Margaret Sanger

Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist, an advocate of negative eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). Initially met with fierce opposition to her ideas, Sanger gradually won some support, both in the public as well as the courts, for a woman's choice to decide how and when she will bear children. Margaret Sanger was instrumental in opening the way to universal access to birth control.

Early life

Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, was a devout Roman Catholic who went through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births)^[1] before dying of tuberculosis and cervical cancer. Sanger attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Hudson for two years. Her sisters paid her tuition, and when they were unable to continue to provide this assistance, Sanger returned home in 1899. Her mother died the same year, after which Sanger enrolled in a nursing program at a hospital in White Plains, an affluent New York suburb. In 1902, she married William Sanger. Although stricken by tuberculosis, she gave birth to a son the following year, followed in later years by a second son and a daughter who died in childhood. Sanger's ill health, marriage and subsequent pregnancy prevented her from completing her third year of training and attaining a certification, though her new husband assured her that he would care for her and that she would be better off raising their children than pursuing a career.^[2]

In 1912, after a devastating fire destroyed the new home that her husband had designed, Sanger and her family moved to New York City, where she went to work in the poverty-stricken East Side slums of Manhattan. That same year, she also started writing a column for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." Distributing a pamphlet, Family Limitation, to poor women, Sanger repeatedly risked scandal and imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices.

Margaret separated from her husband William Sanger in 1913. In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight page monthly newsletter advocating contraception, with the slogan "No Gods and No Masters" (and coining the term "birth control") and that each woman be "the absolute mistress of her own body." She was indicted for violating postal obscenity laws in August and fled to Europe as "Bertha Watson" to escape prosecution. There, she had several affairs, including with the science-fiction author H. G. Wells and sexual psychologist Havelock Ellis. She returned to the U.S. in Oct. 1915. Her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died November 6.

Family planning clinics

On Oct. 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. It was raided nine days later by the police. She served 30 days in prison. An initial appeal was rejected but a state appellate court in 1918 allowed doctors to prescribe contraception.

In 1916, Sanger published What Every Girl Should Know, which was later widely distributed as one of the E. Haldeman-Julius "Little Blue Books." It not only provided basic information about such topics as menstruation, but also promoted an understanding of sexuality in adolescents. It was followed in 1917 by What Every Mother Should Know. She also launched the monthly periodical The Birth Control Review and Birth Control News and contributed articles on health for the Socialist Party paper, The Call.

Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 with Lothrop Stoddard and C. C. Little. In 1922, she traveled to Japan to work with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue promoting birth control; over the next several years, she would return another six times for this purpose. In this year she married the oil tycoon, James Noah H. Slee.

In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established the Clinical Research Bureau. It was the first legal birth control clinic in the U.S. (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in her honor in 1940). It received crucial grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1924 onwards, which were made anonymously to avoid public exposure of the Rockefeller name to her cause. The family also consistently supported her ongoing efforts in regard to population control.^[3]

Also in 1923, she formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control and served as its president until its dissolution in 1937 after birth control, under medical supervision, was legalized in many states. In 1927, Sanger helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva.

Between 1921 and 1926, Sanger received over a million letters from mothers requesting information on birth control. From 1916 on, she lectured "in many places—halls, churches, women's clubs, homes, theaters" to "many types of audiences—cotton workers, churchmen, liberals, Socialists, scientists, clubmen, and fashionable, philanthropically minded women." In 1926, in what she called "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing", Sanger even gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, a group she found so ignorant she had to use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand."^[4]

In 1928, Sanger resigned as the president of the ABCL. Two years later, she became president of the Birth Control International Information Center. In January 1932, she addressed the New History Society, an organization founded by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab and Julie Chanler; this address would later become the basis for an article entitled A Plan for Peace.^[5] In 1937, Sanger became chairperson of the Birth Control Council of America and launched two publications, The Birth Control Review and The Birth Control News. From 1939 to 1942, she was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America. From 1952 to 1959, she served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; at the time, the largest private international family planning organization.

During the 1960 presidential elections, Sanger was dismayed by candidate John F. Kennedy's position on birth control (Kennedy did not believe birth control should be a matter of government policy). She threatened to leave the country if Kennedy were elected, but evidently reconsidered after Kennedy won the election.

In the early 1960s, Sanger promoted the use of the newly available birth control pill. She toured Europe, Africa, and Asia, lecturing and helping to establish clinics.

Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona at age 86 which was eight days from her 87th birthday and only a few months after the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S., the apex of her 50-year struggle.

