In January, 1917, outside a New York courtroom, the crowd behaved predictably: the same whispers and sly grins, the same ugly innuendoes and unreasoning anger, greeted her whenever she appeared in public ; alone, facing them down, was the little woman with the shy smile and dark, penetrating eyes, quietly determined to speak her mind and persuade those who opposed her of the sanity of her cause. A few months earlier Margaret Sanger had opened the first American birth-control clinic; as a result she had been arrested several times, and now she was charged with violating a state law that prohibited distribution of literature on contraception. The judge promised leniency if she would agree to abide by the law in the future, but Margaret Sanger was determined to test the statute. “I cannot promise to obey a law I do not respect,” she said, and was sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse, where she occupied her time by giving her fellow prisoners lectures on birth control.

The sixth of eleven children born to Michael Higgins, an Irish sculptor of tombstone angels in Corning, New York, Margaret had seen childbearing take her mother to an early grave; as a nurse she had come across babies “wrapped in newspapers to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children … pushed into gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small scrawny hands scuttling through rags, making lamp shades, artificial flowers.” From the day in 1912 when Margaret Sanger decided to champion birth control, the enemy was never very far away. Arrayed against her were federal and state governments, churches, the medical profession, the press, and many of her friends, but if anyone personified the opposition, it was Anthony Comstock, a self-appointed “Guardian of Purity” who was incapable of distinguishing between information and obscenity. He had been largely responsible for persuading Congress to enact legislation in 1873 that barred “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy and indecent” materials from the U.S. mails. He had also succeeded in including contraceptive devices and literature about them under those headings, thus equating birth control with smut and pornography.

When in 1914 Margaret Sanger began publishing a paper, The Woman Rebel , that dealt with health, social hygiene, child labor, and the damaging effects of large families, the New York postmaster advised her that it could not be mailed. Not long afterward she was indicted by a grand jury on nine counts for alleged violations of federal statutes; if convicted, she could receive up to forty-five years in prison. When her case came up she asked for a stay, but the judge gave her only until the following morning. Even though it was wartime, she decided to flee to London, buying time to prepare her defense and publish a pamphlet she had just completed, called “Family Limitation,” in which she presented the forbidden information about birth control. In 1916 she was back in the United States, brimming