gether. Some of these rebellious youth made habits that were thought to be perverted and immoral of this time period. These habits/hobbies included things such as necking and making out in the car, parked next to a lake or in a park. Because of all of the fornication that was taking place during this time period, many unwanted pregnancies came about at a very rapid pace. As Sanger herself put it, On Saturday nights I have seen groups of from fifty to one hundred women with their shawls over their heads waiting outside the office of a fivedollar abortionist. These were not merely unfortunate conditions among the poor such as we read about, I knew the women personally. They were living, breathing, human beings, with hopes, fears, and aspirations like my own, yet their wary misshapen bodies, always ailing, never failing, were destined to be thrown on the scrap heap before they were thirty-five. (Halsall, 2) The fact was that many women were getting pregnant with nowhere to turn but the abortionist, which was a risk in itself. Another major cause of death of pregnant women of this time was self-inflicted abortions. With the invention of the birth control pill, Margaret Sanger felt that these kind of unnecessary deaths could be easily prevented. Another factor leading up to the 1920s was that men thought of women as more of an object than a person. They felt that it was the womans place to take care of the house and tend to their husbands needs without asking questions. They also felt that women were there to please them, and therefore they thought of sex as a thing to be enjoyed by men, and as a necessary duty for a woman to perform for her husband. Only in recent years has womans position as the gentler and weaker half of the human family been emphatically and generally questioned. Men assumed that this was a womans place; woman herself accepted it. It seldom occurred to anyone to ask whether she would go on occupying it forever. (Sanger, ...