Sanger's books include Woman and the New Race (1920), Happiness in Marriage (1926), My Fight For Birth Control (1931), and an autobiography (1938).

Philosophy

Although Sanger was greatly influenced by her father, her mother's death left her with a deep sense of dissatisfaction concerning her own and society's understanding of women's health and childbirth. She also criticized the censorship of her message about sexuality and contraceptives by the civil and religious authorities as an effort by men to keep women in submission. An atheist, Sanger attacked Christian leaders opposed to her message, accusing them of Obscurantism and insensitivity to women's concerns. Sanger was particularly critical of the lack of awareness of the dangers of and the scarcity of treatment opportunities for venereal disease among women. She claimed that these social ills were the result of the male establishment's intentionally keeping women in ignorance. Sanger also deplored the contemporary absence of regulations requiring registration of people diagnosed with venereal diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of those with infectious diseases such as measles).

Sanger was also an avowed socialist, blaming the evils of contemporary capitalism for the unsatisfactory conditions of the young working-class women. Her very personal views on this issue are evident in the last pages of What Every Girl Should Know.

Psychology of sexuality

While Sanger's understanding of and practical approach to human physiology were progressive for her times, her thoughts on the psychology of human sexuality place her squarely in the pre-Freudian 19th century. Birth control, it would appear, was for her more a means to limit the undesirable side-effects of sex than a way of liberating men and women to enjoy it. In What Every Girl Should Know, she wrote: "Every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and woman who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, are never sensual." Sexuality, for her, was a kind of weakness, and surmounting it indicated strength:

Though sex cells are placed in a part of the anatomy for the essential purpose of easily expelling them into the female for the purpose of reproduction, there are other elements in the sexual fluid which are the essence of blood, nerve, brain, and muscle. When redirected in to the building and strengthening of these, we find men or women of the greatest endurance greatest magnetic power. A girl can waste her creative powers by brooding over a love affair to the extent of exhausting her system, with the results not unlike the effects of masturbation and debauchery.^[6]

Her thoughts on human development were also laden with racism:

It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.^[7]

Sanger, like most of the population of her time, also considered masturbation dangerous:

In my experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I have never found any one so repulsive as the chronic masturbator. It would be difficult not to fill page upon page of heartrending confessions made by young girls, whose lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so innocently, for even after they have ceased the habit, they find themselves incapable of any relief in the natural act. [...] Perhaps the greatest physical danger to the chronic masturbator is the inability to perform the sexual act naturally.^[8]

For her, masturbation was not just a physical act, it was a mental state:

In the boy or girl past puberty, we find one of the most dangerous forms of masturbation, i.e., mental masturbation, which consists of forming mental pictures, or thinking obscene or voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harmful to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures.^[9]

Eugenics and euthanasia

Sanger was a proponent of eugenics, a social philosophy which gained strong support in the United States in the early 20th century that claimed that human hereditary traits can be improved through social intervention. Methods of social intervention (targeted at those seen as "genetically unfit") advocated by eugenists have included selective breeding, sterilization, and euthanasia. In 1932, for example, Sanger argued for:

A stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.^[10]

Sanger promoted the idea of "race hygiene" through "negative eugenics," an attempt to reduce the fertility of "dysgenic" groups. Sanger considered the unchecked multiplication of the "unfit" to be "the greatest present menace to civilization",^[11] and her writings do indicate that she believed some particular (ethnic) races as a whole were more eugenic or dysgenic than any other. ‘The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it occurs to any of their more rebellious members.’ She condemned the anti-Semitic Nazi program as "sad & horrible."^[5]

Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent "dysgenic" children from being born into a disadvantaged life, and dismissed "positive eugenics" (which promoted greater fertility for the "fitter" upper classes) as impractical. Though many leaders in the eugenics movement were calling for active euthanasia of the "unfit," Sanger spoke out against such methods. Edwin Black writes:

In [William] Robinson's book, Eugenics, Marriage and Birth Control (Practical Eugenics), he advocated gassing the children of the unfit. In plain words, Robinson insisted: 'The best thing would be to gently chloroform these children or give them a dose of potassium cyanide.' Margaret Sanger was well aware that her fellow birth control advocates were promoting lethal chambers, but she herself rejected the idea completely. 'Nor do we believe,' wrote Sanger in Pivot of Civilization, 'that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.'^[12]

Placing the responsibility for eugenic control in the hands of individual parents rather than the state, she wrote:

