1. Tantum artes huius, tantum medicamina possunt, que steriles atque homines in ventre necandos conducit. Guade, infelix et vexare uterum pueris salientibus, esses Aethipiic fortasse pater, mox decolor here imperet tabulas numquam tibi mane videndus. Trans. Ramsay, G. G., Juvenal and Persius (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), 31.Google Scholar

2. Gordon, Linda, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York, 1976).Google Scholar

3. Linda Gordon offers a nuanced, dialectical feminist/Marxist analysis of the transformation of the birth-control movement from a radical feminist movement into a liberal political movement. Her analysis, however, often becomes too categorical in its description. As a consequence, conservative tendencies in the voluntary motherhood movement and the “social purity” movement, intended to abolish prostitution and other sexually deviant behavior, are downplayed in order to emphasize the radical feminist thrust of the movement. Both the voluntary motherhood movement and the social purity movement evidenced strong nativist, elitist, and racist prejudices that coexisted with sincere feminist motivations. Recognition of these less than savory aspects of the birth-control movement or the early feminist movements is not to suggest that these movements should be dismissed, but it does indicate that often social movements need to be seen historically as multidimensional.

4. Literature about Sanger is extensive. See Moore, Gloria and Moore, Ronald, Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement: A Bibliography, 1911–1884 (Metuchen, N.J., 1986)Google Scholar; Chesler, Ellen, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Gray, Madeline, Margaret Sanger (New York, 1979)Google Scholar;Lader, Lawrence, The Margaret Sanger Story (Garden City, N.Y., 1955)Google Scholar; Kennedy, David M., Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, 1970)Google Scholar; and Reed, James, The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue (Princeton, 1983).Google Scholar

5. Sanger, Margaret, Pivot of Civilization (New York, 1922), 6–8Google Scholar. See also Sanger, Margaret, An Autobiography (New York, 1938)Google Scholar, and Reed, The Birth Control Movement and American Society, 67–89.

6. For a discussion of the One Package decision and its importance for the birth-control movement, see Reed, The Birth Control Movement and American Society, 120–23 and 265.

7. For the development of the birth-control pill, see Maisel, Albert Q., The Hormone Quest (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Pincus, Gregory, The Control of Fertility (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; and McLaughlin, Loretta, The Pill, John Rock, and the Church: The Biography of a Revolution (Boston, 1982)Google Scholar. James Reed provides a detailed discussion of the pill in the Birth Control Movement and Modern Society, 311–83.

8. For a succinct discussion of these cases, see Duziak, Mary L., “Contraception,” The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, ed. Hall, Kermit L. (New York, 1992), 193–94.Google Scholar

9. A detailed account of the constitutional struggle for reproductive rights is found in Garrow's, David rich Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of “Roe v. Wade” (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

10. For example, Ellen Chesler, in her excellent biography of Margaret Sanger, generally downplays the importance of eugenics in the birth-control movement by suggesting the Sanger “courted the power of eugenically inclined academics and scientists to blunt the attacks of religious conservatives against her.” In addition, Chesler suggests that eugenicists did not play a significant role in the birth-control movement by accurately pointing out that many leading eugenicists such as Charles Davenport remained vocal opponents of birth control. Furthermore, Chesler notes that few eugenicists were willing to associate with Sanger publicly. Nevertheless, she fails to note Sanger's close relationship with leading English eugenicists. Furthermore, while many American eugenicists did not publicly endorse Sanger—as scientists and physicians, many considered her too flamboyant—they supported birth control and sterilization well before the 1930s, when Chesler argues that eugenicists switched to a pro-birth-control position. Ellen Chesler, Margaret Sanger, 216–17, 343–45. For a critical appraisal of Sanger and eugenics, see Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger.

