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| Figure 1: Margaret Sanger in 1922. |
Born into
an Irish Catholic family in Corning, New York in 1879, Margaret Sanger became
one of the most
influential Americans of the twentieth century. She also became one of the most
controversial, and her impact on American society continues to be felt today.
Here
are a five things you should know about Margaret Sanger.
Margaret Sanger was a nurse. In 1896, Margaret Sanger’s mother
developed tuberculosis, or consumption, as it was often called at the time. “She
was weak and pale and the high red spots on her cheek bones stood out
startlingly against her white face.” (Sanger, 41)
Sanger
decided that in order to care for her mother, she would study medicine. “In an effort
to be more efficient in caring for mother I tried to find out something about
consumption by borrowing medical books from the library of the local doctor,
who was a friend of the family….” (Sanger, 41)
Sanger
continued studying medicine after her mother’s death in 1899. “Though the
immediate occasion for reading medical books had ceased with mother’s death, I
had never, during these months, lost my deep conviction that perhaps she might
have been saved had I had sufficient knowledge of medicine. This was linked up
with my latent desire to be of service in the world.” (Sanger, 45) Sanger went
on to study nursing and became a visiting nurse in the East Side of Manhattan.
Margaret Sanger helped coin the
term “birth control” and popularized it.
While a
nurse in the East Side, Sanger witnessed dire poverty. She also met women who
were enduring the disastrous health consequences of frequent pregnancy.
In her
autobiography, Sanger recounts the story of Sadie Sachs. Sachs was the wife of
truck driver Jake Sachs. They had several children, and Sadie attempted an
abortion to prevent having a fourth. Jake arrived home to find her unconscious,
and Sanger was called to tend to her. Sachs recognized that an additional
pregnancy could spell disaster, so she inquired with the doctor as to how she
could prevent it. The doctor instructed her to “Tell Jake to sleep on the
roof.” Sanger was present and later wrote, “I glanced quickly at Mrs. Sachs.
Even through my sudden tears I could see stamped on her face an expression of
absolute despair.” Three months, Sadie was dead.
Margaret
Sanger’s mother had also endured frequent pregnancies. She had given birth to
11 children. She had also had 7 miscarriages. Sanger believed that these
experiences had weakened her mother, rendering her unable to recover from the
tuberculosis that killed her.
Sanger
decided that families needed to have access to information on sexuality and
reproduction, and women needed to have greater control over their bodies. In
1912 she wrote an article entitled “What Every Girl Should Know.” It began,
The
sexual impulse is the strongest force in all living creatures. It is this that
animates the struggle for existence; it is this that attracts and unites two
beings, that they may reproduce their kind; it is this that inspires man to the
highest and noblest thoughts; it is this also that inspires man to all
endeavors and achievements, to all art and poetry; this impulse is the creative
instinct which dominates all living things and without which life must die. If,
then, this force, this impulse plays so strong a part in our lives, is it not
necessary that we know something of it?”
In 1914
she founded the journal The Woman Rebel,
and soon after she founded The Birth
Control Review. In 1916, she founded a birth control clinic in Brooklyn,
the first in the United States. By providing information on contraception, the
clinic was violating the Comstock Act. She was convicted, but the ruling in her
appeal broadened the circumstances under which doctors were permitted to
prescribe contraception to their patients. This was just the beginning, as
Margaret Sanger would spend the following five decades promoting access to
birth control.
It is
often said that Margaret Sanger coined the term “birth control.” Actually, it
was a colleague’s idea. In her autobiography, Sanger describes the discussion
from which it emerged: “We tried population control, race control, and birth
rate control. Then someone suggested, ‘Drop the rate.’ Birth control was the
answer; we knew we had it.” (Sanger, 108)
Margaret Sanger founded Planned
Parenthood.
