Woman Rebel

WOMAN REBEL. The short-lived anarchist journal Woman Rebel is notable because of the editorship of birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Produced monthly from March through October 1914, this eight-page newspaper addressed working-class women in the name of labor militancy, free love, and anticlericalism. In Sanger’s opinion, Woman Rebel was “red and flaming,” and its motto, No Gods, No Masters, complemented its advocacy of direct action. Sanger argued that each woman had the right to be “absolute mistress of her own body,” a right enhanced by legal and ready access to contraception. She explained that she published the Woman Rebel: “Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions. Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously.’

Sanger reprinted the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World and essays by feminist writers Olive Schreiner, Ellen Key, Helen Keller, and Emma Goldman. Sanger’s editorials, which included promotion of birth control, were ultra-leftist and occasionally struck out at “bourgeois feminists.” In the July issue she published an essay, “In Defense of Assassination,” by Herbert A. Thorpe, for which the U.S. Post Office rescinded her mailing privileges. Sanger was then indicted the following month for violating the Comstock Postal Act of 1873. The newspaper folded when Sanger, hoping to avoid arrest, sought exile abroad.

Baskin, Alex, ed. Woman Rebel. Reprint. New York: Archives of Social History, 1976.

Katz, Esther, ed. The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Vol. 1: The Woman Rebel, 1900-1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Kennedy, David M. Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970.

Margaret Sanger Papers Project. New York University. https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/