An advocate of safe and effective contraception for women, Margaret Sanger dedicated her life to efforts to help women take responsibility for their lives.
Margaret Sanger
Known as the founder of the birth control movement, Margaret Louise Sanger was born into a poor family in Corning, New York, on 14 September 1879. She used her training as a nurse at the White Plains Hospital to solidify her belief in a woman’s right to family planning.
She worked on behalf of women in the tenements to secure proper birth control for them, and to attempt to erase the stigma attached to contraception. By 1914, she had begun to establish a national system of “advice centers” where women could obtain birth control information, and she gave up her nursing career to devote her life to this cause.
She wanted to discover a female-controlled contraceptive, and traveled to Europe in search of this. During this same year, she founded the National Birth Control League, which was indicted soon after its creation for the dispersal of copies of The Woman Rebel, which advocated birth control.
Such literature was considered “obscene” as a result of the 1873 Comstock Law prohibiting such literature, so Sanger spent a year in exile in Europe. Upon her return, her case was dismissed, and in 1916, Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn, New York.
Closed by police soon after, the resulting trial brought Sanger the publicity she wanted, which guaranteed change in New York law. The first birth control clinic, staffed by a doctor, opened as a result. Despite opposition from organized groups, such as the Catholic Church, which in 1919 sent out a formal pastoral letter to all American bishops forbidding artificial means of family limitation.
Sanger attempted to envision a world in which women could claim responsibility for their own contraception. She also wanted to see a world in which taking control of reproduction would consequently lower birth rates, alter the balance of supply and demand for labor, and accomplish the goals of workers without class warfare.
After the end of her first marriage, Sanger had numerous lovers, including Havelock Ellis, whose socialist viewpoints provided an intellectual basis for her arguments that a less-restrictive sexual life was essential for social – and individual – well being. Sanger died in 1966 of congestive heart failure, after spending four years in a Tucson, Arizona nursing home.
Bibliography
Chesler, Ellen. Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.
Fellman, Anita C. “Always the Pragmatist.” Reviews in American History 21.2 (June 1993): 285-290.
