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). Sanger, who worked as a public health nurse in the slums of New York City at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, was strongly motivated to help women in the throes of poverty, who were often grappling with health issues related to pregnancy and childbearing. She was, also, deeply affected by the circumstances of her own mother, whose poor health and untimely death was exacerbated by a large family she could not fully care for. To Sanger, uncontrolled fertility and poverty were inexorably related. 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. Sanger was an avid defender of free speech who was arrested at least eight times for expressing her views on birth control.

Biography

Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Her father Michael Higgins, was described as an "outspoken radical." 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 Lower East Side of Manhattan. That same year, she also started writing a column for the Socialist Party paper 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 in which she 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 activism

On Oct. 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, the first of its kind in the United States. It was raided nine days later by the police, and Sanger served 30 days in prison. While an initial appeal was rejected, a state appellate court in 1918 did allow doctors to prescribe contraception.

In 1916, Sanger published What Every Girl Should Know. It provided basic information about sexuality and development, 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.

Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 along 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 same 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). The clinic 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.

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.

From 1916 on, she lectured "in many places — halls, churches, women's clubs, homes, and 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.

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 passage of 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. Sanger was particularly critical of the lack of awareness of the dangers of and the scarcity of treatment opportunities for venereal disease among women. Sanger spoke against the 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).

In addition to her controversial work for birth control legislation, Margaret Sanger was a proponent of eugenics, defined in the eleventh edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica as "the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity." In the early 20th century, the eugenics movement, in which Sanger was prominently involved, gained strong support in the United States. Other adherents to the philosophy of eugenics included Charles Lindbergh Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and George S. Patton. Eugenics, is thought by many to insinuate racism, even though its theory does not promote the superiority of one race over another. On motherhood Sanger commented: "When a motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race."

Legacy and controversy

While Sanger is widely credited as being instrumental in opening the way for universal access to birth control, she also remains controversial, particularly for her views on eugenics. In her lifetime the strongest opposition to her work came from the Catholic Church. She has often been labelled "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). 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.

She also said of abortion in her 1938 autobiography: "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

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• 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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