There was a time, when it was illegal to use birth control, or even discuss it as a possibility. Reproductive freedom is something we now enjoy, but even in 2012, obviously cannot afford to take for granted given the surly regressiveness of religious conservatives.
The reproductive rights we have today came in large part because of the indefatigable determination of a woman named Margaret Sanger.
This extraordinary lady stood tall in a time when women had no ability to control their reproductive health. Beginning in the late 19th century, Margaret Sanger fought restrictive laws, wrote subversive articles, published a pamphlet called,
Woman Rebel, and battled the US Postal Service to get it distributed to women across America. Margaret Sanger's courage and fortitude helped shape the world we live in today. If you don't kinow who she is, you need to read the article that follows....
How Margaret Sanger Led the Birth
Control Movement - and Why the GOP Still Hates Her
September 10,
2012 |
Editor's Note:
In an inspiring new book, scholar Peter Drier sets out to celebrate the
movements that have made our lives better by bringing attention to the figures
who sparked them. Reaching out to historians, political scientists,
journalists, and other experts, he set out to find out who had helped make
America great over recent generations, and birth control advocate Margaret
Sanger's name was a sure winner. Loathed by conservatives for nearly a century,
Sanger was a pioneer who fought tirelessly to ensure than women would have
control over their reproductive lives -- which she knew was also the key to
economic well-being. In light of the relentless GOP attacks on women's
reproductive rights and the shocking ignorance displayed by figures like Todd
Akin, it seems like a good time to remember Sanger and the pivotal role she
played in the quest for freedom and equality. Excerpted with permission from The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social
Justice Hall of Fame [3], by Peter Dreier. Available from
Nation Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2012.
Margaret Sanger
(1879–1966)
When federal
agents arrived at Margaret Sanger’s home with a warrant
for her arrest in 1914, she calmly ushered the men into her cluttered living
room and quietly spent the next three hours explaining why she had mounted a
campaign to promote birth control, especially to women of little means. She had
been indicted by a grand jury on nine counts of breaking federal laws against
distribution of birth control information with her newsletter the Woman
Rebel. The potential prison sentence was forty-five years. By the time
Sanger completed her persuasive argument, the agents agreed with her.
Nevertheless, they said she had broken the law, and they had no power to
rescind the warrant.
Throughout her
life, Margaret Sanger ran afoul of the law in her quest to promote women’s
health and birth control.
Born Margaret
Higgins, she was the sixth of eleven children in a working-class family in
Corning, New York. Her father, Michael Higgins, a stonemason, was a
freethinking atheist who gave Margaret books about strong women and encouraged
her idealism. Her mother, Ann, was a devout Catholic and the strong and loving
mainstay of the family. When her mother died from tuberculosis at age fifty,
Sanger had to take care of the family. She always believed her mother’s many
pregnancies had contributed to her early death.
Sanger longed
to be a physician, but she was unable to pay for medical school. She enrolled
in nursing
school in White Plains, New York, and as part of her maternity training
delivered many babies—unassisted—in at-home births. Some of the women had had
several children and were desperate to avoid future pregnancies. Sanger had no
idea what to tell them.
Soon after her
1902 marriage to architect and would-be painter William Sanger, she became
pregnant, developed tuberculosis, and had a very difficult birth, followed by a lengthy
illness and recovery. The young family moved from New York City to the suburbs
for Margaret’s health, but two babies and eight years later, Sanger insisted
that they return to the city.
In the city the
Sangers were part of a left-wing circle that included John Reed, William “Big
Bill” Haywood, Lincoln Steffens, and Emma Goldman. Goldman had been
smuggling contraceptive devices into the United States from France since at
least 1900 and greatly influenced Sanger’s thinking. Sanger joined the Socialist
Party and the Industrial Workers of the World, providing support for its
strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 and in Paterson, New Jersey, in
1913. Sanger also returned to nursing, working as a visiting
nurse and midwife at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement in the
Lower East Side. Again, women repeatedly asked her how to prevent future
pregnancies. In those days poor women tried a range of quack medicines and
dangerous methods to end pregnancies, including knitting needles. A turning
point for Sanger came when one of her patients died from a self-induced
abortion. Sanger decided her life’s mission would be fighting for the right of
low-income women to control their destinies and improve their health through
family planning.
