘proudly declared that she was not in favour of Family Planning, as all the members of her family were working and earning enough to maintain a whole family’.⁵² The unnamed woman’s comments turned the economic logic of family planning on its head: if family planning was meant to limit the numbers of children to suit a family’s budget, then a sufficiently large income would eliminate the need to curtail reproduction. The suggestion here is that the family’s earning capacities transcended the need for reproductive control. If family planning were solely a requirement for the ‘poor’, the Madurai worker brought up her family members’ wages to refuse this label and assert her right to have as many children as she wanted. For Narayanswamy, however, this argument was only intelligible as a refusal to accede to the logics of national economic planning. For the nation’s plans to succeed, Narayanswamy implied, women like the Madurai worker would have to curtail their reproduction regardless of their individual or family circumstances. The worker’s refusal thus points to the limitations of the family planning workers’ claims to mediate between ordinary women and state-led development. When these two came into conflict, family planners like Narayanswamy consistently privileged development logics at the expense of ordinary women’s claims.

Conclusion

As we have seen, leaders of the women’s movement took their longstanding support for birth control into the process of state-led planned development during the post-Independence decades, arguing that family planning was a critical component of national planning. In making this case, they joined and shaped an emerging national and transnational consensus of demographers, economists, public health officials and other social scientists who agreed that population was an important variable in development planning, and suggested that birth control measures could help to align population growth with development needs. Women leaders in the AIWC and FPAI thus lobbied to include family planning in the Five-Year Plans and gave shape to the plans’ implementation on the ground. Moreover, through their involvement with family planning, I have argued, women family planners carved out a space for their public work as mediators between rural and working-class women on the one hand, and the state’s development regime on the other. They drew upon the middle-class women’s movement’s claim to serve poor women, and framed family planning as a form of social welfare that would bring the fruits of economic development to rural and working-class women. Yet, some women who were targeted by family planners, as we have seen, refused incorporation into national planning on these terms. They claimed alternative meanings for their reproductive lives and labours, suggesting that they did not need to curtail their reproduction because many children were a benefit, not a drain on their family’s welfare.

Attention to family planning thus makes visible an important arena of women’s movement activity during the 1950s and 1960s. Feminists argued that family planning represented a form of social welfare conducted both for and by women, while insisting that they were best positioned to mediate between ordinary women and the state’s development logics. In making these claims, family planners did not simply set aside their own agendas to passively accept existing state-led plans. Rather, through shaping policy and its implementation, family planners actively helped to make reproduction into a terrain for development interventions into women’s bodies and lives. In this sense, their family planning work was not necessarily co-opted by the state. I suggest, instead, that they worked within the state to advance their goals and, in doing so, pushed national planning processes to embrace family planning.

However, the women’s movement’s commitment to family planning advanced a population control agenda that ultimately had little interest in hearing the voices of the ordinary women whom they targeted. Puzzled by women’s apparent lack of interest, and dismissive of women’s alternative interpretations of their own reproduction, family planners continued to insist upon the development rationales of family planning. As a result, the promise of feminist efforts in family planning was less a two-way mediation between ordinary women and development goals than a claim to bring women’s reproductive lives more firmly into the embrace of the developmental state.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants in the workshop on ‘Women, Nation-Building and Feminism’, held at Cambridge University in September 2018. My thanks as well to Anjali Bharadwaj Datta and Uditi Sen for their careful feedback on several drafts of this piece. I also acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers for South Asia journal for their helpful queries and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Planning Commission, The First Five-Year Plan (New Delhi: Government of India, 1953), p. 522.

2. For example, the landmark report, Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (1975), refused the logic that family planning would by itself improve women’s status, and called instead for education, employment and an increase in the age of marriage. Some feminist demographers in the 1970s shared similar views. Ashwini Tambe, Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws (Urbana/Chicago/Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2019), pp. 114–7. More recently, feminists have been central to challenging the ideologies and impacts of India’s family planning programmes: see, for example, SAMA: Resource Group for Women and Health [http://www.samawomenshealth.in/, accessed 31 Jan. 2020].

3. Of course, not all women’s activists supported population control, and the middle-class women’s movement did not represent the entirety of feminist action during this period. The field is wider, and Leftist and peasant movements raised the question of women in radically different ways.

4. Following from this argument about co-optation, scholars have had little to say about the 1950s in their otherwise comprehensive analyses of Indian feminism: see, for example, Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993). Similarly, Mary John’s thoughtful analysis of the legacies of women’s movements has little discussion of the immediate post–Independence period: Mary John, ‘Feminist Perspectives on Family and Marriage: A Historical View’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 40, no. 8 (19–25 Feb. 2005), pp. 712–5. Nevertheless, in a separate essay, John problematises assumptions about the ‘quietism’ of women’s movements post-Independence, suggesting that perhaps this may have been ‘more apparent than real’: Mary John, ‘Gender, Development and the Women’s Movement: Problems for a History of the Present’, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (ed.), Signposts: Gender Issues in Post–Independence India (New Delhi: Kali/Zubaan, 2000), p. 108.

