SANGER, MARGARET
Margaret Sanger (September 14, 1879–Septembr 6, 1966)
almost single-handedly launched the American birth control movement at a time when American society was just
emerging from the morally constrained Victorian era.
With only a few years of formal education, she educated
herself about women’s health and reproduction issues and
sought to disseminate this information through lectures
and publications. Governmental and Catholic Church officials repeatedly attempted to prevent her from doing this
by censoring and prosecuting her under the nation’s “Comstock” or obscenity laws, but Sanger always succeeded in
turning official prosecution into publicity for herself and
the movement.
Margaret Sanger was born in Corning, New York, the
sixth of eleven children. Her father, Michael Higgins, an
Irish immigrant, was a Socialist who worked as a stonemason. Her mother, Anne Purcell, became pregnant eighteen
times and bore eleven children before she died at the age
of forty-eight of tuberculosis. Margaret escaped the grinding poverty of the family by attending a private Methodist
boarding school on the Hudson River, Claverack College,
which she was able to pay for by working in the kitchen and
dining room. After just three years, however, she had to
leave the school to nurse her dying mother, run the household, and supervise her younger siblings.
While she was nursing her mother, Margaret began to
read medical texts and dreamed of becoming a medical
doctor. Entry into the medical profession was limited for
women, however, and in 1900 she took one of the few routes
open to them when she took a job as a probationary nurse
at White Plains Hospital. Here, at a dance, she met socialist William Sanger, an up-and-coming architect, whom she
married in 1902. They had three children and Margaret
continued to work sporadically as a visiting nurse.
Margaret attended Socialist meetings with William
and in the next decade became acquainted with some of
the leading socialist and radical thinkers of the period. She
joined the Socialist Party and was soon giving lectures to
married women on sex and reproduction. These were so
enthusiastically received that in 1912, the Socialist newspaper, The Call, invited her to write a column based on her
lectures. This column, What Every Mother Knows, was so
popular that a second series, What Every Girl Should Know,
was announced soon after. Here, Margaret Sanger and The
Call were treading on dangerous ground when they chose
to publish anything about sex and reproduction, for this
was a forbidden subject under the “Comstock Law.” Passed
by Congress in 1873 and named after anti-vice reformer
Anthony Comstock, the law defined any information about
contraception, sex, and reproduction as obscene and forbade the sending of such obscene material through the U.S.
mail. Thus, the first column in the second series, which was
to deal with venereal disease, was forbidden publication by
the U. S. Post Office, which also forbade The Call to run
any more sex-related articles by Sanger.
The Post Office’s actions only spurred Sanger on. Frustrated in her attempt to learn more about these subjects,
Sanger in 1913 went to France, where both contraceptive
devices and abortion were legal. Upon returning to the
States some months later, she and a group of like-minded
feminists coined the term “birth control” and founded the
National Birth Control League. In March 1914, Sanger
began to publish a feminist journal, The Woman Rebel,
whose primary purpose was to provide women with scientific information about reproduction and contraception.
More than this, The Woman Rebel was a deliberate challenge to authority. Its motto, which appeared below the title
on the front page, was “No Gods, No Masters.” Its first issue
featured articles denouncing established religion, capitalism, marriage, property laws favoring men, and the Comstock Law. The U. S. Post Office responded immediately
by banning the issue from the mail, though Sanger and her
friends succeeded in mailing out dozens of copies, a few at a time. In the April issue, Sanger challenged the U.S.
Post Office, declaring this was a free speech matter and she
would publish in spite of its action. The April issue was also
banned. In the May issue, Sanger published an article warning readers of the dangers of abortion brought on by the failure to use birth control. The U.S. Post Office denounced the
paper as “indecent, lewd, lascivious and obscene,” seized
all copies, and arrested Sanger. Though she was indicted on
nine counts of sending obscene material through the mail,
she continued to publish and distribute The Woman Rebel
through the fall while awaiting trial. At the same time, she
published a pamphlet, Family Limitation, in which she gave
specific birth control advice, complete with formulas and
drawings. This, too, was banned from the mail and its distribution prohibited.
Sanger fled to Europe before her trial took place. She
returned to the States to face trial in October 1915, but
after her young daughter Peggy died, public sympathy
for Sanger mounted and the U. S. Attorney’s office, fearing the trial might make her a martyr, dropped charges in
February, 1916. Sanger launched a national speaking tour
to promote birth control clinics, and eventually opened the
first in Brooklyn. She especially wanted to awaken working
women. There was “nothing new and radical about birth
control,” she told a New York audience in early 1916. “Aristotle and Plato advocated it. Practically all great modern
thinkers have advanced it, for it is an idea that must appeal
to all mature minds” (New York Times, Jan.18, 1916, 7).
Sanger was arrested again in 1916, along with her sister,
Ethel Byrne, following a raid on her Brooklyn clinic. Both
were found guilty of disseminating information about birth
control and sentenced to thirty days, but the government’s
actions backfired and aroused sensational newspaper coverage and public outrage. While she awaited trial, Sanger
had founded the Birth Control League of New York and
while she served her sentence, the first issue of its monthly
journal, Birth Control Review, appeared. In 1920, she published her first book, Woman and the New Race, in which
she urged labor unions to oppose any laws suppressing birth
control information. In that same year, Margaret and William were divorced. She married Noah H. Slee, a South
African millionaire, in 1922, although she kept the name
Sanger for the rest of her life.
Sanger grew in stature and influence. In 1921, she
founded the American Birth Control League and organized
the first national birth control conference in New York
(where she was arrested once again). In the same year, she
spoke in Japan, China, and Korea and in 1927 organized
the first World Population Conference in Geneva. Then, in
1929, police raided her Clinical Research Bureau in New
York and she was arrested under the Comstock Law. Her
trial became a showcase for birth control and civil liberties advocates and a guilty verdict was overruled on appeal.
Such raids and arrests continued in a number of states, however, well into the 1960s.
Sanger remained a leader in the birth control movement
well into her seventies and enjoyed the eventual defeat of
the federal Comstock Law and the official endorsement of
a host of organizations from the U.S. Federal Council of
Churches to the American Medical Association.
Further Reading
Archer, Jules. “Margaret Sanger.” In Breaking Barriers: The
Feminist Revolution from Susan B. Anthony to Margaret
Sanger to Betty Friedan. New York: Viking Press, 1991.
Chesler, Ellen. Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth
Control Movement in America. New York: Anchor Books,
1993.
Cronin, Mary. “The Woman Rebel.” In Women’s Periodicals of
the United States: Social and Political Issues, edited by
Kathleen Endres and Therese L. Lueck, 446–453, Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1996.
Cullen-Dupont, Kathryn. American Women Activists’ Writings”
An Anthology, 1637–2002. New York: Cooper Square Press,
2002.
Gray, Madeline. Margaret Sanger. New York: Vanguard Press,
1930.
Hunt, John Gabriel, ed. The Dissenters: America’s Voices of
Opposition. New York: Gramercy, 1993.
Sanger, Margaret. My Fight for Birth Control. New York: Farrar
and Rinehart, 1931.
——. An Autobiography New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1938.
——. Woman and the New Race. New York: Truth Publishing
Co., 1920.
Elizabeth V. Burt