An Autobiography by Sanger, Margaret - 1938

New York: W.W. Norton & Company Publishers [1938], 1938. First edition. Hardcover. Near Fine/Very Good. 8vo. 504, [2] pp. Navy cloth with gold lettering blocked in red on the spine; dark orange topstain. Price of $3.50 on the front flap of the dust jacket. Illustrated by a frontispiece portrait of the author. ADNB, Esther Katz, "Sanger, Margaret". The autobiography of a pioneering feminist, and one of the first advocates for birth control and contraception, alongside the notable Emma Goldman. Margaret Sanger was deeply affected by the early death of her mother, a mother whom she thought to be overburdened by poverty and the birthing of eleven children. Inspired by this, she began her career as a nurse, which ended upon her marriage to William Sanger. After the couple moved to New York, Sanger began to affiliate herself with anarchists, socialists, liberal activists, and bohemian artists. Her views on women's independence and bodily autonomy began here to take shape, and she began to publish short articles on contraception and women's sexual health, intended for the average American woman to read. Her publication, The Woman Rebel, was deemed obscene by the Comstock laws, and Sanger therefore had to flee to Europe. Here Sanger would be influenced by Dutch clinicians and their medical birth control practices, and she would go on to open the first United States birth control clinic in Brooklyn, N.Y. Sanger recognized that lower-class and underpriveleged women did not have the same sexual and individual freedoms that middle and upper-class women did. She began a lecture tour around the nation in the late 1920s, and worked hard to keep the cause of birth control and contraception in the American public eye. In 1936 Sanger helped win a judicial victory that allowed the medical distribution of birth control in the United States. After WWII, Sanger would help to found the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Sanger would pass away one year after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of married couples to use contraception, a right that unmarried couples would not be granted until 1972. An important record of a first-wave feminist's life: her friendship with Gandhi, her travels across the world, and her persistent, never-ending fight to help women achieve social and economic equality, and, in Sanger's mind, to bring us closer to world peace. A Near Fine book with minor spotting to the top textblock and to the external leaves (with one spot of foxing on the top edge of the frontispiece); dust jacket is Very Good with a few traces of edge wear, and the reverse showing three small tape repairs and moderate spotting.