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Birth control crusader, feminist, and reformer Margaret Sanger was
one of the most controversial and dynamic figures of the twentieth
century and one of the great women reformers in history. Volume 3:
The Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939-1966 of The Selected
Papers of Margaret Sanger highlights Sanger's quest for the "magic
pill," the non-barrier method of birth control she had envisioned
since the early 1930s. These lively and fascinating letters and
other writings tell the story of Sanger's consequential
collaboration with the philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick
and their masterful direction of scientists, physicians, and birth
control bureaucrats toward the production of the first
contraceptive pill--the catalyst for the sexual revolution. Volume
3 also chronicles Sanger's attempt to guide the American birth
control movement during World War II and its immediate aftermath,
when many were calling for increased fertility, not family
planning. And it documents her controversial efforts to expand
birth control services to African Americans in the rural South and
to incorporate contraceptive health care into state and federal
public health programs. All the while she was engaged in a
contentious battle with the leadership of the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America over the direction of the movement, with
Sanger pushing to revive a feminist rationale for birth control and
to emphasize the needs of the poor, and the Federation looking to
extend its services beyond contraception and to encourage
middle-class childbearing. Constructed to be read as the last
chapter of her domestic biography, this volume documents the final
turbulent decades of a remarkable life and includes important
material on the efforts of biographers, film makers, journalists
such as the young Mike Wallace, and Sanger herself, to assess her
motivations and affirm her pivotal role in the history of
reproductive rights. As with volumes 1 and 2, the documents
assembled here, more than eighty-four percent of them letters, were
culled from the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition, edited by
Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Peter C. Engelman. Volume 4 will
cover Sanger's international work in the birth control struggle.
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