Margaret sanger brief biography of martin

American birth control activist and nurse (1879–1966)

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, which exposed her to a large number of mothers desperate to avoid additional children. Out of these experiences arose her lifelong passion to improve the health and well-being of woman by empowering them to determine if and when to have children. Her drive to promote birth control was influenced by Malthusian concerns about the dangerous effects of overpopulation. She was an adherent of the eugenic movement, and believed that birth control would help reduce the number of "unfit" people.

She felt that education was a valuable tool to promote 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

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.^[5]

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. Although she suffered from tuberculosis, she settled down to a quiet life in Westchester, New York and had three children.

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.^[8][9]

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 a severe sepsis infection 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 sometimes 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".^[11][b]

The Sadie Sachs story 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, she believed, if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy.^[13]

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.^[c]

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".^[18][d] Her periodical also employed the slogan: "Woman can never call herself free until she is mistress of her own body."^[19]

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.^[20]

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

Arrest and exile

In the early years of Sanger's activism, publishing educational material about contraception was illegal, so she attacked birth control as a free-speech issue. 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 overpopulation 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. Overpopulation 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.^[e] 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.^[34]

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.^[f] Sanger's second husband, Noah Slee, also contributed to the birth control movement by smuggling diaphragms into New York from Canada.^[37] He later became the first legal manufacturer of diaphragms in the United States.^[38]

Origins of the birth control movement

Main article: Birth control movement in the United States

Some northern European countries had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States; when Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she was encountered 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.^[g] 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.^[44] After ten days – when Sanger pledged that Byrne would never break the law – her sister was pardoned.^[45] 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."^[46] 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.^[49][50][h] 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.^[52] In 1922, she married her second husband, James Noah H. Slee.

American Birth Control League era

After World War I, Sanger continued to be 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 ... her eighth."^[54] She saw a societal need to limit births by those least able to afford children: the affluent and educated already limited their childbearing, yet the poor and uneducated lacked access to contraception and information about birth control.

Support from wealthy donors in the early 1920s enabled Sanger to expand her reach beyond local, small-scale activism, and allowed her to organize the the American Birth Control League (ABCL). 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.^[58][j]

The 1918 New York court decision had created an exception to "contraceptives are illegal" law: contraceptives could be obtained, 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.^[61] 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.^[62][k]

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.^[65][66] In China, she observed that the primary method of family planning was female infanticide.^[l]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.^[73]

Education and outreach

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.^[74] She once lectured on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Silver Lake, New Jersey.^[74] Explaining her decision to address them, she wrote "Always to me any aroused group was a good group." 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.^[74]

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.^[m] Many of the letters were printed in the monthly Birth Control Review, and five hundred of these letters were compiled into the 1928 book, Motherhood in Bondage.^[78]

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 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 exclusively employed Black doctors, nurses, and social workers.^[81][82] 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.^[n] The Harlem clinic provided contraceptives and information to thousands of African American women until it closed in the mid 1940's.

Sanger did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects.^[86] 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 which lauded Sanger: "[Sanger] went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law.... She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions.... Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger."^[87]

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.^[89] 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.^[90]

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 secretive effort to reduce the Black population against its will.^[91] This interpretation has been widely repeated in the anti-abortion community, leading many to believe Sanger was racist.^[92] However, most scholars interpret the passage as Sanger's effort to prevent the spread of unfounded rumors about nefarious purposes; and they find no evidence that Sanger was a racist.^{[93][94][95][o]}

Planned Parenthood era

Main article: Planned Parenthood

In 1929, Sanger formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control to lobby for legislation to overturn restrictions on contraception.^[96] The lobbying did not produce results, so Sanger changed tack and ordered a diaphragm from Japan 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 of the Comstock laws led to a 1936 court decision which created a nationwide exception and permitted physicians to dispense contraceptives.^[97][p]. 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.^[98]

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.^[98]

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.^[99][q] 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.^[101][102]

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.^[103][104] 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.^[106]

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".^[107][108]

Death

Faced with declining health, Sanger moved into a convalescent home at age 83.^[109] Before her death, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down state laws prohibiting birth control in the United States.^[r] The plaintiff in that case, Estelle Griswold, was the director of the Connecticut affiliate of Planned Parenthood.^[110] 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.^[107] 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.^[111][112] 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.^[114]

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.^[120]

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."^[121] 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."^[124]

