An American History

714 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Progressive Era

next issue of The Call included a blank

page with the headline: “What Every

Girl Should Know— Nothing; by order

of the U. S. Post Office.”

By 1914, the intrepid Sanger was

openly advertising birth- control devices

in her own journal, The Woman Rebel.

“No woman can call herself free,” she

proclaimed, “who does not own and

control her own body [and] can choose

consciously whether she will or will not

be a mother.” In 1916, Sanger opened a

clinic in a working- class neighborhood

of Brooklyn and began distributing

contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women, an action for which

she was sentenced to a month in prison. Few Progressives rallied to her defense.

But for a time, the birth- control issue became a crossroads where the paths of

labor radicals, cultural modernists, and feminists intersected. The IWW and

Socialist Party distributed Sanger’s writings. Like the IWW free- speech fights

and Goldman’s persistent battle for the right to lecture, Sanger’s travail was part

of a rich history of dissent in the Progressive era that helped to focus enlight-

ened opinion on the ways local authorities and national obscenity legislation

set rigid limits to Americans’ freedom of expression. Slowly, laws banning birth

control began to change. But since access was determined by individual states,

even when some liberalized their laws, birth control remained unavailable in

many others.

Native American Progressivism

Many groups participated in the Progressive impulse. Founded in 1911, the

Society of American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era.

It brought together Indian intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight

of Native Americans in the hope that public exposure would be the first

step toward remedying injustice. Because many of the society’s leaders had

been educated at government- sponsored boarding schools, the society united

Indians of many tribal backgrounds. It created a pan- Indian public space inde-

pendent of white control.

Many of these Indian intellectuals were not unsympathetic to the basic goals

of federal Indian policy, including the transformation of communal landholdings

on reservations into family farms. But Carlos Montezuma, a founder of the Society

of American Indians, became an outspoken critic. Born in Arizona, he had been

Mothers with baby carriages wait outside
Margaret Sanger’s birth- control clinic in
Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1916.