Responding to the call by historical demographers for "more empirical studies at
the micro-level" of motives for using birth control, a single archival source—letters written to
Marie Stopes, a major English advocate of contraception—are used to examine the contraceptive
experiences and sexual problems of individual men and women during the later phase of the
demographic transition in England (1918-1939). Various statistical assessments reveal that
methods and motives for contraception were influenced by the correspondents' sex and social
standing.
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