Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger
Sanger in 1922
Born	Margaret Louise Higgins (1879-09-14)September 14, 1879 Corning, New York, U.S.
Died	September 6, 1966(1966-09-06) (aged 86) Tucson, Arizona, U.S.
Occupation(s)	Social reformer, sex educator, writer, nurse
Spouses	William Sanger ​ ​ (m. 1902; div. 1921)​ James Noah H. Slee ​ ​ (m. 1922; died 1943)​
Children	3
Relatives	Ethel Byrne (sister) Bob Higgins (brother) Alexander C. Sanger (grandson)

Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins; September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966), also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. She opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, founded Planned Parenthood, and collaborated in the development of the first birth control pill. Sanger is regarded as a founder and leader of the birth control movement.

Sanger worked as a nurse in the slums of New York City, and associated with radicals, activists, socialists, and artists. Out of this experience came her deep-seated belief that women need to be empowered to choose when to have children – thus her advocacy for birth control. In the early 1900s, eugenics was a popular movement, and Sanger became an adherent, believing it would help achieve her birth control goals; but she never applied eugenic principles a racist fashion. She opened a birth control clinic in Harlem which had an all African American advisory council and employed African American doctors, nurses and social workers.

She felt that education was an important path to promoting birth control, and she wrote many pamphlets, periodicals, and books on the subject. Sanger frequently provoked arrest by distributing birth control literature in contravention of the law. She was arrested eight times, hoping to get favorable legal rulings that would overturn laws that impeded birth control. She was responsible for several major legal victories, culminating with the Griswold v Connecticut decision which legalized contraception nationwide.

Early life

With sons Grant and Stuart, c. 1919

Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins in 1879 in Corning, New York, to Irish Catholic parents Michael Hennessey Higgins and Anne Purcell Higgins. Michael immigrated to the United States aged fourteen, joining the Union army in the Civil War as a drummer aged fifteen. Upon leaving the army, he studied medicine and phrenology but ultimately became a stonecutter, chiseling angels and saints on tombstones. Michael was a free-thinker, an atheist and an activist for women's suffrage and free public education.

Anne accompanied her family to Canada during the Great Famine. She married Michael in 1869. In 22 years, Anne Higgins conceived 18 times, giving birth to 11 live babies before dying at the age of 49. Sanger was the sixth of 11 surviving children, spending her early years in a bustling household.

Supported by her two older sisters, Margaret Higgins attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, before enrolling in 1900 at White Plains Hospital as a student nurse. In 1902, she married architect William Sanger, giving up her education. Margaret Sanger had three children, and the five settled down to a quiet life in Westchester, New York, although she would later experience bouts of recurring tuberculosis.

Activism

In 1911, after a fire destroyed their home in Hastings-on-Hudson, the Sangers abandoned the suburbs for a new life in New York City. Margaret Sanger worked as a visiting nurse in the slums of the East Side, while her husband worked as an architect and a house painter. The couple became active in local socialist politics. She joined the Women's Committee of the Socialist Party of New York, took part in the labor actions of the Industrial Workers of the World (including the notable 1912 Lawrence textile strike and the 1913 Paterson silk strike) and became involved with local intellectuals, left-wing artists, socialists and social activists, including John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge and Emma Goldman.

Working as a nurse, Sanger visited many working-class immigrant women in their homes; many of them underwent frequent childbirth, miscarriages and self-induced abortions – due to lack of information on how to avoid pregnancy. Access to contraceptive information was prohibited by the federal Comstock law and a host of state laws. Seeking to help these women, in 1913 Sanger visited public libraries, but claims she was unable to find information on contraception.

These difficulties were epitomized in a story that Sanger would recount in her speeches: while Sanger was working as a nurse, she was called to the apartment of a woman, "Sadie Sachs", who had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again. The doctor laughed and said "You want your cake while you eat it too, do you? Well it can't be done. I'll tell you the only sure thing to do .... Tell Jake to sleep on the roof [that is, abstain from sex]" A few months later, Sanger was called back to Sadie's apartment – she had attempted yet another self-induced abortion. Sadie died shortly after Sanger arrived. Sanger would end the story by saying, "I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced ... that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth".

This story – along with Sanger's 1904 rescue of her niece Olive Byrne from the snowbank in which she had been abandoned – marks the beginning of Sanger's commitment to spare women from the pursuit of dangerous and illegal abortions. Sanger opposed abortion, not on theological grounds, but as a societal ill and public health danger – which would disappear if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

Sanger's political interests, her emerging feminism and her nursing experience led her to write two series of columns on sex education which were titled "What Every Mother Should Know" (1911–12) and "What Every Girl Should Know" (1912–13) for the socialist magazine New York Call. By the standards of the day, Sanger's articles were extremely frank in their discussion of sexuality, and many New York Call readers were outraged by them. Other readers, however, praised the series for its candor. One stated that the series contained "a purer morality than whole libraries full of hypocritical cant about modesty". Both were published in book form in 1916.

