THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT

The Campaigner

Women from all economic classes gained greater ability to limit pregnancy in the 1920s as a result of the effort of nurse and birth control advocate Margaret Sänger, who vowed to "do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were as vast as the sky." By 1914 Sanger was determined to remove the stigma of obscenity from contraception and to set up a nationwide network of advice centers on birth control for women. She first had to find a safe, reliable method of birth control and, in 1915, traveled to Europe, where she learned about the diaphragm. By the 1920s Sänger broke her ties with radical colleagues, a shift in approach that won her the support of powerful, conservative groups such as physicians, philanthropists, and wealthy women.

The Triumph

In 1921 Sanger organized the American Birth Control League, which changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. In 1923 she opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York City, the first doctor-staffed birth-control clinic in the United States. The bureau, which refuted claims that diaphragms cause cancer and madness, became a model for the network of more than three hundred clinics established by Sänger across the country by 1938. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Sänger worked tirelessly to raise money for these clinics and fought for the reversal of laws that had labeled birth control information obscene. In 1937 the mailing of contraceptive material became legal, and birth control was affirmed as a legitimate medical service to be taught in medical schools.

Sources:

Ellen Chesler, Women of Valor: Margaret Sänger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon Oc Schuster, 1992);

David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).