   #copyright

Margaret Sanger

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Political People

   Margaret Higgins Sanger
      Margaret Sanger.
   Born September 14, 1879
        Corning, New York
   Died September 6, 1966
        Tucson, Arizona

   Margaret Higgins Sanger ( September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was
   an American birth control activist, an advocate of certain aspects of
   eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which
   eventually became Planned Parenthood). Initially meeting with fierce
   opposition to her ideas, Sanger gradually won the support of the public
   and the courts for a woman's choice to decide how and when she will
   bear children. Though her tentative support of eugenics was less well
   received, Margaret Sanger was instrumental in opening the way to
   universal access to birth control.

Life

   Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins,
   was a devout Roman Catholic who went through 18 pregnancies (with 11
   live births) before dying of tuberculosis and cervical cancer. Sanger
   attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Hudson for two years.
   Her sisters paid her tuition, and when they were unable to continue to
   provide this assistance, Sanger returned home in 1899. Her mother died
   the same year, after which Sanger enrolled in a nursing program at a
   hospital in White Plains, an affluent New York suburb. In 1902, she
   married William Sanger. Although stricken by tuberculosis, she gave
   birth to a son the following year, followed in later years by a second
   son and a daughter who died in childhood. Sanger's ill health, marriage
   and subsequent pregnancy prevented her from completing her third year
   of training and attaining a certification, though her new husband
   assured her that he would care for her and that she would be better off
   raising their children than pursuing a career.

   In 1912, after a devastating fire destroyed the new home that her
   husband had designed, Sanger and her family moved to New York City,
   where she went to work in the poverty-stricken East Side slums of
   Manhattan. That same year, she also started writing a column for the
   New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." Distributing a
   pamphlet, Family Limitation, to poor women, Sanger repeatedly risked
   scandal and imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of
   1873, which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive
   information and devices.

   Margaret separated from her husband William Sanger in 1913. In 1914,
   Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, a monthly newsletter advocating
   contraception (and coining the term "birth control") and that each
   woman be "the absolute mistress of her own body." She was indicted for
   violating postal obscenity laws in August and fled to Europe as "Bertha
   Watson" to escape prosecution. There, she had several affairs,
   including with the science-fiction author H. G. Wells and sexual
   psychologist Havelock Ellis. She returned to the U.S. in Oct. 1915. Her
   five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died Nov. 6.

   On Oct. 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control
   clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighbourhood of Brooklyn,
   the first of its kind in the United States. It was raided nine days
   later by the police. She served 30 days in prison. An initial appeal
   was rejected but a state appellate court in 1918 allowed doctors to
   prescribe contraception.

   In 1916, Sanger published "What Every Girl Should Know," which was
   later widely distributed as one of the E. Haldeman-Julius " Little Blue
   Books." It not only provided basic information about such topics as
   menstruation, but also promoted an understanding of sexuality in
   adolescents. It was followed in 1917 by What Every Mother Should Know.
   She also launched the monthly periodical The Birth Control Review and
   Birth Control News and contributed articles on health for the Socialist
   Party paper, The Call.

   Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 with
   Lothrop Stoddard and C. C. Little. In 1922, she traveled to Japan to
   work with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue promoting birth control; over
   the next several years, she would return another six times for this
   purpose. In this year, she also married oil tycoon James Noah H. Slee.
   In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established the Clinical
   Research Bureau. It was the first legal birth control clinic in the
   U.S. (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in her honour in 1940).
   That year, she also formed the National Committee on Federal
   Legislation for Birth Control and served as its president of until its
   dissolution in 1937 after birth control under medical supervision was
   legalized in many states. In 1927, Sanger helped organize the first
   World Population Conference in Geneva.

   Between 1921 and 1926, Sanger received over a million letters from
   mothers requesting information on birth control. From 1916 on, she
   lectured "in many places—halls, churches, women's clubs, homes,
   theaters" to "many types of audiences—cotton workers, churchmen,
   liberals, Socialists, scientists, clubmen, and fashionable,
   philanthropically minded women." In 1926, in what she called "one of
   the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing", Sanger even gave a
   lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan
   in Silver Lake, New Jersey, a group she found so ignorant she had to
   use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make
   children understand."

