Her legacy reconsidered1
Ellen Chesler
Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing diaphragms to immigrant women from a makeshift clinic in a tenement storefront in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. When she died nearly 50 years later, the cause for which she defiantly broke the law had achieved international stature. Although still a magnet for controversy, she was widely eulogised as one of the great emancipators of her time.
A visionary if sometimes quixotic thinker, a relentless agitator and gifted organiser, Sanger lived just long enough to savour the historic US Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which established privacy protections as a framework for legalising basic reproductive rights. Elderly and frail, she watched Lyndon Johnson finally incorporate family planning into US social welfare and foreign policy programmes, although he refused her a much coveted Presidential Medal of Freedom, for fear of provoking controversy with Catholic voters. She saw the birth control pill developed and marketed by a team of doctors and scientists she had long encouraged and found the money to support. She watched a global family planning movement descend from her own international efforts.
The years since have not been as good to Sanger, even as they have witnessed measurable progress for women in achieving reproductive freedom. Today, outside of a small minority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of the Middle East, which are now high-profile exceptions to the global norm, a typical woman bears no more than two children over the course of several years and spends another 30 to 40 years avoiding pregnancy. More than 60 million women around the world use oral contraception daily, a dramatic increase since organised interventions began. The right of women to plan their families remains at least for the time being enshrined in the US Constitution and in international human rights law, where it is widely recognised as a necessary condition to improve women’s status, and in turn to sustain democratic institutions, promote social and economic progress and help sustain fragile environments.
Still, universal standards for women’s human rights offer no sure cure for violations that persist with uncanny fortitude and often unimaginable cruelty in so many places around the world. Harsh fundamentalisms are resurgent in many countries, where women’s bodies remain an arena of intense political conflict, as a perhaps predictable response to the social dislocations resulting from changing gender roles and to the larger assaults on traditional cultures from the many real and perceived injustices of modernisation and globalisation. Counted among these are the abuses of technologically driven and demographically targeted population programmes, which have spawned understandable outrage and, despite many well-realised efforts at reform in recent years, continue to spark controversy, especially around Sanger to whom they are linked, however indirectly.
Even in the USA, decades of substantial progress by women have fuelled a fierce backlash. With an intensity that few would have predicted in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected as America’s first pro-choice president, a powerful conservative minority has eroded abortion rights along with funding for family planning at home and abroad, while dollars have surged instead for abstinence programmes known to be ineffective and often harmful. We have tolerated the impunity of daily campaigns of intimidation and outright violence against courageous providers of contraception and abortion. And Sanger herself has become a collateral victim of this frenzy, her reputation savaged by rightwing zealots who deliberately misrepresent what has been a heated but usually respectful academic discourse about the history of birth control to circulate scurrilous, false accusations about her on the internet.2
Reproductive and sexual rights are attacked, on the one hand, for fostering a corrosive individualism that threatens the presumed cohesion of traditional families and communities. At the same time, if somewhat contradictorily, they are criticised for demanding a fearsome conformity that homogenises cultures and denies rights of self-determination to minority groups, a point on which critics across a political spectrum from right to left often concur (Roberts 1997).
Conceptions of the past are never stable. We are, in fact, prisoners of our own experience. We bring to history the preoccupations of our own age. In the context of a reproductive and sexual rights discourse that is at once vibrant and expansive but also fiercely contested, we are obliged to re-examine Margaret Sanger one more time and interrogate her unquestioning confidence in the power of medicine and science to shape human conduct and alleviate suffering, a confidence that fuelled her interest in trying to make birth control serve as a tool of both individual liberation and social betterment.
Margaret Sanger’s fundamental heresy was in claiming women’s right to experience their sexuality free of consequence, just as men have always done. Following in the footsteps of a first generation of educated US women who had proudly forgone marriage in order to seek fulfilment outside the home, she offered birth control as a necessary condition to the resolution of a broader range of personal and professional satisfactions. The hardest challenge in writing about her for modern audiences, for whom this claim has become routine, is to explain how absolutely destabilising it seemed in her own time.
