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.
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
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.
Woman of Valor
"Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women in a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She died a half-century later, just after the Supreme Court guaranteed constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives. Now, Ellen Chesler provides the first authoritative biography of this great emancipator, whose lifelong struggle helped women gain control over their own bodies." "An idealist who mastered practical politics, Sanger seized on contraception as the key to redistributing power to women in the bedroom, the home, and the community. For fifty years, she battled formidable opponents ranging from the U.S. Government to the Catholic Church. Her crusade was both passionate and paradoxical. She was an advocate of female solidarity who often preferred the company of men; an adoring mother who abandoned her children; a socialist who became a registered Republican; a sexual adventurer who remained an incurable romantic. Her comrades-in-arms included Emma Goldman and John Reed; her lovers, Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells." "Drawing on new information from archives and interviews, Chesler illuminates Sanger's turbulent personal story as well as the history of the birth control movement. An intimate biography of a visionary rebel, this is also an epic story that extends from the radical movements of pre-World War I to the family planning initiatives of the Great Society. At a time when women's reproductive and sexual autonomy is once again under attack, Woman of Valor is indispensable reading for the generations in debt to Sanger for the freedoms they take for granted."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality
The book--which is suitable for courses on the history of American sexuality, gender studies, or gay and lesbian studies, presents a carefully selected group of readings organized to allow students to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw their own conclusions.
War Against the Weak
In War Against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early 20th century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in 27 U.S. states, and the supporters of eugenics included progressive thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes against humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst -- with many important lessons for the impending genetic age.
Teaching America about Sex
In this witty and provocative study of sex and marriage manuals, M.E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson reveal that permissiveness, prohibition, and, tellingly, persuasion and enforcement-from sermons and hellfire to mutilation and electroshock-have informed popular sex education over the past hundred and twenty years. From the late Victorian obsession with masturbation and hygiene, to the "if it feels good, do it" ethos of The Joy of Sex, America's disposition to sex has evolved from a general squeamishness to a veritable cult of mutual orgasm. But despite the recent emphasis on "voluptuous pleasure," the basic power dynamic underlying the discourse on sex has been remarkably resistant to change. The authors reveal that, even as sexual behavior changed during periods of upheaval, the prescriptive literature on sex has remained traditional at its core, promoting sex within marriage for the purpose of reproduction. A cross-generational account of the major constructions of masculinity and femininity from 1880 to the present day, Teaching America About Sex serves up a lucid and entertaining reading of the twentieth century's vexed relationship with sex.