Women & Children First

Description

Ellen Chesler's 1992 biography of Margaret Sanger is acclaimed as definitive and is widely used and cited by scholars and activists alike in the fields of women's health and reproductive rights.

Chesler's substantive new Afterword considers how Sanger's life and work hold up in light of subsequent developments, such as U.S. Supreme Court cases challenging the constitutional doctrine of privacy and international definitions of reproductive health as an essential human right.

About the Author

ELLEN CHESLER is distinguished lecturer and director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Life at Roosevelt House, the new public policy center of Hunter College of the City University of New York. Woman of Valor was a finalist for PEN's 1993 Martha Albrand prize for the year's best first work of nonfiction.

Praise for Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America…

"Authoritative, readable and rippling with the energy of the life it conveys." -- Daniel J. Kevles, The New York Times Book Review

"The Sanger portrayed by Chesler is compelling, and persuasively counters the tendency of earlier biographers to either eulogize or condemn...Chesler's exhaustive scholarship has yielded not only a fuller picture of Sanger but new knowledge about the history of birth control." -- Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Boston Sunday Globe

"Woman of Valor's chief virtue is a sweeping and authoritative grasp not only of Sanger's life but of the political detail and maneuvering behind it." -- Ruth Brandon, The Washington Post Book World

"Chesler illuminates Sanger's rich personal and public life with a sophisticated understanding of psychology and history, yet the book reads like a good novel." -- Sylvia A. Law, Professor of Law, New York University

"A major contribution to women's history." -- Library Journal