This bookm the first history of contraception for almost fifty years, provides a scholarly and highly readable account of procreation and attempts to prevent it from ancient Greece to the late twentieth century. The story, as the author shows, is not one of unalleviated progress, and anything but a simple passage from ignorance to enlightenment. Marshalling evidence from demography, medicine, literature, religious, family and women's history, he shows both that the idea of limiting progeny is ever-present in humna history and that mnay contraceptive practices have endured for at least two and a half millennia.

In cosidering questions of both motivation and method, Angus McLaren reveals the intimate interactions between reproductive decision-making on the one hand and social, economic, political and gender relationaships on the other.

Angus McLaren was born in Vancouver, Canada. He completed his first degree at the University of British Columbia, and his graduate studies at Harvard University. He has taught in North America, at the University of Calgary, and in Britain, where he was a Senior Associate Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is currently Professor of History at the University of Victoria. The author lives in Vancouver with his wife Arlene Tigar McLaren, Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University, with his eleven year old son Jesse.