Christine Adams is a professor of history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her teaching and research interests are Family History, Women's and Gender History, European History, Middle Ages-present with an emphasis on social and cultural history. She has written two books, Poverty, Charity and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Illinois Press, 2010) and A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Penn State Press, 2000).
The recent controversy over insurance coverage for contraception has vividly made the point that feminists have argued for years. The culture wars over reproductive rights never have been primarily about fetal personhood, the right to life, or now, religious freedom: they have always been about the control of women’s bodies and sexuality.
