Sanger's older sisters paid for her to attend Claverack College, a private academy. She had to work in the school's kitchen to help pay for her room and board, but she much preferred life at school to being at home. After three years, however, she had to return to her family to help nurse her mother through her final days.
College/University
Gallery of Margaret Sanger
41 E Post Rd, White Plains, NY 10601, United States
Lacking the money to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor, Sanger enrolled in nursing school at White Plains Hospital, where she spent much of her training time in the maternity ward.
Career
Gallery of Margaret Sanger
1919
Margaret Sanger with sons Grant and Stuart, c. 1919
Gallery of Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Gallery of Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Gallery of Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Achievements
Margaret Sanger Square, at the intersection of Mott Street and Bleecker Street in Manhattan.
Sanger's older sisters paid for her to attend Claverack College, a private academy. She had to work in the school's kitchen to help pay for her room and board, but she much preferred life at school to being at home. After three years, however, she had to return to her family to help nurse her mother through her final days.
41 E Post Rd, White Plains, NY 10601, United States
Lacking the money to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor, Sanger enrolled in nursing school at White Plains Hospital, where she spent much of her training time in the maternity ward.
(What Every Mother Should Know is the popular handbook by ...)
What Every Mother Should Know is the popular handbook by Margaret Sanger. Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
(What Every Girl Should Know is the popular handbook by Ma...)
What Every Girl Should Know is the popular handbook by Margaret Sanger. Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
(Woman and the New Race is a book by birth control advocat...)
Woman and the New Race is a book by birth control advocate Margaret Sanger published in 1920. It advocates contraception as the only reasonable means to prevent overpopulation. The book discusses Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus's advocacy of celibacy until middle age to avoid overpopulation, but criticizes the idea as harmful, and also suggests that karezza, also called coitus reservatus, is harmful. She states in the book that a few men and women can channel their sexual impulses into a non-sexual direction, but that this will not work for most people, and that those people need sex and if celibate will be harm physically and mentally by their celibacy and therefore should be able to use birth control. Eugenics and birth control were intertwined topics in the 1920s.
(While working as a nurse amid the squalor of New York's L...)
While working as a nurse amid the squalor of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger witnessed the devastating effects of unwanted pregnancies. Women already overwhelmed by the burdens of poverty had no recourse; their doctors were either ignorant of effective methods of birth control or were unwilling to risk defying the law. Sanger resolved to dedicate her life to establishing birth control as a basic human right. Her battles brought a world of troubles - arrest, indictment, and exile among them - but ultimately she triumphed, opening the first American birth control clinic in 1916 and serving as the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1953. A fascinating firsthand account of an early crusade for women's healthcare, this autobiography is a classic of women's studies and social reform.
Margaret Sanger was an American activist, journalist, nurse, writer, and educator. She was a leading founder of the U.S. movement to make birth control widely available. The organizations she established later evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Background
Sanger was born Margaret Louisa Higgins on September 14, 1879, into a large Irish American family in Corning, New York. Her father, Michael Hennessey Higgins, was a stonecutter with unconventional, liberal views who was more interested in political arguments than in making a steady income for his family. Her mother, Annie Higgins, was a devout member of the Roman Catholic religion, which forbids the use of birth control. Consequently, Annie endured eighteen pregnancies and eleven live births (Margaret was the sixth), while at the same time suffering from tuberculosis, a serious lung disease that was usually fatal.
Sanger would watch as her mother, worn out from many difficult births, from her illness, and from the pure exhaustion of looking after eleven children, died before she reached fifty. This tragedy would strongly influence Sanger's views about the effects of unwanted, unplanned pregnancies. The unequal relationship between her strong-willed father and meek, obedient mother also shaped her ideas about men and women.
Education
After a negative encounter with an eighth-grade teacher, Sanger's older sisters paid for her to attend Claverack College, a private academy. She had to work in the school's kitchen to help pay for her room and board, but she much preferred life at school to being at home. After three years, however, she had to return to her family to help nurse her mother through her final days. Mounting tensions between Sanger and her father, and her mother's death, propelled Sanger into her next step. Lacking the money to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor, she enrolled in nursing school at White Plains State Hospital, where she spent much of her training time in the maternity ward.
While completing her nursing training, Sanger met William Sanger, an architect, whom she married in 1902. He was a German Jew and a socialist who was active in the radical causes of the day.
By 1912, the Sangers and their three children had moved to Greenwich Village, where the couple became involved in politics and the arts, and entertained some of the most radical intellectuals of the time. Sanger became deeply involved with the Socialist party. While recruiting for the organization, she visited many working-class families with six and seven children that were forced to make their home in two- and three-room tenements. She found that the women lived in dread of having more children and the resulting increase in poverty, and she concluded that women needed the right to control their own bodies.
