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130 SANGER, Margaret. Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentano’s, 1920 Octavo. Original red cloth, spine and front cover lettered in black, single black border to front cover. With the dust jacket. Photographic frontispiece. Spine ends lightly bumped, small shallow bump to base of front cover. Oth-
erwise a very good copy indeed in the scarce jacket, spine panel slightly fad- ed, a few nicks and short closed tears to head of panels. first edition of this uncommon work, in which the founder of America’s first birth control clinic, Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) calls for access to and information about contraception to be made readily available as a form of female empowerment and to prevent overpopulation. Sanger, who trained as a nurse, focused her femi- nist and socialist activism on sexual health from 1911 onwards, and in 1912 wrote “What Every Girl Should Know”, a column on female sexuality and social hygiene for the New York Call . The series soon caused the first of her many conflicts with censors, and in 1913 the postal authorities banned her article on venereal disease as ob- scene. Working as a visiting nurse among the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side Sanger “realized that poor women did not have the same freedom from the physical hardships, fear, and dependency inherent in unwanted pregnancy as did those radical middle-class women who were espousing sexual liberation”, and subsequently “launched her own campaign, challenging govern- mental censorship of contraceptive information by embarking on a series of law-defying confrontational actions designed to force birth control into the centre of public debate” (ibid.). In March 1914 Sanger began publishing The Woman Rebel , a radical feminist monthly that coined the term “birth control” and advocated mili- tant action and the right of every woman to be “absolute mistress of her own body”. Controversially, in this work Sanger attempted to broaden her support base to “the liberal wing of the scientific eugenics movement, championing birth control for those with ge- netically transmitted mental or physical defects . . . While she did not advocate efforts to limit population growth solely on the basis of class, ethnicity, or race, and refused to encourage positive eu- genics for white, native-born, middle and upper classes, Sanger’s
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