In the spring of 1914, Margaret Sanger, who was born in upstate New York in 1879, rallied a small group of radical friends in her New York City apartment to launch the Woman Rebel, “a militant-feminist monthly.” A dynamic, titian-haired woman of Irish ancestry, Sanger was endowed with unfailing charm, fierce determination and persuasive wit.

In direct defiance of the federal Comstock Act, Sanger announced in the very first issue of the Woman Rebel that she would “advocate the prevention of conception” and that she would “impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper.” It was at this time that Sanger and her group coined the term “birth control.” The campaign Sanger initiated that spring would grow into “one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history.”

Sanger and her husband moved to New York City in 1911 and soon became part of the radical culture of Greenwich Village. Sanger tended obstetrical patients in the tenement districts on the Lower East Side, an experience that exposed her for the first time to the squalor and suffering caused by the combination of poverty and unwanted pregnancy. Sanger later wrote about how pregnant women, desperate to avoid childbirth, brought “themselves around” by drinking “drops of turpentine on sugar, steaming over a chamber of boiling coffee or of turpentine water, rolling down stairs, and finally inserting slippery-elm sticks, or knitting needles, or shoe hooks into the uterus.”

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