Even with so much lingering animus toward changes in women’s lives around the world, it is difficult to inhabit an era in our own history when sexuality was considered more an obligation of women than a pleasure. It is hard to remember that well into Sanger’s own time motherhood was accepted as a woman’s principal purpose and primary role. It is even harder to fathom that US women, a mere century ago, were still largely denied identities or rights of their own, independent of those they enjoyed by virtue of their relationships with men, and that this principle was central to the enduring opposition they encountered in seeking access to full rights of inheritance and property, to suffrage and, most especially, to birth control. This unyielding principle of male covertures defined women’s legal identities even with respect to physical abuse in the family, which the US Supreme Court condoned in 1910, denying damages to a wife injured by violent beatings on that the grounds that to do so would undermine the peace of the household.
Re-examining this history in the context of the recent expansion of human rights to incorporate women’s autonomy underscores Sanger’s originality as a feminist theorist who first demanded civil protection of women’s claims to reproductive liberty and bodily integrity, in and outside marriage. Recent scholarly works have made all the more clear that as a result of private arrangements and a healthy trade in condoms, douches and various contraptions sold largely under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene, the country’s birth rate began to decline long before she came on the scene (Brodie 1994; Tone 2001). But it was she who invented ‘birth control’ as a comfortable, popular term of speech, and, in so doing, gave the practice essential public and political currency. It was she who first recognised the far reaching consequences of bringing sexuality and contraception out in the open and claiming them as fundamental women’s rights. And by winning medical validation for specific contraceptive practices, she also helped lift the religious shroud that had long encased reproduction in myth and mystery and secured houses of worship as primary arbiters of sexual behaviours and values.
When Sanger opened her clinic and deliberately staged an arrest in 1916, she challenged anachronistic obscenity laws that remained on the books as the legacy of the notorious anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock, whose evangelical fervour had captured Victorian politics and led to the adoption by the states and Federal government of broad criminal sanctions on sexual speech and commerce, including all materials related to contraception and abortion. Her critique, however, was not just of legal constraints on obscenity, but of legal constraints on women’s place. In this respect, I would argue, she helped inaugurate the modern human rights movement that moves beyond traditional civil and political claims of liberty on behalf of women to embrace social and cultural ones. She understood that to advance women’s rights it is necessary to address – and the state has an obligation to protect – personal as well as public spheres of conduct. It must establish broad safeguards for women and intervene to eliminate everyday forms of discrimination and abuse.
Sanger was fortunate to witness the fulfilment of at least part of this vision when the Supreme Court finally protected the private use of contraception in its landmark 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut. The extension of that privacy doctrine to abortion eight years later in Roe v. Wade, and the court’s reinterpretation of the law in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, moved it further in the direction of achieving her intent by explicitly ruling that women are not obliged to seek spousal consent in decisions about whether or not to bear a child. But as feminist legal theorists from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Catherine McKinnon have since pointed out, privacy is not a secure judicial philosophy for women, since it only protects couples from unwarranted state interference and does not mandate positive state obligation for their equal protection under the law.3
Those intentions, they both would argue and I would agree, are more fully realised today in international human rights constructs than in US constitutional law – in an intellectual architecture that builds on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the first formal document to claim that discrimination against women is an appropriate matter for international concern, not a category privileged and protected by local sovereignty or by traditional cultural or religious practices governing women’s civil status or their marriage and family relations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights quite deliberately guarantees rights to all ‘human beings’ not just to men, establishes broad protections for women as citizens and workers and specifically accords them the right to free consent in marriage and divorce and to the necessary provisions to care for their children when abandoned or widowed.
Drafted by Eleanor Roosevelt, who was, incidentally, long a friend and follower of Sanger’s, the Universal Declaration paved the way for vigorous participation in the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) by women from India, Latin America, the Caribbean and later from African and other newly independent states, a fact that disputes common accusations that this ambitious women’s rights agenda has largely been a product of western feminism. Years of incremental but significant gains by the CSW occurred over the next 30 years and were then finally codified with adoption in 1979 of CEDAW, the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination against Women, one of the UN’s five pillars of human rights implementation, along with its agreements on civil and political rights, torture, social and economic rights and racial discrimination.
CEDAW acknowledges the importance of women’s traditional obligations with the family but also establishes new norms for their participation in all dimensions of life. It provides binding protection to a broad range of rights in marriage and family relations, including property, inheritance and access to healthcare, with an explicit mention of family planning. It demands equality for women as citizens with full access to suffrage, political representation and other legal obligations and benefits. It declares their right to education, including professional and vocational training and the elimination of gender stereotypes and segregation, and establishes their rights as workers deserving equal remuneration, social security benefits and protection from sexual harassment and workplace discrimination on the grounds of marriage or maternity.
