#fania mindell

[ursaminorjim]

[247reader]

Awesome Ladies of History, Day… ???

Is it October?  No. But in these interesting times, sometimes it’s a comfort to look at those who lived in the interesting times before us.

In 1916, Margaret Sanger (center), her sister Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened America’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. All three were almost immediately arrested.  Birth control and sex education fell into the category of “distributing obscene information,” and the women were found the guilty. The clinic was forcibly closed, but the publicity and ensuing legal battles helped light the fire that would finally see birth control fully legalized in 1965.

Sanger, the matriarch of what would become Planned Parenthood, is a well-known figure, both for her activism and her controversies, but Byrne and Mindell  have faded into history.

Byrne and Sanger were two of the eleven siblings who resulted from their mother’s eighteen pregnancies, and Byrne’s own marriage resulted in her separation from an abusive husband. She left her children with their paternal grandparents, but her daughter, Olive, would eventually be raised by Sanger and become an activist in her own right. Mindell was a Russian immigrant, artist, and actress, who worked on Broadway and soon moved in the same activist circles as the sisters.

All three women continued their activism after the clinic was closed, but their lives moved them in different directions. Ethel Byrne went on a hunger strike in prison, and the fallout damaged her relationship with her sister. She died in 1955. Fania Mindell married fellow activist and scholar Ralph Roeder in 1929, but the couple left the United States permanently after seeing friends persecuted during the Red Scare; she died in Mexico in 1969.

[catskewl]

1917. Photograph shows Fania Mindell who worked with Margaret Sanger and Ethel Byrne at the first birth control clinic on Amboy Street in Brooklyn. Mindell was accused of distributing a book entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." (Source: Flickr Commons project, 2015)

[amymcools]

New Podcast Episode: Margaret Sanger NYC Sites, Day 3, Part 1

New Podcast Episode: Margaret Sanger NYC Sites, Day 3, Part 1

Margaret Sanger with Fania Mindell inside Brownsville clinic, forerunner of Palanned Parenthood, Oct. 1916, public domain via Library of Congress

Listen to this podcast episode here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes

Thursday, October 20th, 2016

I get out in decent time to start the day’s explorations, just after eight, but it’s not long before I realize I’m tired and hence, a little…

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