She soon began speaking publicly on the problems of family life, connecting the size of the family with the economic problems of the working class. Her speeches became so popular that she was asked to turn them into a series of articles for the Call, a New York socialist newspaper. In her twelve-week series, entitled "What Every Woman Should Know," Sanger explained puberty, the reproductive organs, and sexually transmitted diseases. After the paper printed an article about gonorrhea, the authorities threatened that if it published a planned article on syphilis, its mailing permit would be canceled under the Comstock Act of 1873, a strict censorship law that barred the mailing of "obscene" material. The law was named for Anthony Comstock, a special agent of the post office with authority to open the mail and determine whether materials were obscene.
Along with her speaking and writing, Sanger returned to nursing in New York and spent much of her time assisting with home births and living with the families for several weeks afterward. She observed that the women had repeated pregnancies and were obsessed with methods of preventing conception. They sought illegal and cheap abortions, which often caused injury or death, and tried dangerous cures of their own, such as drinking turpentine and inserting instruments into the uterus. After one woman died following her second self-induced abortion, Sanger was distraught and walked the streets for hours before returning home. That night, Sanger decided to devote her life to educating women about their bodies and methods of contraception.
Sanger began her work by scouring libraries for information on preventing conception. After months of reading and research, she was convinced that no practical information existed in the United States, and she traveled to France with her family. In Paris, Sanger found that French women were well versed in contraceptive methods. She talked to druggists, midwives, doctors, and working women, and noted formulas for suppositories and douches, which she planned to write up as a pamphlet for U.S. women.
Returning home to New York, she began publishing a monthly magazine called the Woman Rebel. She deliberately decided to use the publication to engage in a frank discussion of women's liberation from the fear and reality of unplanned pregnancies, knowing that she would soon run afoul of Anthony Comstock. Sanger realized that the new movement needed a name, and after much discussion, she and a group of supporters agreed to call it birth control.
In April 1914, four weeks after the first issue of the Woman Rebel was published, the post office notified Sanger that the magazine was unmailable under the Comstock Act. While she skirmished with Comstock over her magazine, Sanger worked on her pamphlet on contraceptive techniques, called Family Limitation, in which she described the practical knowledge she had gathered in Europe. Sanger visited twenty-two printers in one week, trying to find someone who would produce the pamphlet. Finally, one hundred thousand copies were printed, addressed, and stored in San Francisco, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, to be mailed on her prearranged signal, when she thought she would be safe from Comstock's interference.
In August 1914, Sanger was indicted on charges of violating the Comstock Act. When it became clear that the judge hearing her case was biased against her, she fled to Europe to gain time to prepare her case properly. She sailed from Canada under a false name and without a passport. From the ship, where she was safely outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, Sanger sent telegrams containing the prearranged code word that indicated it was time to send out her pamphlet on contraception. After landing in Liverpool, she traveled on to London, where news of the Woman Rebel had made her a celebrity in radical circles. She later moved to Holland, which had the lowest infant death rate in the world and where all mothers were taught about contraception. There, Sanger learned how to examine women and advise them on which of the fifteen available birth control devices were appropriate. As a result of her experience in Europe, she learned the necessity of the medical community's involvement in the birth control movement and the importance of keeping thorough records and conducting follow-up studies.
In October 1915, Sanger sailed home. She contacted the district attorney about her case, and a hearing was scheduled for the following January. But in November 1915, the Sangers' daughter, Peggy, died of pneumonia, and Sanger sank into a severe depression. She insisted on going ahead with her trial, however, and received an outpouring of support from people across the country who had heard of her loss. Eventually, the charges were dismissed on the grounds that they were two years old and that Sanger had not made a practice of publishing obscene articles. Although this dismissal prevented the Comstock Act from being challenged in the courts, the publicity surrounding Sanger's case made the entire country aware of the birth control movement.
Sanger next notified her supporters of her intent to establish free clinics throughout the country, at which women could receive instruction in birth control. Sanger rented a storefront tenement in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where many newly arrived immigrants lived. The three women printed five thousand circulars in English, Yiddish, and Italian, advertising the clinic and offering contraceptive information for ten cents, and posted them around the neighborhood.
In October 1916, Sanger, along with her sister Ethel Byrne, who was a nurse, and another supporter, Fania Mindell, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. After only nine days, over four hundred women had come to the clinic for assistance. Among them was an undercover policewoman, who arrested Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell and confiscated all the patient records, pamphlets, and contraceptives. The women were charged with disseminating birth control information and maintaining a public nuisance. Byrne was found guilty and sentenced to thirty days in jail, where she nearly died from a hunger strike before the governor pardoned her. Mindell was found guilty of selling copies of "What Every Woman Should Know" and fined fifty dollars. Sanger was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in the work-house, where she gave lectures on birth control to the other inmates and taught them to read and write.
After her release, Sanger decided to focus on changing the laws on contraception and educating women about birth control techniques. Her conviction for running the birth control clinic had been upheld by the New York Supreme Court in People v. Sanger, and she appealed to the state's high court, the New York Court of Appeals. In January 1918, in an opinion that became known as the Crane decision after the authoring judge, Frederick Crane, the appellate court upheld the lower court. But the court interpreted the criminal laws broadly, holding that doctors could give out birth control information to any married person to protect his or her health. This meant that clinics could operate freely and that they would be under the supervision of medical personnel, where Sanger thought they belonged.
