Margaret Higgins Sanger

As a nurse on New York's crowded Lower East Side, Margaret Sanger saw firsthand how constant childbearing contributed to the cycle of poverty, and in 1912 she gave up nursing to devote herself to the promotion of birth control. Faced with laws forbidding dissemination of contraceptive information, Sanger's crusade had much opposition. But by 1921, when Sanger founded the Birth Control League, her movement had begun to win adherents in respectable quarters. Many years of battling were left before birth control would become part of mainstream social thinking, but with Sanger leading the way, that outcome increasingly seemed to be all but inevitable.
This photograph was taken shortly after Sanger's thirty-day imprisonment in 1917 for opening her first birth control clinic. Shortly before her release, the police ordered her to submit to fingerprinting. When she refused, a prolonged physical struggle ensued, from which she emerged the winner.