Margaret Louisa Higgins Sanger | Biography

Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in America, spearheaded the birth control movement, and founded both organizations that later merged to form the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

"Maggie" Higgins was born in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children of a freethinking Irish immigrant stonecutter, Michael Hennessy Higgins, and his wife, Anne Purcell Higgins, a sickly, passive, woman. Margaret never accepted the patriarchal family structure, and mourned her mother's early death, hastened by repeated pregnancies. Although she considered men in the style of her father to be sexual tyrants, Margaret admired her father's his leftist iconoclastic ideas, and shared many political and ideological heroes with him.

The family fortunes declined after 1894 when Michael Hennessy alienated the local Roman Catholic constituency by engaging the atheist socialist Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) to speak at a public meeting in Corning. Margaret always longed to escape from Corning's provincialism. She endured the taunts of her teachers and classmates at the parish school of St. Mary's Church until 1896, when, with financial help from her older sisters, she was able transfer to Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, a Protestant boarding school far from her detested Corning. For the first time in her life, she had regular access to secular books.

After graduating in 1900, she enrolled in the nursing program at the White Plains, New York, Hospital, unable to afford to study medicine leading to an M.D. degree. In 1902, she received her nursing credentials and married Jewish architect William Sanger (1874-1961). The Sangers were already involved with both the Socialist Party and the International Workers of the World when they moved to Manhattan in 1910, and became involved in a prominent socialist circle including Emma Goldman (1869-1940), John Reed (1887-1920), and Upton Sinclair (1878-1968).

Margaret worked on the Lower East Side as a visiting nurse midwife for women suffering from too many children, inadequate reproductive health care, frequent miscarriages, sexually transmitted diseases, and abortion. She was so affected by the misery of these mothers that she quit nursing in 1912 to devote full time to the cause of freeing women from the medical and economic afflictions of unwanted pregnancy. She became a prolific propagandist and publicist. In 1912, Sanger began writing a sex education column for The New York Call. Her first monthly issue of The Woman Rebel, a journal subtitled "No Gods, No Masters," appeared in March 1914, but it was soon suppressed. In 1917 she founded Birth Control Review.

Sanger opened her clinic in Brooklyn, New York, on October 16, 1916, to distribute family planning literature and contraceptive devices. Because sex education was considered legally obscene, the police almost immediately raided and closed the clinic. She was arrested and convicted.

She divorced Sanger in 1920, and two years later married a self-made millionaire, J. Noah H. Slee (1860-1943). He liberally funded the birth control movement. In 1922, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League and in 1923, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, which in 1939 merged into the Birth Control Federation of America. She retired in 1942 when, against her wishes, it changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Some historians suggest Sanger was forced out of the movement by moderates who believed that she offended mainstream citizens.

Sanger died of atherosclerosis at home in Tucson, Arizona.