![]() ![]() ![]() And condoms depended on men’s will, at a time when a doctor could advise a woman to sleep on her roof to avoid her husband’s advances.Īs Jonathan Eig writes in “The Birth of the Pill,” all of Sanger’s talk of spacing pregnancies and women’s independence was for naught without effective contraception: “It was as if she’d been teaching starving people about nutrition without giving them anything healthy to eat.”īy the time Eig’s book opens in 1950, Sanger had fixed her obsession on a contraceptive pill to feed the masses. ![]() By Sanger’s time, modern medicine had improved upon the crocodile dung ancient Egyptians used as vaginal plugs and the lemon half Casanova recommended as a cervical cap - but not by much. For much of the first half of the 20th century, women approached Margaret Sanger with a plea: “Do tell me the secret.” They wrote letters, too: “Doctors are men and have not had a baby so they have no pitty for a poor sick mother.” But she had no secret to not getting pregnant when you didn’t want to. ![]()
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