Given the connection between contraception and working-class empowerment, Sanger came to believe that only by liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. Toward that end, she began a campaign to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information through confrontational actions. In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight-page monthly newsletter which promoted contraception using the slogan "No Gods, No Masters".

Sanger, collaborating with anarchist friends, popularized the term "birth control" as a more candid alternative to euphemisms such as "family limitation"; the term "birth control" was suggested in 1914 by a young friend, Otto Bobsein. Sanger proclaimed that each woman should be "the absolute mistress of her own body."

Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and the couple's divorce was finalized in 1921.

Arrest and exile

In these early years of Sanger's activism, she viewed birth control as a free-speech issue; and when she started publishing The Woman Rebel, one of her goals was to provoke a legal challenge to the federal anti-obscenity laws which banned dissemination of information about contraception. Though postal authorities suppressed five of its seven issues, Sanger continued publication, all the while preparing Family Limitation, another challenge to anti-birth control laws. This 16-page pamphlet contained detailed and precise information and graphic descriptions of various contraceptive methods. In August 1914, Sanger was indicted for violating federal obscenity laws by sending The Woman Rebel through the postal system. Rather than stand trial, she fled to Canada, where fellow activists forged documents that permitted her to sail to England in early November.

Sanger spent most of her self-imposed exile in England, where contact with British Malthusians – such as Charles Vickery Drysdale and Bessie Drysdale – helped refine her socioeconomic justifications for birth control. She shared the concern of Malthusians that over-population led to poverty, famine and war. She would return to Europe in 1922 and become the first woman to chair a session at an International Neo-Malthusian Conference, and she organized the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth-Control Conference that took place in New York in 1925. Over-population would remain a concern of hers for the rest of her life.

During her sojourn, she was profoundly influenced by British physician Havelock Ellis, under whose tutelage she conceived the goal of making sex more pleasurable for women, in addition to safer. Marie Stopes, a British academic whose life would parallel Sanger's life in many ways, met Sanger and began a transatlantic collaboration that would last for several years.

Sanger returned from England in October 1915 to face trial. Before the December trial, her five-year old daughter died of pneumonia. She was offered a plea bargain, but refused, because she wanted to use the trial as a forum to advocate for the right of women to control their own destiny. The prosecutor dropped the charges.

Early in 1915, Sanger's estranged husband, William Sanger, gave a copy of Family Limitation to a representative of anti-vice politician Anthony Comstock. William Sanger was tried and convicted, spending thirty days in jail while attracting interest in birth control as an issue of civil liberty. Sanger's second husband, Noah Slee, also contributed to the birth control movement by smuggling diaphragms into New York from Canada. He later became the first legal manufacturer of diaphragms in the United States.

Birth control movement

Main article: Birth control movement in the United States

This page from Sanger's Family Limitation, 1917 edition, describes a cervical cap.

Some countries in northwestern Europe had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States, so when Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she was exposed to diaphragms and became convinced that they were a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had been distributing back in the United States. Diaphragms were generally unavailable in the United States due to the Comstock Act, so Sanger and others began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States law.

On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic – the first in the United States – in the Brownsville neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York. Nine days after the clinic opened, Sanger was arrested for giving a birth control pamphlet to an undercover policewoman.. After she bailed out of jail, she continued assisting women in the clinic until the police arrested her a second time. She and her sister, Ethel Byrne, were charged with distributing contraceptives in violation of New York state law.

Sanger and Byrne went to trial in January 1917. Byrne was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse, where she went on a hunger strike. She was force-fed, the first woman hunger striker in the U.S. to be so treated. After ten days – when Sanger pledged that Byrne would never break the law – her sister was pardoned. Sanger was also convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception." Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she refused and said: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today." She was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.

An initial appeal was rejected, but in a subsequent court proceeding in 1918 (after Sanger had completed her sentence) the birth control movement secured a major victory when Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals issued a ruling which allowed doctors to dispense contraceptives. The publicity surrounding Sanger's arrest, trial, and appeal sparked birth control activism across the United States and earned the support of numerous donors, who would provide her with funding for future endeavors.

In February 1917, Sanger began publishing the monthly periodical Birth Control Review. In 1920–21, and intermittently until his death in 1946, she had a love affair with the English novelist H.G. Wells. In 1922, she married her second husband, James Noah H. Slee.

American Birth Control League era

Sanger published the Birth Control Review from 1917 to 1f929.

After World War I, Sanger's reach expanded beyond local, small-scale activism, allowing her to create a large organization – the American Birth Control League (ABCL) – funded by middle-class donors. The founding principles of the ABCL were:

We hold that children should be (1) Conceived in love; (2) Born of the mother's conscious desire; (3) And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health. Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied.

