Bartleby Weekly: May 30, 2000

Bartleby Weekly

Volume I, Issue 11. May 30, 2000

Margaret Sanger

Read the Seminal Work of the Crusader for Women’s Reproductive Rights

Woman and the New Race, published in 1920, chronicles Margaret Sanger’s decades-long battle to legalize and develop information on the prevention of venereal disease and then methods of birth control, during which she endured indictment, exile and prison. While both an outspoken and sometimes flamboyant figure in American twentieth-century culture, Sanger’s words form an early manifesto of women’s emancipation. Trained in nursing, she watched one of her first patients die from a botched abortion; to avert such a common tradegy, she went on to found the organization that became Planned Parenthood and advocate for the medical research that resulted in the invention of the first birth control pill.

Continue to Woman and the New Race (http://www.bartleby.com/1013/).

Celebrate the Birthdays of Whitman and Hardy

Two poets who led their respective national literatures into the age of modern verse celebrate their birthdays this week: the American Walt Whitman was born in Long Island, New York, on May 31, 1819; and the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, near Dorchester. Their poetic opera form a cornerstone of Bartleby.com’s Verse collection:

Whitman, Walt. 1900. Leaves of Grass.

Hardy, Thomas. 1898. Wessex Poems & Other Verses.

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