   In 1928, Sanger resigned as the president of the ABCL. Two years later,
   she became president of the Birth Control International Information
   Centre. In January 1932, she addressed the New History Society, an
   organization founded by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab and Julie Chanler; this
   address would later become the basis for an article entitled A Plan for
   Peace. In 1937, Sanger became chairperson of the Birth Control Council
   of America and launched two publications, The Birth Control Review and
   The Birth Control News. From 1939 to 1942, she was an honorary delegate
   of the Birth Control Federation of America. From 1952 to 1959, she
   served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation;
   at the time, the largest private international family planning
   organization.

   During the 1960 presidential elections, Sanger was dismayed by
   candidate John F. Kennedy's position on birth control (Kennedy did not
   believe birth control should be a matter of government policy). She
   threatened to leave the country if Kennedy were elected, but evidently
   reconsidered after Kennedy won the election.

   In the early 1960s, Sanger promoted the use of the newly available
   birth control pill. She toured Europe, Africa, and Asia, lecturing and
   helping to establish clinics.

   Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona at age 86 which was 8 days from
   her 87th birthday and only a few months after the landmark Griswold v.
   Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples
   in the U.S., the apex of her 50-year struggle.

   Sanger's books include Woman and the New Race (1920), Happiness in
   Marriage (1926), and an autobiography (1938).

Philosophy

   Although Sanger was greatly influenced by her father, her mother's
   death left her with a deep sense of dissatisfaction concerning her own
   and society's understanding of women's health and childbirth. She also
   criticized the censorship of her message about sexuality and
   contraceptives by the civil and religious authorities as an effort by
   men to keep women in submission. An atheist, Sanger attacked Christian
   leaders opposed to her message, accusing them of Obscurantism and
   insensitivity to women's concerns. Sanger was particularly critical of
   the lack of awareness of the dangers of and the scarcity of treatment
   opportunities for venereal disease among women. She claimed that these
   social ills were the result of the male establishment's intentionally
   keeping women in ignorance. Sanger also deplored the contemporary
   absence of regulations requiring registration of people diagnosed with
   venereal diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of
   those with infectious diseases such as measles).

   Sanger was also an avowed socialist, blaming the evils of contemporary
   capitalism for the unsatisfactory conditions of the young working-class
   women. Her views on this issue are evident in the last pages of What
   Every Girl Should Know.

Psychology of sexuality

   While Sanger's understanding of and practical approach to human
   physiology were progressive for her times, her thoughts on the
   psychology of human sexuality place her squarely in the pre- Freudian
   19th century. Birth control, it would appear, was for her more a means
   to limit the undesirable side-effects of sex than a way of liberating
   men and women to enjoy it. In What Every Girl Should Know, she wrote:
   "Every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his
   sexual impulse. Men and woman who have it in control and constantly use
   their brain cells thinking deeply, are never sensual." Sexuality, for
   her, was a kind of weakness, and surmounting it indicated strength:

          Though sex cells are placed in a part of the anatomy for the
          essential purpose of easily expelling them into the female for
          the purpose of reproduction, there are other elements in the
          sexual fluid which are the essence of blood, nerve, brain, and
          muscle. When redirected in to the building and strengthening of
          these, we find men or women of the greatest endurance greatest
          magnetic power. A girl can waste her creative powers by brooding
          over a love affair to the extent of exhausting her system, with
          the results not unlike the effects of masturbation and
          debauchery.

   Her thoughts on human development were also laden with racism:

          It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger
          than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where
          there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious
          sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development
          we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the
          aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human
          family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain
          development, has so little sexual control that police authority
          alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the
          streets.

   Sanger also considered masturbation dangerous:

          In my experience as a trained nurse while attending persons
          afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter
          what their ailments, I have never found any one so repulsive as
          the chronic masturbator. It would be difficult not to fill page
          upon page of heartrending confessions made by young girls, whose
          lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so
          innocently, for even after they have ceased the habit, they find
          themselves incapable of any relief in the natural act. [...]
          Perhaps the greatest physical danger to the chronic masturbator
          is the inability to perform the sexual act naturally.

   For her, masturbation was not just a physical act, it was a mental
   state:

          In the boy or girl past puberty, we find one of the most
          dangerous forms of masturbation, i.e. mental masturbation, which
          consists of forming mental pictures, or thinking obscene or
          voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harmful
          to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost
          impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures.

