Margaret Sanger: “The Prevention of Conception”

Margaret Sanger was a New York City nurse in 1912, when she wrote “Sexual Impulse—Part II,” but by the time she wrote “Birth Control and Racial Betterment” in 1919, she had launched a new movement for birth control and women’s empowerment. “The Prevention of Conception” represents her early activism, beginning with her goal of promoting sex education and then focusing specifically on birth control. In this article, published in the first issue of her radical feminist monthly, The Woman Rebel, Sanger argues for legalizing birth control. As time passed, she sought to reach broader and broader segments of the population, first speaking to working-class women, then to middle-class and society women, and finally to an audience that included physicians, legislators, and eugenicists (scientists who dealt with control of hereditary characteristics). Until the end of her active and long life, Sanger continued to refine her arguments and address new and different audiences on behalf of birth control, but she always maintained that birth control was fundamentally both the right and the responsibility of each woman.