tion. This eugenics movement. paralleled the birth-control movement
and remained a presence in modern family planning circles. Finally, a
population-control movement emerged following World War II that
sought to address problems of social stability, war, poverty, and eco-
nomic development in the United States and developing nations. Crit-
ics, often imposing their own moral and religious values on the policy
debate, claimed that population control sought to solve larger social
problems through a technical solution—population control—rather
than confronting directly problems of social inequality, wealth and in-
come redistribution, racism, and imperialism.

Although the birth-control movement in the United States emerged in
the nineteenth century as a part of a radical feminist struggle to liberate
women from the "drudgery of domesticity," birth control was transformed
into a liberal civil rights issue, albeit with radical social ramifications, in
the mid-twentieth century. The birth-control movement, as historian
Linda Gordon has argued, passed through three distinct stages. ² In the
first stage, "voluntary motherhood" was advanced by certain feminists as
part of a general struggle closely associated with women's suffrage to
challenge the traditional political and social status of women in American
society. In the second stage, "birth control" became a concept that found
new organizational expression in separate birth-control leagues created
largely by feminists involved in the revolutionary socialist, movement to
transform capitalist society and empower women and the working class.
In the third stage, from 1920 on, the movement evolved into a liberal
reform movement that gained the support of physicians, civil libertarians,
and population control advocates. ³ The transformation of the birth-
control movement from a radical feminist movement in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries into a liberal movement for civil
rights and population control in the mid-twentieth century reveals the
power of liberal democracy to translate radical causes into legal issues. In
each stage, birth-control advocates confronted local and state govern-
ments that had enacted anticontraceptive laws, often in response to
Catholic and bluenosed Protestant constituencies.

In this long history of contending forces, Margaret Sanger ( 1879-1961)
played a key role in the birth-control movement as it changed from a
radical socialist cause into a liberal issue over legal rights. ⁴ Although
vaginal diaphragms, cervical caps, spermatocidal compounds, condoms,
and safe periods had gained widespread use among upper classes in the
nineteenth century, Sanger undertook a campaign to reform sexual prac-
tices among the masses, especially the working-class poor.

Raised in the factory town of Corning, New York, Sanger grew up in a

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