Running After Pills

Kaler examines how "modern" contraceptive technologies, such as the pill and the Deop-Provera injection, were embroiled in gender and generation conflicts, and in the national liberation struggle, in Zimbabwe during the 1960s and 1970s. Based on extensive oral and archival research, the book shows the ways in which fertility and control over reproduction within marriage and the family influenced the development of the "imagined community" of the nascent Zimbabwean nation. Kaler's book reveals the numerous intricate connections among these different domains of social life. Her book also shows how ideas about gender influenced the opposition of African nationalists to the new contraceptive technologies, and played a key role in shaping the nationalists' visions for an independent Zimbabwe. On a more general level, Kaler's book provides a major foundation for understanding the fertility revolution in southern Africa, as manifested in smaller family sizes and widespread acceptance and use of contraceptives. The enormity of change has hitherto been primarily the domain of statisticians and demographers. By focusing on the very beginning of the contraceptive revolution in Zimbabwe, Kaler gives demographic change a place in a social history that highlights the voices and experiences of those who actually participated in this revolution.