Margaret Sanger, “The Unrecorded Battle” (1912)

Published here for the first time, “The Unrecorded Battle” is a short story written in 1912 by Margaret Sanger, later the most famous American advocate of women's access to birth control. A dramatization of a doctor's sexual harassment of a nurse, the story drew on elements of Sanger's life. In 1912, Sanger was a nurse in New York City. She was thirty-two or thirty-three years old, having been born Margaret Higgins on September 14, 1879, in the middle of her working-class Irish immigrant parents’ eleven children. Upon her father's death, Higgins trained as a nurse between 1899 and 1902 at White Plains Hospital in Westchester County, at which time she lived in a boardinghouse, much like the story's protagonist. A few months’ residence at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital followed, but her nursing career was sidetracked when she married the Jewish architect and artist William Sanger and gave birth...