Margaret Sanger

Margaret Higgins Sanger
Margaret Sanger.
Born
September 14, 1879 Corning, New York
Died
September 6, 1966 Tucson, Arizona

Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). Initially met with fierce opposition to her ideas, Sanger gradually won some support, both in the public as well as the courts, for a woman's choice to decide how and when she will bear children. Margaret Sanger was instrumental in opening the way to universal access to birth control. Sanger was an avid defender of free speech who was arrested at least eight times for expressing her views in a time when speaking publicly in favor of birth control was illegal. H.G. Wells quote here?

Early life

Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, was a devout Roman Catholic who went through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births) before dying of tuberculosis and cervical cancer. Sanger attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Hudson for two years. Her sisters paid her tuition, and when they were unable to continue to provide this assistance, Sanger returned home in 1899. Her mother died the same year, after which Sanger enrolled in a nursing program at a hospital in White Plains, New York. In 1902, she married William Sanger. Although stricken by tuberculosis, she gave birth to a son the following year, followed in later years by a second son and a daughter who died in childhood.

In 1912, after a devastating fire destroyed the new home that her husband had designed, Sanger and her family moved to New York City, where she went to work in the poverty-stricken East Side slums of Manhattan. That same year, she also started writing a column for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." Distributing a pamphlet, Family Limitation, to poor women, Sanger repeatedly risked scandal and imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices.

Margaret separated from her husband William Sanger in 1913. In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel,a monthly newsletter and coined the term "birth control." She was indicted for violating postal obscenity laws in August and fled to Europe using the assumed name "Bertha Watson" to escape prosecution. She returned to the United States in 1915 and later that year her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died. ?

Family planning clinics

On Oct. 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. It was raided nine days later by the police. She served 30 days in prison. An initial appeal was rejected but a state appellate court in 1918 allowed doctors to prescribe contraception.

In 1916, Sanger published What Every Girl Should Know, which was later widely distributed as one of the E. Haldeman-Julius "Little Blue Books." It not only provided basic information about sexuality particularly in adolescence. It was followed in 1917 by What Every Mother Should Know. She also launched the monthly periodical The Birth Control Review and Birth Control News and contributed articles on health for the Socialist Party paper, The Call.

Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 with Lothrop Stoddard and C. C. Little. In 1922, she traveled to Japan to work with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue promoting birth control; over the next several years, she would return another six times for this purpose. In this year she married the oil tycoon, James Noah H. Slee.

In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established the Clinical Research Bureau. It was the first legal birth control clinic in the U.S. (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in her honor in 1940). It received crucial grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1924 onwards, which were made anonymously to avoid public exposure of the Rockefeller name to her cause. The family also consistently supported her ongoing efforts in regard to population control.

Also in 1923, she formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control and served as its president until its dissolution in 1937 after birth control, under medical supervision, was legalized in many states. In 1927, Sanger helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva.

Between 1921 and 1926, Sanger received over a million letters from mothers requesting information on birth control. From 1916 on, she lectured "in many places—halls, churches, women's clubs, homes, theaters" In 1930 she became president of the Birth Control International Information Center. In January 1932, she addressed the New History Society, an organization founded by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab and Julie Chanler; this address would later become the basis for an article entitled A Plan for Peace. In 1937, Sanger became chairperson of the Birth Control Council of America and launched two publications, The Birth Control Review and The Birth Control News. From 1939 to 1942, she was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America. From 1952 to 1959, she served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; at the time, the largest private international family planning organization.

During the 1960 presidential elections, Sanger was dismayed by candidate John F. Kennedy's position on birth control (Although Kennnedy was a practicing Catholic, a church who strongly opposed Sanger's view, Kennedy did not believe birth control should be a matter of government policy). She threatened to leave the country if Kennedy were elected, but evidently reconsidered after Kennedy won the election.

In the early 1960s, Sanger promoted the use of the newly available birth control pill. She toured Europe, Africa, and Asia, lecturing and helping to establish clinics.

Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona at age 86 which was eight days from her 87th birthday and only a few months after the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S., the apex of her 50-year struggle.

Sanger's books include Woman and the New Race (1920), Happiness in Marriage (1926), My Fight For Birth Control (1931), and an autobiography (1938).

Philosophy

Although Sanger was greatly influenced by her father, her mother's death left her with a deep sense of dissatisfaction concerning her own and society's understanding of women's health and childbirth. She also criticized the censorship of her message about sexuality and contraceptives by the civil and religious authorities as an effort by men to keep women in submission. An atheist, Sanger attacked Christian leaders opposed to her message, accusing them of Obscurantism and insensitivity to women's concerns. Sanger was particularly critical of the lack of awareness of the dangers of and the scarcity of treatment opportunities for venereal disease among women. She claimed that these social ills were the result of the male establishment's intentionally keeping women in ignorance. Sanger also deplored the contemporary absence of regulations requiring registration of people diagnosed with venereal diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of those with infectious diseases such as measles).

