1.5 The phrase "birth control" was coined in 1914 - almost certainly by Margaret Sanger. Then 30, she was a former nurse who had been fighting since girlhood for women's rights, and her work among the New York poor had convinced her that contraceptive knowledge was one of those rights. At that time Comstock's law of 1873, forbidding dissemination through the mail of information about contraception, represented the views of the American medical professional: almost to a man they declared attempts to prevent conception injurious and wicked. Mrs Sanger was the most energetic of the courageous handful of people who disputed this, not only in her writings for newspapers and in her own paper, Woman Rebel (several numbers of which were suppressed), but in action. She opened the first US birth control clinic in 1916, in Brooklyn; she and her sister were soon in prison. Undaunted, she issued Birth Control Review and continued to lecture, and by the mid-Twenties her persistence had won a hearing in the US for advocates of birth control and, soon after, the co-operation of the medical profession. By 1932 there were 80 clinics @ 2.2 Book review Although sociologists and feminists will be interested in Mrs. Sanger's book as a record of a fight to win public opinion to her cause and to reform the laws of her country, it is perhaps most interesting as the evocation of a personality, a most unusual and dynamic personality. Child of a happy-go-lucky sculptor of gravestones and of a rather grim mother who had to wrestle with poverty in her struggle to feed eleven children, Margaret was very early initiated into the hardships of the working-class woman's life; and her career as a nurse, following an education sketchy so far as schooling was concerned, but rich in human experience, determined her subsequent activities. She tells, with passionate sincerity which sometimes amounts almost to fury, of the death of one of her patients, a young wife and mother who had been told by the doctor that another pregnancy would kill her, but treated humorously by that same doctor when she asked him how to avoid pregnancy. On the night of the woman's death, after a valiant fight for her life, her nurse went home, took off her nurse's uniform and announced that she would do no more patching; women, she felt, were groaning under the burden of accidental and inescapable motherhood, children already ridden with poverty and illness. She would find out how to reform this state of things, if it cost her her life. That decision is typical of many. Marrying an artist, living very happily with him a sort of blissful garden-city domesticity, she helped him to design and build the house of their dreams, and together they spent many laborious hours making a rose window for the new home. On the day they moved in it was burnt down. Her reaction to this episode is remarkable. I stood silently watching the effort of months of our work and love disintegrate... this thing of beauty had perished in a few minutes. I stood there amazed, but I was certain of a relief, of a burden lifted, a spirit set free... Somewhere in the back of my mind I saw the absurdity of placing all of one's hopes, all of one's efforts in the creation of something external that could perish. My scale of suburban values had been consumed by the flames... Such flashing enlightenments are common in Mrs. Sanger's life. On another occasion, sent to the mountains apparently to die quietly of tuberculoses, she suddenly decided that if, in order to live, she had to spend her days drinking milk and medicines, miles away from the current of active life, she had better die. Telegraphing to a startled husband that she was coming back to New York, she took up her normal life there, fought the disease and apparently succeeded curing it. Yet again, in 1913, she was determined to go to Paris to learn all she could about contraception, which was practically unknown in America; and this time transported a husband and three children with her. She says she cannot remember how they paid for the trip; I cannot remember how trips were financed... I do things first and somehow or other they get paid for. I suppose here is the real difference between the idealist - or the fanatic, as we are called - and the ordinary "normal" human being. Her fights with the laws of her country filled the Press of the world a few years ago. It began with the postal authorities suppression of her paper, The Woman Rebel, in which she stated the case for contraception but gave no practical information; the issues of this paper which had appeared had brought in such a flood of inquiries from women that Mrs. Sanger had printed an edition of 100,000 copies of her booklet, "Family Limitation," which were packed and addressed to inquirers and ready to be dispatched when she gave the signal. Before this signal was given she was arrested for an article in The Woman Rebel and indicted. Then came the first great personal struggle of her life - should she appear at Court the next morning with her case inadequately prepared, since the whole of her time in between arrest and trial had been spent in organizing her children's care in case of long imprisonment - or should she run away? Finally she decided to run to Europe, get all the facts and figures she needed about the incidence of crime, poverty and illness with large families, and the working of family limitation in countries where it was practised. When the case was called next day she was over the Canadian border, on the first stage of her flight to Europe. Thence she returned two years later with all her facts prepared, and yielded herself to the police, with the result that the case was finally dismissed, ostensibly because the authorities did not wish to make a martyr of her, but really, as she points out, as a result of the Press campaigns her first arrest had aroused. There was still much work to do, and other arrests and police intervention before she won her way; she was dragged from her first slum clinic and taken to prison; when later it was made legal for properly qualified doctors to give such information as was necessary to preserve the life or health of married women, doctors employed by Mrs. Sanger were arrested in circumstances somewhat discreditable to the police. But at the end of her book she can look round on clinics or other media of help accessible to almost every woman, though she cannot yet feel that enough propaganda has been done to make these clinics as useful to the community as they might be. @ 2.3 A sexually unhappy marriage, and the search for information it provoked, inspired Marie Stopes to write "a book on marriage and sex (which) would teach a man and a woman how to understand each other's sexual problems". This was Married Love (1918) which sold 2000 copies in its first fortnight. After her marriage to Humphrey Vernon Roe, who helped her publish it, she wrote Wise Parenthood (1918), which included descriptions of various methods of birth control. In 1921 she opened Britain's first birth control clinic in Holloway, London. So at the age of 40, after an earlier career as a scientist, she had discovered the work that was to fulfil her life. The medical profession was hostile and the Roman Catholics attacked her even more fiercely. In 1922 a Dr Halliday Sutherland wrote of her work so venemously that Marie Stopes sued him for libel. It was the first of many legal battles, which served to spread her fame to the millions of women she wanted to reach. She was not only a brilliant propagandist - she even wrote a play about birth control - but a woman prepared to put her vision into practice @ 2.5 Mrs. Margaret Sanger, a pioneer of the birth control movement and its leader in the United States of America, has arrived in London on her way in India in response to an invitation from the All-India Women's conference to address the annual session, to be held in Travencore in December. Mrs. Sanger has not previously been to India, but in 1922 toured in China and Japan to introduce and recommend the idea of conscious control of parenthood. On Thursday Mr. and Mrs. John H. G. Guy gave a dinner at the Barbers' Hall Monkwell Street, to meet Lord Horder, president of the British birth control organization, and was supported by Mr. H. G. Wells.