Britannica On This Day October 16 2023

This Day in History: October 16

Featured Event

1916







Margaret Sanger, an activist for women's reproductive rights, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, in Brooklyn, New York.


Margaret Sanger
American social reformer




Margaret Sanger, original name Margaret Louisa Higgins, (born September 14, 1879, Corning, New York, U.S.—died September 6, 1966, Tucson, Arizona), founder of the birth control movement in the United States and an international leader in the field. She is credited with originating the term birth control.



Margaret Sanger
Sanger was the sixth of 11 children. She attended Claverack College and then took nurse’s training in New York at the White Plains Hospital and the Manhattan Eye and Ear Clinic. She was married twice, to William Sanger in 1900 and, after a divorce, to J. Noah H. Slee in 1922. After a brief teaching career, she practiced obstetrical nursing on the Lower East Side of New York City, where she witnessed the relationships between poverty, uncontrolled fertility, high rates of infant and maternal mortality, and deaths from botched illegal abortions. These observations made Sanger a feminist who believed in every woman’s right to avoid unwanted pregnancies, and she devoted herself to removing the legal barriers to publicizing the facts about contraception.


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Featured Biography

John Mayer
American singer, songwriter, and guitarist







John Mayer, in full John Clayton Mayer, (born October 16, 1977, Bridgeport, Connecticut, U.S.), American singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose melodic, often soft rock earned him a wide audience and a number of Grammy Awards in the early 21st century.
Having taken up guitar playing as a teenager, Mayer briefly attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music but never completed his studies. Moving to Atlanta, Georgia, he played frequently in local clubs with a band and as a solo act. In 1999 he independently released his debut EP, Inside Wants Out. After a 2000 performance at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, he signed with the Aware record label, which released the full-length album Room for Squares (2001). Columbia Records repackaged the album with additional material for a much higher-profile national release later in 2001. The songs “No Such Thing” and “Your Body Is a Wonderland” both became hits, and the latter earned Mayer a Grammy Award for best male pop vocal performance. Mayer’s next studio release, Heavier Things (2003), topped the Billboard album chart and featured the hit “Daughters,” which was honoured with two Grammy Awards, including song of the year.


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