The Indian Heritage of New Hampshire and Northern New England Book

This book was excellent and extremely readable. Another page turner. In fact, it will be one of the most powerful books I read in 2010.

The author makes the simple and extremely important point that the majority of Americans went from being very suspicious of birth control in 1910 to being pretty comfortable with it as a fact of life by the late 1920s. Religious institutions were the most discouraging of discussion on these new methods, and the heart of these tensions was the purpose of marriage (for raising kids, or for being in love?). Tobin traces the way social changed happened through newspaper reporting in both radical (feminist) newspapers and church records. The book left me staring at the ceiling for days, contemplating the profound power of birth control in the untold revolutions of the 1920s.