Part of the fight for birth control has been the struggle to even be able to discuss it. Here a campaign for a Congressional bill that would lift the legal restrictions on its mention through the federal mail service.

‘The Fight Starts For Legal, Free Birth Control Clinics’ from Working Woman. Vol. 6 No. 11. December, 1935.

“WHAT do you women talk about when you get together?” husbands will say. Many of us have laughed with them at this. But it is true that when women are so desperate for knowledge and help that their natural shyness is lost, they may indeed talk to one an- other occasionally, in an effort to find out how to prevent incessant child-bearing.

Right here in New York City where birth control clinics are legal, a young girl about to marry, was heard saying that she thought the best method of not having too many children was not to have relations with her husband except for the purpose of having children. She was quite right in fearing abortions but knew absolutely nothing about birth control.

There are advertisements in magazines and papers for expensive medicines which hint that they prevent conception or bring on menstruation. These are either utterly useless or definitely dangerous to life itself.

The information and supplies necessary to the health and well-being of women and their families must be made legally available to all and must be given free by the Public Health Authorities.

The WORKING WOMAN lends its full support to the movement started by Margaret Sanger for legal birth control clinics throughout the United States. We support the Bill H.R. 5600.

It is not generally known, that even now, there are 230 such clinics legally operated in different states.

“How strange!” you will say. It is indeed strange. The Federal (or National) Laws do not agree with the State Laws, and the birth control organizations are forbidden to tell you by mail, that there may be a legal clinic operating within walking distance of your home, where the charge is low for workers and the information may be had free for those on relief. In fact, in New York, if you open the telephone book to the right place by chance, you will see their name and number, legally listed.

The Bill, H.R. 5600 will adjust the Federal Laws so that they will agree with State Laws. The WORKING WOMAN and other publications which go through the mails, may not tell you where to go nor what to do, because the Federal authorities would ban our magazine from the mails and take away our right to mail in the future. Yet, in the following states it is al- ready legal to give birth control information; Alabama Arkansas Delaware Florida Georgia Illinois Kentucky Maryland New Hampshire New Mexico North Carolina North Dakota Oklahoma Oregon Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia West Virginia Wisconsin.

It is necessary to stress that birth control does not mean abortions (operations). It means simple methods of preventing conception. Women who write to the American Birth Control League, 515 Madison Avenue, New York City, will be sent free literature about their work.

We must remember that winning the legal right to send and receive birth control information will not mean the end of unemployment, low wages and poverty and will not prevent war. It will be of great help, though, to women who work and wives of workers.

Women and men should work together to fight the coming of fascism which brings war in its train.

Support H.R. 5600

Women’s Trade Union Auxiliaries in particular, should start a movement to get city, county and state governments to open free birth control clinics. This is the next move, particularly in those states where the legal right to such clinics has been won, but where it is left to birth control organizations to get inadequate, private donations for their public work. Birth control clinics should be part of the health programs of local governments, but workers and small business people and home owners should not be taxed for the purpose.

Millions of factory and white-collar workers and workers’ wives, may not now, be told publicly what concerns them so deeply, on account of Federal Postal Laws passed in 1873, which class birth control with obscenity.

Doctors who may legally give advice in their states, have to “bootleg” their contraceptive supplies and information for their patients. It is this ridiculous situation that H.R. 5600 would amend, says Margaret Sanger.

Only poor women are suffering. Any woman with the funds to pay a doctor may have correct, scientific information.

Over 15,000 women die in the United States each year from having operations performed by quacks and midwives who are not competent. Many, many others are left with internal disorders from unscientific work, which may indeed prevent them from ever having children again and may turn them into helpless invalids at an early age, when all life is before them.

All women’s organizations must be reached with this message. Trade unions, mass organizations, social, and other clubs. Women must bring pressure to bear on their local Congressional representatives to support and vote for H.R. 5600.

Conferences must then be arranged to take up this subject exclusively and then lend their weight to press for enactment of H.R. 5600. It is so vitally important a measure that the response to your activity will be large.

The Working Woman, ‘A Paper for Working Women, Farm Women, and Working-Class Housewives,’ was first published monthly by the Communist Party USA Central Committee Women’s Department from 1929 to 1935, continuing until 1937. It was the first official English-language paper of a Socialist or Communist Party specifically for women (there had been many independent such papers). At first a newspaper and very much an exponent of ‘Third Period’ politics, it played particular attention to Black women, long invisible in the left press. In addition, the magazine covered home-life, women’s health and women’s history, trade union and unemployment struggles, Party activities, as well poems and short stories. The newspaper became a magazine in 1933, and in late 1935 it was folded into The Woman Today which sought to compete with bourgeois women’s magazines in the Popular Front era. The Woman today published until 1937. During its run editors included Isobel Walker Soule, Elinor Curtis, and Margaret Cowl among others.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v6n10-dec-1935-only-4-pgs-WW-R7524-R2.pdf