Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger
Founder of the American Birth Control Movement
(1879-1966)

The visiting nurse had been called to a New York City tenement where a young Russian woman was lying in a coma. Within minutes, the young woman died. The cause of her death was her attempt to abort a baby. Her three children huddled in a corner, wailing, and her husband began sobbing and pulling his hair. It was a scene that nurse Margaret Sanger never would forget. Only three months before, she and a doctor had been called to this same apartment and the young woman had begged the doctor for information on how to prevent pregnancy. The young couple was living in poverty and could not afford to have any more children, and an abortion would surely kill the mother. However, it was illegal then to give out information on contraception, so the doctor suggested that the husband sleep on the roof.
This tragic experience, and the fact that thousands of women were trapped in poverty from bearing so many children, moved Margaret Sanger to action. She learned all she could about birth control. She wrote books and articles, opened clinics, and even went to prison because she broke the law forbidding the distribution of such informa¬tion. In the end, she succeeded in changing the laws, and founded what became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. But the contro¬versy over reproductive rights is one that continues to this day, involv¬ing complex moral and religious, as well as social and medical issues.
Margaret Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins on September 14, 1879, in the factory town of Corning, New York. Her mother, Anne, and father, Michael, had eleven children. Margaret's mother was a devout Roman Catholic; her father, a free-thinking atheist. Margaret's parents loved and respected one another, and she loved both of her par¬ents dearly. Her father, a maker of stone monuments, encouraged his children to be independent thinkers and to challenge authority.
Margaret's first act of rebellion was against her eighth grade teacher, who made cruel remarks about a new pair of gloves, a gift from Margaret's older sister. Margaret refused to return to that school, so her sisters scraped up enough money to send her to a private school. After three years of study, she took a teaching job in New Jersey. She soon found that she did not like teaching, and so she was not reluctant to return home when word came that her mother was very ill with tuberculosis.
Anne Higgins died at the age of forty-nine. Margaret blamed her mother's death on exhaustion from years of childrearing as much as from tuberculosis. Michael Higgins wanted Margaret to move back home and be his housekeeper, but they had a serious quarrel, and Margaret left home to become a nurse.
She entered a nursing school in White Plains, New York. To com¬plete her course of study, the school sent her for practical training to a New York City hospital. There, she was introduced to a young architect and artist, William Sanger. The couple fell in love and were married in 1902. They settled down in a New York suburb and, by 1910, had three children.
Eventually, the Sangers grew restless and dissatisfied with their sub¬urban lives. They saw many injustices in the world and wanted to do something to help. New and radical ideas were stirring in arts and poli¬tics. Wanting to be part of the new movement, the Sangers moved to New York City and joined the Socialist Party. Margaret helped organize strikes by workers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. To earn money, she worked as a home nurse, caring for sick people and women giving birth in their homes. She met and was influenced by the great radical leaders of the day, including labor leader William Haywood and feminist Emma Goldman. She became convinced that poor women never would be able to improve their lives until they could control their bodies.
She began to learn all that she could about birth control. First, she read all the material available in New York libraries. Then, she and her husband went to France, where she gathered information on how the French practiced contraception. Armed with this information, she returned to the United States and began publishing information about sexuality in her new magazine, The Woman Rebel, which first appeared in March 1914. After several issues, the U.S. government charged her with violating the federal law forbidding the distribution of birth con¬trol information. She learned she could be sentenced to forty-five years in prison, and so she left for Europe again. Before she sailed, she left instructions to have her pamphlet, Family Limitation, distributed. This pamphlet contained the most detailed information on birth control then available in English.
Margaret spent a year in Europe, and discovered that there were birth control information centers in Holland, staffed by midwives. She also met and became friends with English psychologist Havelock Ellis, a pioneer in studies on sexuality. Ellis convinced Sanger that she should abandon her militant feminism and instead, try to convert the middle class to her views about birth control.
While Margaret was in Europe, Bill Sanger was arrested and sent to prison for distributing Family Limitation. She decided it was time to go home and face trial. A few days after her return in October 1915, her daughter died of pneumonia. By then, the actions of Margaret Sanger were making front page news. Her husband's imprisonment and her daughter's death turned public sympathy in her favor. The government dropped the charges.
Margaret Sanger then decided to establish a birth control clinic. She and her sister opened the Brownsville Clinic in Brooklyn, New York, in October 1916. Ten days after it opened, the police shut the clinic down. Sanger and her sister were arrested, tried, and sent to prison. But an appeals court judge ruled that, while it was illegal for the sisters to dis¬tribute birth control advice, it was not illegal for doctors to do so. Even though she went to jail, Margaret Sanger believed she had won a great victory.
At that point, her struggle for legal birth control began a new phase. She campaigned for birth control clinics staffed by doctors and lobbied to have the laws changed. Wealthy socialites and philanthropists con¬tributed money to her cause. During this time, Margaret Sanger moved away from her radical past. In 1921, she founded the American Birth Control League, which became Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. She divorced Bill in 1920 and in 1922, married a mil¬lionaire, J. Noah Slee, who helped to fund the birth control cause.
In 1923, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States to be staffed by doctors, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York City. Under the direction of a woman physician, the bureau did the first real research on the effectiveness of birth control methods. Doctors could also go there to learn about birth control techniques. In 1936, a federal court ruled that birth control information was not obscene and thus not illegal. By 1938, there was a network of more than three hundred birth control clinics around the United States, most of them staffed by women physicians. One of the greatest victories came in 1937, when the American Medical Association ruled that giving out advice on contraception was a proper service for a doctor to perform.
Margaret Sanger's ideas gained new respect with the baby boom that occurred after World War II. In 1952, she helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation and served as its first pres¬ident. She longed to find a birth control measure that was controlled entirely by the woman, a vision that finally became reality when she learned that a biologist, Gregory Pincus, had developed a birth control pill. She brought his work to the attention of those who could bring it to market, and the first birth control pill was sold in 1960.
Six years later, on September 6, 1966, Margaret Sanger died of heart failure in a Tucson, Arizona, nursing home. During her lifetime, she had seen the issue of birth control move from being considered obscene to being considered a legitimate medical matter. She never believed, how¬ever, that the victory was permanent. "I am often asked," she wrote, "Aren't you happy now that the struggle is over? But I cannot agree that it is. Though many disputed barriers have been leaped, you can never sit back, smugly content, believing that victory is forever yours; there is always the threat of its being snatched from you".

More detailed information can be found in the "Extraordinary Women of Medicine" Darlene R.Stille, and issued by The Children's Press  in the USA.
Information should be used just for educational purposes.