liminate obscenity. Birth control also became a target, for Comstock could not imagine anyone providing birth control information for a legitimate reason. He saw birth control as the same thing as abortion, and he used whatever means he could to stamp out both. Birth control information was suppressed as part of a larger campaign of social reform and control. In part, this reflected a pragmatic response to the real dangers of venereal disease such as was then rampant, and the purity crusaders pointed out that attacking the problem of venereal disease depended on higher standards of sexual conduct (Reed 36-39).
Reviving birth control as a legitimate activity and even as a social good was undertaken by various new reformers after the turn of the century. One of the leading lights in this effort was Margaret Sanger, who led a movement on behalf of birth control from 1912 until World War II. It was during this era when contraception was for the first time advocated in an organized way. It was initially rejected and then finally accepted both privately and publicly (Kennedy ix). Sanger shaped her ideas under the guidance of Havelock Ellis. Sanger had been a nurse, and her work had taken her to New York's Lower East Side, an immigrant slum where she found pregnancy a chronic condition and living conditions deteriorating. She sought an answer and was warned to stay away from the subject of contraception or risk the wrath of Comstock and his followers. She traveled in Europe and brought back new ideas about contraception, which she began printing in her monthly sheet, The Woman Rebel, beginning in 1914. Various issues of the publication were banned. She wrote Family Limitation in 1914 and distributed it, describing the birth control methods available and how they were to be used (Fryer 201-206).
Sanger did not give up in spite of threats of prosecution, and she opened the first center for contraceptive instruction in the Uni...