Download or read book A History of the Birth Control Movement in America written by Peter C. Engelman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare. A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.
Download or read book Woman of Valor written by Ellen Chesler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-10-16 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This illuminating biography of Margaret Sanger—the woman who fought for birth control in America—describes her childhood, her private life, her relationships with Emma Goldman and John Reed, her public role, and more. Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women in a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She died a half-century later, just after the Supreme Court guaranteed constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives. Now, Ellen Chesler provides an authoritative and widely acclaimed biography of this great emancipator, whose lifelong struggle helped women gain control over their own bodies. An idealist who mastered practical politics, Sanger seized on contraception as the key to redistributing power to women in the bedroom, the home, and the community. For fifty years, she battled formidable opponents ranging from the US Government to the Catholic Church. Her crusade was both passionate and paradoxical. She was an advocate of female solidarity who often preferred the company of men; an adoring mother who abandoned her children; a socialist who became a registered Republican; a sexual adventurer who remained an incurable romantic. Her comrades-in-arms included Emma Goldman and John Reed; her lovers, Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells. Drawing on new information from archives and interviews, Chesler illuminates Sanger’s turbulent personal story as well as the history of the birth control movement. An intimate biography of a visionary rebel, Woman of Valor is also an epic story that extends from the radical movements of pre-World War I to the family planning initiatives of the Great Society. At a time when women’s reproductive and sexual autonomy is once again under attack, this landmark biography is indispensable reading for the generations in debt to Sanger for the freedoms they take for granted.
Download or read book The Case for Birth Control written by Margaret Sanger and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Margaret Sanger written by Jean H. Baker and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undoubtedly the most influential advocate for birth control even before the term existed, Margaret Sanger ignited a movement that has shaped our society to this day. Her views on reproductive rights have made her a frequent target of conservatives and so-called family values activists. Yet lately even progressives have shied away from her, citing socialist leanings and a purported belief in eugenics as a blight on her accomplishments. In this captivating new biography, the renowned feminist historian Jean H. Baker rescues Sanger from such critiques and restores her to the vaunted place in history she once held. Trained as a nurse and midwife in the gritty tenements of New York's Lower East Side, Sanger grew increasingly aware of the dangers of unplanned pregnancy—both physical and psychological. A botched abortion resulting in the death of a poor young mother catalyzed Sanger, and she quickly became one of the loudest voices in favor of sex education and contraception. The movement she started spread across the country, eventually becoming a vast international organization with her as its spokeswoman. Sanger's staunch advocacy for women's privacy and freedom extended to her personal life as well. After becoming a wife and mother at a relatively early age, she abandoned the trappings of home and family for a globe-trotting life as a women's rights activist. Notorious for the sheer number of her romantic entanglements, Sanger epitomized the type of "free love" that would become mainstream only at the very end of her life. That she lived long enough to see the creation of the birth control pill—which finally made planned pregnancy a reality—is only fitting.
Download or read book Funding Feminism written by Joan Marie Johnson and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-08-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joan Marie Johnson examines an understudied dimension of women's history in the United States: how a group of affluent white women from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries advanced the status of all women through acts of philanthropy. This cadre of activists included Phoebe Hearst, the mother of William Randolph Hearst; Grace Dodge, granddaughter of Wall Street "Merchant Prince" William Earle Dodge; and Ava Belmont, who married into the Vanderbilt family fortune. Motivated by their own experiences with sexism, and focusing on women's need for economic independence, these benefactors sought to expand women's access to higher education, promote suffrage, and champion reproductive rights, as well as to provide assistance to working-class women. In a time when women still wielded limited political power, philanthropy was perhaps the most potent tool they had. But even as these wealthy women exercised considerable influence, their activism had significant limits. As Johnson argues, restrictions tied to their giving engendered resentment and jeopardized efforts to establish coalitions across racial and class lines. As the struggle for full economic and political power and self-determination for women continues today, this history reveals how generous women helped shape the movement. And Johnson shows us that tensions over wealth and power that persist in the modern movement have deep historical roots.
Download or read book Sex and the Constitution Sex Religion and Law from America s Origins to the Twenty First Century written by Geoffrey R. Stone and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 935 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A “volume of lasting significance” that illuminates how the clash between sex and religion has defined our nation’s history (Lee C. Bollinger, president, Columbia University). Lauded for “bringing a bracing and much-needed dose of reality about the Founders’ views of sexuality” (New York Review of Books), Geoffrey R. Stone’s Sex and the Constitution traces the evolution of legal and moral codes that have legislated sexual behavior from America’s earliest days to today’s fractious political climate. This “fascinating and maddening” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) narrative shows how agitators, moralists, and, especially, the justices of the Supreme Court have navigated issues as divisive as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and contraception. Overturning a raft of contemporary shibboleths, Stone reveals that at the time the Constitution was adopted there were no laws against obscenity or abortion before the midpoint of pregnancy. A pageant of historical characters, including Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Comstock, Margaret Sanger, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, enliven this “commanding synthesis of scholarship” (Publishers Weekly) that dramatically reveals how our laws about sex, religion, and morality reflect the cultural schisms that have cleaved our nation from its founding.
Download or read book Margaret Sanger s Eugenic Legacy written by Angela Franks and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-12-24 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Sanger, the American birth-control and population-control advocate who founded Planned Parenthood, stands like a giant among her contemporaries. With her dominating yet winning personality, she helped generate shifts of opinion on issues that were not even publicly discussed prior to her activism, while her leadership was arguably the single most important factor in achieving social and legislative victories that set the parameters for today's political discussion of family-planning funding, population-control aid, and even sex education. This work addresses Sanger's ideas concerning birth control, eugenics, population control, and sterilization against the backdrop of the larger eugenic context.
