Linking the social and legal equality of women to their control over their right to bear—or not to bear—children
Margaret Sanger
(1879–1966)
Disruptor is not a synonym for hero. Whatever disruptive innovations do for us, they almost always also do something to us. Many times, they challenge familiar concepts of morality, forcing us to weigh one set of rights and imperatives against another, and often—very often—make us uncomfortable.
In an era of Progressive reform and the intense awakening of concern over women’s rights, Margaret Sanger chose to advocate for a right unique to and basic for women, yet one that challenged long-held views of morality. Sanger opposed what she called “enforced motherhood” as “the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty” and for that reason became an advocate of birth control. As her social philosophy developed, however, she came to see birth control as a way “to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” As both creative destruction and destructive creation, social and moral disruption can be an ethically troubled process.
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She was born Margaret Higgins in Corning, New York, on September 14, 1879, to a free-thinking Irish immigrant stonemason named Michael Hennessey Higgins and Anne Purcell Higgins, Michael’s devoutly observant Roman Catholic Irish American wife. Her father’s radicalism influenced Margaret more than her mother’s piety. An even stronger influence was her having been born and raised one of eleven children, the bearing of whom, Margaret believed, contributed to her mother’s early death.
Armed with her father’s social iconoclasm and the cautionary tale she saw in her mother’s life, Sanger was determined to avoid what she regarded as the twin traps of frequent pregnancy and poverty. Seeking an education, she attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute. Seeking a profession outside the home, she enrolled at White Plains Hospital as a nurse probationer. Supporting herself as a practical nurse in the White Plains women’s ward, she worked toward earning a registered nursing degree, but her marriage in 1902 to architect William Sanger put an end to her training. Moreover, despite recurring bouts of tuberculosis, Sanger bore three children and attempted to settle into a life as a homemaker and mother in comfortable suburban Westchester, New York.
The trouble was that the Sanger marriage proved to be anything but blissful. In an effort to save their union, the Sangers decided in 1911 to leave the suburbs and make a bold move into the milieu of radical political activism and “bohemian” moral revisionism sweeping Lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The Sangers opened their new urban home to a community of “liberals, anarchists, socialists and IWW’s,” as Sanger later wrote. She eagerly allowed herself to be radicalized, joining the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party and pitching in on strikes and demonstrations staged by the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World).
Her infatuation with the world of bohemian radicalism, like her move from Westchester to the city, might have begun as nothing more than an attempt to relieve boredom. Soon, however, it became far more sharply focused. Sanger found herself identifying deeply with the feminist movement, and this, combined with her education and experience in nursing, prompted her to accept in 1912 an invitation to write a column on female sexuality and “social hygiene” for the New York Call, a daily newspaper affiliated with the Socialist Party of America. The column was called “What Every Girl Should Know.” It was so full of frank medical advice that an article devoted to venereal disease was branded as obscene, leading U.S. postal inspectors to ban delivery of that edition of the paper.
Soon, Sanger’s interest in women’s health and sex education narrowed to a topic that was bound to draw the attention of more than the postal authorities. She became increasingly interested in what was at the time called “family limitation.” Her move to New York had prompted her to resume nursing, this time as a visiting nurse working among the poor immigrants living in Lower East Side tenements. In these sordidly overcrowded quarters, it was impossible to deny the dire consequences of frequent childbirth and the presence of more children than a family could support. Along with this reality came an elevated incidence of miscarriage and self-induced abortion, which often produced catastrophic results.
Sanger wanted to educate poor women in methods of contraception, but was legally blocked by the 1873 Comstock Act, which barred the “Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” including contraceptives, “abortifacients” (substances and devices to induce abortion), and “any information regarding” these and other items considered obscene. An abundance of state laws also introduced their own prohibitions. Conversation with the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman persuaded Sanger that contraception was a means of empowerment being denied mainly to poor and working-class women. To Sanger and other like-minded activists, keeping women pregnant was an important way of keeping them out of the workforce and under the thumb of their husbands. By the same token, fear of unwanted pregnancy was a way by which men kept women “faithful.”
Sanger believed that women had the inherent right to have control over their own bodies, including reproduction. She also believed that liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would bring about more fundamental social change. It was apparent to her that the older generation of feminists could accept only one method of “family limitation”: sexual abstinence. Sanger believed that abstinence imposed an unacceptable level of self-denial on women and men. As for the Socialists, they regarded the fight for birth control as a distraction from other political objectives. Sanger saw an unmet social and psychological need that both society and the government opposed. She took it upon herself to create and carry out a campaign to challenge federal and local censorship of contraceptive information. She also challenged laws banning birth control and abortion. Sanger believed that if she could bring these to public consciousness, she would find the support she needed.