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 asserted that it was futile to attempt to restrict this freedom and controlling fertility; the most efficient action, she believed, 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.^[126]

Sanger maintained links with members 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 topic of sexual continence, explaining how birth control would reduce the need for abstinence. She later praised Ellis for explaining to the medical profession that homosexuality was not a perversion, but rather an inherent difference.^[120]

Free speech

During the early years of her activism, it was illegal to send information about contraception through the mail, so Sanger initially tackled the birth control challenge as a free-speech issue, rather than a feminist issue. 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.^[129]

The most significant opponent to birth control in the 1920s was the Catholic Church, which tried to stop Sanger from publicizing birth control. Catholics persuaded the Syracuse city council to ban Sanger from giving a speech in 1924; the National Catholic Welfare Conference lobbied against birth control; the Knights of Columbus boycotted hotels that hosted birth control events; the Catholic police commissioner of Albany prevented Sanger from speaking there; and several newsreel companies, succumbing to pressure from Catholics, refused to cover stories related to birth control. Sanger turned some of the boycotted speaking events to her advantage by inviting the press, and the resultant news coverage often generated public sympathy for her cause.

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.^[135][136] Over the course of her career, Sanger was arrested eight times for speaking or publishing prohibited information.^[137]

Eugenics

Further information: Eugenics in the United States

Sanger found common ground between eugenics and her birth control movement: both endeavors would benefit if contraception were legal and readily available. In the early 1900's, eugenics was a very popular movement, promoted by major organizations, led by intellectuals and scientists, and funded by corporate sponsors.^[139][140] Sanger was surrounded by influential people who approved of eugenics, including close friends Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells,^[143] and notables W.E.B. Du Bois^[144][145] and Winston Churchill (who supported the first ABCL conference in 1921).^[146][147]

Sanger adopted eugenics because it was another opportunity to advocate for the legalization of contraception – eugenics was a means to her end.^[s] According to some historians, Sanger did not sincerely believe in eugenic principles, but she calculated that if she joined with the eugenics movement, it would lend legitimacy to her own birth control endeavors.^[150]

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^[t] eugenic policy of limiting the population growth of the "undesirable" ethnicities through contraception, abortion, or forced sterilization.^[153][154] Colleagues of Sanger that espoused racist eugenic policies included Charles Davenport^[155][u] 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.^[158]

Sanger's approach to eugenics

Sanger's overarching goals were to improve the quality of life of women and to address overpopulation. This led Sanger to adopt a distinctly feminist version of eugenics which emphasized the welfare of mothers while – at the same time – attempting to reduce the number of "unfit" people in the world.^[161] Sanger's eugenic policies included free access to contraceptives, exclusionary immigration laws, freedom for able-minded families to determine how many children to have, compulsory segregation or sterilization for people that have severe hereditary defects,^[162] and use of birth control to reduce the number of "unfit" persons.^[156]

Sanger adopted the eugenic practice of dividing society into fit and unfit classes of people, defining the unfit class as people that had hereditary defects that  – in her opinion – harmed the health of the human race.^[161][v] After the U.S. Supreme court decided that involuntary sterilization was legal in 1927 – she began to endorse sterilization (in addition to her first choice, contraception) as a mechanism to improve the genetics of the human race, and even suggested involuntary sterilization in some situations.

Sanger deviated from mainstream eugenics in several ways: Whereas most eugenicists encouraged "fit" parents to produce many children, Sanger was concerned about overpopulation, and wanted even fit parents to limit the size of their families. Whereas many eugenicists claimed heredity was the sole cause of "unfitness", Sanger believed that environmental factors were also responsible. Whereas most eugenicists regarded sterilization as the primary way to avoid "unfit" children, Sanger preferred birth control. And whereas many eugenicists wanted the government to manage family planning, Sanger believed that mothers – with some exceptions – should wield that power.^[w][x][y]

The most significant way that Sanger differed from the majority of eugenicists was that her eugenic proposals never targeted specific ethnicities: instead, her goal was to improve the entire human race by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered unfit.^[169][z] When she used the word "race" in the context of eugenics, the word invariably meant the entire human race, rather than a specific ethnicity; when she used the word "unfit" she mean a hereditary defect, not an ethnicity.^{[161][169][aa]}