Linda Gordon offers subtle argument concerning the progressive impetus behind the eugenics argument as it was employed by certain feminists. My discussion of eugenics draws from Gordon's insights, although I disagree with her that eugenics became predominantly anti-feminist and anti-birth control. This difference, I suspect, follows from my own reading of the recently opened Population Council papers at the Rockefeller Family Archive (RFA) in Tarrytown, New York, and the Frederick Osborn papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. These papers were not available to the early students of the birth-control movement and have not been utilized by more recent scholars such as Ellen Chesler. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 125–35. For a more general discussion of eugenics in reform thought, see Kevles, Daniel J., In the Name of Eugenics (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Heller, Mark, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, 1963)Google Scholar; and Pickens, Donald K., Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, 1968).Google Scholar

11. Quoted in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 84, 86.

12. Quoted in Reed, The Birth Control Movement and American Society, 135.

13. Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 177.

14. Sanger, Margaret, “Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review 16 (April 1932): 107.Google Scholar

15. Eleanor Dwight Jones to Lawrence B. Dunham, 3 November 1930, RG2 Medical Interests, Box 1, RFA.

16. Lawrence B. Dunham to Thomas M. Deboise, 5 March 1931, RG 2, Box 1, RFA.

17. Raymond Fosdick to John D. Rockefeller Jr., 7 February 1931 and 21 January 1932, RG2, Box 1, RFA.

18. Robert L. Dickinson to Arthur Packard, 3 March 1925, RG 2, Box I, RFA. John D. Rockefeller III also contributed financially to the Eugenics Society. See Arthur W. Packard to John D. Rockefeller, 9 June 1937, RG 2, Box 1, RFA.

Daniel Kevles has argued that eugenicists in the 1930s shifted from a hereditarian position to a progressive eugenic position that sought economic and social change. While more research needs to be done in this area, the story appears to be more complicated than Kevles suggests. Eugenicists such Clarence J. Gamble and his Pathfinder Fund continued to remain concerned about race and dysgenic qualities found in the population. In most respects, Gamble remained out of the mainstream (although he was actively involved in the birth-control movement), but eugenicists such as Frederick Osborn and others involved in the population-control movement continued to use hereditarian language. See Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 395–98.

19. An extensive correspondence dating back to the 1930s on using Puerto Rico as a laboratory for birth-control techniques and programs is found in the Rockefeller Family Archives.

20. Arthur W. Packard, Internal Memorandum, 24 January 1947, RG 2, Box 1, RFA.

21. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 396.

22. Hardin, a professor of biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, later apologized for the remark, which he claimed was only intended to challenge taboos in our society. See Hardin, Garrett James, Stalking the Wild Taboo (Los Altos, Calif., 1979), 10–11Google Scholar; see also Hardin, Garrett, Population, Evolution, and Birth Control (San Francisco, 1964).Google Scholar

23. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right, 395. Interestingly this same position has been taken up by some Catholic conservatives in their attack against birth control and abortion. See Drogin, Elasah, Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society (New Hope, Ky., 1979).Google Scholar

24. These perspectives found early expression in an internal Rockefeller Foundation memorandum circulated in 1952 that declared: “We need to see birth control in expansive terms.” Birth control should be interrelated to increasing food supply, improving health, and developing education. This entailed the development of a “cheap and effective pill, as well as increasing food from the sea, solar power, and developing genetic mechanisms that affect the yield of crop plants.” Warren Weaver, Memorandum, 1 January 1952, RG 2, Box 1, RFA.

25. A detailed record of the meeting is found in the John D. Rockefeller III papers, RG 2, Box 47, and the Rockefeller Foundation papers, RG 3.2, Box 57, RFA.

26. Fund, Hugh Moore, The Population Bomb (New York, 1954)Google Scholar, and Will L. Clayton, Hugh Moore, and Ellsworth Bunker to John D. Rockefeller III, 26 November 1954, RG 2, Box 45, RFA.

27. Onotaro, Suzanne A., “The Population Council and the Development of Contraceptive Technologies,” Research Reports from the Rockefeller Archive Center, Spring 1991, 1–2.Google Scholar

28. Sharpless, John B., “The Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council, and the Groundwork for New Population Policies,” Rockefeller Archive Center Newsletter, Fall 1993, 1–4.Google Scholar

29. “Eisenhower Bars Birth Control Help,” New York Times, 31 December 1959, 20.

