Meeting of The Voluntary Parenthood League

March is Women’s History Month. NY1920s always centers women’s history; this month we’ll do so a bit more emphatically.

One hundred years ago today …  The Voluntary Parenthood League met at 124 Willow Street in Brooklyn and “indorsed [sic] the birth control movement”  (“BORO CLUB WOMEN CALL MASS MEETING ON BIRTH CONTROL,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 March 1922, p. 3).

The League had been formed in 1919 by Mary Ware Dennett, who was the meeting’s only speaker. 

Mrs. Dennett did not argue the merits of the birth-control question, but confined herself to the point of view that the family limitation has been a fact for many years in the lives of practically all women who belong to the class which has education and leisure.

"As a matter of fair play these women owe it to the 10,000,000 families below the income tax level to help secure such a change in the laws as will allow the fathers and mothers in these 10,000,000 families to secure scientific information on family limitation," said Mrs. Dennett.

Asked whether birth control information would not increase immorality, Mrs. Dennett replied:

"AII knowledge can be and is abused, but the cure is not the perpetuation of ignorance, but rather the increase of knowledge and the education which produces character. If the younger generation has been so poorly reared that it has a tendency to abuse this knowledge. the fault is with those who have reared them."

 (“BORO CLUB WOMEN CALL MASS MEETING ON BIRTH CONTROL,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 March 1922, p. 3).

– Jonathan Goldman, March 9, 2022

TAGS: women’s history, activism, family planning, bodily autonomy, right to choose