Introduction to Health, Housing, and Family Planning

While concerns of health, housing, and family planning may now seem like unrelated concerns, to social reformers in the United States and Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, these were inseparable issues. Reformers championed the removal of slums and tenements, as they linked poor housing to poor public health. Some promoted family planning and birth control methods as a solution to urban crowding and poverty. While some of these reform crusades may have been motivated by ethnic prejudice (especially against recent immigrant populations) and eugenics, their basic ideas on suitable housing, family planning rights, and family health revolutionized both the family and society in the modern era.

Reformers viewed the family as a valuable agent of positive social change. The temperance movement advocated family abstention from alcohol as a means of promoting general health, religious ideals, and protecting women and children by reducing incidences of domestic violence. "The Fruits of Intemperance," "Family Temperance Pledge," and the "Shadow of Danger" all feature images associated with anti-alcohol campaigns directed at family participation or family safety.

Much like temperance crusaders, public health officials and the medical community also targeted the family. Beginning in the 1890s, major U.S. cities began to replace tenement slums with specially designed apartment blocks with indoor plumbing, clean water, more ample ventilation, and working windows—all features that were considered to improve the health of families living in the developments. The trend of family-centered housing boomed after World War II (1938–1945). The explosion of the suburbs removed affluent and middle-class families from densely populated urban areas. Advertisements billed suburban developments as clean, safe, and family-oriented. However, after the birth of the suburbs, many low-income and minority families remained in urban neighborhoods that had seen scant improvements since the turn-of-the century reforms.

Finally, the birth control revolution fundamentally transformed the modern family. Family planning permitted couples to have fewer children. Advances in medicine and disease control reduced childhood mortality, making the once-common loss of a child an increasingly scarce event as the twentieth century progressed. Early family planning advocates targeted low-income and minority (often immigrant) populations, but use of birth control rapidly spread among women of all socioeconomic classes.

Today, family planning and medicine once again intersect. China instituted a controversial one child per family policy to limit population growth. In developed nations, family planning has gained a new meaning—planning and attempting to have children. "A Few Good Sperm" and "Babies on Ice" describe new and sometimes contentious options for having children and forming families.