Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women in a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She died a half-century later, just after the Supreme Court guaranteed constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives. Now, Ellen Chesler provides the first authoritative biography of this great emancipator, whose lifelong struggle helped women gain control over their own bodies. An idealist who mastered practical politics, Sanger seized on contraception as the key to redistributing power to women in the bedroom, the home, and the community. For fifty years, she battled formidable opponents ranging from the U.S. Government to the Catholic Church. Her crusade was both passionate and paradoxical. She was an advocate of female solidarity who often preferred the company of men; an adoring mother who abandoned her children; a socialist who became a registered Republican; a sexual adventurer who remained an incurable romantic. Her comrades-in-arms included Emma Goldman and John Reed; her lovers, Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells. Drawing on new information from archives and interviews, Chesler illuminates Sanger's turbulent personal story as well as the history of the birth control movement. An intimate biography of a visionary rebel, this is also an epic story that extends from the radical movements of pre-World War I to the family planning initiatives of the Great Society. At a time when women's reproductive and sexual autonomy is once again under attack, Woman of Valor is indispensable reading for the generations in debt to Sanger for the freedoms they take for granted.
Chesler, EllenThis is a recording of the oral history of Bella Trachtenberg conducted by Albert S. Lyons on October 31st, 1985. Some of the significant topics represented in this oral history include: working as a stenographer; stories from life in France while working in the laboratory at Base Hospital No. 3 AEF during World War I; her experiences with and opinion of the men of the Board of Trustees and Medical Board; recalling controversies and tensions between surgeons, as well as the first and second woman externs, Isabel Beck (finished training in 1924) and Gertrude Felshin (class of 1925), and the first woman intern Rose Speigel; and George Baehr’s work with the Consultation Serivces and early animal kidney transplants, including her own role in Baehr’s kidney transplants as an anesthesiologist.
The recording begins in mid-sentence without context.
Trachtenberg, BellaIncludes information about Mount Sinai's World War I Unit
Jackson, Edgar B., 1893-