The 1918 New York court decision created an exception to "contraceptives are illegal" law – contraceptives could be legal, provided they were dispensed by a physician. To exploit this loophole, she established the Clinical Research Bureau (CRB) in 1923. The CRB was the first legal birth control clinic in the United States, and was staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers. The clinic received extensive funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family, who continued to make anonymous donations to Sanger's causes in subsequent decades.

In 1922, Sanger traveled to Asia, visiting Korea, Japan and China. She ultimately visited Japan six times, working with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue to promote birth control. In China, she observed that the primary method of family planning was female infanticide. Chinese feminists inspired by Sanger's visit went on to be significantly involved in the subsequent Chinese debates on birth control and eugenics. She later worked with Pearl Buck to establish a family planning clinic in Shanghai in 1935.

In 1928, conflict within the birth control movement leadership led Sanger to resign as the president of the ABCL and take full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB), marking the beginning of a schism that would last until 1939.

Sanger invested a great deal of effort communicating with the general public. From 1916 onward, she lectured in churches, women's clubs, homes, and theaters; her audience included workers, churchmen, liberals, socialists, scientists, and upper-class women. She once lectured on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Silver Lake, New Jersey. Explaining her decision to address them, she wrote "Always to me any aroused group was a good group," meaning that she was willing to seek common ground with anyone who might help promote legalization and awareness of birth-control. She described the experience as "weird" and reported that she had the impression that the audience were all half-wits, and, therefore, spoke to them in the simplest possible language, as if she were talking to children.

She wrote several books in the 1920s which had a nationwide impact in promoting the cause of birth control. Between 1920 and 1926, 567,000 copies of Woman and the New Race and The Pivot of Civilization were sold. She wrote two autobiographies, both aimed at promoting birth control: Margaret Sanger: My Fight for Birth Control published in 1931; and Margaret Sanger An Autobiography published in 1938.

During the 1920s, Sanger received hundreds of thousands of letters, many of them written in desperation by women begging for information on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Five hundred of these letters were compiled into the 1928 book, Motherhood in Bondage.

Work with the African American community

W. E. B. Du Bois served on the board of Sanger's Harlem clinic.

Sanger worked with African American leaders and professionals who saw a need for birth control in their communities. In 1929, James H. Hubert, a Black social worker and the leader of New York's Urban League, asked Sanger to open a clinic in Harlem. Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic, staffed with Black doctors, in 1930. The clinic was directed by an all African American advisory board consisting of 15 Black doctors, nurses, clergy, journalists, and social workers; the clinic also employed Black doctors, nurses, and social workers. The clinic was publicized in the African American press as well as in Black churches, and it received the approval of W.E.B. Du Bois, the co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the editor of its magazine, The Crisis.

Sanger did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects. Sanger's work with minorities earned praise from Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr. – when King was not able to attend his Margaret Sanger award ceremony, Mrs. King read her husband's acceptance speech that praised Sanger, but first said her own words: "Because of [Sanger's] dedication, her deep convictions, and for her suffering for what she believed in, I would like to say that I am proud to be a woman tonight."

From 1939 to 1942, Sanger was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America, which included a supervisory role – alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble – in the Negro Project, an effort to deliver information about birth control to poor Black people. Sanger advised Gamble on the utility of hiring a Black physician for the Negro Project. She also advised him on the importance of reaching out to Black ministers, writing:

The ministers work is also important and also he should be trained, perhaps by the [Birth Control] Federation [of America] as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

When academic Angela Davis analyzed that quote, she interpreted the passage "We do not want word to go out" as evidence that Sanger led a calculated effort to reduce the Black population against its will. This interpretation has been widely repeated in the anti-abortion community, leading many to believe Sanger was racist. However, most scholars assert that Sanger was not racist, and interpret the passage as an effort to prevent the spread of unfounded rumors about racist purposes.

Planned Parenthood era

Main article: Planned Parenthood

Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau operated from this New York building from 1930 to 1973.

In 1929, Sanger formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in order to lobby for legislation to overturn restrictions on contraception. That effort failed to achieve success, so Sanger ordered a diaphragm from Japan in 1932, in order to provoke a decisive battle in the courts. The diaphragm was confiscated by the U.S. government, and Sanger's subsequent legal challenge led to a 1936 court decision which created a nationwide exception to the Comstock laws, permitting physicians to dispense contraceptives.

This court victory motivated the American Medical Association in 1937 to adopt contraception as a normal medical service and a key component of medical school curriculums.

This 1936 contraception court victory was the culmination of Sanger's birth control efforts, and she took the opportunity, now in her late 50s, to move to Tucson, Arizona, intending to play a less critical role in the birth control movement. In spite of her original intentions, she remained active in the movement through the 1950s.

