Birth Control Review, The.
Sanger, Margaret, editor. The Birth Control Review. Dedicated to the Principle of Intelligent and Voluntary Motherhood. Volume One; Number One. February 1917.
4to.; 8 leaves, folded, stapled; off-white wrappers.
First edition of the inaugural issue, founded and edited by Margaret Sanger, who contributed to this issue her essay “Shall We Break This Law?” A financially precarious venture, the Review was published solely through subscription (it had several thousand subscribers), newsstand sales, and generous individual benefactors, such as Dorothy Whitney Straight and Gertrude Pinchot. (In 1925, the American Birth Control League, founded by Sanger in 1921, undertook its publication; it had grown from 16 pages to 271.) Frederick Blossom, a charity worker and Socialist who was instrumental in putting out the magazine while Sanger devoted her time to her birth control clinic defense, and Elizabeth Stuyvesant, a social worker who had also worked in the clinic, included a vocal manifesto in the first issue:
Birth control is the most vital issue before the country to-day. The people are waking to the fact that there is no need for them to bring their children in the world haphazard, but that clean and harmless means are known whereby children may come when they are desired, and not as helpless victims of blind chance.
Inserted is a typed form letter announcing that due to the high volume of requests, Sanger’s pamphlet “Family Limitations” could no longer continue being issued free of cost.
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