Bookplate designed for Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger is widely recognized as the founder of the birth control movement in the United States. After serving as a visiting nurse on New York’s Lower East Side and recognizing the links between poverty, high rates of infant and maternal mortality, and deaths from illegitimate abortions, she began publishing articles and disseminating information about contraception. Her advocacy also had a personal motivation: her mother had 11 children and seven miscarriages, which Sanger cited as the underlying cause of her mother’s death at the age of 50. Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the country in Brooklyn in 1916 and was arrested that year under New York State’s 1868 “Little Comstock” law for disseminating advocacy materials.” This bookplate features a design that Sanger’s friend Rockwell Kent originally created for the cover of her pamphlet The Birth Control Review, first published in 1917 and one of the publications that was censored. (The source of the handwritten annotation is unknown.) Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, became the first president of Planned Parenthood on its founding in 1942, and was instrumental in the development of the first oral contraceptive, Enovid, which the FDA approved in 1960. Her legacy is complicated, however, by her association with white supremacist groups and support for eugenics.