, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior, among other outlets.
Littlejohn applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics, and reported the following:
An excerpt from the first full paragraph on page 99:Visit Krystale E. Littlejohn's website.In this chapter, I focus on the fifty women who had experienced a pregnancy to demonstrate how broader patterns of unchecked gender inequality--not "careless" contraceptive behavior--limited women's ability to prevent pregnancy and control their fertility on their own terms... Whereas the previous chapters focused more heavily on gender-normative behavior, this chapter focuses on elucidating the social contexts in which women engaged in non-normative behavior.This page does a fairly nice job of summarizing what I do in Just Get on the Pill. It doesn't explain what aspect of gender inequality I focus on in the book (birth control responsibility), but I appreciate that it addresses the way that race intersects with gender in women's experiences trying to prevent pregnancy with partners who do not always cooperate with using condoms. In the rest of Just Get on the Pill, I focus on how women are socialized to accept primary responsibility for preventing pregnancy and face intense social pressure to adhere to gender norms that outline pregnancy prevention as their job. Page 99 is part of the introduction to Chapter 4 (titled, "Selective Selection") where I discuss how black and less advantaged women resisted gender norms that held them responsible for using prescription birth control and instead pressed their partners to continue using condoms. I contend that if we listen to stories like those told by women in the book and in this chapter, we can learn about how our social approach to pregnancy prevention encroaches on people's reproductive freedom and, ironically, undermines their goals to prevent pregnancy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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