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Margaret Sanger completed her personal transformation from suburban homemaker to radical activist by beginning publication in March 1914 of The Woman Rebel. A radical feminist monthly magazine, it called for militant action to assert the right of every woman to be “absolute mistress of her own body.” She also challenged conventional, prevailing feminism, arguing that educational, economic, and political equality were meaningless if women were still subjected to unwanted pregnancies. The key to equality, the basis of human rights for women, she argued, was contraception.
Sanger did not espouse abortion in The Woman Rebel, only contraception, which was not itself illegal. What was illegal was disseminating information about contraception through the mail. Postal authorities seized five of the magazine’s seven issues. Despite this, Sanger continued publishing and distributing. She also wrote and published a sixteen-page pamphlet titled Family Limitation, which included graphic instructions and information covering a variety of various contraceptive methods. This resulted in a federal indictment in August 1914 for violation of postal obscenity laws. Although she made bail, she evaded what she believed would be certain conviction and imprisonment, fleeing to England even as she ordered the distribution of Family Limitation. When federal authorities jailed her husband, William Sanger, for giving a copy of the pamphlet to an undercover agent, national interest in birth control exploded. As often happens when authorities seek to suppress knowledge, the clamor for that knowledge became irresistible.
While self-exiled in England, Sanger became involved in linking birth control to socioeconomic and medical issues of eugenics—attempts to “improve” the race. She also came under the influence of the work of Havelock Ellis, who believed that contraception would free women to enjoy sexual intercourse. Sanger, in effect, espoused the then-revolutionary idea that women—and men—had a right to sexual pleasure.
She put theory into practice in her own life. Separation from her husband ended her marriage, and she embarked on sexual relationships with a number of men, including Ellis and the novelist H. G. Wells. Sanger returned to New York in October 1915, now determined to face trial because she was convinced that she had public support. Tragically, that support was boosted by the sudden death, in November 1915, of her five-year-old daughter. A public outpouring of sympathy dissuaded the government from continuing to press its case against her. She embarked on a national tour, enduring frequent brushes with the law—and exploiting the publicity generated by each.
Her boldest act of defiance came on October 16, 1916, when she opened America’s first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn. Predictably, the clinic was raided, and Sanger and her clinic staff were tried and convicted. She was jailed for thirty days, and her conviction was upheld on appeal—except that the appellate court did stipulate that physicians were lawfully permitted to prescribe birth control “when medically indicated.” This gave Sanger a basis on which to establish a birth-control distribution system through clinics staffed with physicians.
In 1922, Sanger married wealthy oilman James Noah H. Slee, who provided considerable financial support for the birth-control movement she now led. Having founded the American Birth Control League, she lifted issues of birth control into the social mainstream. But she also engaged the support of the eugenics movement and began advocating birth control for those with genetically transmitted mental or physical defects. She even supported compulsory sterilization for the mentally incompetent. At the time, this was hardly a radical idea. In 1927, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the Supreme Court decision (Buck v. Bell) upholding a Virginia law that authorized the state to surgically sterilize “mental defectives” without their consent. But, after the already scientifically specious and morally repugnant theory of eugenics was enthusiastically seized upon by Nazi Germany during the 1930s and early 1940s, Sanger’s position was almost universally condemned. She never advocated eugenics based on class, ethnicity, or race; nevertheless, her reputation in the human-rights community became tainted and controversial.
By the mid-twentieth century, Margaret Sanger’s feminist crusade had morphed into a movement for birth control on more general human ecological grounds. A much-publicized “population explosion” was seen as threatening global welfare, especially in economically disadvantaged countries. In 1952, Sanger was instrumental in founding the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), winning widespread support from world leaders but disrupting domestic politics in some countries, including, to this day, the United States. She retreated from her earlier advocacy of eugenics and now insisted that the IPPF mission was to do no more than make birth control information and measures available on a global basis. She steadfastly refused to support controls mandated by governments. Sanger retired as president of the IPPF in 1959 and, increasingly frail, withdrew from activism. Her death, at the age of eighty-six on September 6, 1966, came after the introduction of oral contraception (“the Pill”) and a year after the United States Supreme Court upheld the right of married couples to use birth control.