"Who has told you to do this thing?": toward a feminist interpretation of contraceptive diffusion in Rhodesia, 1970-1980.

Contraceptives are at the center of countless dramas of "everyday resistance" involving struggles for power between genders and generations (Scott 1985). In most demographic scholarship such dramas are obscured by emphasis on the "big picture" of broad demographic changes. This article is part of the intellectual movement toward the goal of viewing such huge social transformations from the ground on which they occur-the daily lives of men and women-in order to challenge existing demographic descriptions of fertility change that ignore conflict resistance and subversion in the ways fertility is regulated. (excerpt)