When Margaret Sanger opened the United States’ first birth control clinic 110 years ago Friday, women weren’t yet guaranteed the right to vote, and sharing information on contraception was a crime.
Sanger’s mother, weakened by 11 births and seven miscarriages, had died at 50 of tuberculosis. Watching her mother suffer, and her own experience as a nurse, motivated Sanger to travel to Europe to study birth control methods and bring what she learned back home.
More than 400 women, some wheeling baby carriages, lined up outside the rented storefront at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn on Oct. 16, 1916, to pay 10 cents for pamphlets and instruction. The clinic, staffed by Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne and friend Fania Mindell, distributed contraceptives, too.
The venture lasted some 10 days before police raided the premises, arrested the women working there and shut down the clinic. Sanger was sentenced to 30 days in the Queens County penitentiary, where, according to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University, she spent her time lecturing fellow inmates on birth control.
Sanger left a complex legacy: She promoted the racist pseudoscience of eugenics, delivered a speech on birth control to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan and endorsed the 1927 Supreme Court ruling that states may forcibly sterilize the “feeble minded” or “unfit.”
But the clinic she founded in 1916 went on to inspire Planned Parenthood, which now operates hundreds of clinics in the U.S., and her work helped lead to legal access to contraceptives.
Photo Almanac is an occasional series from The Washington Post, using photo archives to understand where we are today by examining where we’ve been.
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