Timeline
of Important Events in Sanger’s Life:
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|
1879
|
September
14 Margaret Sanger born in Corning, New York
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1914
|
Sanger begins publishing The Woman Rebel
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1915
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Sanger flees the country
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1916
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Sanger returns to U.S. and founds
a birth control clinic
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1921
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Sanger
founds the Birth Control League
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1960
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the
FDA approves the pill for contraception
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1966
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Sanger
dies
|
In
order to further the cause of access to contraceptive devices and information,
Sanger founded the American Birth Control League. The League was incorporated
in 1923, and Sanger served as its president until 1928. In 1942, the League
merged with another of Sanger’s organizations, the Birth Control Clinical
Research Bureau, to become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
One of
the League’s major victories occurred in 1936. Knowing she would be arrested,
Sanger used the postal service to order birth control products. The resultant
court ruling declared that contraceptive
devices
were not obscene. The ruling only applied to New York, Connecticut, and
Vermont, but it presaged the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision. In that case, Estelle Griswold, president
of Planned Parenthood, successfully challenged a Connecticut law that
prohibited the distribution of contraceptives. The Supreme Court ruled that the
Constitution guaranteed a right to privacy that included access to contraceptives
and thereby overturned not only the Connecticut law but all such laws
throughout the country.
Today,
Planned Parenthood boasts approximately 700 health centers throughout the
country and they report serving more than 5 million Americans a year. They
report providing 700,000 HIV tests, 500,000 breast exams, and 400,000 pap tests
a year.
Planned
Parenthood is the nation’s leading provider of abortion services. Planned
Parenthood receives about $450 million a year through Medicaid and Title X
federal funds. Though this money is prohibited from being used to fund abortion
services, anti-abortion activists would like to cut off all Planned Parenthood
funding.
Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist.
The
term “eugenics” was coined by English statistician and scientist Francis Galton
in 1883. It means “good birth,” or “well born,” and he used it to refer to the
movement that he founded that was dedicated to the improvement of the human
germplasm. Just as humans managed the breeding of crops and livestock to render
plants and animals more useful to people, eugenicists wanted to manage the
breeding of people in order to eliminate undesirable traits and increase
desirable traits. For instance, eugenicists recognized that intelligence has a
heritable component—parents with high IQs are more likely to have children with
high IQs. Therefore, some advocated the sterilization of those with very low
IQs. Through such measures, it was argued, the IQ of the general population
would gradually increase. The eugenics movement reached its peak of popularity
in the United States and Western Europe in the first decades of the twentieth
century.
Margaret
Sanger supported eugenic ideas. For Sanger, birth control and eugenics went
hand-in-hand. In October 1921, in an article entitled “The Eugenic Value of Birth
Control Propaganda,” she wrote, “…the campaign for Birth Control is not merely
of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of
Eugenics.” In this respect, Sanger was typical of early twentieth-century
American progressives. “In the United States, support for eugenics arose as
part of the broader American progressive movement, which emphasized planned and
centrally administered solutions to social and political problems. Many of the
same reformers who advocated temperance, women’s suffrage, and political reform
also championed eugenic legislation,” writes Largent. (Largent, 189)
Sanger endorsed
the underlying logic of eugenics: that “dysgenic,” or negative, traits were
increasing in the population because the fittest were having fewer children. And
she agreed that this posed a virtually existential threat to civilization. In that same October 1921 article she described “…the unbalance between the birth rate of the
‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’…” as “…the greatest present menace to civilization….” If
this problem continued to be neglected, she wrote, “Possibly drastic and
Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to
encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly
cruel sentimentalism.”
On the
other hand, Sanger did not want it to come to “drastic and Spartan methods.”
She hoped that educating people about sexuality and eugenics would result in
people making better choices about whether and when to have children. Again in the same article she wrote, “…racial degeneration like individual
regeneration…must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without.”
It is
frequently claimed that Margaret Sanger was a racist. Many of Sanger’s
eugenicist colleagues were racists; Sanger once addressed a female Ku Klux Klan
meeting; and in 1939 she wrote in a letter that “We don’t want the word to go out that we
want to exterminate the Negro population….”
So was
Margaret Sanger a racist? The most credible authorities insist that she wasn’t.
This includes Sanger biographer Jean J. Baker and historian of eugenics Edwin
Black. It also includes Esther Katz, editor and director of the Margaret Sanger
Papers Project at NYU. In a thoughtful piece published in The Public Historian, Katz describes the difficulty of conveying
a nuanced reality to a general audience regarding a politically controversial
figure. Was Sanger a racist? According to Katz, the answer is “…yes and no.
By
our current highly sensitized standards, some of her attitudes and statements
can be construed as racist, elitist, ethno-centric, and surely not politically
correct. But judged by the standards of her own time, Sanger can be
characterized as rather liberal on issues of race and ethnicity. (Katz, 48)
Margaret Sanger pushed for the
development of “the pill.”