Download or read book The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger Volume 4 written by Margaret Sanger and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Margaret Sanger returned to Europe in 1920, World War I had altered the social landscape as dramatically as it had the map of Europe. Population concerns, sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use had entered public discussion, and Sanger's birth control message found receptive audiences around the world. This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's dramatic birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her tireless efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's contentious dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's own dramatic evolution from gritty grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat.
Download or read book Family Limitation written by Margaret H. Sanger and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Family Limitation By Margaret H. Sanger Revised - Sixth Edition 1917 A Classic American Family Planning Booklet Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914. She was afraid of what would happen, so she fled to Britain until she knew it was safe to return to the US. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States. Due to her connection with Planned Parenthood Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of abortion, although Planned Parenthood did not begin providing abortions until 1970, after Sanger had already died. Sanger, who has been criticized for supporting negative eugenics, remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement.
Download or read book The Birth of the Pill How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution written by Jonathan Eig and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-10-13 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chicago Tribune "Best Books of 2014" • A Slate "Best Books 2014: Staff Picks" • A St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Books of 2014" The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.
Download or read book Margaret Sanger and the Origin of the Birth Control Movement 1910 1930 written by Patricia Walsh Coates and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the early writing and relationships of activist Margaret Sanger by f()cusing on the feminist aspect of the birth control movement pertaining to sexual autonomy for women. Sanger's distinctive philosophy separated her early advocacy for biJ1h control from other women's movements. This work contributes to the existing body ofliterature on Sanger by bringing to the forefront both the American and transatlantic social and philosophical influences present in the birth control and feminist debate.
Download or read book Birth Control in America written by David M. Kennedy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1970-01-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combines a biography of M. Sanger with a social history of the birth control movement.
Download or read book Motherhood in Bondage written by Margaret Sanger and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motherhood in Bondage is a collection of confessions from mothers in the bondage of enforced maternity sent to birth control activist, women's rights advocate, sex educator, and nurse Margaret Sanger. The compilation includes confessions from mothers of all walks of life - girl mothers, those in poverty, those unfit to become mothers because of different reasons, and working mothers. The book also includes the confessions of children of these mothers and grandmothers whose daughters have been bound with enforced maternity. The text is for mothers who are also burdened with enforced maternity, especially those who feel alone in their plight. The book is also recommended for mothers who would like to know more about the lives of other mothers who gave birth to many children, people who wish to educate mothers, and prospective mothers who would like to learn the dangers and the difficult life of enforced maternity.
Download or read book Birth Control Politics in the United States 1916 1945 written by Carole Ruth McCann and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a disturbing behind-the-scenes history of the early achievements of Margaret Sanger's American birth control movement, Carole R. McCann scrutinizes the movement's compromises as well as its successes.
Download or read book The Man Who Hated Women written by Amy Sohn and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smithsonian Magazine, 10 Best History Books of 2021 • "Fascinating . . . Purity is in the mind of the beholder, but beware the man who vows to protect yours.” —Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker Anthony Comstock, special agent to the U.S. Post Office, was one of the most important men in the lives of nineteenth-century women. His eponymous law, passed in 1873, penalized the mailing of contraception and obscenity with long sentences and steep fines. The word Comstockery came to connote repression and prudery. Between 1873 and Comstock’s death in 1915, eight remarkable women were charged with violating state and federal Comstock laws. These “sex radicals” supported contraception, sexual education, gender equality, and women’s right to pleasure. They took on the fearsome censor in explicit, personal writing, seeking to redefine work, family, marriage, and love for a bold new era. In The Man Who Hated Women, Amy Sohn tells the overlooked story of their valiant attempts to fight Comstock in court and in the press. They were publishers, writers, and doctors, and they included the first woman presidential candidate, Victoria C. Woodhull; the virgin sexologist Ida C. Craddock; and the anarchist Emma Goldman. In their willingness to oppose a monomaniac who viewed reproductive rights as a threat to the American family, the sex radicals paved the way for second-wave feminism. Risking imprisonment and death, they redefined birth control access as a civil liberty. The Man Who Hated Women brings these women’s stories to vivid life, recounting their personal and romantic travails alongside their political battles. Without them, there would be no Pill, no Planned Parenthood, no Roe v. Wade. This is the forgotten history of the women who waged war to control their bodies.
Download or read book Church Control Or Birth Control written by Nicholas Kaminsky and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The name Margaret Sanger is nearly synonymous with birth control in the United States. A controversial character even now, she founded the predecessor to today's Planned Parenthood and dedicated her life to working tirelessly for the legalization and promotion of birth control and abortion. While scholars have directed some attention toward Sanger's provocative statements on race and ethnicity, few have documented her vehement anti-Catholicism or shown the way she cleverly used anti-Catholic propaganda to promote her birth control crusade. Kaminsky has now done so. In this book, he demonstrates the way in which Sanger exploited powerful anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States to portray her fight for birth control as a struggle for American Freedom against a moral domination by the Catholic Church. As she phrased it, "All who resent this sinister Church Control of life and conduct - this interference of the Roman Church in attempting to dictate the conduct and behavior of non-Catholics, must now choose between Church Control or Birth Control. You can no longer remain neutral. You must make a declaration of independence, of self-reliance, or submit to the dictatorship of the Roman Catholic hierarchy." Kaminsky further demonstrates that Sanger did not choose this course as a matter of mere convenience, but that she genuinely viewed the Catholic Church as her arch-enemy in a battle to overturn the traditional moral order of western civilization and usher in a new era based upon a pragmatic moral code. Anyone seeking to understand the displacement of Judeo-Christian morality from the American public square should read this book.
Download or read book Family Limitation written by Margaret Sanger and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
