Overview

Primarily through the efforts of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) in America and Marie Stopes (1880-1958) in England, deliberate family planning emerged as a social force in the early twentieth century.

Background

Until the second decade of the twentieth century, women had little choice but to bear as many children as they conceived. Rape victims, incest victims, prostitutes, sexually active unmarried women, and even wives whose husbands wanted no more children did not have any safe, readily available, or medically reliable means to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Women who used contraception were regarded as immoral, unfeminine, or abnormal.

The contraception movement began in the early nineteenth century. It drew much of its inspiration from a famous book by British political economist Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Malthus argued that the...