Edward Carpenter: The Forgotten Birth Control Advocate. The Progression of His Advocacy and its Culmination

Edward Carpenter is remembered as an English Poet, Socialist, sex-reformer and gay rights activist. This work aims to illuminate another avenue of Carpenter’s ventures, birth control. The previously overlooked avenue of Carpenter’s interest is the focus of this work. Through analysis of selected work by Carpenter, such as his 1894 pamphlets, can his ideology and advocacy begin to be shaped and understood. This becomes further evident through his professional relationships with birth control pioneers such as Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger. Carpenter’s advocacy is made further evident through the analysis of his unpublished manuscript ‘Birth Control and Bisexuality’. What becomes clear in this work is that Carpenter was advocating for birth control throughout his early work and, by the 1920s, was actively writing about the subject. Whether or not intentional, Carpenter was dropping breadcrumbs of birth control advocacy in early writing and later on was explicit and deliberate in his advocacy.