In 1937, Sanger became chairman of the newly formed Birth Control Council of America, and attempted to resolve the schism between the ABCL and the BCCRB. Her efforts were successful, and the two organizations merged in 1939 as the Birth Control Federation of America. Although Sanger continued in the role of president, she no longer wielded the same power as she had in the early years of the movement, and in 1942, more conservative forces within the organization changed the name to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a name Sanger objected to because she considered it too euphemistic.

In 1948, Sanger helped found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, which evolved into the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952, and soon became the world's largest non-governmental international women's health, family planning and birth control organization. Sanger was the organization's first president and served in that role until she was 80 years old.

In the early 1950s, Sanger encouraged philanthropist Katharine McCormick to provide funding for biologist Gregory Pincus to develop the first birth control pill which was eventually sold under the name Enovid. Pincus recruited John Rock, Harvard gynecologist, to investigate clinical use of progesterone to prevent ovulation. Pincus would often say that he never could have done it without Sanger, McCormick, and Rock.

The Japanese government invited Sanger to Tokyo in 1954 to address the National Diet – she was the first foreigner to do so – where she gave a speech on the subject "Population Problems and Family Planning".

Death

Faced with declining health, Sanger moved into a convalescent home at age 83. Before her death, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down state laws prohibiting birth control in the United States. The plaintiff in that case, Estelle Griswold, was the director of the Connecticut affiliate of Planned Parenthood. A year before she died, the Japanese government bestowed upon Sanger the Order of the Precious Crown in recognition of her contributions to Japanese society. She died of congestive heart failure in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, aged 86. Sanger was Episcopalian, and her funeral was held at St. Philip's in the Hills Episcopal Church in Tucson, followed a month later by a memorial service at St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan. Sanger is buried in Fishkill, New York, next to her sister, Nan Higgins, and her second husband, Noah Slee. One of her surviving brothers was College Football Hall of Fame player and Pennsylvania State University Head Football coach Bob Higgins.

Views

Sexuality

While researching information on contraception, Sanger read treatises on sexuality, and was heavily influenced by The Psychology of Sex by the English psychologist Havelock Ellis While traveling in Europe in 1914, she conducted research under Ellis' guidance, and she came to adopt his view of sexuality as a powerful, liberating force. This view provided another argument in favor of birth control, because it would enable women to fully enjoy sexual relations without fear of unwanted pregnancy. Sanger believed that sexuality, along with birth control, should be discussed with more candor, and praised Ellis for his efforts in this direction; she blamed Christianity for the suppression of such discussions.

Sanger opposed excessive sexual indulgence. She wrote that "every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and women who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, are never sensual." Sanger said that birth control would elevate women away from the position of being objects of lust and elevate sex away from an activity that was purely being engaged in for the purpose of satisfying lust. She believed that women had the ability to control their sexual impulses, and they should utilize that control avoid relationships that were not marked by "confidence and respect". She felt that exercising such control would lead to the "strongest and most sacred passion."

Although she did not promote excessive sex, Sanger did believe that women should "control their own bodies". She developed the concept of the "feminine spirit," theorizing that the internal urge of womanhood causes desires for freedom. Sanger said that it was futile to attempt to restrict this freedom and controlling fertility. The most efficient action, she said, would be to align these internal desires with human law and give women access to contraception.

Sanger believed that masturbation was a pernious habit and, if carried to extremes, was revolting.

Sanger maintained links with affiliates of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (which contained a number of high-profile gay men and sexual reformers as members), and gave a speech to the group on the issue of sexual continence. She later praised Ellis for explaining to the medical profession that homosexuality was not a perversion, but rather an inherent difference.

Freedom of speech

Sanger opposed censorship throughout her career. Sanger grew up in a home where orator Robert Ingersoll was admired. During the early years of her activism, Sanger viewed birth control primarily as a free-speech issue, rather than as a feminist issue, and when she started publishing The Woman Rebel in 1914, she did so with the express goal of provoking a legal challenge to the Comstock laws banning dissemination of information about contraception. In New York, Emma Goldman introduced Sanger to members of the Free Speech League, such as Edward Bliss Foote and Theodore Schroeder, and subsequently the League provided funding and advice to help Sanger with legal battles.

Over the course of her career, Sanger was arrested eight times, often for expressing her views during an era in which speaking publicly about contraception was illegal. Numerous times in her career, local government officials prevented Sanger from speaking by shuttering a facility or threatening her hosts. In Boston in 1929, city officials under the leadership of James Curley threatened to arrest her if she spoke. In response she stood on stage, silent, with a gag over her mouth, while her speech was read by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

Eugenics

After World War I, Sanger was frustrated by the inverted priorities of charities: they provided free obstetric and post-birth care to indigent women, yet failed to provide birth control or assistance in raising the children. She wrote: "The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth." She saw a societal need to limit births by those least able to afford children: the affluent and educated already limited their childbearing, while the poor and uneducated lacked access to contraception and information about birth control.

