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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