Author(s): Karen Weingarten; Ian Bogost (Series edited by); Christopher Schaberg (Series edited by)

Essay | Sociology | Women's Histories | Anthropology | Philosophy | Gender & Sexuality | Medicine

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In the 1970s, the invention of the home pregnancy test changed what it means to be pregnant. For the first time, women could use a technology in the privacy of their own homes that gave them a yes or no answer. That answer had the power to change the course of their reproductive lives, and it chipped away at a paternalistic culture that gave gynecologists-the majority of whom were men-control over information about women's bodies.However, while science so often promises clear-cut answers, the reality of pregnancy is often much messier. Pregnancy Test explores how the pregnancy test has not always lived up to the fantasy that more information equals more knowledge. Karen Weingarten examines the history and cultural representation of the pregnancy test to show how this object radically changed sex and pregnancy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Review: A new gem from Object Lessons. . . . A quick and quirky read. * Zoomer Magazine *
Karen Weingarten illuminates the fascinating history, politics, and culture of the pregnancy test in this kaleidoscopic and entertaining volume. It's all in there: life and death, feminist empowerment and patriarchal coercion, scientific discovery and sci-fi dystopia. Weingarten shows how a seemingly modest yet ingenious technology has profoundly shaped-and even brought into being-some of our most intimate, vulnerable, and meaning-filled moments. * Lara Freidenfelds, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America *
As anyone who has anxiously shut a bathroom door to take one knows, the home pregnancy test is a riveting plot in and of itself: within its pages, lives are made and unmade. Karen Weingarten's Pregnancy Test tells the fascinating story of how this intimate technology came to be with insight and compassion, suggesting that the strange mix of reproductive agency and reproductive surveillance the home pregnancy test has enabled in US culture will be of central importance as these private dramas become ever more encroached upon by the state. * Sarah Blackwood, Associate Professor of English, Pace University, USA *

Contents: Introduction Part One: History 1. Designing the Home Pregnancy Test 2. Hormones 3. Urine and Blood 4. The Stick Part Two: Culture 5. Tell Me Doctor 6. The Psychological Torture of a Beautiful Young Woman 7. There is No Pregnancy Without the Pregnancy Test 8. The Science Fiction of Pregnancy Testing Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Index

Author Biography: Karen Weingarten is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. Her first book was Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880-1940. She has co-edited special issues for South Atlantic Quarterly and Women's Studies Quarterly and has written about reproduction, abortion, and disability in Hypatia, Literature and Medicine, College Literature, and Medical Humanities, among other places. She writes for Nursing Clio, a peer-reviewed blog on the history of medicine and gender.