Here she found common ground between eugenics and her birth control movement: both endeavors desired contraception to be legal and readily available. In the early 1900's, eugenics was a popular movement, promoted by several organizations, led by intellectuals and scientists, and funded by corporate sponsors. Sanger was surrounded by influential people who approved of eugenics, including close friends Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells, and notables W.E.B. Du Bois and Winston Churchill (who supported the first ABCL conference in 1921).

Sanger adopted eugenics because it was another avenue to advocate for the legalization of contraception – eugenics was a means to her end. According to some historians, Sanger calculated that the popularity of the eugenics movement lent legitimacy to birth control, leading her to join their ranks.

Eugenic efforts were generally categorized as positive measures which encouraged parents to reproduce if they are deemed "fit"; and negative measures which discouraged parents from reproducing (via sterilization, contraception, abortion, or financial incentives) if they are deemed "unfit".

Some eugenicists were racists who sought to preserve the purported supremacy of the white race by diminishing the population of certain ethnicities, such as Blacks, Jews, Asians, or Hispanics. Some proposed a negative eugenic policy of limiting the population growth of the "undesirable" ethnicities through contraception, abortion, or forced sterilization. Colleagues of Sanger that espoused racist eugenic policies included Charles Davenport and Lothrop Stoddard, a member of the KKK, who was also a founding board member of the ABCL and contributed an article to the Birth Control Review.

Sanger's approach to eugenics

Sanger's eugenics policies included exclusionary immigration laws, free access to contraceptives, freedom for able-minded families to determine how many children to have, compulsory segregation or sterilization for those that have severe hereditary defects, and applying birth control methods to reduce the number of "unfit" persons.

Consistent with her experiences working in the slums of New York City, her overarching goals were to improve the quality of life of women and to address overpopulation. Regarding large, poor families, she wrote "...if they are not able to support and care for themselves, they should certainly not be allowed to bring offspring into this world for others to look after. We do not believe that filling the earth with misery, poverty and disease is moral." Her focus on putting birth control in the hands of individual families distinguished her from many fellow eugenicists, particularly those focused on white supremacy.

Sanger's approach to eugenics did not have a racist component, and she never targeted specific ethnicities. Her goal was to improve the entire human race by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered unfit. When she used the word "race" in the context of her positions on eugenics, the word invariably meant the entire human race, rather than a specific ethnicity. Academic Carole McCann wrote "although Sanger articulated birth control in terms of racial betterment and, like most old-stock Americans, supported restricted immigration, she always defined fitness in individual rather than racial terms."

Mainstream eugenicists promoted several initiatives that Sanger disagreed with: She promoted birth control as a superior alternative to sterilization. She did not encourage "fit" couples to reproduce, writing "the eugenist [sic] also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold that the world is already over-populated." And she did not want the state to decide when mothers could bear children, rather she believed that mothers – with some exceptions – should wield that power.

When the Nazis rose to power in Germany, she expressed her sadness about the aggressive and lethal Nazi eugenics program, and donated to the American Council Against Nazi Propaganda. Sanger never advocated killing disabled infants, writing "Nor do we believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding."

While Sanger did not explicitly traffic in racist language, Scholar Peter Engelman noted that "Sanger quite effortlessly looked the other way when others spouted racist speech. She had no reservations about relying on flawed and overtly racist works to serve her own propaganda needs." Biographer Ellen Chesler commented: "Margaret Sanger was never herself a racist, but she lived in a profoundly bigoted society, and her failure to repudiate prejudice unequivocally – especially when it was manifest among proponents of her cause – has haunted her ever since."

Abortion

While Sanger's primary focus was on contraception, she also wanted to prevent so-called back-alley abortions, which were common because abortions were illegal in the U.S. in the early 20th century. She believed that, while abortion may be a viable option in life-threatening situations for the pregnant, it should generally be avoided – and she considered contraception the only practical way to avoid them.

Sanger opposed abortion and sharply distinguished it from birth control. She believed that the latter is a fundamental right of women, and the former is a shameful crime. In 1916, when she opened her first birth control clinic, she was employing harsh rhetoric against abortion. Flyers she distributed to women exhorted them in all capitals: "Do not kill, do not take life, but prevent." Sanger's patients at that time were told "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 it was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun." Sanger consistently distanced herself from any calls for legal access to abortion, arguing that legal access to contraceptives would remove the need for abortion.

While Sanger condemned abortion as a method of family limitation, she was not opposed to abortion intended to save a woman's life. In 1932, Sanger directed the Clinical Research Bureau to start referring patients to hospitals for therapeutic abortions when indicated by an examining physician. Her advocacy for birth control was intended to reduce therapeutic abortions by avoiding pregnancy in the first place.

