author
Winter Russell
Best remembered today for a public debate with Margaret Sanger, this early 20th-century writer and lawyer stepped into one of the era’s fiercest social arguments. His surviving work offers a small but revealing glimpse of the moral and political battles around birth control in the 1920s.
1 Audiobook
Debate on birth control. Margaret Sanger and Winter Russell
by Margaret Sanger, Winter Russell
About the author
Winter Russell appears to have been a New York lawyer as well as a writer. The clearest documented record of his authorship is Debate on Birth Control, a published exchange with Margaret Sanger that grew out of their 1920 debate on the subject.
Sources available online describe him as a recent convert to Catholicism at the time of that debate, and his role in the book was to argue against birth control from a moral and religious standpoint. Because so little verified biographical material is easily available, much of his life remains obscure in the historical record.
That relative obscurity makes his work interesting in its own right: rather than a broad literary career, he is remembered through one sharply focused public controversy. For readers interested in social history, reform movements, or the culture wars of the early 20th century, his surviving publication is a useful window into the arguments of the period.