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| Figure 2: Margaret Sanger circa 1917. |
“The pill” was developed by biologist Gregory Pincus. Pincus studied mammalian reproduction, and as a researcher at Harvard in the 1930s, he had experimented with breeding rabbits in Petri dishes. His research was built upon by John Rock, who achieved the first human in vitro fertilization in 1944. (Eig, 2, 110) In the early 1950s, Pincus developed a pill that inhibited ovulation with the hormone progesterone. He joined with John Rock to test the pill in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico and to file for approval from the FDA. The FDA first approved the pill—in the form of pharmaceutical company Searle’s Enovid—for treatment of severe menstrual disorders in 1957. The fact that the drug inhibited ovulation was listed as a side effect. Finally, in 1960, the pill was approved as a method of birth control. By 1965, the pill was the most popular form of birth control in the United States, used by 6.5 million women.
Sanger
long imagined what would constitute the perfect method of birth control. Such a
method would be 100% effective, giving women the liberty to spontaneously
engage in sexual intercourse without fear of unwanted pregnancy. But it would
also be reversible, unlike hysterectomies. She discussed the possibility of
developing such a method with several scientists, and it was a discussion
between Sanger and Pincus in 1950 that set Pincus on the path of developing the
pill. For the first few years of Pincus’s research on the pill, Planned
Parenthood provided him with funds in the range of $3,100 to $3,600 annually.
Sources Consulted
Primary
Sources:
Margaret
Sanger, “What Every Girl Should Know: Sexual Impulses—Part 1,” New York Call, December 22, 1912.
Margaret
Sanger, “What Every Girl Should Know: Sexual Impulses—Part 2,” New York Call, December 29, 1912.
The
Margaret Sanger Papers Project:
Margaret
Sanger, Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton
& Company, 1938).
Margaret
Sanger, “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” Birth Control Review, October 1921, pg. 5. https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=238946.xml
Books:
Edwin
Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and
America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. (New York: Four Walls Eight
Windows, 2003).
Jonathan
Eig, The Birth of the Pill: How Four
Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (W. W. Norton &
Company, 2014).
Sources
on Controversies:
Mike
DeBonis, “House votes to defund Planned Parenthood, but will that help to avert
a shutdown?” The Washington Post,
September 18, 2015.
Clay
Wirestone, “Did Margaret Sanger believe African-Americans ‘should be
eliminated’?” October 15, 2015. Evaluates a claim made by Republican
presidential candidate Ben Carson.
Politifact
on sanger’s racism
Clay
Wirestone, “NH Rep. Bill O’Brien says Margaret Sanger was active participant in
KKK,” March 18, 2015. Evaluates a claim made by former New Hampshire speaker of
the House William O’Brien.
Sarah
Kliff, “The Planned Parenthood controversy over aborted fetus body parts,
explained,” Vox, August 4, 2015. http://www.vox.com/2015/7/14/8964513/planned-parenthood-aborted-fetuses
Arthur
Caplan, “Planned Parenthood’s awkward clash,” Chicago Tribune, July 23, 2015.
Esther
Katz, “The Editor as Public Authority: Interpreting Margaret Sanger,” The Public Historian, Vol. 17, No. 1
(Winter, 1995), pp. 41-50.
Jill
Grimaldi, “Sanger’s First Clinic,” The Margaret Sanger Papers Project blog,
October 26, 2010.
Other
Resources:
Mark A. Largent, "'The Greatest Curse of the Race': Eugenic Sterilization in Oregon, 1909-1983, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 188-209.
Harvard
University Library Open Collections Program’s Women Working, 1800-1930 page on Margaret Sanger: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/sanger.html
Planned
Parenthood’s own timeline of its history:
Encyclopedia
Britannica entry on the Comstock Act
Jacksonville
University has resources on the history of nursing which includes a brief
biography of Sanger:
Other
Jacksonville University resources on the history of nursing:
Megan
Gibson, “The Long, Strange History of Birth Control,” Time, February 2, 2015.
Penn
State has a list of locations at which one can find editions of The Birth Control Review online:
Lori
Robertson, “Cain’s False Attack on Planned Parenthood,” FactCheck.org, November
1, 2011.
Biography.com
entry on Margaret Sanger: http://www.biography.com/people/margaret-sanger-9471186
Planned
Parenthood’s website: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/history-successes
American Experience resources on the pill:
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