Signed Photograph

New York: Ira L. Hill, 1917. SANGER, Margaret. Margaret Sanger. An Autobiography. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, [1938].

First edition. Octavo (9 3/8 x 6 3/8 inches; 237 x 161 mm). [1]-504, [2] pp. With photographic frontispiece portrait. Title-page printed in black and blue.

Original full blue cloth. Spine printed in orange and gilt, and lettered in gilt. Top edge brick red, others uncut. Some minor rubbing to boards. Overall about fine.

Margaret Sanger is a woman's right's activist and a pioneer of the birth control movement, starting clinics that would eventually become known as Planned Parenthood. "Sanger made it her mission to 1) provide women with birth control information and 2) repeal the federal Comstock Law, which prohibited the distribution of obscene materials through the mails, and regarded birth control information as such. In 1914, Sanger launched her own feminist publication, The Woman Rebel, advocating for birth control. She was charged with violating the Comstock laws and fled to England, though had friends share a pamphlet she authored on contraceptive techniques in her absence. She returned a year later to stand trial, but when her five- year-old daughter died unexpectedly, public pressure led to the charges against Sanger being dropped. In 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Barely a week later, she was arrested and spent 30 days in jail. Sanger's arrest garnered much media attention and brought her several affluent supporters. She appealed her conviction, and although she lost, the courts ruled that physicians could prescribe contraceptives to women for medical reasons, a loophole that allowed Sanger to open a clinic in 1923 staffed by female doctors and social workers, which would later become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America." (Womanshistory dot org).

HBS 68449.

$1,500.