The Birth Control Clinic in a Marketplace World is the first book to chart the origins and evolution of the charity birth control clinic movement in the United States from the teens through the 1970s, a period that witnessed dramatic transformation in the goods and services such clinics provided. Rose Holz exposes the virtually unexamined relationship between Planned Parenthood and the commercial marketplace sphere. Challenging more thanthirty years of historiography on birth control, Holz sheds new light on battles over reproductive rights through her dissection of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America within the context of the commercial birth control world. Revealing that it would be Planned Parenthood's engagement to charity -- the argument it once used against the profit-driven exploitation of the marketplace -- that would put precisely those women it hoped to assist in dangerous situations, she asks such probing questions as: What were the meanings attached to the provision of birth control and its commercial distribution? How in turn were these meanings used as sources of power? The project draws onrich primary documents and oral histories to answer these questions and to examine the historical role of the local birth control clinic in the modern marketplace.

The birth of the clinic -- Rising above -- Old habits are hard to break -- New habits are formed.