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"A moving story of action — direct, forceful, and plain...)
"A moving story of action — direct, forceful, and plain-spoken.…It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this autobiography." — Saturday Review of Literature.
While working as a nurse amid the squalor of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger witnessed the devastating effects of unwanted pregnancies. Women already overwhelmed by the burdens of poverty had no recourse; their doctors were either ignorant of effective methods of birth control or were unwilling to risk defying the law.
Sanger resolved to dedicate her life to establishing birth control as a basic human right. Her battles brought a world of troubles — arrest, indictment, and exile among them — but ultimately she triumphed, opening the first American birth control clinic in 1916 and serving as the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1953.
A fascinating firsthand account of an early crusade for women's healthcare, this autobiography is a classic of women's studies and social reform.
Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn was an American activist and reformer. She was a leader of the suffrage movement in the United States, and then became a member of the National Woman's Party.
Background
Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn was born on February 2, 1878 in Buffalo, New York, United States. She was the daughter of Caroline Garlinghouse Houghton and Alfred Augustus Houghton.
Amory Houghton, Katharine's paternal grandfather, founded the Corning Glass Works; her uncle Amory Jr. , succeeded him as president of the company. But Katharine's immediate family did not follow the tidy existence of the business-minded Houghtons. Although Alfred Houghton eventually settled into the presidency of the Buffalo Scale Company, his brother Amory had fired him from the glass works for frequent tardiness.
Katharine's mother was known to lead her husband off to lectures on advanced subjects--Darwinism and religion, abolition and women's rights--including those offered by Robert Ingersoll.
Education
Caroline Houghton urged her three daughters to go to college. By 1892, when she died suddenly, at the age of thirty-six, from an internal disorder, she had already counseled the girls to go to Bryn Mawr (presumably passing over Harvard, the Houghton alma mater, because it had not created a definite space for females).
When her husband, despondent over her death, committed suicide, fourteen-year-old Hepburn and her sisters were placed under the guardianship of their uncle Amory, who opposed education for girls. They had to fight to fulfill their mother's legacy, but all three did go to Bryn Mawr, starting with Katharine, who entered the class of 1899 at age sixteen.
Once admitted, however, Katharine lost her feminist zeal and direction. A casual undergraduate student, she later recalled an encounter between herself and M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr's president, as a turning point in her life. In a discussion concerning Miss Houghton's smoking in public, Miss Thomas reportedly made her so ashamed of her failure to live up to the noble history of the fight for female education that Houghton not only gave up smoking, but stayed on at Bryn Mawr after she received the Bachelor of Arts to take a Master of Arts in chemistry and physics--the subjects she most abhorred.
Career
After graduation in 1900, Hepburn still could not find a vocation. She traveled abroad; taught elementary grades at the Calvert School in Baltimore; and, in 1904, in an action which might have appeared to mark the end of her prospects for a career.
From about 1910 on Katharine Hepburn became involved with controversial matters - woman suffrage, the abolition of the white slave trade, and birth control. In 1913, together with Josephine Day Bennett and Emily Pierson, she gained control of the moribund Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association. They set to work, tripling the association's budget, inviting such speakers as Emmeline Pankhurst of the British Women's Social and Political Union, sponsoring large parades, and assailing the state legislature regularly, so that the CWSA and its leaders had almost daily publicity in the Hartford papers.
Hepburn struck hard for her cause. For example, when Hartford officials had resisted the women's attempts to close houses of prostitution in downtown Hartford, she organized street action; women marched, carrying placards publicizing the names of the intransigent officials and bearing warnings: "Danger! Mothers Beware! 60, 000 innocent girls to take the place of 60, 000 white slaves who will die this year in the United States. " The houses were closed.
In 1918 she resigned as president of the Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association to join the militant Woman's Party, led by Alice Paul. Although she joined their picketing actions, she was never arrested, and thus was not forced to go on a hunger strike or be force-fed. In 1934 she served briefly as acting president of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, part of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League. In that year, she and Sanger (who was also from Corning, though from the other side of the tracks) appeared before a House judiciary committee investigating penal laws against the medical dispersal of birth control. During the hearings, a Congressman asserted, "I want it to appear on the Committee's record that there has never been a contraceptive in my home. I have six children. " A placid Hepburn is reported to have rejoined, "I also have six children. " Hepburn decided that, for her, at least, the vote was not enough. Legally, women needed an Equal Rights Amendment; privately, they might need much more.
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"A moving story of action — direct, forceful, and plain...)
Politics
Hepburn was a member of the National Woman's Party.
Views
Quotations:
"Don't regret your daily chores. They are what keep you from going insane. "
Membership
Hepburn served as president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association.
Connections
Hepburn was married to Thomas Noval Hepburn of Virginia, who was one of her sister's classmates at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. She accompanied her husband to Hartford, Connecticut, where he began his career as a surgeon and then a urologist; they had six children, the second of whom, Katharine (born in 1909), became a well-known actress.