"Nurse Gordon on trial: those early days of the birth control clinic movement reconsidered"

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2005

Rose Holz, "Nurse Gordon on Trial: Those Early Days of the Birth Control Clinic Movement Reconsidered"

This essay concerns a woman by the name of Adele Gordon. Adele Gordon was a nurse who, during the 1930s, operated a commercially-sponsored birth control clinic in the city of Milwaukee and who, in 1935; was arrested and tried for precisely these activities. However, while her story is the guiding theme of this narrative, her life (as well as the lessons to be learned from the history of medicine) invites us to consider the larger world in which her work took place, in particular the early days of the birth control clinic movement. Indeed, what this essay asks us to imagine is the presence of what I call the Irregular birth control clinic movement, a movement of clinics which continued to embody the supposedly lost radicalism of Margaret Sanger in the teens. And this Irregular clinic movement, in turn, invites us to re-think the efforts of the American Birth Control League in its quest for professionalization and the backing of the American Medical Association. Hence Nurse Gordon's story is an important one in part, because she is an intriguing individual who embodied an uncommon sense of modesty and determination, dignity and pride. But also because Nurse Gordon offers us a new way to tell the story of twentieth-century birth control, encouraging us to appreciate the breadth of the birth control clinic movement, the malleability of the birth control institution, and the American Birth Control League's efforts to contain them both.