Liberalism: Power, Economic Crisis, Reform, War 79likely to live in poverty and that contraception could solve many of their
economic problems. Sanger saw a friend, who already had a sizable family,
die from a self-induced abortion after her doctor refused to give her birth
control so she went on a crusade to educate Americans about family planning.
Sanger saw it as not just a feminist cause but a health and medical issue as
well, but authorities arrested her for giving out information—not contracep-
tive devices but merely pamphlets about them—on contraception [contracep-
tion and abortion were often outlawed under obscenity laws] and she fled to
Europe for a time. Upon her return, she began the National Birth Control
League with its first clinic in Brooklyn, New York. Sanger had some contro-
versial views of her own that harmed her cause [she believed, for instance, in
the racist idea that birth control should be given to non-white families to
prevent a larger Black or Hispanic population] and some religious people,
especially Catholics, fought her efforts vigorously. Not until the development
of “the pill” in 1960 and a Supreme Court case preventing states, Connecticut
in this instance, from outlawing contraception, did birth control advocates win
their half-century long battle.
Progressivism resided in the world of ideas and art as well. It represented
a “revolt against formalism,” the idea that there was a singular, formal and
FIGuRE 2-7 Child industrial workers in West Virginia