Listener supported WNYC Studios.

Brian Laira on WNYC, studios. Now we continue our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

And because March is Women's History Month, our thing number 76 is particularly relevant to women's increased independence and participation in the workforce and just control over their own bodies.

Birth control. A hundred bodies. Birth control,

100 years of birth control. Joining me now is Elaine Tyler May, Regents Professor Emerita of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, an author of several books, including

America and the Pill, a history of promise and peril. Welcome to WNYC, Professor May.

Thank you for joining our 100 Years of 100 Think Series. Thank you for inviting me.

And starting off just before a hundred year timeline, 109 years ago, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the neighborhood

of Brownsville in Brooklyn. In 1921, Sanger followed this with the establishment of the American

Birth Control League. Elaine, everyone has heard the name, but who is Margaret Sanger very briefly?

And what was new with birth control technology or anything else

that these steps were taken in 1916 and 1921?

Well, Margaret Sanger was a socialist, a feminist, an activist, an activist, and she wasn't the first or the only person or woman activist to be

involved in advocating for birth control. There were others who were also very well known.

Emma Goldman works also alongside Margaret Sanger. She was a

radical anarchist and was very committed to the cause. Margaret Sanger was also funded by another

woman activist by the name of Catherine McCormick, who was the widow of Cyrus McCormick,

who had developed the Reaper machine for farming, and so she had a lot of resources at her disposal.

And they were all part of a group of radical feminist women, socialist anarchist,

anarchists, progressives who were supporting the development of the birth control movement as it grew.

It wasn't invented then. It wasn't started then. There's a long history of

efforts to control reproduction in various ways with various kinds of devices. The diaphragm was not

...