Why am I passionate about this?
My great-grand aunt Blanche Ames was a co-founder of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts. My grandmother marched in birth control parades with Blanche. My mother stood in the Planned Parenthood booth at the Minnesota State Fair and responded calmly to those who shouted and spit at her. As the lead author and associate editor of the monumental reference work Women’s History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States, which helped to launch the field of women’s history in the 1970s, I learned to love American women’s history, and I’ve always loved writing. Lemons in the Garden of Love is my third award-winning historical novel.
Ames' book list on reproductive freedom
Why did Ames love this book?
This historical novel about the life of Margaret Sanger, founder of the birth control movement, is full of accurate details about the life of Sanger – a revolutionary who spent her life making it possible for women to choose the number of children they wish to bear. She was an intriguing character driven by her cause and her belief that women enjoy sex as well as men do. She was charismatic, generous, ruthless, compassionate, calculating, and, when it came to her children, conflicted.
1 author picked Terrible Virtue as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In the spirit of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank, the provocative and compelling story of one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the twentieth century: Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood—an indomitable woman who, more than any other, and at great personal cost, shaped the sexual landscape we inhabit today.
The daughter of a hard-drinking, smooth-tongued free thinker and a mother worn down by thirteen children, Margaret Sanger vowed her life would be different. Trained as a nurse, she fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to…