By 1920, over twenty-five birth control leagues were operating, and Mindell's conviction for distributing literature about contraception was reversed, which meant that pamphlets and books could more easily be distributed. In 1921, Sanger formed the American Birth Control League. The Catholic Church came to lead the opposition to Sanger's efforts, and she continued to battle the church throughout her life.
Sanger attacked the Comstock law, establishing the National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control, headquartered in Washington, D.C., to gather support for federal legislation dubbed the Doctor's Bill. By 1931, hundreds of medical, political, religious, and labor organizations supported the bill. When Sanger appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judicial Committee in February 1931, she testified that based on statistics for the period since the Comstock Act took effect in 1873, one-and-a-half million women had died during pregnancy and childbirth; seven hundred thousand illegal abortions had been performed each year; and fifteen million children had died during their first year because of poverty or their mother's poor health. But the proposed legislation was vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church, the Patriotic Society, the Purity League, and other groups, and was defeated.
After further attempts to pass the legislation were unsuccessful, Sanger decided to turn to the courts. In 1933 she had had a new type of pessary (vaginal suppository) sent to Dr. Hannah Stone, in New York, and the package had been seized under the Comstock Act. Stone filed charges. After a trial, the court ruled that the doctor was entitled to the package. The government appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which upheld the lower court, ruling that the aim of the Comstock law was not to "prevent the importation, sale, or carriage by mail of things which might intelligently be employed by conscientious and competent physicians for the purpose of saving life or promoting the well being of their patients." In 1937 the American medical association adopted the position that all doctors should receive information about the legal dispensation of contraceptives and that new contraceptive techniques should be studied.
In 1939 the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and the Birth Control League merged into the Birth Control Federation of America, which was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Sanger continued her work, initiating birth control programs in rural clinics. Here, she decided that the relatively expensive and difficult-to-use diaphragm was impractical and that women needed a birth control pill or injection. In the 1950s, she supported the work of Dr. Gregory Pincus, whose research eventually produced the birth control pill.
Margaret Sanger was born into a Roman Catholic family. Promoting birth control and sex education, she would later repeatedly experience being locked out of public halls, even countries, under Catholic pressure.
Politics
The Sangers became active members of the workers’ rights movement. The Sangers embraced the three basic tenets of the labor movement: workers have the right to form unions; women who work the same jobs as men should get the same pay as men; all people deserve a decent standard of living.
In the end, socialism disappointed Margaret Sanger. Its leaders were not ready to rally to the idea that women have a right to decide when and whether to have children. Let down by her “comrades,” Sanger would eventually fall away from the doctrinaire socialist movement of her day.
Her views evolved after World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the U.S. government’s increasingly anti-communist crusades. She moved from a class-based view of economics to one that was more centrist. She became a progressive who believed in reforming the capitalist system and building a strong social welfare state. But she would never forget the poor struggling American workers who were faced with too many mouths to feed. She would find a way to relieve their plight - on her own.
Views
Sanger increasingly focused her attention on sex education and women's health and reproductive rights. She argued that a woman's right to control her own body was the foundation of her human rights, that limiting family size would liberate working-class women from the economic burdens associated with unwanted pregnancies, and that women are as much entitled to sexual pleasure and fulfillment as men. Margaret Sanger opposed abortion and sharply distinguished it from birth control, the latter being a fundamental right of women, the former being a shameful crime.
Sanger's ideas have remained controversial. Those who oppose family planning point to her adherence to certain popular ideas of her time as proof that the movement is fundamentally flawed. Sanger advocated birth control as a means of reducing genetically transmitted mental and physical defects, even going so far as to call for the sterilization of the mentally incompetent. But her thinking differed significantly from the reactionary eugenics that eventually became the centerpiece of the Nazi party platform. Sanger never condoned eugenics based on race, class, or ethnicity, and in fact her writings were among the first banned and burned in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
Sanger opposed censorship throughout her career. Over the course of her career, Sanger was arrested at least eight times for expressing her views during an era in which speaking publicly about contraception was illegal.
Quotations:
"Let us not confuse the sexual impulse with love, for it alone is not love, but merely a necessary quality for the growth of love."
"Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation."
"Our laws force women into celibacy on the one hand, or abortion on the other. Both conditions are declared by eminent medical authorities to be injurious to health."
"Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race."
"Eugenics is … the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems."
"Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist - a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she 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. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. 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 and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I admire Margaret Sanger enormously. Her courage, her tenacity, her vision... I am really in awe of her. And there are a lot of lessons we that can learn from her life and the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so greatly." - Hillary Clinton
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Robert Ingersoll, Havelock Ellis
Connections
Margaret Sanger married architect William Sanger. They had three children. Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and the couple's divorce was finalized in 1921. In 1922, she married her second husband, James Noah H. Slee.