Eugenics and Euthanasia

   Sanger was a proponent of eugenics, a social philosophy claiming that
   human hereditary traits can be improved through social intervention.
   Methods of social intervention (targeted at those seen as "genetically
   unfit") advocated by eugenists have included selective breeding,
   sterilization, and euthanasia. In 1932, for example, Sanger argued for:

     A stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that
     grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose
     inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to
     offspring.

   With advances in biology and genetics, it has become clear that the
   policies Sanger advocated to prevent the disabled from reproducing
   would in practice be ineffective. However, in the early 20th century,
   the eugenics movement, in which Sanger was prominently involved, gained
   strong support in the United States.

   Sanger promoted the idea of "race hygiene" – meaning the human race,
   not the idea of race as ethnicity – through "negative eugenics," though
   her writings do not indicate that she believed that any particular
   (ethnic) race as a whole was more eugenic or dysgenic than any other,
   and she condemned the anti-Semitic Nazi program as "sad & horrible."

   Of this, she said, "The campaign for birth control is not merely of
   eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of
   eugenics."

   Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent "dysgenic" children from
   being born into a disadvantaged life, and dismissed "positive eugenics"
   (which promoted greater fertility for the "fitter" upper classes) as
   impractical. Though many leaders in the eugenics movement were calling
   for active euthanasia of the "unfit," Sanger spoke out against such
   methods. Edwin Black writes:

     In [William] Robinson's book, Eugenics, Marriage and Birth Control
     (Practical Eugenics), he advocated gassing the children of the
     unfit. In plain words, Robinson insisted: 'The best thing would be
     to gently chloroform these children or give them a dose of potassium
     cyanide.' Margaret Sanger was well aware that her fellow birth
     control advocates were promoting lethal chambers, but she herself
     rejected the idea completely. 'Nor do we believe,' wrote Sanger in
     Pivot of Civilization, 'that the community could or should send to
     the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from
     irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.'

   She maintained, however, that she advocated certain instances of
   coercion: "The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be
   discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."

Freedom of speech

   Sanger was an avid defender of free speech who was arrested at least
   eight times for expressing her views in a time when speaking publicly
   in favour of birth control was illegal. She stated in interviews that
   she had been influenced by the agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll, who
   spoke in her hometown when she was 12 years old.

Legacy

   Sanger remains a controversial figure. While she is widely credited as
   a leader of the modern birth control movement, and remains an iconic
   figure for the American reproductive rights movements, she also is
   reviled by some who condemn her as "an abortion advocate" (perhaps
   unfairly so: abortion was illegal during Sanger's lifetime and Planned
   Parenthood did not then support the procedure or lobby for its
   legalisation). Groups opposed to Planned Parenthood and/or legalized
   abortion have frequently targeted Sanger for her views, attributing her
   efforts to promote birth control to a desire to "purify" the human race
   through eugenics, and even to eliminate minority races by placing birth
   control clinics in minority neighborhoods. For this reason, Sanger is
   often quoted selectively or out of context by detractors (a practice
   known as quote mining), and her history and involvement with socialism
   and eugenics have often been rationalized or even ignored by her
   defenders and biographers (a practice known as spin doctoring). Despite
   the allegations of racism, Sanger's work with minorities earned the
   respect of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. In their
   biographical article about Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood notes:

     In 1930, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that
     sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the
     benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their
     city's health and social services. Staffed by a black physician and
     black social worker, the clinic was endorsed by The Amsterdam News
     (the powerful local newspaper), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the
     Urban League, and the black community's elder statesman, W.E.B.
     DuBois.

   Although Sanger's views on abortion (like many of her opinions) changed
   throughout the course of her life, in her early years she was acutely
   aware of the problem of abortion, typically self-induced or with the
   aid of a midwife. Her opposition to abortion stemmed primarily from a
   concern for the dangers to the mother, and less so from legal concerns
   or the welfare of the unborn child. She wrote in a 1916 edition of
   Family Limitation, "no one can doubt that there are times when an
   abortion is justifiable," though she framed this in the context of her
   birth control advocacy, adding that "abortions will become unnecessary
   when care is taken to prevent conception. (Care is) the only cure for
   abortions." Sanger consistently regarded birth control and abortion as
   the responsibility and burden first and foremost of women, and as
   matters of law, medicine and public policy second.

   Sanger's 1938 autobiography notes her 1916 opposition to abortion as
   the taking of life: "To each group we explained what contraception was;
   that abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it
   was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer
   way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while
   in the long run, because life had not yet begun."
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