Psychology of sexuality

While Sanger's understanding of and practical approach to human physiology were progressive for her times, her thoughts on the psychology of human sexuality place her squarely in the pre-Freudian 19th century. Birth control, it would appear, was for her more a means to limit the undesirable side-effects of sex than a way of liberating men and women to enjoy it. In What Every Girl Should Know, she wrote: "Every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and woman who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, are never sensual." Sexuality, for her, was a kind of weakness, and surmounting it indicated strength:

Eugenics and euthanasia

Sanger was a proponent of eugenics, a social philosophy claiming that human hereditary traits can be improved through social intervention. Methods of social intervention (targeted at those seen as "genetically unfit") advocated by eugenists have included selective breeding, sterilization, and euthanasia. In 1932, for example, Sanger argued for:

With advances in biology and genetics, it has become clear that the policies Sanger advocated to prevent the disabled from reproducing would in practice be ineffective.^{[citation needed]} However, in the early 20th century, the eugenics movement, in which Sanger was prominently involved, gained strong support in the United States.

Sanger promoted the idea of "race hygiene" – meaning the human race, not the idea of race as ethnicity – through "negative eugenics," though her writings do not indicate that she believed that any particular (ethnic) race as a whole was more eugenic or dysgenic than any other, and she condemned the anti-Semitic Nazi program as "sad & horrible."

Of this, she said, "The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics."

Legacy

Sanger remains a controversial figure. While she is widely credited as a leader of the modern birth control movement, and remains an iconic figure for the American reproductive rights movements, she also is reviled by some who condemn her as "an abortion advocate" (perhaps unfairly so: abortion was illegal during Sanger's lifetime and Planned Parenthood did not then support the procedure or lobby for its legalisation). Pro-life groups have frequently targeted Sanger for her views, attributing her efforts to promote birth control to a desire to "purify" the human race through eugenics, and even to eliminate minority races by placing birth control clinics in minority neighborhoods. For this reason, Sanger is often quoted selectively or out of context by detractors, and her history and involvement with socialism and eugenics have often been rationalized or even ignored by her defenders and biographers. Despite the allegations of racism, Sanger's work with minorities earned the respect of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. In their biographical article about Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood notes:

In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city's health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community's elder statesman, W.E.B. DuBois.

Although Sanger's views on abortion (like many of her opinions) changed throughout the course of her life^{[citation needed]}, in her early years she was acutely aware of the problem of abortion, typically self-induced or with the aid of a midwife. Her opposition to abortion stemmed primarily from a concern for the dangers to the mother, and less so from legal concerns or the welfare of the unborn child. She wrote in a 1916 edition of Family Limitation, "no one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable," though she framed this in the context of her birth control advocacy, adding that "abortions will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. (Care is) the only cure for abortions." Sanger consistently regarded birth control and abortion as the responsibility and burden first and foremost of women, and as matters of law, medicine and public policy second.

Sanger's 1938 autobiography notes her 1916 opposition to abortion as the taking of life: "To each group we explained what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun."

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Black, Edwin (November 9, 2003). Eugenics and the Nazis - the California connection. San Francisco Chronicle: D - 1.
• Black, Edwin [September 2003]. The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York City, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows. ISBN 1-56858-258-7. 
• Chesler, Ellen [1992]. Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York City, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60088-5. 
• Gray, Madeline [1979]. Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control. New York City, NY: Richard Marek Publishers, 280. ISBN 0-399-90019-5. 
• Knowles, Jon (2004). The Truth About Margaret Sanger. Katharine Dexter McCormick Library. (April 20, 2006 version available on the Internet Archive)
• Marshall, Robert G. and Donovan, Chuck (October 1991). Blessed Are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. ISBN 0-89870-353-0. 
• Sanger, Margaret (1938). An Autobiography. New York, NY: Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0-8154-1015-8. 

• Planned Parenthood Federation of America (2004). Rev. Martin Luther King Jr..
• Pouzzner, Daniel (February 2005). Returning to Eden: Herding People, Culling the Herd. The Architecture of Modern Political Power. Retrieved 2006-04-13.
• Sanger, Margaret (April 1932). A Plan For Peace. The Birth Control Review: 106.
• Steinem, Gloria (April 13, 1998). Time's 100 Most Important People of the Century: Margaret Sanger. Time Magazine.

Further reading

Works by Margaret Sanger

• The Pivot of Civilization
• Woman and the New Race c.1920
• What Every Girl Should Know (1920 ed.) (GIF facsimile available)
• What Every Girl Should Know (1922 ed.) (GIF and PDF facsimiles available)
• "The Case for Birth Control" (first published in the Woman Citizen, February 23, 1924)
• Correspondence between Sanger and Katharine McCormick
• Works by Margaret Sanger. Project Gutenberg
• The Margaret Sanger Papers at Smith College

Works by other authors

• Profile on Time.com
• Profile in Women's History section of About.com
• The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
• Online excerpt from Blessed Are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood
• Online excerpts from The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

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