30. Dwight D. Eisenhower to William H. Draper, 30 December 1963, and William H. Draper to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 18 November 1964, Office of Dwight D. Eisenhower Files, Box 33, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library (DDE), Albilene, Kansas.

31. William H. Draper to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 18 November 1964, and Dwight D. Eisenhower to William H. Draper, 30 December 1963, Office of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Box 33; and Dwight D. Eisenhower to H. J. Porter, 20 November 1964, Office of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Box 49, DDE.

32. Lyndon Baines Johnson to Douglass Cater, 5 December 1966, Douglass Cater File, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (LBJ).

33. Philip S. Hughes to Harry C. McPherson, 1 February 1967, Legislative Files, Box 164, LBJ.

34. Joseph A. Kershaw to Harry C. McPherson, 19 October 1965, Office of Economic Opportunity Files (Microfilm), National Archives.

35. Douglass Cater to the President, 30 March 1965, Cater File, Box 66, LBJ.

36. The regulations drew criticism in the press. Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak attacked the exclusion of unmarried women from OEO-funded family planning programs. “Yet the precise heart of the problem is unmarried women and married women not living with their husbands. The American problem of exploding population is centered in illegitimate Negro births in the slums of the great Northern cities.” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Birth De-Control,” unidentified column, 10 April 1965, Douglass Cater File, Box 66, LBJ.

37. Harry C. McPherson Jr. to Bill Moyers, 28 January 1966, Douglass Cater File, Box 66, LBJ.

38. Wilbur J. Cohen, “Statement by Wilbur J. Cohen before President's Committee on Population and Family Planning,” 24 October 1968, Wilbur J. Cohen File, LBJ. Also, Katherine Brownell Oettinger, Children's Bureau Chief: A Pioneer in the Twentieth Century, Oral History (1985), Women in the Federal Government Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Oettinger's relations with Planned Parenthood are found in an extensive correspondence in Records of the Children's Bureau, Central File, Box 1141, National Archives.

39. Piotrow, Phyllis Tilson, World Population Crisis: The United States Response (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

40. John D. Rockefeller III to Daniel Moynihan, 26 March 1969, Population Commission Files (unprocessed files), RFA.

41. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, continued to oppose efforts to expand federal planning programs. In 1974 and 1975 he vetoed authorization and appropriation bills for HEW that included family planning funds. Only a concerted effort by Congress in 1975 overrode Ford's veto. Littlewood, Thomas B., The Politics of Population Control (South Bend, Ind., 1977), 107–33.Google Scholar

42. One of the best accounts of the conference is found in Yost, Charles, “An Ominous Failure at Population Conference,” Des Moines Register, 8 September 1974, 1, 10.Google Scholar

43. John D. Rockefeller, “Population Growth: The Role of the Developed World” (1974), RG3, Box 493, RFA.

44. Robert C. Bates to Rockefeller Brothers Foundation Files, 2 October 1974, Rockefeller Brothers Fund papers, Box 210, RFA.

45. John Dunlap to John D. Rockefeller III, 2 May 1974, FG3, Box 494, RFA.

46. Joan M. Dunlop to John D. Rockefeller III, 2 May 1974; Joan M. Dunlop to William Ruder, 29 May 1974; and Joan M. Dunlop to John D. Rockefeller III, 19 April 1974, RG 3, Box 494, RFA.

Dunlop's argument was supported by others within the Population Council. As one Rockefeller Foundation officer wrote: “It is now also clear that the solution to the population problem involves more than contraceptive technology and family planning service. The social, cultural, and economic determinants of desired family size and contraceptive motivation will be critically important to the solution…. To achieve this kind of relevance, the population field must go beyond lip service to a full integration of population policy and social planning.” Gerald O. Barney to Robert C. Bates, 1 April 1975, RG 3.2, Box 88, RFA.

47. Gerald O. Barney to Rockefeller Brothers Fund Files, 9 March 1976, Rockefeller Brother Fund Files, Box 88, RFA.

48. McKeegan, Michele, Abortion Politics: Mutiny in the Ranks of the Right (New York, 1992).Google Scholar