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Article: Nurse Gordon on trial: those early days of the birth control clinic movement reconsidered.(Linda Gordon)
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- September 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It is a story many of us know well. As historian Linda Gordon explained nearly thirty years ago, in the early days of the teens Margaret Sanger was a radical. She talked about sex. She talked about revolution. She criticized doctors. She even opened a clinic in overt defiance of the law. And in this clinic she exercised her skills as a nurse and educated women about birth control. But then, as Gordon's story also goes, by the 1920s Sanger shifted tactics: she softened her critique and she put a doctor in charge of her new facility, with the message that only physicians were qualified to fit women with the diaphragm, though she knew full well how to do it on her own. And ...