Alice Hancock

speaker

191 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Alice Hancock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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The Science Show · How bird brains help us understand human brains, and how eugenics had as much hand in the birth control movement as did feminism · 26 Jun 2026 podcast

And she writes this book that becomes a worldwide bestseller called Married Love.

And this has lots of tips and advice about how to have a good time as a married couple.

And it also has information about birth control because...

For stopes, for women to enjoy sex, they have to be free from the fear of getting pregnant constantly.

But she's already a eugenicist, so these ideas merge.

Meanwhile, over in the US, a nurse called Margaret Sanger was treating mothers who'd had incredibly dangerous back-alley abortions to avoid having more kids.

So Sanger thought, well, why not birth control?

Problem was, birth control and literature about birth control were considered obscene in the United States.

And if you were caught distributing either, you could be punished with a fine, jail, or both.

Margaret Sanger took that risk.

She became a socialist feminist and she published this now very famous pamphlet called On Family Limitation, which was all about birth control, and this is what got her arrested.

So to avoid prosecution, she goes to England, where she meets Marie Stopes and a whole bunch of other people who were involved in the eugenics movement.

And Stopes organises...

campaign to lobby the president, Woodrow Wilson, to withdraw the charges against Sanger.

And so she writes a letter, gets all the other key genesis to sign it, including HG Wells.

That's HG Wells of War of the World's fame.

Anyway, the letter campaign worked because Margaret Sanger went back to the US, her charges were dismissed, and in 1918, the law banning contraception was loosened.

Women could now use birth control, like diaphragms and sponges with spermicide, as long as they were prescribed by a doctor.

So Sanger founded a birth control organisation and in 1923 opened the first legal birth control clinic in the US.

But she very much courts the support of eugenicists in America as part of this campaign.

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