NURSE GORDON ON TRIAL: THOSE EARLY DAYS OF THE BIRTH CONTROL CLINIC MOVEMENT RECONSIDERED

By Rose Holz

University of Nebraska, Lincoln

It is a story many of us know well. As historian Linda Gordon explained nearly thirty years ago, in the early days of the teens Margaret Sanger was a radical. She talked about sex. She talked about revolution. She criticized doctors. She even opened a clinic in overt defiance of the law. And in this clinic she exercised her skills as a nurse and educated women about birth control. But then, as Gordon's story also goes, by the 1920s Sanger shifted tactics: she softened her critique and she put a doctor in charge of her new facility, with the message that only physicians were qualified to fit women with the diaphragm, though she knew full well how to do it on her own. And so, there ended the radicalism not only of Margaret Sanger but of the birth control clinic movement itself.1	1
Undated photograph of Nurse Adele Gordon, circa early 1930s, frame 224, reel 108, Margaret Sanger Papers (Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
But what if this were only part of the story? What if there were other birth control clinics out there which did not adhere to this newly emergent medical model: clinics which used nurses; clinics which used Irregular practitioners; clinics which even had direct ties with the commercial contraceptive world. Furthermore, what if those clinics, which operated in association with the increasingly physician-dominated American Birth Control League, still occasionally threatened to rupture into radicalism themselves, or at least to blur seemingly effortlessly into the world I just described above. And finally, what if Sanger herself continued to dabble in her old habits as well by lending her support to those whom she supposedly should not? As these and other such questions suggest, what I argue here is that it is perhaps time we set aside (for the moment at least) Gordon's brilliant yet oft-told tale so that we might cast our gaze anew upon those early days of the 1920s and '30s. For what I believe we will find as a result is an even richer story, one which reveals not only the breadth of the birth control clinic movement but also the American Birth Control League's efforts to contain it.2	2
To cast such a gaze, we must begin by viewing this world through the lenses ground by historians of medicine. First, we must take seriously what I call "Irregular" birth control clinics (those sponsored by nurses, chiropractors, and commercial entrepreneurs), for to do otherwise would be to perpetuate what the American Birth Control League (ABCL) would have us believe, that such clinics were nothing more than the work of quacks or scoundrels whose only purpose was to profit off their patrons' desperation.3 Using the word "Irregular" to describe them is important too.4 Among historians of medicine, this is a term to define such practitioners as chiropractors or homeopaths whom the Regular medical profession (the American Medical Association for example) regarded in less than favorable ways. My use of the term, admittedly, covers a much broader range of providers, but I do so for good reason. In part, grouping these many individuals together shows the similarity of their status with respect to organized medicine, as the American Medical Association (AMA) had about as much love for the entrepreneur or the self-reliant nurse as it did the Irregular practitioner. But to group them together, under this heading especially, captures also organized medicine's long-standing campaign against this world of Irregular providers, a campaign in which the American Birth Control League, in its efforts to win the backing of the AMA, was now becoming an avid participant.5	. . .