Jewish women from a range of social and economic backgrounds found common political cause in the American birth control movement and profoundly impacted its successes in the early twentieth century. Radical and socialist Jewish women, in defiance of anti-obscenity laws, distributed information about birth control to working-class women, while middle-class women established clinics and lobbied to overturn the Comstock Laws, which restricted the publication, distribution, and even discussion of material the government deemed obscene. Professional women affiliated with the movement as gynecologists and social workers, and many women enthusiastically sought the financially accessible services of birth control clinics. Later, communal leaders helped start and grow educational efforts like Planned Parenthood and the Our Bodies, Ourselves book project, ultimately lobbying the government to include contraception as required coverage in 2010’s Affordable Care Act. This article charts the grassroots and organizational engagement of Jewish women as the American birth control movement grew from its formative years at the start of the twentieth century to today’s complex and interconnected network of education, activism, and healthcare.

Jewish women in western and central Europe and in the United States attained widespread success reducing their fertility rates well before the start of the American birth control movement. Using available contraceptive methods and performing abortions at rates that far exceeded those of other religiously or ethnically defined groups, central and western European Jews attained rapidly declining fertility rates by the late nineteenth century and soon controlled their fertility more effectively than their non-Jewish peers.

The arrival in the United States of eastern European Jews, whose fertility rates had remained high, generated considerable interest among health care reformers. Although eastern European Jewish families were generally quite large upon arrival in the United States, a trend that continued in the following generation, 1930s studies of fertility rates by ethnic or religious affiliation found that American Jews, including those of the first or second generation, avidly sought birth control services to limit their relatively high fertility rates. Jewish women’s commitment to the birth control cause had dramatic consequences: In 1915, Jews in New York City had the highest number of children per marriage of any immigrant group, but by the early 1930s Jewish fertility rates generally matched the lower national average.

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Rose Pastor Stokes began her involvement with the birth control cause at a rally to protest Goldman’s arrest, handing out leaflets describing the benefits of contraception. Pastor Stokes, an impoverished eastern European immigrant who began her career in a Cleveland cigar factory, eagerly worked to become a New York journalist, eventually making the front page herself when she married Socialist (and millionaire) J.G. Phelps Stokes. In 1915 Pastor Stokes became the financial secretary of the National Birth Control League, an organization attempting to legalize the distribution of birth control information by repealing anti-obscenity laws. Pastor Stokes disliked the limits of this legislative approach, however, and soon joined a variety of birth control organizations.

During the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, the American birth control movement shifted its focus to the rapidly growing number of clinics across the country, and the legal restrictions preventing women from accessing contraception. Immigrant Jewish women and their first-generation children educated themselves about birth control through the Jewish press. Sanger had several of her pamphlets about birth control translated into Yiddish and Polish, but she was not the only source of birth control-related information for Jewish immigrant readers in the United States. Ben-Zion Liber (1875-1958) wrote and published the magazine Undzer gezunt, “Our Health,” which had four thousand subscribers in its first year. “A Jewish monthly for enlightenment in health questions,” it provided news of the birth control movement and of Sanger’s legislative and court battles. He urged his readers to reject “die alte minhagim,” the old ways that might rule out birth control as an option for limiting family size. One issue included “The Truth About Sexuality,” an illustrated pamphlet. A book about sexuality, Dos geshlekhts lebn, went through four editions in 1914, 1918, 1919, and 1927.

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