Just a year after Susan B. Anthony introduced her constitutional amendmendment for the right of women to vote, and not far away from her hometown of Seneca Falls, a traditional Catholic family gave birth to Margaret Sanger, the sixth of eleven children (and 18 total pregnancies). Sanger would not join the suffrage movement so much as work alongside it, to grant women independence of another sort: from unwanted pregnancies. In defiance of the Comstock Laws, which deemed material on contraception as obscene, she would work to educate working-class women on liberating themselves by avoiding unplanned pregnancies.

On this day, October 16, in 1916, Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel opened the first women’s health clinic in Brooklyn, New York. For the nine days that the authorities allowed it to stay open, they served numerous women contraceptive devices and advised them on “birth control” — a term Margaret coined.

Sanger’s clinic was shut down on grounds of violating the Comstock Laws, and she herself spent a month in prison, but won her case on appeal. The state of New York, in a very liberal interpretation, ruled that medical reasons constitute an exception to the Comstock Laws. As the verdict was passed down, Sanger was already hard at work publishing the first issue of her scientific journal, The Birth Control Review. Continuing in that vein, in 1921 she founded American Birth Control League, an organization focused on promoting contraception and family planning (according to its charter principle, children should be born only when the mother’s health and desire allow it), which later became the Planned Parenthood organization.