Legacy

Margaret Sanger Square, at the intersection of Mott Street and Bleecker Street in New York

Today, Sanger, along with Emma Goldman and Mary Dennett, is viewed as a founder and leader of the birth control movement. Sanger achieved her goal of improving the well-being of women around the world through family planning: contraception is now legal in the U.S., family planning clinics are commonplace, contraception is taught in medical schools, tens of millions of women have made use of Planned Parenthood services, and hundreds of millions of women around the globe have access to birth control pills.

Sanger's writings are curated by two universities: New York University's history department maintains the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, and Smith College's Sophia Smith Collection maintains the Margaret Sanger Papers collection.

Several biographers have documented Sanger's life, including David Kennedy, whose Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) won the Bancroft Prize and the John Gilmary Shea Prize. Two television films have portrayed Sanger's life as well as two graphic novels.

Sanger has been recognized with numerous honors. Between 1953 and 1963, Sanger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 31 times. In 1957, the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year. In 1966, Planned Parenthood began issuing its Margaret Sanger Awards annually to honor "individuals of distinction in recognition of excellence and leadership in furthering reproductive health and reproductive rights". In 1981, Sanger was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1976, she was inducted into the first class of the Steuben County (NY) Hall of Fame. In 1993, the United States National Park Service designated the Margaret Sanger Clinic – where she provided birth-control services in New York in the mid-twentieth century – as a National Historic Landmark. Government authorities and other institutions have memorialized Sanger by dedicating several landmarks in her name, including a residential building on the Stony Brook University campus, a room in Wellesley College's library, and Margaret Sanger Square in New York City's Noho area. There is a Margaret Sanger Lane in Plattsburgh, New York and an Allée Margaret Sanger in Saint-Nazaire, France. There is a bust of Sanger in the National Portrait Gallery, which was a gift from Cordelia Scaife May. Her speech "Children's Era", given in 1925, is listed as #81 in American Rhetoric's Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century. Time magazine designated Sanger as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Sanger, a crater in the northern hemisphere of Venus, takes its name from Margaret Sanger.

Attacks by anti-abortion movement

Following the legalization of abortion in 1973, Sanger has become a lightning rod – attracting virulent attacks from opponents of abortion. The attacks usually repeat falsehoods, often attributing quotes to Sanger that are fabricated or presented out of context. Accusations typically claim that she was a Nazi sympathizer, that she supported the KKK, that she supported abortion, that she was racist, or that she supported eugenics. Scholars have overwhelmingly concluded that Sanger was not associated with the Nazi party, nor a supporter of the KKK, nor a supporter of abortion. The consensus of scholars is that Sanger was not a racist, and that clinics in Black neighborhoods were not established with the goal of eliminating or harming the African American community. Sanger did support eugenics, but she did not aim to suppress any specific ethnic groups; rather, according to Sanger scholar Esther Katz, her goal was "intervening in the reproduction of hereditary traits to improve the quality not of any specific race, but rather of the human race".

Reacting to the criticisms of Sanger, in 2020 Planned Parenthood took steps to distance itself from their founder by removing some mentions of Sanger from their website and renaming the Planned Parenthood building on Bleecker Street (which previously was named after Sanger). Essayist Katha Pollitt and Sanger biographer Ellen Chesner criticized Planned Parenthood for succumbing to pressure from the anti-abortion movement.

Works

Books and pamphlets

• Sanger, Margaret (1912). What Every Mother Should Know. Originally published in 1911 or 1912, based on a series of articles Sanger published in 1911 in the New York Call, which were, in turn, based on a set of lectures Sanger gave to groups of Socialist party women in 1910–1911. Multiple editions published starting in 1914 by Max N. Maisel and Sincere Publishing, with the title What Every Mother Should Know, or how six little children were taught the truth
• —— (1914). Family Limitation. Originally published 1914 as a 16-page pamphlet; revised and expanded in several later editions, including Sanger, Maragaret (2017). Family Limitation. ISBN 9781977520722.
• —— (1916). What Every Girl Should Know.
• —— (1916). The Fight for Birth Control. New York. LCCN 2003558097.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) Pamphlet.
• —— (1917). The Case for Birth Control: A Supplementary Brief and Statement of Facts. ISBN 9780598730961. Filed with court to support a legal battle.
• —— (1920). Woman and the New Race. Truth Publishing. ISBN 9781414221984. Foreword by Havelock Ellis.
• —— (1921). Debate on Birth Control. Haldeman-Julius Company. LCCN 2004563524. Transcript of a debate between several prominent figures: Sanger, Theodore Roosevelt, Winter Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Robert L. Wolf, and Emma Sargent Russell.
• —— (1922). The Pivot of Civilization. Brentanos. Online editions include: Sanger, Margaret (2006). The Pivot of Civilization.
• —— (1928). Motherhood in Bondage. Brentanos. LCCN 28028778. A collection of letters desperate women wrote to Sanger; edited by Sanger.
• —— (1931). My Fight for Birth Control. Farrar & Rinehart. LCCN 31028223. Memoir.
• —— (1938). Margaret Sanger An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton. Republished starting in 1971 under a different title The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger. Dover. 2012. ISBN 9780486120836.

