We are pleased to invite you to the fourth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025/26 Spring semester!
Samira K. Mehta
(University of Colorado Boulder)
“God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion”
Thursday, May 21, 2026
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Most people today understand contraception as central to women’s liberation, and when the birth control pill arrived in 1960, the media thought it would usher in a sexual revolution. But a surprising number of religious Americans in the mid-twentieth century also saw contraception as part of God’s plan—a tool to create happy, prosperous American families in the post–World War II era. In “God Bless the Pill,” Samira K. Mehta traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans. They hoped birth control methods would curb divorce rates by encouraging sexually dynamic marriages and families unstrained by “too many” children—thereby creating a postwar upwardly mobile middle class. Religious leaders also promoted this understanding of the family as tied to Cold War capitalism and encouraged neither racial nor gender equity. But then came the backlash, both from the Right—which failed to anticipate the feminist potential of contraception—and from the Left, where women, particularly women of color, sought to ensure that birth control was a tool of liberation rather than one rooted in patriarchal and racial oppression. Ultimately, Mehta offers compelling new insights into the way religion accommodates itself to social, technological, and medical change.
Who?
Samira K. Mehta is an 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 religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. She has also published a book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023) and which appeared on Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023,” where it was called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.” God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the 1990s. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures. She also serves as a series editor for the North American Religion series at NYU Press. Professor Mehta has been a Research Associate and the Colorado Scholar in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and visiting associate professor of North American Religion at Harvard Divinity School and has been a Larson Fellow of the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. She holds degrees from Swarthmore College, Harvard University, and Emory University.
