Margaret Sanger: “The Prevention of Conception”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In March 1914 Sanger published the first issue of her radical feminist monthly, The Woman Rebel. In the first issue, she dedicated the paper to building a “conscious fighting character” in women and included the Industrial Workers of the World slogan “No Gods, No Masters” on its masthead. The short article “The Prevention of Conception” represents Sanger's first public declaration in favor of legalizing birth control, a phrase that she and her fellow activists coined. In this article, one of the shaping documents of the U.S. birth control movement, Sanger establishes the goals of the birth control campaign: to defy the Comstock Act, which had labeled birth control obscene and banned the circulation of contraceptives and contraceptive information; to increase access to safe and effective contraceptives and thereby reduce the numbers of dangerous and illegal abortions; and to give working-class women the knowledge and means of controlling their fertility.

“The Prevention of Conception” was aimed directly at working-class women and offers frank descriptions of the predicament they found themselves in: With little access to knowledge, health care, or sanitary living conditions, they had large, unhealthy families, without hope for betterment. Sanger points out the double standard that allowed middle-class moralists to condemn and outlaw birth control, while in their own clean homes they practiced birth control and had small, healthy, and well-educated families. Sanger also claims that birth control could serve a revolutionary function. If the working classes could bring down their family size through birth control, they would command higher wages as a result of the shortage of available workers.

Sanger's ideas on birth control's use as a tool of class warfare reflected those of the anarchist feminist Emma Goldman and must be understood as a response to the distrust that many Socialists had for birth control. Earlier adherents of Socialism, calling themselves neo-Malthusians and operating in Europe, had argued that that if the working classes used birth control, it would reduce the chances of social revolt. (The ideas of the neo-Malthusians drew on a set of doctrines taken from Thomas Malthus, specifically his theory that limited resources keep populations in check and reduce economic growth.) If families had fewer children, workers would not be driven to labor organizing or demanding more equitable economic distributions. Thus, many Socialists opposed birth control as a palliative that distracted workers from real inequities. In Sanger's view, “no plagues, famines or wars could ever frighten the capitalist class so much as the universal practice of the prevention of conception. On the other hand no better method could be utilized for increasing the wages of the workers.” Her claim in “The Prevention of Conception” that workers could use birth control to “frighten” capitalists turned neo-Malthusian theory on its head.

The first issue of the Woman Rebel was one of seven issues suppressed by the postal service. In August 1914 the federal government indicted Sanger for publishing and disseminating obscene material, including “The Prevention of Conception.” According to the government, she had violated nine counts of the Comstock Act. Sanger published one more issue of the Woman Rebel in September; released copies of Family Limitation, her how-to pamphlet on birth control; and fled the country to avoid prosecution. Her bold defiance of the law generated publicity about an issue that seldom received coverage in the press and set in motion a series of events that led to the formation of the birth control movement.