The Sangers
went to France, which was then, with regard to contraception, the most
progressive nation. After learning as much as she could from the French, she
returned to the United States and launched her newsletter the Woman Rebel in
1914, with considerable backing from unions and feminists. As Sanger and her
friends sat around her dining room table addressing newsletters, they
brainstormed what to call their emerging movement for reproductive freedom.
From that conversation, the term “birth control” was born. Encouraging
working-class women to “think for themselves and build up a fighting character,”
Sanger wrote that “women cannot be on an equal footing with men until they have
full and complete control over their reproductive function.”
Sanger also
began writing on women’s issues for the Call, a socialist newspaper. She
developed two columns that later became popular books, What Every Mother
Should Know (1914) and What Every Girl Should Know (1916). When she
covered the topic of venereal disease, she went up against the US postal
inspector Anthony Comstock, a one-man army against all things sexual. In 1873 Congress
had passed the Comstock Law, which made illegal the delivery or transportation
of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material and banned contraceptives and
information about contraception from the mails.
Comstock
censored her column, the first of many run-ins. He then seized the first few
issues of the Woman Rebel from Sanger’s local post office. She got around him by mailing
future issues from different post offices. Thousands of women responded to
the newsletter, anxious for information on contraception.
Sanger’s next
project was an educational pamphlet, Family Limitation, which described
clearly and simply what she had learned in France about birth control methods
such as the condom, suppositories, and douches. She planned to print
10,000 copies,
but there was great demand from labor unions, representing members from Montana
copper mines to New England cotton mills. She scraped up enough money to print
100,000. Over the years, 10 million copies would be printed, and the pamphlet
was translated into thirteen languages. In the 1920s in Yucatán, Mexico,
feminists distributed the pamphlet to every couple requesting a marriage
license.
But before she
could distribute Family Limitation in the United States, Sanger
had to go to court for the Woman Rebel, whose distribution was the
“crime” for which she had received the arrest warrant. With very little time to
prepare her defense and faced with a judge who seemed hostile to her cause, she
made the snap decision to jump bail and flee, alone, to England. While in Europe,
she visited a birth control clinic in Holland run by midwives, where she
learned about a more effective method of contraception, the diaphragm, or
“pessary.”
By the time
Sanger returned to the United States, Comstock had died. Her hopes were raised
that the laws might not be so vigorously enforced and that she might not have
to stand trial. A well-publicized open letter to President Woodrow Wilson,
signed by nine prominent British writers, including H. G. Wells, supported
Sanger and her work. Newspapers wrote about Sanger’s notoriety, and she gained
sympathy when they reported that her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, had died
suddenly of pneumonia. In the face of public pressure, the government dropped
the case, but the laws remained on the books.
Sanger opened
the nation’s first birth control clinic in October 1916 in the Brownsville
section of Brooklyn, primarily serving immigrant Jewish and Italian women. She,
her sister Ethel Byrne (a registered nurse), and Fania Mindell (who helped
translate for the immigrant patients) rented a small storefront space and
distributed flyers written in English, Yiddish, and Italian advertising the
clinic’s services. Sanger smuggled in diaphragms from the Netherlands and tried
to re- cruit a physician to properly fit them in her patients, but no doctors
were willing to face possible imprisonment. Although doctors were allowed to
provide men with condoms as protection against venereal disease, they were not
allowed to provide women with contraception.
Instead, Sanger
and Byrne provided the services. The first day the clinic opened, they saw 140
women. Women—some from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts— stood in long lines to
avail themselves of the clinic’s services. After nine days, the vice squad
raided the clinic, and Sanger spent the night in jail. As soon as she was
released, she returned to work. Again, the police came, and this time they
forced her landlord, a Sanger sympathizer, to evict them.
Following the
eviction, Sanger, her sister, and two others were arrested for “creating a
public nuisance.” Ethel was the first to be convicted, and she responded to her
sentence of thirty days of hard labor by going on a hunger strike. After four
days, the judge ordered her to be force-fed; it was the first time this
punishment had been used in the American penal system. Headlines around the
nation publicized her plight. “The whole country seemed to stand still and
anxiously watch this lone woman’s fight against an iniquitous law,” wrote a
reporter for the Birth Control Review in 1917. Ethel almost died before
Sanger was able to secure a par- don from the governor and rescue her.
