Margaret Sanger and Birth Control
Together with Fania Mindell and Ethel Byrne, Margaret Sanger opened a birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 in violation of contemporary laws banning birth control dissemination by non-physicians. Shortly after it opened, a policewoman, posing as a client, arrested Sanger and closed down the clinic. Here, Margaret Sanger is shown outside the courthouse after her arraignment in 1917. Would you risk public censure and censorship to oppose a law that you considered to be wrong?
Margaret Sanger Outside the Brooklyn Court of Special Sessions Following Her Arraignment. Two photographs. October 1917.
Courtesy of the Margaret Sanger Center, Planned Parenthood of New York.
Sanger, Margaret. "What Every Girl Should Know." Little Blue Books. New York: Arno, 1974. Rpt. of Little Blue Book No. 14. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, ca. 1920. 1-64.
This pamphlet, produced by Sanger, teaches adolescent girls about "the beauty and wonder and sacredness of the sex functions." Must we judge censorship in the context of its day? Do you think Sanger overstepped her bounds by providing such information to young girls in the early 1900s?
The Comstock Laws Considered as to Their Constitutionality: Being T.B. Wakeman's Faneuil Hall Speech, Letter from James Parton, Replies to the Index, etc. New York: D.M. Bennett, Liberal Publisher, 1878.
In 1873, the Comstock Laws outlawed the mailing of "obscene," "lewd," "indecent," or "filthy" materials. These laws were named after Anthony Comstock, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a society founded on "Morals, Not Art or Literature." In the above speech, given at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1878, T. B. Wakeman argued against the Comstock Laws, claiming freedom of the press to be "the birthright secured to us in the Bill of Rights by Massachusetts and Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson." Nonetheless, despite the reaction against these statutes, the Comstock Laws remain on the books even today, although largely unenforced. Specifically, section 211 of the Comstock Laws outlaws the use of the U. S. Postal Service to send birth control materials.
From the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.
Margaret Sanger's Woman Rebel (1914), a feminist newspaper advocating the use of birth control, was censored by the Post Office in accordance with the Comstock Laws.
Sanger, Margaret. Woman Rebel, April 1914. Ed. Alex Baskin. New York: Archives of Social History, 1976.
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