The Birth Control Review. Volume V. No. 1. The American Birth Control League. New York, NY.
Item
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Title
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The Birth Control Review. Volume V. No. 1. The American Birth Control League. New York, NY.
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Creator
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Margaret Sanger.
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Description
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In the early 1920s, under the supervision of Dorothy Bocker, a physician, Margaret Sanger established the Clinical Research Bureau – later renamed the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau – in New York city. The Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB) – considered the first legal birth control clinic in the country – functioned primarily as a contraceptive dispensary and research laboratory and served as an autonomous clinic and research facility from 1928 to 1939.
The Birth Control Review, from which the BCCRB grew, was edited by Sanger and its first edition published in 1917 under the banner of "Dedicated to the Principle of Intelligent and Voluntary Motherhood”. According to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, the journal featured an array of the speeches that Sanger herself gave in pursuit of normalizing and organizing for the legal proliferation of birth control from the early 1910s and 1920s; issues of the journal also contained artwork, political cartoons, poetry, book reviews, and a lively letters section that often included opposing views and sometimes "mothers letters," excerpts from the letters of women seeking birth control advice.
The featured writings cover a range of topics, themes and approaches to the concept and practice of birth control; for example, an opinion piece by a Florence Guertin Tuttle titled “Why I Believe in Birth Control” whereby she discusses – at length – what it means to think through the principle, practice, and ethic of birth control. Meanwhile, another article penned by Anna Martin that appears on page 12 of the journal features a different perspective that simultaneously discussed the meaning of birth control as a means to “arrest the procreation of the unfit” with the aim of forwarding the social and economic benefits of selective birth control. Ultimately, inclusion of the fifth volume of the BCR journal is with the purpose of showcasing where the rhetoric surrounding birth control had gotten in 1923.
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Publisher
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New York : Birth Control Federation of America
New York : American Birth Control League
New York : New York Women's Publishing Company
New York City : M. Sanger, 1917-1940
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Date
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January, 1921.
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Source
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HathiTrust. Digitized by Cornell University. Original at Cornell University. Ithaca, NY.