Sanger’s trial
began on January 29, 1917. She was also convicted, but the judge offered her a
suspended sentence if she would agree not to repeat the offense. She refused.
Offered a choice of a fine or a jail sentence, she chose the lat- ter and spent
thirty days in jail.
Sanger appealed
her conviction, and a year later the New York Court of Appeals upheld her
conviction. However, the judge ruled that physicians could legally prescribe
contraception for general health reasons rather than exclusively for venereal
disease.
Sanger
continued to fight for the right to disseminate birth control information and to
import contraceptives from abroad. She launched the monthly Birth Control
Review in 1917 and started the American Birth Control League (the pre-
cursor to Planned Parenthood) in 1921, focusing particularly on physicians,
nurses, and social workers. Two years later she opened the Birth Control Clinic
Research Bureau in New York, the first legal clinic to distribute contraceptive
information and fit diaphragms, directed by women doctors. But it was not until
1936 that a
federal district court in New York City ruled that the US government could not
interfere with the importation of diaphragms for medical use.
Feminists and
progressive reformers were divided over Sanger’s crusade for birth control.
Alice Hamilton, Crystal Eastman, and Katharine Houghton Hepburn (mother
of actress Katharine Hepburn) supported Sanger, but others, such as Charlotte
Perkins Gilman and Carrie Chapman Catt, thought that birth control would
increase men’s power over women as sex objects.
To the
detriment of her reputation and the cause of reproductive freedom, Sanger was
also attracted to aspects of the eugenics movement. In the 1920s, some
scientists viewed eugenics as a way to identify the hereditary bases of both
physical and mental diseases. Some, however, viewed it as a means of creating a
“superior” human race. Among them were leading Nazis, who opposed birth control
or abortion by healthy or “fit” women in order to promote a white master race.
In fact, the Nazis banned and burned Sanger’s books on family planning.
Sanger’s
primary focus was on freeing women who lived in poverty from the burden of
unwanted pregnancies, but by embracing eugenics, she appeared to be crossing
the line in troubling ways. For example, in a 1921 article, “The Eugenic Value
of Birth Control Propaganda,” she argued that “the most urgent problem today is
how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically
defective.” Although many of the eugenics movement’s leaders were racists and
anti-Semites who promoted involuntary sterilization in order to help breed a
“superior” race, Sanger was not among them. Her embrace of eugenics was
intended to stop individuals from passing down mental and physical diseases to
their descendents. She believed that reproductive choices should be made on an
individual basis. She always repudiated the use of eugenics, including
sterilization, for specific racial or ethnic groups. In the 1920s, when
anti-immigrant sentiment reached a peak and some scientists sought to justify
restricting immigration by claiming that some ethnic groups were mentally and
physically inferior, Sanger spoke out against the stereotyping that led to the
Immigration Act of 1924.
In 1930, with
the support of W. E. B. Du Bois, the Urban League, and the Amsterdam News (New
York’s leading black newspaper), Sanger opened a family- planning clinic in
Harlem, staffed by a black doctor and a black social worker. In
1939,
encouraged by Du Bois, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem’s powerful
Abyssinian Baptist Church, journalist Ida Wells, sociologist E. Frank- lin
Frazier, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and other black leaders, Sanger expanded
her efforts to the rural South, where most African Americans lived.
Sanger remained
an activist for birth control and women’s rights throughout her life. She
helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952. She spent
the end of her career raising money for research. Her efforts contributed to
the development of the birth control pill.
In 1961,
Estelle Griswold, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut,
opened a birth control clinic in New Haven with Dr. C. Lee Buxton, a licensed
physician and professor at Yale’s medical school. They were arrested in
November 1961 for violating a state law prohibiting the use of birth control.
They appealed the case to the US Supreme Court, which in 1965 ruled in Gris-
wold v. Connecticut that the law violated the right to marital privacy. The
case es- tablished a woman’s right to control over her personal life and made
birth control legal for married couples. This paved the way for Roe v. Wade,
the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that recognized a woman’s right to
choose abortion.