5. All India Women’s Conference, 6th Session, Madras, 28 Dec. 1931–1 Jan. 1932, p. 81a, AIWC Papers, Margaret Cousins Library (hereafter, AIWC Papers, Cousins Library), Delhi.

6. Sanjam Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877–1947 (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 86. Barbara Ramusack points out that AIWC resolutions aimed to transfer contraceptive information from ‘the elite, urban-based women of the AIWC’ to ‘nonelite women’ who were not represented within the organisation: Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Embattled Advocates: The Debate over Birth Control in India, 1920–1940’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1989), pp. 34–64 [43].

7. All India Women’s Conference, 7th Session, Lucknow, 28 Dec. 1932–1 Jan. 1933, p. 95, AIWC Papers, Cousins Library.

8. For instance, Margaret Sanger’s efforts in the United States centred on reaching poor women, including African American women, through birth control clinics: Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), pp. 72–81. Among eugenic and Neo-Malthusian circles in India, there was concern that, in the words of S. Chandrasekhar, ‘those of the upper and middle classes who can bring up moderate-sized families are resorting to contraceptives and those who really need them are denied that aid’: S. Chandrasekhar, ‘Population Pressure in India’, in Pacific Affairs, Vol. 16, no. 2 (June 1943), p. 181.

9. On the relationship between eugenics, population anxieties and campaigns for birth control, see Ahluwalia, Reproductive Restraints; and Sarah Hodges, ‘South Asia’s Eugenic Past’, in Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 228–42.

10. National Planning Committee, Woman’s Role in Planned Economy: Report of the Sub-Committee (Bombay: Vora & Co., 1947).

11. Ibid., pp. 174–5. Neo-Malthusians adopted the principles of Thomas Malthus, who argued that human population growth threatened to outpace resources available; however, unlike Malthus, Neo-Malthusians supported birth control as one solution to this imbalance between population and resources.

12. Ibid., p. 175.

13. Mytheli Sreenivas, Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021, forthcoming), chap. 3.

14. National Planning Committee, Report of the Sub-Committee on Population (Bombay: Vora & Co., 2nd ed., 1949).

15. National Planning Committee, National Health: Report of the Sub-Committee on Health (Bombay: Vora & Co., 1948), p. 19.

16. Hansa Mehta, in Roshni, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Feb. 1946), pp. 19–20.

17. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, ‘Women’s Movement in India’, in The Awakening of Indian Women (Madras: Everyman’s Press, 1939), pp. 32–3.

18. Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘Conjugality, Contraception and the Politics of Sexuality in Late Colonial India’, in Srimati Basu and Lucinda Ramberg (eds), Conjugality Unbound: Sexual Economies, State Regulation and the Marital Form in India (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2015), pp. 30–6.

19. ‘Draft of Indian Woman’s Charter of Rights and Duties’, in Roshni, Vol. 1, no. 5 (June 1946), p. 24.

20. Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, An Inheritance: The Memoirs of Dhanvanthi Rama Rau (London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 243.

21. Ibid., p. 246.

22. Ibid.

23. Avabai Wadia, The Light Is Ours: Memoirs and Movements (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, 2001), p. 496.

24. Ibid., p. 505.

25. Rama Rau, An Inheritance, p. 253; and Wadia, The Light Is Ours, p. 505.

26. On national and transnational interest in population control, see, for example, Mohan Rao, From Population Control to Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004).

27. Rama Rau, An Inheritance, p. 253; and Beryl Suitters, Be Brave and Angry: Chronicles of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (London: International Planned Parenthood Federation, 1973), p. 45.

28. I use the term ‘subaltern’ to reference non-elite women, who were marked as different from the middle-class family planner by virtue of class, caste, religion and/or tribal/Adivasi identity. Most importantly, these differences marked them as in need of family planning services. On the middle-class assumptions of the planning commissioners, see Nirmala Buch, ‘State Welfare Policy and Women, 1950–1975’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 33, no. 17 (25 April–1 May 1998), pp. WS18–WS20.

29. Planning Commission, The First Five-Year Plan, p. 124, quoted in Buch, ‘State Welfare Policy’, p. WS19.

30. Deshmukh distinguishes between the state’s provision of ‘social services’, which are intended for an entire community, and ‘social welfare’, which targets those with special needs. As a member of the Planning Commission, Deshmukh advocated for the government to commit funds for family planning; this funding was then administered through the Central Social Welfare Board as supporting social welfare for women (p. 44): Durgabai Deshmukh, Chintaman and I (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1980), pp. 60, 44.

