Family Limitation manuscript notebook.
Sanger’s First Birth Control Pamphlet
Original Manuscript, With Unpublished Text
[Sanger, Margaret]. Family Limitation. Circa 1913.
Small 8vo.; store-bought journal stamped “Record” in blind on front cover, consisting of lined pages with writing throughout in Sanger’s hand; preliminaries sunned; front hinge tender, all pages present; spine partially detached; a heavily used copy, the wear to the covers reflecting this constant use. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
…There are various and numerous mechanical means of prevention which I find a preventative to keep the woman from becoming pregnant. Of course it is troublesome to get up to douche it is also a nuisance to have to trouble about the date of the menstrual period. It seems inartistic and sordid to insert a pessary or suppository in anticipation of the sexual act.
But it is far more sordid to find yourself several years later burdened down with half a dozen unwished for children helpless, starved, shoddily clothed, dragging at your skirt, yourself a dragged out shadow of the woman you were. (From the Introduction to Sanger’s manuscript, p. 5)
A miraculous survival: Sanger’s original manuscript of her first published pamphlet, with passages on abortion deleted before its first publication in 1914 and in later, revised editions, as well. In this manuscript, composed almost entirely in her hand (with a second, secretarial hand also present), Sanger espouses pro-abortion sentiments in the baldest prose to appear on that subject in any of her published works, including the first edition of this work.
The title page, headed “Family Limitation by Margaret Sanger,” is followed by 43 pages in her hand in which she writes on birth control, a woman’s right to choose, gynecological health, and – most controversially — methods of inducing abortion, a subject she would shy away from in future published writings. Although Sanger’s writing is continuous from page to page she provides subtitles for what would become chapter headings (“Introduction”; “A Nurse’s Advise to Women”; “Douches and Their Importance”; “The Use of Condoms or Cots”; “The Pessary and The Sponge”; “Sponges”; and “Vaginal Suppositories.”) The chapter order remained the same in the published version, but her language was tempered: this is the only version of this classic text to bear Sanger’s boldest assertions in her baldest prose.
According to Esther Katz, Head of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU (an ongoing digitalization effort which aims to transcribe, edit, and post all of Sanger’s writings on the web), who examined a copy of the autograph manuscript, this is a copy of Sanger’s pre-publication, unbowdlerized text:
…We’ve compared the text among these early editions with the handwritten [autograph]
version [i.e., this document] you sent and we believe that your copy is indeed a handwritten version of the first edition….
As to the possibility that the handwritten version that you sent is a draft of the first
edition…because it contains the early abortion text [to be discussed below], we think it is
a first edition version, but rather than a draft we think that it may be an early transcribed
copy of the [published] pamphlet. As you know, Sanger encouraged people to make
copies and reprint and redistribute the pamphlet, and it conceivable that she made a
handwritten copy for someone. (Letter from Esther Katz to Ellen Chesler, 12/02/01)
Even after tempering her language from this manuscript version in preparation for the first edition, Sanger was scorned and even jailed for what she wrote. She consequently toned down her language and content in later versions, ultimately eliminating her remarks on abortion entirely. This manuscript includes those unpublished remarks on birth control, and on abortion in particular. Katz writes that before the discovery of this manuscript it was believed that “the first edition printed pamphlet held in Smith
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