Birth control is everywhere these days look at the early centry.These women truly stood at the head of time.
Lena Levine
(1903-1965)
Levine believed that women’s sexual enjoyment, free access to birth control and frankness about sexual techniques contributed to stronger marriages and psychologically healthier children.
Lena Levine was a pioneer in the birth control movement and marriage counseling. She worked very closely with Margaret Sanger and traveled with her to many world conferences.
She was born on May 17, 1903, in Brooklyn, New York, to Sophie and Morris H. Levine, a successful clothing manufacturer. Her parents were Russian Jews from Lithuania, who immigrated to the United States in the 1890′s. Levine went through the public educational system, graduating from Hunter College in 1923 with an A.B. Degree. She received her medical degree from Bellevue College, in 1927. Levine married Louis Ferber, a fellow student and they both did their residencies at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital.
She became a gynecologist and an obstetrician and her husband was a general practitioner. She retained her maiden name in her professional life. They had two children: Ellen Louise (1939) and Michael Allen (1942). Unfortunately, Michael, as an infant, became retarded from an illness and later in life was institutionalized.
Tragedy confronted her again, when in 1942 Louis Ferber died of a heart attack. She was deeply affected and decided to give up obstetrics. She became very close with her daughter and with her housekeeper, Pearl Harrison, who remained with the family until Levine died.
Levine met Margaret Sanger and became involved with birth control and planned parenthood. Planned parenthood and marriage counseling became the focus of her life. She became the medical secretary of the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation.
She was active in marriage counseling in New York with Hannah and Abraham Stone. When Hannah died in 1941, she and Abraham Stone organized a group counseling program on sex and contraception under the sponsorship of Planned Parenthood. This was the first program of its kind in the United States.
Levine offered group therapy for sexual problems and she ran a special consultant bureau for pregnant women. As a physician and psychiatrist, she helped women with their physical and emotional problems and counseled them on the use of contraceptives.
Levine was the author and co-author of five books on marriage and sex problems. She also wrote many pamphlets and papers on women’s medical and psychological problems for the lay readers and professionals. She lectured widely in America and abroad on sex education, planned parenthood and marriage. She frequently appeared on national television and radio discussing the topics that she wrote about.
She was a supporter of President Franklin
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
Working closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony was a primary organizer, speaker, and writer for the 19th century women’s rights movement in the United States, especially the first phases of the long struggle for women’s vote, the women’s suffrage movement or woman suffrage movement.
Selected Susan B. Anthony Quotations
• Independence is happiness.
• Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less.
• Failure is impossible.
• The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain.
• It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.
• Suffrage is the pivotal right.
• The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it.
• Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother
[T]here never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.
• There is not the woman born who desires to eat the bread if dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for any one who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.
• The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.
• Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
• I can’t say that the college-bred woman is the most contented woman. The broader her mind the more she understands the unequal conditions between men and women, the more she shafes under a government that tolerates it.
• on foreign policy: How can you not be all on fire? … I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don’t wake up –and raise your voice in protest against the impending crime of this nation upon the new islands it has clutched from other folks. Do come into the living present and work to save us from any more barbaric male governments.
Recent Comments