The Women’s Rights Movement made great strides in the 1920s, both in the areas of gender discrimination and women’s health. Groups such as the National Woman’s Party worked hard not only to secure women’s continued suffrage, but also to oppose the ongoing mistreatment of women under President Woodrow Wilson’s administration. At the same time, Margaret Sanger led a movement to promote reproductive rights and contraception for women in the form of a groundbreaking newsletter and the country’s first legal birth control clinic.
National Woman’s Party
The National Woman's Party (NWP), founded by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in 1913, fought for women's rights in the United States, particularly the right to vote. Originally called the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, its name changed to the National Women's Party in 1917. In contrast to other organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which focused on lobbying individual states, the NWP put its priority on passage of a constitutional amendment ensuring suffrage.
Alice Paul, 1920
Alice Paul founded the National Woman's Party in 1913 to promote women's suffrage and greater equal rights for women.
NWP vs. Wilson
While non-partisan, the NWP directed much of its ire at President Woodrow Wilson as someone responsible for the poor treatment of women during the era. The party also opposed World War I, and its members staged a suffrage parade on March 3, 1913, the day before Wilson's inauguration, as well as becoming the first group to picket for women's rights in front of the White House. The protesters were tolerated at first, but after the U.S. entry into the war in 1917, they were arrested by police for obstructing traffic.
NWP Picket, 1917
Members of the National Woman's Party picket in front of the White House for women's suffrage in 1917.
Many NWP members went on hunger strikes while in jail, with some force-fed to keep them alive, including Paul. The resulting scandal, at a time when Wilson was trying to present himself and America as being at the forefront of human rights, may have contributed to his decision to publicly call for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Suffrage Amendment. After its ratification, the NWP’s attention turned to eliminating other forms of gender discrimination, principally by advocating passage of the Equal Rights Amendment drafted by Alice Paul in 1923.
The NWP spoke for middle-class women, while its agenda was generally opposed by working class women and labor unions representing working class men who feared that women working for low wages bring down the overall pay scale and demean the role of the male breadwinner. Eleanor Roosevelt, an ally of the unions, generally opposed NWP policies because she believed women needed protection, not equality. After 1920, the NWP authored more than 600 pieces of legislation for women's equality, half of which passed.
Margaret Sanger
In 1913, Sanger worked as a nurse in New York's Lower East Side, often with poor women who were suffering due to frequent childbirth and self-induced abortions. She told the story of one woman who required care following a self-induced abortion and had begged a doctor for medical assistance, but was met only with the advice to remain abstinent. Some time later Sanger returned to the woman’s house to find her dead of yet another self-induced abortion. Sanger would later tell audiences at her speaking engagements, "I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced... that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth."
Margaret Sanger, 1922
Margaret Sanger was a nurse and pioneering educator and birth control activist in the 1920s.
Sanger sought answers to the plight of women in this situation but was unable to find information on contraception in public libraries. In 1914, she launched an eight-page, monthly newsletter titled, The Woman Rebel, which promoted contraception using the slogan, "No Gods, No Masters." Collaborating with anarchist friends, coined the term birth control as a more candid alternative to euphemisms such as family limitation.
In the early years of Sanger's activism, she viewed birth control as a free speech issue, and when she began publishing her newsletter, one of her goals was to provoke a legal challenge to the federal anti-obscenity laws banning dissemination of information about contraception. She was indicted in August 1914, but prosecutors focused their attention on articles Sanger had written on assassination and marriage, rather than contraception. Afraid she might be imprisoned without an opportunity to argue for birth control in court, she fled to England under the alias "Bertha Watson."
While she was in Europe, Sanger's husband distributed a copy of her pamphlet, Family Limitation, to an undercover postal worker, resulting in a 30-day jail sentence. During her absence, however, a groundswell of support had grown in the United States and Sanger returned in October 1915. Prominent civil rights attorney Clarence Darrow offered to defend Sanger free of charge. Bowing to public pressure, the government dropped the charges in early 1916.
Historic Clinic
Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, on October 16, 1916, the first of its kind in the United States. Nine days after its opening, Sanger was arrested for distributing contraceptives. Following a trial in January 1917, Sanger was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. The trial judge stated that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception." A court rejected her first appeal, but in 1918 the birth control movement won a victory when the New York State Court of Appeals issued a ruling allowing doctors to prescribe contraception.
American Birth Control League
In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) to enlarge the base of supporters to include the middle class. The ABCL’s founding principles included empowering women to prevent conception if children were not "Conceived in love… Born of the mother's conscious desire… And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health."
Using the 1918 legal exemption allowing physicians to distribute contraceptive information to women provided it was prescribed for medical reasons, Sanger established the Clinical Research Bureau (CRB) in 1923. The CRB was the first legal birth control clinic in the United States, staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers. The clinic received funding from the Rockefeller family, which continued to make donations to Sanger's causes for years, although usually anonymously.
In 1946, Sanger helped found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, which evolved into the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952, soon becoming the world's largest, non-governmental family planning organization. She served as the organization's first president and remained in the role until she was 80.
Sanger died in 1966, about a year after the event that marked the climax of her 50-year career: the U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized birth control in the United States.