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Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography First Edition W. W. Norton & Company, 1938
A notable association copy of Sanger's second autobiography inscribed to the prominent English birth control advocate and eugenicist Maurice Newfield - "My Love to Maurice - Margaret Sanger Oct. 1948"
Gilt stamped full navy cloth with red title label decoration, red topstain, frontis. portrait of Sanger, pp. [2], 1-4, 5-504, [2]; VG+ book with a touch of soil and a lightly bumped corner, binding firm and square, internally clean with just a touch of soil to pastedowns; VG jacket with several minor closed tears and creasing to extremities, jacket interior has some light moisture staining, small chip to head of spine, lightly rubbed, touch of soil to rear panel
Margaret Sanger was the foremost leader of the US birth control movement, who founded the first birth control clinic in the United States and the organization that would become Planned Parenthood. This copy highlights Sanger's complex association with the eugenics movement. While scholarly consensus supports her rejection of eugenics beliefs along racial and class lines, Sanger's endorsement of certain beliefs and policies tied to eugenics such as limited involuntary sterilization remain a stain on her legacy.
Maurice Newfield (1893-1949), was the long-time editor of London-based The Eugenics Review. He published an influential book in 1928 outlining contraceptive methods under the pseudonym of Michael Fielding titled Parenthood: Design or Accident? A Manual of Birth Control with a preface by H. G. Wells, for whom Newfield briefly served as a private physician. He also served as the second honorary director of the Birth Control International Information Centre, a London-based clearinghouse for birth control information established by Margaret Sanger and British suffragist Edith How-Martyn. It supported the establishment of clinics and maternity advice centers abroad, sponsored lecture tours and a conference.
Sanger wrote the following tribute in the Eugenics Review following Newfield's passing in 1949 -
"In the death of Doctor Maurice Newfield, on August 13th, I949, the Eugenics Society and the birth control movement have lost a distinguished leader and an uncompromising and fearless defender of their theories and objectives. Despite his physical frailty, his ever-willing spirit never once refused to respond and those of us who knew him and loved him looked to him always for guidance because of his courageous, liberal views. Maurice Newfield was a man of wisdom, humanity, tolerance and understanding, and his entire life was devoted to truth and social justice. To those of us who knew and loved him, there remains only the consolation that Maurice Newfield lived the good life to its fullest spiritual capacity and the influence of such a life carries on. I shall miss him, as will all his many American friends."
Robert Graves also wrote of Newfield in the same publication - "Once my neighbor Agatha Christie came to supper and I sat back happily while he put her through a highly technical cross-examination (from which she emerged with high marks) on the subject of drugs suitable for undetected murder."
[Moore & Moore 952].
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