Margaret Sanger was a New York City nurse in 1912 when she began writing a series of articles for the New York Call that would be compiled into the 1916 book What Every Girl Should Know. By the time she wrote “Birth Control and Racial Betterment” in 1919, an article published in the monthly Birth Control Review, she had launched a new movement for birth control and women’s empowerment. Her rhetoric changed as she grew more experienced and was exposed to different kinds of activism. She sought to expand the birth control movement beyond its radical base and draw support from broader segments of the population, first speaking to working-class women, then to middle-class and society women, and finally to an audience that included physicians, legislators, and eugenicists. The latter were scientists and others who advocated controlling hereditary characteristics and thereby preventing the birth of people deemed “unfit” for what they perceived as the betterment of humankind—even to the point of sterilizing poor people, immigrants, disabled people, and nonwhites. The philosophy was popular and even mainstream at the time but would taint the birth control movement in years to come.