The birth control crusader, feminist, and reformer Margaret Sanger was one of the most controversial and compelling figures in the twentieth century. This first volume of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger documents the critical phases and influences of an American feminist icon and offers rare glimpses into her working-class childhood, burgeoning feminism, spiritual and scientific interests, sexual explorations, and diverse roles as wife, mother, nurse, journalist, radical socialist, and activist.<P>Complex, savvy, and passionate, Sanger largely constructed her own image for propaganda purposes. The Woman Rebel, 1900-1928, more fully explores her personal and public lives. It extracts the nuances and contradictions of her career from the daily records she left behind, including letters, diaries, journals, articles, and speeches. These documents vividly capture her developing and shifting ideals, intellectual and class-based insecurities, as well as her staunch sense of duty and restless spirit.<P>This volume covers a twenty-eight-year period from her nurse's training and early socialist involvement in pre-World War I Greenwich Village to her adoption of birth control (a term she helped coin in 1914) as a fundamental tenet of women's rights. It also highlights her legislative and organizational efforts, her support of the eugenics movement, and the alliances she secured with medical professionals in her quest to make birth control legal, respectable, and accessible. Supplemented by an introduction, brief essays providing narrative and chronological links, and substantial notes, the volume is an invaluable tool for understanding Sanger's actions and accomplishments.<P>The documentsassembled here, more than 80 percent of them letters, are culled from the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition, edited by Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Peter C. Engelman. Two subsequent volumes will address later periods in Sanger's life, and an additional volume wi

Promoting birth control as reform rather than revolution