Sanger, Margaret | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), born in Corning, New York on September 14, was an internationally renowned leader in the movement to secure reproductive rights for women. Founder of the first birth-control clinic in the United States and later, of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Sanger was a controversial figure with militant feminist and socialist views, working for change in areas of strong traditional values and cultural resistance.

Sanger was the sixth of eleven children born to a devout Catholic Irish-American family. To escape what she saw as a grim class heritage, she worked her way through school and chose a career in nursing. Although she married and had three children, Sanger maintained an intellectual and professional independence. She immersed herself in the radical bohemian culture of intellectuals and artists that flourished in New York City's Greenwich Village. She also joined the Women'sCommittee of the New York Socialist Party and participated in labor strikes organized by the Industrial Workers of the World.

Working with poor families on the Lower East Side of New York City, 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.

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 called for the reversal of the Comstock Law and related state laws banning the dissemination of information on human sexuality and contraception. In 1914, indicted for distributing a publication that violated postal obscenity laws, she fled to England, where she was deeply influenced by the social and economic theories of Britain's radical feminist and neo-Malthusian intelligentsia. Separated from her husband and exploring her own sexual liberation, Sanger had affairs with several men including the psychologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) and the author and historian H. G. Wells (1866–1946). She returned to the United States in 1915 to face the charges against her, hoping to use her trial to capture media attention. But the sudden death of her five-year-old daughter generated public sympathy, and the government dropped the charges. She then embarked on a national tour and was arrested in several cities, attracting even greater publicity for herself and the birth-control movement.

Sanger founded a number of important organizations and institutions to advance the cause of reproductive rights. In 1916 she opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. Nine days later, Sanger and her staff were arrested. She then opened a second clinic, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, staffed by female doctors and social workers, which became important in collecting clinical data on the effectiveness of contraceptives. In 1921 Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later merged with the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau to form the Birth Control Federation of American, forerunner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 1930 she founded a clinic in Harlem, and she later founded "the Negro Project," serving African Americans in the rural South. Of Sanger's work, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) said, "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."

After World War II, Sanger shifted her concerns to global population growth, especially in the Third World. She helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation, serving as its president until 1959. Sanger helped find critical development funding for the birth-control pill and fostered a variety of other research efforts including the development of spermicidal jellies and spring-form diaphragms. She died only a few months after birth control became legal for married couples, a 1965 decision that reflected the influence of Sanger's long years of dedication to radical, visionary social reform.

Birth Control;; Eugenics.

Chesler, Ellen. (1992). Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster.

King, Martin Luther Jr. (1966). "Family Planning—A Special and Urgent Concern." King's acceptance speech upon receiving the Margaret Sanger Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Valenza, Charles. (1985). "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives 17(1): 44–46.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project. Available from http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/inde x.html.

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