MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

While most scholars will remember Margaret Sanger and her campaign for birth control, it is easy to forget that she undertook this challenge before women even had the right to vote in the United States. The fight for reproductive autonomy in the early twentieth century took place alongside the suffragist struggle to attain voting rights for women, as well as the socialist struggle for working class rights. The social agenda of these three groups converged around issues of motherhood, including the plight of working class mothers and the problem of child labor. In this paper, I analyze this convergence by bringing critical attention to Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, particularly in terms of the cartoon imagery produced therein. I argue that Sanger’s Art Editors, Cornelia Barns and Lou Rogers, developed a visual rhetoric around reproductive rights that borrowed from the strategies of both socialist and suffragist illustrations. The resulting images published in the Birth Control Review are indicative of the ways in which the agenda of birth control advocates overlapped with the social agendas of radical socialism and moderate suffragism, especially concerning the problems faced by working class mothers, and the pernicious practice of child labor in the United States.