Periodicals

• The Woman Rebel – Seven issues published monthly from March 1914 to August 1914. Sanger was publisher and editor.
• Birth Control Review – Published monthly from February 1917 to 1940. Sanger was editor until 1929, when she resigned from the ABCL. Not to be confused with Marie Stopes' Birth Control News, published by the London-based Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress.

Collections and anthologies

• Sanger, Margaret (2003). Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, Peter Engelman (ed.). The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 1: The Woman Rebel, 1900–1928. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0252027376. OCLC 773147056.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• —— (2007). Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, Peter Engelman (ed.). The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 2: Birth Control Comes of Age, 1928–1939. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252031373.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• —— (2010). Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, Peter Engelman (ed.). The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 3: The Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939–1966. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252033728.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• —— (2016). Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, Peter Engelman (ed.). The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4: Round the World for Birth Control, 1920-1966. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252098802.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• "The Margaret Sanger Papers at Smith College". Smith College.
• "The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University". New York University.
• McElderry (1976). McElderry, Michael J. (ed.). Margaret Sanger: A Register of Her Papers in the Library of Congress. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Speeches

• Sanger, Margaret (1921a). "The Morality of Birth Control".

• Sanger, Margaret (1925). "The Children's Era".

• Sanger, Margaret (1937). "Woman and the Future".

See also

• Anthony Comstock – American anti-vice activist (1844–1915)
• Caroline Nelson – Danish-born birth control advocate and radical socialist (1868–1952)
• Fania Mindell – American feminist, activist, and theater artist (1894–1969)
• Feminism – Range of socio-political movements and ideologies
• History of women in the United States – The working Lives of Women in the U.S.
• Kitty Marion – Actress and political activist, Militant Suffragette (1871–1944)
• List of women's rights activists
• Mabel Sine Wadsworth – American birth control activist and women's health educator (1910–2006)
• Margaret Mead – American cultural anthropologist (1901–1978)
• Reproductive rights – Legal rights and freedoms relating to reproduction and reproductive health
• Upton Sinclair – American writer (1878–1968)

