Margaret Sanger
1879 - 1966
Sanger was born into a large working-class family of moderate means. She adored her father, Michael Higgins, and absorbed his radical politics, but it was the fate of her mother, Anna __________, that propelled her into nursing and helped inspire her life-long battle to secure for women the power to control their reproductivity. Margaret watched her mother, constantly pregnant and constantly sick, succumb to tuberculosis after bearing 11 children.
Sanger's experiences as a nurse made her aware of how common her mother's plight was. Women begged her for information on how to prevent pregnancy, and Sanger watched women die slowly and painfully, whose only means of contraception had been self-induced abortions. In response, she began a six-month crusade to locate reliable information on birth control (a phrase she coined). She asked doctors, she visited libraries, she consulted with feminists, and her inquiries were everywhere met by shocked refusal or ignorance. "Why," she asked, " was it so difficult to obtain information on this subject? Where was it hidden? Why would no one discuss it? . . . It was like the lost trail in the journey toward freedom." In the end, she had to travel to Europe for the information she sought. There were several reasons for the obstacles that Sanger encountered. The most pervasive problem was people's discomfort with the subject itself. On those rare occasions when sex-related subjects were discussed, they were obscured by a cloud of euphemism (condoms were called "French" products, and spermicides were "feminine hygiene products"). Feminists usually wanted little to do with so offensive a topic, and, moreover, they felt that all energies should be concentrated on securing the vote; once women had suffrage, all other reforms would follow. (Sanger, on the other hand, believes that unless woman was "the absolute mistress of her own body," any other social change was negligible.) There was also the widespread idea that fear of pregnancy was all that kept women honest - if they had access to birth control, the theory ran, adultery would become rampant.
However, an even deeper paranoia
seems to have underlain these objections. Women and maternity had been
yoked, willingly or not, for the entire history of humanity. There had, of
course, always been ways of circumventing the reproductive system, but these
methods were neither universally known nor fully reliable. To attempt to
separate the females from their reproductive functions flew in the face of
society's definition of what it meant to be a woman. St. Augustine once
asked, "If it is not to generate children that the woman was given to the man as a
helpmate, in what could she be a help for him?" and this assumption, that
women existed, not in their own right, but because of their usefulness to
others, persisted in various forms until Sanger's own time and beyond.
According to some, women existed to please men; for others, women were to
serve the good of the species by rearing good children; others believed that it
was their beneficent moral influence that justified their existence. Few
feminists until the middle of the 19th century were entirely comfortable
claiming that women existed as independent, self-sufficient souls. By
separating women from their reproductive role, birth control implicitly asserted
their autonomy and personhood.
Equally threatening, it gave women a new power over their own sexuality. There was an unconscious assumption at the time that women's sexuality was regulated by nature - and thus, this unsettling aspect of the gender was not in their own control, but contained by much larger forces. If a woman was promiscuous, she would become pregnant and possible diseased; if, on the other hand, she read too much, she could become infertile - her behavior and her sexuality were linked in ways decreed by nature and outside of a woman's ability to alter. This belief was apparently somewhat reassuring, because when women began to assert their authority over their sexuality, the outcry was vehement.
The existence of these more subterranean reasons for the rampant objections to birth control is indicated by the fact that birth control was illegal for married couples in Connecticut until the Supreme Court struck down the statute as unconstitutional in 1965! (Connecticut did not recognize unmarried couples' right to contraception until 1972). Clearly, immorality could not have been at issue in the state's resistance, since the law pertained to married couples; neither is Connecticut overwhelmingly Catholic, so the concerns cannot have been religious. Instead, the explanation is that female sexuality has long been viewed as a dangerous and destabilizing force, so much so that some people could not be comfortable with the idea of women having autonomy over their own bodies.
Sanger's first major effort to reform reproduction was the publication of the series What Every Girl Should Know, which covered the basic sex education topics, such as hygiene, pregnancy, puberty, and physical changes. In 1914, she began issuing a periodical called the Woman Rebel, a feminist serial for the working woman, that disseminated birth control information, among other radical subjects (Its motto was "No Gods No Masters"). Sanger, not surprisingly, fell afoul of the Comstock Laws (1873), a far-reaching piece of legislation prohibiting the mailing of materials that are "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, [or] disgusting." Surreally enough, the Woman Rebel was supposed to incite obscenity. Sanger fled to England to avoid the possible 45-year sentence; on the way, however, she sent word to her supporters, and they released 100,000 copies of her pamphlet Family Limitation. Once in England, she met Havelock Ellis, the pioneering sex psychologist, conferred with eminent socialists, and researched birth control in a number of European nations, especially France, where the contraceptives were particularly widely utilized.
When
she returned to the United States to take up the battle in court, she came
heavily armed with data. The government opted to throw out the case as
public opinion swung heavily in her favor following the death of her
five-year-old daughter from pneumonia. The government claimed that it
didn't want to make a martyr of her, although it is conceivable that they also
didn't want to give her a forum.
Sanger continued her work, founding a birth control clinic in Brooklyn, creating the periodical, the Birth Control Review, and establishing the American Birth Control League, which was eventually to become Planned Parenthood. She also organized the first American and the first international conferences on birth control. In a case fought by Sanger in the 1930s, the Supreme Court exempted physicians from the Comstock Laws, although the laws themselves were not revoked until 1971. She helped to fund the research that led to the first pill, which was created in 1950, when Sanger was in her 80s.
Sanger's mission was, however, more complicated than just liberating women. Part of her goal was to democratize reproductive rights. In her words, defending the dissemination of contraceptive information, "it was the working class women who fill the death list which results from abortion, for though women of wealth have abortions performed too, there is given them the best medical care and attention money can buy; trained nurses watch over them, and there is seldom any evil consequence. But the working woman must look for the cheapest assistance. The professional abortionist; the unclean midwives, the fake and the quack - all feed upon her helplessness and thrive and prosper on her ignorance. It is the Comstock laws which produce the abortionist and make him a thriving necessity, while the lawmakers close their Puritan eyes."
Moreover, in giving contraceptives to working women, Sanger believed she could effect an economic revolution. The misery of the poor, she pointed out, stems from their great numbers - as long as the working classes were plentiful, wages would be low. If women had fewer children, those children would be better paid. She said, "...too long have the workers produced the slave class, the children for the mills, the soldiers for the wars, and the time had come to watch the masters produce their own slaves, if they must have them. We know the capitalist class must have a slave class, bred in poverty and reared in ignorance. That is why it is quote consistent with their laws that there should be a heavy penalty of five years' imprisonment for imparting information as to the means of preventing contraception."
In contrast to this philanthropic side of Sanger's work is the disturbing whiff of eugenics that appears in some of her works. Although Sanger differentiated herself from the eugenicists, she did utilize some of their language, appealing to bourgeois prejudices about the inferiority of the laboring classes, the congenitally handicapped, and non-whites. This aspect of Sanger's work remains troubling, yet her efforts on behalf of contraception radically altered society, and has much to do with the present sexual freedom that women enjoy.