The consensus of scholars is that Sanger was not racist, though her collaboration with eugenicists assisted racist causes. Academic Dorothy Roberts wrote "Sanger did not tie fitness for reproduction to any particular ethnic group. It appears that Sanger was motivated by a genuine concern to improve the health of poor mothers she served rather than a desire to eliminate their stock".^[169][ab] Scholar Carole McCann wrote "although Sanger articulated birth control in terms of racial betterment ... she always defined fitness in individual rather than racial terms."^[172] Historian Peter Engelman concluded that Sanger was not a racist, but added: "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 wrote: "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

In the early 1900s, when Sanger started on her path as an activist, abortion was illegal in all 50 states, though physicians were able to legally perform therapeutic (medically necessary) abortions in some states.^[175] Despite the fact that abortion was illegal, it was widespread: in 1930, there were an estimated 800,000 illegal abortions performed in the U.S., resulting in between 8,000 to 17,000 women's deaths from complications.^[176][ac] An estimated 17% to 28% of pregancies ended in abortion.^[177]

Sanger was acutely aware of the class divide that governed how women obtained abortions: wealthy and middle-class women could afford to pay doctors for abortions, but the poorer women that Sanger was concerned with often had to resort to back-alley abortions.^[180] Ignorance about abortion was widespread, and many women conflated contraception and abortion, and thought they were the same thing; this was one of the motivations for Sanger's campaign to educate women about birth control.

Faced with high rates of morbidity and death from back-alley abortions, Sanger did not try to make abortion safer; instead she aimed to reduce the number of abortions by promoting contraception, thus avoid pregnancies in the first place.^[180][ad] The vast majority of educational material that Sanger produced was focused on contraception, and abortion was rarely mentioned. In 1914, in the first edition of her Family Limitation pamphlet, she wrote that every woman is entitled to make a choice of whether to have an abortion or not, and she suggested (incorrectly) that quinine could be used to induce abortion. She removed that advice (and any mention of abortion) in later editions.^[ae][af]

By 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."^[184][ag] Abortions were never performed at clinics managed by Sanger; in fact, for the first 16 years of operation the staff were not even permitted to refer patients to physicians (outside the clinic) for therapeutic abortions.^[185] It was not until 1932 that Sanger authorized the staff to refer patients to hospitals for abortions when the examining physician determined that the woman's health was in jeopardy.

Early in her career, Sanger chose not to join with feminists who lobbied to make abortion legal, preferring instead to promote contraception. And later, when the campaign to make abortion legal was gaining steam in the 1950s, Sanger continued to distance herself from efforts.^[ah]

Legacy

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.^{[137][194][ai]}

Sanger's writings are curated by two universities: New York University's history department maintains the Margaret Sanger Papers Project,^[195] and Smith College's Sophia Smith Collection maintains the Margaret Sanger Papers collection.^[196]

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^[197][198] as well as two graphic novels.^[199][200]

Sanger has been recognized with numerous honors. Between 1953 and 1963, Sanger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 31 times.^[201] In 1957, the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year.^[202] 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".^[203][aj] In 1981, Sanger was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.^[204] 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.^[205] 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,^[206] and Margaret Sanger Square in New York City's Noho area.^[207][ak] 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.^[208] Her speech "Children's Era", given in 1925, is listed as #81 in American Rhetoric's Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century.^[209][210]Time magazine designated Sanger as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.^[211] Sanger, a crater in the northern hemisphere of Venus, takes its name from Margaret Sanger.^[212]

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.^[al] The attacks usually repeat falsehoods, often attributing quotes to Sanger that are fabricated or presented out of context.^{[214][92][am]} Common falsehoods are that she was a Nazi sympathizer, that she supported the KKK, that she supported abortion, or that she was racist.^[an] The attacks sometimes mention that Sanger was a eugenicist, which she was, but such attacks often falsely imply that she applied eugenics in a racist manner.^[ao]

One of the more common falsehoods is that Sanger designed her birth control policies with the intent to specifically decimate the African American population. In 2020, Planned Parenthood, hoping to improve relations with the African American community, took steps to distance itself from their founder: they published an editorial acknowledging Sanger's eugenic history, removed some mentions of Sanger from their website and renamed the Planned Parenthood building on Bleecker Street (which previously was named after Sanger).^[216][217] Essayist Katha Pollitt and Sanger biographer Ellen Chesner criticized Planned Parenthood for succumbing to pressure from the anti-abortion movement.^[218][219]

Works

Books and pamphlets

Periodicals

Collections and anthologies

Speeches

Notes