Sanger, Margaret

SANGER, MARGARET (1879–1966). Born Margaret Higgins in Corning, New York, one of eleven children in an Irish family, Sanger absorbed some of the radical ides of her father, a follower of freethinker Robert Ingersoll and single-taxer Henry George. She was able to attend college thanks to financial support from her two older sisters, then worked as a schoolteacher, then attended nursing school. At first it seemed that her medical training might be in vain, when she married William Sanger in 1902. An architect and aspiring artist, he moved his family to suburban Westchester, where she cared for their three children while he commuted to New York City. After a restless eight years of housewifery and isolation, Margaret convinced him to move to Manhattan, where she began working as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side. It was this experience, tending to poor mothers exhausted from many pregnancies and many children, that formed the rest of her career.

She became part of NYC’s vibrant Left, joining the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World. From Emma Goldman she learned that issues concerning women’s bodies and health might be understood politically. She began to discuss and write about health issues, including taboos subjects such as venereal disease, and in 1912 began a series of columns on sexual issues in the Socialist daily Call. Enthusiastic responses from women convinced her that these issues were politically vital. The censorship of one of her columns by the U.S. Post Office in 1913 brought her more publicity. In 1914 she created the Woman Rebel, a feminist newspaper that again broke taboos, and then published Family Limitation, a pamphlet aimed at mass distribution containing instructions for using contraception, thereby violating the indecency clauses of the Comstock Act. Fleeing from arrest, she spent a year in Europe in 1914–1915, where contraception was already available in socialist and union-run clinics; she absorbed sex-politics ideas from Havelock Ellis and medical training from Dutch feminist physician Aletta Jacobs.

Upon her return to the United States she began to organize a movement for birth control, which quickly spread and attracted support. After WWI it became a large social movement, with clinics and birth-control advocacy groups throughout the country. In part because of this enthusiasm, Sanger became a single-issue campaigner for the rest of her life, edging away from a broader Left agenda. To win support for legalizing birth control from people of influence, she courted doctors and academic eugenicists. Although no more racist than most white Leftists of the time, and supported by black progressives such as Du Bois, she occasionally used eugenic arguments that were read as attempts to reduce the population of people of color, arguments that even today feed the fear that birth control is a racist plot. Her alliance with physicians also continues to shape contraception today, as it was ultimately legalized as a medical device requiring prescription, thereby making doctors the gate-keepers for access to birth control.

In 1921 Sanger established the American Birth Control League, a national, professionally dominated lobbying and education group, which ultimately became Planned Parenthood in 1942. Personally as well as politically ambitious, Sanger often suggested that her leadership was irreplaceable. She was never timid: until the mid-1920s she smuggled European diaphragms into the United States to supply birth-control clinics. After World War II, population-control fears renewed support for promoting contraception, and Sanger was instrumental in securing funding for research into hormonal contraception.

Jean H. Baker, Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Gordon, Linda. The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002, a revised and updated version of the original Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America, New York: Penguin, 1976 and 1990.

Margaret Sanger papers. Collection Identifier: SSC-MS-00138. Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Library. https://findingaids.smith.edu/repositories/2/resources/826