Kristin Carlisle
Margaret Sanger:
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Born as the sixth of eleven children on September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York
to a devout Catholic family.
Margaret thought her mother’s death at age 50 was caused by her many
pregnancies.
In 1896 she entered Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, she then
attended White Plains Hospital’s nursing program in 1900.
She married architect William Sanger in 1902 and the couple had three children.
The family moved to New York City in 1910, and Margaret soon got involved
with the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party.
In 1912 she began writing a sex education column called “What Every Girl
Should Know” for the New York Call.
She publishes The Woman Rebel in March of 1914 and was indicted in August of
1914 for obscenity laws because of its urging women to use contraceptives.
She decided to leave the country, and on her way to England has 100,000 copies
released of Family Limitation which detailed various contraceptive methods.
She separates from her husband.
She returns to America to face the charges against her, but the death of her five
year old daughter lead to all charges being dropped.
She opens the country’s first birth control center in Brownsville, Brooklyn in
October of 1916.
She married James Noah H. Slee in 1922 after a series of affairs.
She formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in
1929 in order to lobby for legislation to allow physicians to legally provide
women with contraceptives.
She helps form the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952 and
served as its first president until 1959.
The 1965 Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut allowed married
couples to legally acquire birth control.
Margaret Sanger died on September 6, 1966.
Main points:
1. Birth control will lay the foundation for improving civilization and decreasing the ills
of society.
“While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder
for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums
with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the
prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she
planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could
hardly have done it more effectively.”
“Within her is wrapped up the future of the race- it is hers to make or mar.”
2. The use of contraceptives will lessen the economic and social hardships that many
people encounter due to overcrowding, and will revolutionize the world.
“It is she who has the long burden of carrying, bearing and rearing the unwanted children.
It is she who must watch beside the beds of pain where lie the babies who suffer because
they have come into overcrowded homes. It is her heart that the sight of the deformed, the
subnormal, the undernourished, the overworked child smites first and oftenest and
hardest.”
“War, famine, poverty, and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes
life cheap.”
“Diplomats may formulate leagues of nations and nations may pledge their utmost
strength to maintain them, statesmen may dream of reconstructing the world out of
alliances, hegemonies and spheres of influence, but woman, continuing to produce
explosive populations, will convert these pledges into the proverbial scrapes of paper; or
she may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a voluntary, intelligent
function, and remake the world. When the world is this remade, it will exceed the dream
of statesman, reformer and revolutionist.”
3. Birth control is a woman’s problem and she must be able to educate herself about the
various methods that are best suited for her needs. Education will allow her to have the
freedom to determine her future.
“In an ideal society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the man as well
as the woman. The hard, inescapable fact which we encounter to-day is that man has not
only refused any such responsibility, but has individually and collectively sought to
prevent woman from obtaining knowledge by which she could assume this responsibility
for herself.”
“Woman must have her freedom- the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not
she shall be a mother- and how many children she will have.”
Question:
According to Sanger, why is birth control a woman’s problem?