In 1992 CEDAW was expanded so that gender-based violence is also formally identified as a form of discrimination in violation of fundamental human rights and recognised as a problem of epidemic proportions worldwide, veiled by traditions of privacy, guilt and shame. International human rights law thus moves beyond traditional constructs guaranteeing sex-neutral norms measured by male standards to obligate state response to what is now finally understood as pervasive and systematic discrimination against women.
In 1994 the UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, reacting to heavy-handed practices in population programmes, created a framework for state responsibility to ensure programmes allowing women to make free and informed decisions about their bodies, while also guaranteeing them access to quality healthcare services, including family planning. A year later, in Beijing, the international community overcoming considerable conservative resistance, committed to a wide range of practical interventions to advance women’s rights, and while paying required deference to the plurality of religious values around the world, reaffirmed the universality of human rights over local custom and culture. With strong leadership from a US delegation assembled by the Clinton administration, the Beijing Platform of Action, while stopping short of creating a new category of explicit sexual rights that in the eyes of some would have licensed same-sex partnerships and abortion, is quite direct in claiming that: ‘The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence’.
The Beijing Platform received unanimous endorsement, although 29 countries, including many Islamic states, filed reservations about the sexual and reproductive health and rights language and, in the years since, of course, the USA under George W. Bush substantially eroded prior commitments to sexual and reproductive health and rights, even as it waged two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ostensibly in pursuit of securing human freedoms. Meanwhile, CEDAW has now been endorsed by 185 countries, with the notable exception of the USA itself, which signed the document in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was president but has never since been able to achieve the two-thirds majority vote in the Senate required for ratification – a worthy goal now back on the agenda of the Obama administration.
Observing the contorted politics of sexuality in recent years has only reinforced my sympathy for Margaret Sanger’s predicament as a wildly polarising figure and clarified the logic of her decision after the First World War to abandon radicalism and mainstream her movement by identifying reproductive autonomy as a necessary foundation for broader improvements in public health and social welfare. Moreover, her decision to adopt the socially resonant content of ‘family planning over birth control’, when the Great Depression encouraged attention to collective needs over individual ones and when the New Deal created a blueprint for bold public endeavours, continues to seem inventive, not cynical. Neither, as some of her harshest critics then and since have charged, did she ever define family planning as right of the privileged, but as a duty or obligation of the poor, any more than we do so today when we call for increased public expenditure on it as a matter of simple justice. To the contrary, I would argue that Sanger showed considerable foresight in lobbying for voluntary family planning programmes to be included among the benefits of any sound public investment in social security. Had the New Deal included public health and access to contraception in its social welfare package, as most European countries were then doing, protracted conflicts over welfare and healthcare policy in the years since in the USA might well have been avoided. Where she went wrong was in failing to anticipate the force of the opposition her proposal would generate from a coalition of urban Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants to whom Roosevelt Democrats became captive, much as Republicans have become in recent years.
What is harder to deconstruct and understand is Sanger’s engagement with eugenics during these years, the widely respectable and popular movement of her era that addressed the manner in which biology and heredity affect human intelligence and ability. Like many well-intentioned secularists and social reformers of her day, Sanger took away from Darwin the essentially optimistic lesson that men and women’s common descent in the animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement, if only we apply the right tools. Eugenics held the promise that merit would replace birthright and social status as the standard for mobility in a democratic society.
Eugenics most enduring if still controversial legacy is standard IQ testing, its most damning and unfathomable, a series of state laws upheld by a progressive majority of the US Supreme Court in 1927, including Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who in Buck v. Bell authorised the compulsory sterilisation of a poor young white woman with an illegitimate child, on grounds of feeble mindedness that were never clearly established, a decision, incidentally, also accepted by civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin and civil rights advocates, including W. E. B. DuBois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, both of whom Sanger counted among her supporters and friends.
Orthodox eugenics opposed birth control on the grounds that the fit should procreate. Sanger countered by disdaining what she called a ‘cradle competition’ of class, race or ethnicity. She opposed immigration restrictions and racial and ethnic stereotypes. She framed poverty as a matter of differential access to resources, including birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low inherent ability or poor character, a view many eugenicists embraced. She argued for broad government safety nets for social welfare and public health. And she proudly marshalled clinical data to demonstrate that most women, even among the poorest and least educated populations, did use birth control successfully when it was provided them.
