Women’s Reproductive Rights Debate with Margaret Sanger, 1921

Winter Russell Margaret Sanger

Ephemera and pamphlets

Sanger, Margaret, and Russell, Winter. Debate on Birth Control, 1921, captures early twentieth-century public argument over contraception, women’s health, family poverty, morality, and demographic anxiety. Issued as a Little Blue Book, the pamphlet places birth control within mass-market reform literature and preserves opposed positions during the same year Sanger organized national conferences that helped move contraception into public-health debate.

Sanger, Margaret, and Russell, Winter. Debate on Birth Control. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1921. Little Blue Book No. 208. 63 pages, grey-blue staple-bound wrappers printed in black, 32mo. The text presents Sanger’s argument that access to contraception protects women’s health, permits reproductive self-determination, and reduces the burdens of unwanted pregnancy on impoverished families, against Russell’s claim that birth control threatens moral responsibility, social vitality, and national birth rates. The exchange uses statistics, anecdote, and direct social argument, including Russell’s warning against “race suicide.”

The pamphlet belongs to the contested print culture of early reproductive-rights advocacy, when contraception remained legally and morally disputed under older anti-obscenity regimes and Sanger’s public campaigns made birth control a national controversy. Wrappers sunned, foxing to inner pages, binding tight, text and pages mostly clean and bright; overall very good condition. A compact and revealing debate pamphlet on contraception, feminism, and the public language of reproductive politics in 1921.

Item #21251

Price: $450.00