References

Bibliography

• Bagge, Peter (2013). Woman Rebel. The Margaret Sanger Story. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly. ISBN 978-1-77046-126-0.
• Baker, Jean (2011). Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion. New York: Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-1-4299-6897-3. OCLC 863501288, 1150293235.
• Black, Edwin (2012), War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Washington, DC: Dialog Press, ISBN 978-0-914153-29-0
• Blanchard, Margaret (1992), Revolutionary Sparks: Freedom of Expression in Modern America, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-505436-1
• Bronski, Michael (2011), A Queer History of the United States, Boston: Beacon Press, ISBN 978-0-8070-4439-1
• Buchanan, Paul (2009), American Women's Rights Movement: A Chronology of Events and of Opportunities from 1600 to 2008, Boston: Branden Books, ISBN 978-0-8283-2160-0
• Chesler, Ellen (2007), Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, New York: Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4165-4076-2. Originally published in 1992 (Anchor ISBN 978-0385469807), it was republished in 2007 with a new afterward.
• Coates, Patricia (2008), Margaret Sanger and the Origin of the Birth Control Movement, 1910–1930: The Concept of Women's Sexual Autonomy, Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, ISBN 978-0-7734-5099-8
• Cohen, Warren (2009). Profiles in Humanity: The Battle for Peace, Freedom, Equality, and Human Rights. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-6703-0. OCLC 434016837.
• Coigney, Virginia (1969), Margaret Sanger: Rebel With a Cause, Doubleday
• Cox, Vicki (2005). Margaret Sanger: Rebel for Women's Rights. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4381-0759-2. OCLC 613206381.
• Craig, Layne (2013), When Sex Changed Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 978-0-8135-6212-4
• Dietrich, Alicia (2010), "What Every Girl Should Know: The Birth Control Movement in the 1910s", Cultural Compass at the Harry Ransom Center
• Douglas, E.T. (1970), Margaret Sanger; Pioneer of the Future, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, ISBN 9780030818448
• Eig, Jonathan (2014). The birth of the pill: how four crusaders reinvented sex and launched a revolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-07372-0.
• Engelman, Peter (2011). A History of the Birth Control Movement in America. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. ISBN 978-0-313-36510-2. OCLC 728097821.
• Freedman, Estelle (2007), The essential feminist reader, New York: Modern Library, ISBN 978-0-8129-7460-7
• Gordon, Linda (1976), Woman's body, woman's right: a social history of birth control in America, New York: Grossman, ISBN 978-0-670-77817-1
• Gordon, Linda (2002). The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252027642.
• Gorton, Stephanie (2024), The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America, New York: HarperCollins, ISBN 9780063036314
• Gray, Madeline (1979), Margaret Sanger: a biography of the champion of birth control, New York: R. Marek, ISBN 978-0-399-90019-8
• Hajo, Cathy (2010), Birth control on main street: organizing clinics in the United States, 1916–1939, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ISBN 978-0-252-07725-8
• Hale, Robert (April 11, 1925). "The child who was mother to a woman". Profiles. The New Yorker. Vol. 1, no. 8. pp. 11–12.
• Hitchcock, Susan (2008), Roe v. Wade: Protecting a Woman's Right to Choose, New York: Chelsea, ISBN 978-1-4381-0342-6
• Katz, Esther (2000), "Sanger, Margaret", American National Biography Online, New York: Oxford University Press
• Kennedy, David (1970). Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-01202-6. OCLC 70781307.
• Kevles, Daniel (1985), In the name of eugenics: genetics and the uses of human heredity, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-05763-0
• Lader, Lawrence (1955). The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. OCLC 910372158. Reprinted: The Margaret Sanger story and the fight for birth control. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 1975. ISBN 978-0-8371-7076-3. OCLC 703034.
• Lader, Lawrence (1969). Margaret Sanger: pioneer of birth control. Ty Crowell. ISBN 978-0690519341.
• Lader, Lawrence (1995). A Private Matter: RU486 and the Abortion Crisis. Prometheus Books. ISBN 978-1573920124.
• McCann, Carole R (1994). Birth control politics in the United States, 1916-1945. Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-8612-8. OCLC 988564989.
• McCann, Carole (2010). "Women as Leaders in the Contraceptive Movement". In O'Connor, Karen (ed.). Gender and Women's Leadership: A Reference Handbook. Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Reference. ISBN 978-1-84972-763-1. OCLC 568741234.
• Reed, Miriam (2003), Margaret Sanger: her life in her words, Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, ISBN 978-1-56980-255-7
• Rodriguez, Sarah Mellors (2023). Reproductive realities in modern China: birth control and abortion, 1911–2021. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-009-02733-5. OCLC 1366057905.
• Rosenbaum, Judith (2011), "The Call to Action: Margaret Sanger, the Brownsville Jewish Women, and Political Activism", in Kaplan, Marion; Moore, Deborah (eds.), Gender and Jewish history, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0-253-22263-3
• Rosenberg, Rosalind (2008), Divided Lives: American women in the twentieth century, New York: Hill and Wang, ISBN 978-0-8090-1631-0
• Sanger, Margaret (1919). "Birth Control and Racial Betterment". Birth Control Review. Vol. 3, no. 2. The New York Women's Publishing Company. pp. 11–12 – via The Margaret Sanger Papers Project.
• Shone, Steve J. (2019). "Margaret Sanger: The Scientist of Human Salvation". Women of Liberty. Studies in Critical Social Sciences. Vol. 135. Brill Publishers. pp. 239–262. doi:10.1163/9789004393226_010. ISBN 978-90-04-39045-4. S2CID 211982781.
• Valenza, Charles (1985), "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?", Family Planning Perspectives, 17 (1), Guttmacher Institute: 44–46, doi:10.2307/2135230, JSTOR 2135230, PMID 3884362
• Viney, Wayne; King, D. A. (2003), A history of psychology: ideas and context, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, ISBN 978-0-205-33582-4

Historiography

• Dinger, Sandi L. (1998). "Sanger, Margaret". In Amico, Eleanor B. (ed.). Reader's Guide to Women's Studies. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. pp. 505–506. ISBN 978-1884964770. OCLC 906760335.

External links

• Works by Margaret Sanger at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Margaret Sanger at the Internet Archive
• Works by Margaret Sanger at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by Margaret Sanger at Open Library
• Interview Archived April 8, 2019, at the Wayback Machine conducted by Mike Wallace, September 21, 1957. Hosted at the Harry Ransom Center.
• Michals, Debra "Margaret Sanger". National Women's History Museum. 2017.
• "Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs. Sanger".  – 1980 television film directed by Virgil W. Vogel
• Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story – 1995 television film directed by Paul ShapiroPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback
• Bagge, Peter (2013). The Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly. ISBN 978-1770461260. OCLC 841710267.
• Jones, Sabrina (2016). Our Lady of Birth control: A Cartoonist's Encounter with Margaret Sanger. Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, an imprint of Counterpoint. ISBN 978-1619028111. OCLC 957604758.