Sanger, Margaret (b. Higgins)

(1879–1966) birth control advocate; born in Corning, N.Y. The sixth of eleven children, she married architect William Sanger (1902) and had three children before leaving him in 1913. She moved to New York City (1912) where she became active in the women's labor movement and the Socialist Party. She concluded that control over childbearing was the key to female emancipation and was appalled by women's ignorance of contraception, which she experienced first-hand working as a practical nurse in New York City (1912). She wrote newspaper articles on feminine hygiene, put out a militant journal entitled Woman Rebel, and published a pamphlet, Family Limitation (1914), in which she coined the term "birth control" and called for legalization of contraception; indicted for violating postal laws, she fled to Canada and then England (1914), where she was influenced by sex reformer Havelock Ellis to tone down her radical tactics. After her return (1915), the government dropped its charges and she began lecturing widely, also founding the Birth Control Review (1916), which she edited until 1928. She and her sister served 30 days in prison for opening a birth control clinic in Brooklyn (1916), but an appeal judge's decision allowed for doctors to provide birth control information to married women. Her Birth Control Research Bureau (founded in New York in 1923 with the support of her wealthy new husband, J. Noah Slee) was the first doctor-staffed medical clinic in America and a model for the 300 others she helped establish. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League; accused of autocratic tactics, she resigned from its presidency in 1928, but it later merged with her Clinical Research Bureau into the organization that in 1942 became Planned Parenthood. She founded a lobbying group (1929) that successfully sued to allow the mailing of contraceptive materials in the U.S.A. She was less active from the 1940s on, but in the 1950s she induced philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick to help fund development of a birth control pill, and in 1952 she helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She was undeniably difficult to work with, and close examination of her writings shows that she endorsed birth control in part to maintain the position of the white race, but she was just as certainly a courageous pioneer.

References in periodicals archive

Unfortunately, the seeds that Margaret Sanger planted more than a hundred years ago have taken root in her cleverly cultivated soil, and the world is left with the bitter fruit.

Planned Parenthood, past and present

Caption: Newscom/Everett Collection Margaret Sanger

History of the pill is a page turner

(14) Besant provided the necessary eugenic rhetoric that would underpin future campaigns for birth control, notably those of Margaret Sanger. (15)

Racist origins of eugenics and its expression in modern environmentalism

(3.) Margaret Sanger Papers Project, "About the project," http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/aboutmspp/index.html.

Women's compositions online: five digital collections

Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Alice Paul; WCTU President Frances Willard; and birth control reformer Margaret Sanger, but the author's comprehensive approach allows her to go beyond the more well-known contributions of these national leaders to examine those made by others.

The Rise of the New Woman: The Women's Movement in America, 1875-1930

Ellen Chesler, a senior fellow at the Open Society Institute, is the author of a 1992 biography of Margaret Sanger.

Margaret Sanger: she believed reproductive rights could change history without class war. (Articles)

Affiliated with the Long Island College Hospital, one of Brooklyn's most venerable institutions, the family health center sits less than a mile from the makeshift clinic in a Brownsville tenement where Margaret Sanger made history in 1916 by defying the law to provide contraceptives to women, many of whom were immigrants.

New Options, New Politics

Others faced public scorn and threats for advocating unpopular causes, like the civil rights leader Martin Luther Kino Jr.; Margaret Sanger, who championed birth control early in the century; and Betty Friedan, who founded the National Organization of Women.

The Power of PEOPLE

Emboldened by all their successes, House pro-lifers in July even took a swipe at federal health coverage for some common forms of birth control--including the pill--which they consider "abortifacients." Margaret Sanger would be horrified.

Democrats yield to pro-lifers

This was in opposition to Margaret Sanger's "doctor only" bill, which Dennett called "class legislation." Under Sanger's plan, only rich educated women could continue to find ways of gaining access to birth control.

"The Sex Side of Life": Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education

It is Margaret Sanger and also every woman who chose to control her own reproductive rights despite relentless social oppression.

Remembering the women of history