Voices of Revolution by Rodger Streitmatter

Author:Rodger Streitmatter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN008000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Journalism, HIS036000, History/United States/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2001-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

PROVIDING VITAL INFORMATION TO WORKING-CLASS WOMEN

During Sanger’s many years as a dissident journalist, she would repeat the central premise of her movement hundreds of times. The first of those instances came in the lead editorial of the first issue of Woman Rebel in 1914. The headline read “The Prevention of Conception,” and the editorial itself began with Sanger asking the disarmingly simple question: “Is there any reason why woman should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception?” Sanger then continued, “The woman of the upper class has all available knowledge and implements to prevent conception, but the woman of the people is left in ignorance of this information.” The intrepid editor went on to tell how only upper-class women had access to the subrosa grapevine of information about birth control, forcing working-class women to turn to “bloodsucking men with M.D. after their names” who performed abortions in shadowy back alleys with “no semblance of privacy or sanitation.”15

Sanger concluded her editorial by exposing the real reason, in her mind, that the financiers and industrialists who ran the United States conspired to deny birth control information to the underclass: Capitalism would survive only as long as poor women continued to produce masses of children who did not receive proper educations and were thereby doomed to become the next generation of laborers to grind away their lives in the nation’s factories. “No plagues, famines or wars could ever frighten the capitalist class,” Sanger wrote, “so much as the universal practice of the prevention of conception.”16

The “little brown wren” did not mellow as the years passed. Indeed, Sanger became even more vehement in her demand that women on the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder be told how to prevent pregnancy. In a 1920 Birth Control Review editorial titled “A Birth Strike To Avert World Famine,” she took one of the most radical steps in a career paved with many of them, calling for every woman in America to pledge that not a single baby would be born anywhere in the country for the next five years. “Each woman who is awake to the true situation,” Sanger insisted, “should make it her first task to encourage and to assist her sisters in avoiding child bearing until the world has had an opportunity to readjust itself.”17

The impassioned editor did not limit her campaign to her own words only but also opened the pages of her magazines to her readers. “The following letters are published to illustrate the deep interest in and widespread demand among women of the working class for knowledge concerning birth control,” Sanger said in a note above a typical batch of letters. A California woman wrote: “Enclosed find ten cents, for information of how to prevent conception. I am nearly crazy with worry from month to month.” An Illinois woman made the same request: “I am the mother of six children. I am not well enough to have any more. Will you please send me information so I can prevent me having another child.

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