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Vote: | Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression. |
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Biography
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Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist. Initially meeting with fierce opposition, Sanger gradually won the support of the public and the courts and was instrumental in opening the way to universal access to birth control. She was also a fervent believer in eugenics.
Life Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Her mother was a devout Roman Catholic who had 11 children before dying of tuberculosis. After graduating from Claverack College in Hudson, Sanger trained as a nurse and worked for ten years in the affluent New York suburb of White Plains. In 1902, she married William Sanger. Although stricken by tuberculosis, she gave birth to a son the following year, followed in subsequent years by a second son and a daughter who died in childhood.
In 1912, Sanger and her family moved to New York City, where she went to work in the poverty-stricken East Side slums of Manhattan. That same year, she also started writing a column for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." Distributing a pamphlet, Family Limitation, to poor women, Sanger repeatedly risked scandal and imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of 1873 which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices.
In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, a newspaper advocating birth control. She also separated from William Sanger. In 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. It was raided by the police and Sanger was arrested for violating the post office's obscenity laws by sending birth control information by mail. Sanger fled to Europe to escape prosecution. However, the following year, she returned to the U.S. and resumed her activities, launching the periodical The Birth Control Review and Birth Control News. She also contributed articles on health for the Socialist Party paper, The Call.
In 1916, Sanger published "What Every Girl Should Know," which was later widely distributed as one of the E. Haldeman-Julius "Little Blue Books." It not only provided basic information about such topics as menstruation, but also acknowledged the reality of sexual feelings in adolescents. It was followed in 1917 by What Every Mother Should Know. That year, Sanger was sent to the workhouse for "creating a public nuisance."
With Lothrup Stoddard, and C. C. Little Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. The next year, she married oil tycoon James Noah H. Slee.In 1923, she established, under the auspices of American Birth Control League, the Clinical Research Bureau, the first legal birth control clinic in the US (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in her honor in 1940). That year, she also formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control and served as its president of until its dissolution in 1937 after birth control under medical supervision was legalized in many states. In 1927, Sanger helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva.
In 1928, Sanger resigned as the president of the American Birth Control League. Two years later, she became president of the Birth Control International Information Center. In 1937, Sanger became chairperson of the Birth Control Council of America and launched two publications, The Birth Control Review and The Birth Control News. From 1939 to 1942, she was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America. From 1952 to 1959, she served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; at the time, the largest private international family planning organization.
In the early 1960s, Sanger promoted the use of the newly available birth control pill. She toured Europe, Africa, and Asia, lecturing and helping to establish clinics.
Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona at age 87 only a few months after the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the US. It was the apex of her fifty-year struggle.
Sanger's books include Woman and the New Race (1920), Happiness in Marriage (1926), and an autobiography (1938).
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Margaret Sanger".
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