Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture on Gender and Human Rights: Dr. Samira K. Mehta on “God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion”
In observance of International Women’s Day, HBI is honored to host Dr. Samira K. Mehta as the 2025 Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture on Gender and Human Rights guest speaker. Dr. Mehta is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado – Boulder, where she currently serves as the Director of Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States.
In the middle of the 20th century, Protestants, Jews, and even some Catholics were in an alliance to expand birth control access to American women. Religious leaders joined medical authorities to make birth control respectable. Yet these efforts to expand access sometimes found these same leaders distancing themselves from the birth control movement’s feminist underpinnings. In this talk, Professor Mehta shows how the mainstreaming of birth control in the middle of the 20th century has more in common than one might expect with the family values rhetoric that would limit reproductive rights in the late 20th and early 21st century.
The Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture Series was created by Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law founder Sylvia Neil and her husband, Dan Fischel, in memory of Sylvia’s late sister, Diane Markowicz, to honor her commitment to gender equality and social justice. The Lecture Series features internationally renowned scholars, judges, and activists discussing ways of negotiating the tensions between gender equality and religious or cultural norms.
This event is in person and online. Click “Register” to attend in-person.
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