Reference
- Sanger, MargaretMargaret Sanger was the single most influential crusader for safe, legal, and effective birth control in the United States. From the 1910s through the 1950s, she fought to grant women the ability to limit their own fertility. Her phenomenal energy, charismatic personality, and single-minded focus made her a highly successful activist. Yet Sanger remains a controversial figure. In her own day, conservatives accused her of undermining public morality; today, commentators on both the left and the right have criticized her support of eugenics and population policies in the developing world.
Sanger's convictions derived from her own familial history. She was the sixth of 11 children, born in 1879 to an Irish-Catholic family in Corning, New York. Her mother, a devout Catholic, endured 18 pregnancies before succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 49. Sanger's father, a stonecutter who held a variety of iconoclastic and radical views, did not earn enough to support the family comfortably. From a young age, Sanger associated large families with ill-health and poverty, and small families with prosperity and progress.
Sanger's older sisters helped to send her to boarding school, and thereafter she studied nursing. In 1902, at age 23, she married William Sanger, an architect with artistic ambitions. She spent the next decade living a fairly conventional domestic life in Westchester County, New York. Despite her own struggles with tuberculosis, Sanger gave birth to a son in 1903. In 1908, she had another son, and in 1910, she gave birth to daughter who died at age 5—a loss that would haunt Sanger for the rest of her life.
By 1910, the Sanger's marriage had begun to fray, and the family relocated to Manhattan. Sanger began working as a home nurse on the Lower East Side, where she acquired first-hand knowledge of poor mothers' vulnerability and desperation. She also immersed herself in the bohemian culture that flourished in Greenwich Village; she was particularly influenced by anarchist Emma Goldman's advocacy of free love and birth control. In 1912, Sanger joined the Socialist Party and allied herself with the radical labor movement. However, she soon came to believe that, for poor women, the ability to restrict childbearing was even more crucial than the fight for higher wages and better working conditions.
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Streaming Media
- Margaret SangerBirth control advocate, self-styled libertarian, and ardent proponent of women’s rights—Margaret Sanger was all of these, as this balanced, probing documentary attests. Using rare archival footage, diary excerpts, and commentary from historians, critics, and relatives, the program traces Sanger’s extraordinary life and exhaustive work in the promotion and legalization of contraception. The documentary examines Sanger’s legal battles, her work to distribute scientific birth control information, and her best-known achievement: the establishment of Planned Parenthood. Grandson Alexander Sanger—himself a birth control activist—offers insight into her bohemian life as well as the fierce opposition she faced from conservative religious and social groups. Margaret Sanger is seen in both triumph and failure. At the start of her career, she opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. She finished her work a half-century later after launching the research that led to the birth control pill. But her darker side—her use of the racist and elitist arguments of eugenics—haunts her memory to this day. (87 minutes)
Online Resources
- Margaret Sanger, Taking a Stand for Birth Control.An essay is presented which examines the activism of American nurse Margaret Sanger against the 1873 Comstock Act and related policies prohibiting the distribution of information on contraceptives. It discusses Sanger's efforts to mobilize other activists resulting in the creation of birth control clinics and conferences that eventually led to more widespread contraceptive use in the U.S.
- Margaret Sanger: Demonstrating Leadership and Legacy Through Her Crusade For Women's Reproductive RightsMargaret Sanger was a crusader for female reproductive rights.
Thanks to her tireless efforts, not only are contraceptives now legal, women
can also control the size of their families, a basic right denied them until
the 1960s. Throughout the better part of the twentieth century Sanger faced
public outcry and even arrest in her campaign to make contraceptives
known and legal for women around the world. In her lifelong quest,
Margaret Sanger demonstrated impeccable leadership and brought about
a tremendous legacy as she fought for women’s reproductive rights. - When Publics Collide: Margaret Sanger's Argument for Birth Control and the Rhetorical Breakdown of BarriersWomen have fought for centuries in the United States to secure and maintain reproductive rights. Yet, few understand the rhetorical history that paved the way for women to access a public space to speak on the once taboo topic of birth control. At the turn of the twentieth century, the 1873 Federal Comstock Act prohibited the public discussion of reproductive information and control. This essay investigates how the private topic of family planning became a public debate during the start of the twentieth century. To accomplish this, I examined Margaret Sanger's newspaper articles written for the New York Call, The Woman Rebel, and Family Limitation and argue that storytelling and personal experiences became the primary, rhetorical tactics used to bridge the divide between subaltern counterpublic, counterpublic, and public spheres.
Perspectives
The Pivot of Civilization
Arguably her most important and influential book, this controversial work, first published in 1922 by pioneering birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, attempted to broaden the still-radical idea of birth control beyond its socialist and feminist roots. Moving away from a single-minded focus on women's reproductive rights to the larger issue of the general health and economic prosperity of the whole human race, Sanger argued that birth control was pivotal to a rational approach toward dealing with the threat of overpopulation and its ruinous consequences in poverty and disease. Through this book Sanger hoped to persuade the medical establishment to assume control over contraceptive distribution, and thereby to lessen the religious, legal, and moral opposition that continued to restrict access to contraceptive information. However important this book is to the history of women's rights, it remains a very problematic work from our more scientifically informed perspective today. In arguing for population control Sanger made frequent reference to the then fashionable "science" of eugenics. She also adopted its rhetoric, using such callous phrases as "the feeble-minded" and the "unfit" and advocating birth control as a means of limiting the breeding of "defectives, delinquents and dependents." Although she incorporated views and terminology commonly held in respectable medical and scientific circles of the day, Sanger's writings on eugenics, and this book in particular, have become fodder for her critics both on the left and the right, who seek to diminish her achievements and obscure what is ultimately a powerful feminist message: when women gain greater control over their fertility, they will improve the human race. This unusual and historically significant book is complemented by a thoughtful and informative introduction by Peter C. Engelman, assistant editor of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, who provides much insight by placing this work in the context of the age and Sanger's life.
