Wo

Woman Rebel

This short-lived anarchist journal is notable because of the editorship of birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger. Produced monthly from March through October, 1914, this eight-page newspaper addressed working-lass women in the name of labor militancy, free love, and anticlericalism. In Sanger’s opinion, Woman Rebel was “red and flaming,” and its motto, No Gods, No Masters, complemented its advocacy of direct action.

Sanger reprinted the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World and essays by feminist writers Olive Schreiner, Ellen Key, Helen Keller, and Emma Goldman. Sanger’s editorials, which included promotion of birth control, were ultraleftist and occasionally struck out at “bourgeois feminists.” in the July issue she published an essay, “in Defense of Assassination,” by Herbert A. Thorpe, for which the U.S. Post Office rescinded her mailing privileges. Sanger was then indicted the following month for violating the Comstock Postal Act of 1873. The newspaper folded when Sanger, hoping to avoid arrest, sought exile abroad.

Mari Jo Buhle