2 - Rising Above

Summary

“The cause of birth control has reached that stage of development where charlatans, quacks and commercial interests are trying to turn it to profit and ride in upon the wave of popularity,” warned the American Birth Control League's executive director, Marguerite Benson, in a 1935 issue of the Birth Control Review. Indeed, fueled by Depression-era hardships as well as the charity movement's efforts to promote birth control and help with the establishment of local charity clinics, the 1930s witnessed a massive expansion of birth control methods, birth control providers, and the rise even of irregular birth control clinics—those facilities not associated with the charity movement but run instead by nurses, chiropractors, and entrepreneurs. Americans therefore, particularly those in larger cities, found themselves with newfound access to a remarkably large and openly available selection of goods and services to assist them in limiting childbearing, despite the Comstock laws that continued to ban birth control.

But, as Benson's words also suggest, this was not something about which the charity movement was pleased because, when taken together, the radicalism of old had now become commercially mainstream. While the radical Sanger of the 1910s had originally promoted a variety of birth control techniques, a variety of birth control providers, and frankness in sex, this new commercialization of contraceptives and providers now did much the same, with an even greater openness than before.