At the same time, however, she was capable of shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families among individuals of low intelligence and defective heredity, which may well have provoked exactly the intolerance she claimed to oppose. In endorsing compulsory sterilisation, and also on several occasions the payment of pensions or bonuses to women of low intelligence who would with this inducement agree to the procedure, she seems to have considered neither the fundamental rights questions raised by such practices nor the validity of the aptitude assessments on which determinations of low intelligence were based. Living in an era indifferent to the firm obligation to respect and protect the rights of individuals whose behaviour does not always conform to prevailing mores, she did not always fulfil it.
The challenge for historians has been to reconcile these apparent contradictions in Sanger’s views. She was actually an advanced thinker on race for her day, one who condemned discrimination and encouraged racial reconciliation. She opened an integrated clinic in Harlem in the early 1930s and then facilitated birth control and maternal health programmes for rural black women in the south, when local white health officials denied them access to the New Deal’s first federally funded programmes. She worked on this project with behind-the-scenes support from Eleanor Roosevelt, whose advanced views on race were well known but whose support for birth control was silenced by her husband’s Catholic political handlers, at least until he was safely ensconced in the White House for a third term. Historically specific circumstances of this complexity, however, are hard to untangle and convey, and Sanger’s legacy has been compromised accordingly.
Michel Foucault, perhaps better than any other thinker about sexuality, must be summoned in conclusion to help explain the complicated politics of reproduction, which has so long ensnarled Margaret Sanger and all others who have tried to discipline it. As so many scholars writing under Foucault’s broad influence have observed, reproduction is by its very nature experienced individually and socially at the same time.4 In claiming women’s fundamental right to control their own bodies, Margaret Sanger, was also mindful of the dense fabric of cultural, political and economic relationships in which those rights are exercised (Wolin 2006; Clarke 1998; Murphy 2004; Petchesky 2003). And almost if obviously not always, she tried to encourage a balance in the behaviours she prescribed between the contentment that derives from the right of individual self-expression and the contrary obligation to participate in a shared human experience, governed by common mores, rules and laws.
This same tension, I would argue, exists at the heart of the movement today that is formulating principles by which to incorporate sexuality within a framework of universal human rights at once protective and empowering. That Sanger in a long and mostly honourable career failed to get the balance quite right should not discourage us from continuing to try and do so. Like the deities of ancient lore, perhaps, she can inspire us with awe and fear at the same time.
1 This chapter is a new contribution but draws on E. Chesler (1992, 2007) Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, New York: Simon & Schuster; and E. Chesler (2005) ‘Introduction’, in Chavkin, W. and Chesler, E. (eds) (2005) Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality, and Women in the New Millennium, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Press.
2 Some of this material can be found in Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, 42 (Spring 2006), ‘Searching for Sanger in the Land of Google’, 1–4, available at www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger.
3 For more on the limitations of the privacy doctrine and of the ‘undue burden’ standard established in Casey, see US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, July 20–23 1993, at www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/senate/judiciarysh 103–482 (MacKinnon 2005; Wharton et al. 2006).
4 Wolin, R. ‘Foucault the Neohumanist?’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 September 2006, 12–14, contains a provocative discussion of the tensions in Foucault’s writings between his early celebration of non-conformity and difference, for which he has been canonised, and a later reconsideration of humanist values and liberal political traditions guaranteeing individual rights and expanding civic freedom that he had once rejected as inherently suppressive. For contrasting analyses of the politics of disciplining reproduction, also see Clarke 1998; Murphy 2004; and Petchesky 2003.
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Chesler, E. (1992, 2007) Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Chesler, E. (2005) ‘Introduction’, Chavkin, W. and Chesler, E. (eds) Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality, and Women in the New Millennium, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Press.
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MacKinnon, C. (2005) Women’s Lives: Men’s Laws, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Murphy, M. (2004) ‘Liberation through Control in the Body Politics of U.S. Radical Feminism’, in Daston, L. and Vidal, F. (eds) The Moral Authority of Nature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Petchesky, R. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Petchesky, R. and Judd, K. (eds) Global Prescriptions: Gendering Reproductive Health and Rights, London: Zed Books.
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Wolin, R. (2006) ‘Foucault the Neohumanist?’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 September: 12–14.