31. For a discussion of the operation of the Central Social Welfare Board, see Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Not Part of the Plan? Welfarism, State Feminism and Indian Socialism in the Nehru Years’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 44, no. 2 (April 2021), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2021.1884790.

32. Planning Commission, The Second Five-Year Plan (Delhi: Government of India, 1956), p. 533; see also Buch, ‘Welfare Policy and Women’, p. WS19.

33. This interrelationship between state planning and reliance on voluntary efforts may have been characteristic of Indian socialism more broadly: Taylor C. Sherman, ‘“A New Type of Revolution”: Socialist Thought in India, 1940s–1960s’, in Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 21, no. 4 (2018), pp. 485–504.

34. According to Deshmukh, the vast majority of state-allocated family planning funds in the First Five-Year Plan—Rs5 million—went to voluntary organisations to fund their activities: Deshmukh, Chintaman and I, p. 38.

35. Padmini Sengupta, ‘Report of 8 August 1959’, AIWC Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter, AIWC Papers, NMML), file no. 430.

36. K. Meenakshi Amma, ‘Report for the Month of April 1960’, AIWC Papers, NMML, file no. 430.

37. P.L. Gupta, ‘Report for July–September 1959’, AIWC Papers, NMML, file no. 430.

38. Krishna Agarwal, ‘Report of Work by Mrs. Krishna Agarwal in the Indore Region’, AIWC Papers, NMML, reel 43, file no. 146.

39. Through the 1950s, mechanisms for birth control would have included contraceptive foams and jellies, and possibly pessaries or diaphragms for women who could visit a physician. Some family planners may have suggested cheaper barrier methods, like a cloth dipped in oil, to women who could not see a physician. New technologies exploded onto the scene in the mid 1960s, most notably the Intra-Uterine Contraceptive Device (IUD or IUCD) and the hormonal birth control pill.

40. ‘Report of the Family Planning Association of India from January 1961 to December 1963’, USAID Mission to India/Public Health Division, National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter cited as NARA), RG 286, entry P458: subject files 1961–1967, container 8.

41. Prem Lata Gupta, ‘Women’s Role in Promotion of Family Planning and in Raising the Status of Women in India’, in Bharatiya Grameen Mahila Sangh and Central Institute of Research and Training in Public Co-Operation, ‘Status of Women and Family Planning in India’, unpublished report, p. 3.

42. ‘Role of Voluntary Organizations in Family Planning’, AIWC Papers, NMML, file no. 989.

43. Aleyamma George, ‘Speeches Delivered at the 31st Annual Session of the AIWC (December 1961)’, AIWC Papers, NMML, reel no. 42, file no. 131. George’s comments echo Rameshwari Nehru, who had also suggested that poor women were most in need of birth control some thirty years earlier, as noted above. By the time George was speaking, in 1961, some demographic data suggested a small fertility differential between urban and rural women, and between wealthier and poorer women, though the difference was slight and the data was not definitive. See, for example, Kingsley Davis, ‘Demographic Fact and Policy in India’, in The Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, Vol. 22, no. 3 (July 1944), pp. 256–78. George does not reference demography directly, but her claims continue the longstanding assumption that the poor, not the rich, need to control their fertility.

44. Asha Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 139.

45. Family planners typically left caste or religious distinctions implicit, but, as I have argued elsewhere, these distinctions were nevertheless critical in crafting a normative Hindu citizenship for the middle-class family planner: Sreenivas, Reproductive Politics, chap. 4.

46. Visakha Dixit, ‘Report’, AIWC Papers, NMML, reel no. 43, file no. 146.

47. Aroti Dutt, ‘Report’, AIWC Papers, NMML, reel no. 43, file no. 146.

48. ‘Consolidated Report of the Family Planning Education Work in the Year 1960 February to 1961 April’, AIWC Papers, NMML, reel no. 43, file no. 146. Other initiatives acknowledged the limitations of middle-class family planners by seeking other mediators, such as the FPAI’s ‘Grandmothers Project’, which recruited older married women in villages to mentor younger women. ‘Report of the Family Planning Association of India (from January 1961 to December 1963)’, USAID Mission to India/Public Health Division, NARA, OCM to SOC 1961–64, p. 4.

49. Rama Rau, An Inheritance, p. 278.

50. Betsy Hartmann, Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1995), pp. 1–11.

51. Rama Rau, An Inheritance, pp. 278–9.

52. Visalakshi Narayanswamy, ‘Report of the Family Planning Work’, in All India Women’s Conference Report (Jan.–Dec. 1966), p. 57, AIWC Papers, Cousins Library.