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 as reproductive rights entered public political and medical debate.

Sanger, Margaret, and Russell, Winter. Debate on Birth Control. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1921. First edition. 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 and Sanger’s public campaigns made birth control a national controversy. Slight surface loss to front cover, some dog-eared pages, minor foxing to some pages, binding tight, text and pages mostly clean and bright; overall very good condition. A compact and revealing first edition debate pamphlet on contraception, feminism, and the public language of reproductive politics in 1921.

Item #21372

Price: $450.00