"The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.... We are convinced that racial regeneration, like individual regeneration, must come 'from within.' That is, it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without."^[13]

We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother... Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment.^[14]

She nevertheless advocated certain instances of coercion, in cases where she considered the parents unfit to decide whether they should bear children:

"The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."^[15]

Freedom of speech

Sanger was an avid defender of free speech who was arrested at least eight times for expressing her views in a time when speaking publicly in favor of birth control was illegal. She stated in interviews that she had been influenced by the agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll, who spoke in her hometown when she was 12 years old.^[16]

Legacy

Sanger remains a controversial figure. While she is widely credited as a leader of the modern birth control movement, and remains an iconic figure for the American reproductive rights movements, she also is reviled by some who condemn her as "an abortion advocate". (though abortion was illegal throughout Sanger's lifetime, and Planned Parenthood did not then support the procedure or lobby for its legalisation). Pro-life groups have frequently condemned Sanger for her views, attributing her efforts to promote birth control to a desire to "purify" the human race through eugenics, and even to eliminate minority races by placing birth control clinics in minority neighborhoods.^[17] For this reason, Sanger is often quoted selectively or out of context, and her history and involvement with socialism and eugenics have often been rationalized or even ignored by her defenders and biographers. Despite allegations of racism, Sanger's work with minorities earned the respect of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.^[18] In their biographical article about Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood notes:

In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city's health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the Urban League, and the black community's elder statesman, W.E.B. DuBois.^[19]

Although Sanger's views on abortion changed throughout the course of her life^{[citation needed]}, in her early years she was acutely aware of the problem of abortion, typically self-induced or with the aid of a midwife. Her opposition to abortion stemmed primarily from a concern for the dangers to the mother, and less so from legal concerns or the welfare of the unborn child.^[20] She wrote in a 1916 edition of Family Limitation, "no one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable," though she framed this in the context of her birth control advocacy, adding that "abortions will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. (Care is) the only cure for abortions." Sanger consistently regarded birth control and abortion as the responsibility and burden first and foremost of women, and as matters of law, medicine and public policy second.^[21]

Sanger's 1938 autobiography notes her 1916 opposition to abortion as the taking of life: "To each group we explained what contraception was; that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun."^[22]

Notes

^ Steinem.
^ Chesler.
^ Crucial, anonymous Rockefeller grants to the Clinical Research Bureau and support for population control - see John Ensor Harr, and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988. (pp.191, 461-62)
^ Sanger, Margaret (1938). Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. pp. 361, 366–7. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
^ ^a ^b Pouzzner.
^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 46
^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 47
^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, pp. 39-40
^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 39
^ Sanger, "A Plan For Peace", Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 106
^ Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5
^ Black (The War Against the Weak), 251.
^ Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5
^ Sanger, "Birth Control and Racial Betterment." The Birth Control Review, 3(2), 11-12
^ Sanger, quoted in Charles Valenza: "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives, January-February 1985, page 44.
^ "The Child Who Was Mother to a Woman" from The New Yorker, April 11, 1925, page 11.
^ Marshall.
^ Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
^ Knowles.
^ Streitmatter, Rodger (2001). Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 169. ISBN 0-231-12249-7.
^ Gray.
^ Sanger, Margaret (1938). Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. p. 217. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

References

Black, Edwin. The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York City, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows. ISBN 1-56858-258-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |origmonth= ignored (help)
Chesler, Ellen. Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York City, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60088-5.
Gray, Madeline. Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control. New York City, NY: Richard Marek Publishers. p. 280. ISBN 0-399-90019-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |origdate= ignored (|orig-date= suggested) (help)
Knowles, Jon (2004). "The Truth About Margaret Sanger" (PDF). Katharine Dexter McCormick Library.
Marshall, Robert G. (1991). Blessed Are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press. ISBN 0-89870-353-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
Sanger, Margaret (1920). What Every Girl Should Know. Springfield, Ill.: United Sales co. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)
Sanger, Margaret (1938). An Autobiography. New York, NY: Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0-8154-1015-8. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (2004). "The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr".
Pouzzner, Daniel (February 2005). "Returning to Eden: Herding People, Culling the Herd". The Architecture of Modern Political Power. Retrieved 2006-04-13.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: year (link)
Sanger, Margaret (1932). "A Plan For Peace". The Birth Control Review: 106. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
Steinem, Gloria (April 13, 1998). "Time's 100 Most Important People of the Century: Margaret Sanger". Time Magazine.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: year (link)