he seminar investigates the Italian ‘family planning’ movement – its ideologies, programmes and impacts – as a case study illustrating the global interconnectedness of discourses of sexual modernisation in the early Cold War era. While the Italian FP movement was highly impactful in campaigning for the legalisation of birth control (1971), its ideology, strongly influenced by transnational networks advocating population control in the Global South, was marked by a consistent social hierarchisation of reproductive bodies. The case study forms part of a AHRC Leadership Fellowship project on the emergence of notions of reproductive rights in Europe in the global context (1945-1995).
Maud is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and specialises in social, political and gender history of Europe after 1945. She holds a PhD from the EUI Florence and has published on European second-wave feminism, 1968, women and work, West European communism in the Cold War. She leads Glasgow’s Centre for Gender History.