The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger
Volume I: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928 (now available in paperback)
Edited by Esther Katz
Cathy Moran Hajo and Peter C.
Engelman, Assistant Editors
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The birth control crusader, feminist, and reformer Margaret Sanger was one of the most controversial and compelling figures inthe twentieth century. This first volume of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger documents the critical phases and influences of an American feminist icon and offers rare glimpses into her working-class childhood, burgeoning feminism, spiritual and scientific interests, sexual explorations, and diverse roles as wife, mother, nurse, journalist, radical socialist, and activist. These letters and other writings, including diaries, journals, articles, and speeches, most of which have never before been published, have been selected and assembled with an eye to telling the story
of a remarkable life, punctuated by arrests and imprisonments, exile, love affairs, and a momentous personal loss--a life consumed with the quest for women's sexual liberation. Because its narrative line is so absorbing,
Volume 1 may be read as a powerful biography. Volume 1 covers a twenty-eight-year period from her nurse's training and early socialist involvement in
pre-World War I bohemian Greenwich Village to her adoption of birth control (a term she helped coin in 1914) as a fundamental tenet of women's rights. It traces the intersection of her life and work with other reformers, activists and leaders of modernity on both
sides of the Atlantic, including Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, and Eugene Debs, as well as many leading radical artists and writers of the day. It highlights her legislative and organizational efforts, her support of the eugenics movement, and the alliances she
secured with medical professionals in her crusade to make birth control legal,
respectable, and accessible. This volume also includes letters from women desperately in need of fertility control who saw Sanger as their last hope. Supplemented by an introduction, brief essays providing narrative
and chronological links, and substantial notes, the volume is an invaluable tool for
understanding Sanger's actions and accomplishments.
December 2002
519 pages. 6 x 9 1/4 inches. 32 photographs.
Cloth, ISBN 0-252-02737-X. $65.00
Women's Studies / Biography / American History
January 2007 (paper)
576 pages
ISBN 0-252-07-4602-X $35.00
Women's Studies / History, American 20th Century / Biography and Personal Papers / Medicine
Library Availability
See the list of libraries.
Table of Contents
Consult the table of contents in PDF format.
Sample Chapter Opening and Documents
The opening to Chapter Five: "The Birth of the Birth Control Movement" and a few documents relating to the Brownsville clinic raid in 1917 is available in PDF format.
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Revised: July 25, 2007