Margaret Higgins Sanger

Margaret Higgins Sanger 1883-1966, American leader in the birth control movement, b. Corning, N.Y. Personal experience and work as a public-health nurse convinced her that family planning, especially where poverty was a factor, was a necessary step in social progress. She studied in London with Havelock Ellis and others and, back in the United States, began her campaign almost single-handed. Indicted in 1915 for sending birth control information through the mails and arrested the next year for conducting a birth control clinic in Brooklyn, Sanger gradually won support from the public and the courts. A clinic opened (1923) in New York City functioned until the 1970s. She organized the first American (1921) and international (1925) birth control conferences and formed (1923) the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. She was president of the committee until its dissolution (1937) after birth control under medical direction was legalized in most of the states. In the 1960s, Sanger actively supported the use of the newly available birth control pill. She visited many countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, lecturing and helping to establish clinics. Her books include Woman and the New Race (1920), Happiness in Marriage (1926), and an autobiography (1938).

Bibliography: See biographies by L. Lader (1955, repr. 1975) and E. Chesler (1992); studies by D. M. Kennedy (1970) and E. T. Douglas (1975); L. V. Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (2001); bibliography by R. and G. Moore (1986).

Sanger, Margaret [Higgins] (1883–1966),New York leader of the movement for birth control, author of such books as Happiness in Marriage (1927). My Fight for Birth Control (1931) and Margaret Sanger (1938) are autobiographical works.

Sanger, Margaret (1879–1966), birth control pioneer and sex reformer, founder of the international family planning movement.Born Margaret Louisa Higgins, the middle child of a large Irish‐Catholic family, Sanger emerged on the American scene in the early years of the twentieth century, a follower of labor radicals, free‐thinkers, and bohemians. Married to William Sanger, an itinerant architect, she help to support three young children by working as a visiting nurse. Following the death of a patient from an illegal abortion, she vowed to give all women ownership and control over their own bodies.

In 1914, she coined the term “birth control” as a simple way of talking about a still clandestine and delicate subject. Three years later she went to jail for opening a clinic to distribute diaphragms and spermicidal jellies. Appeal of her conviction led to licensed medical prescription of contraception in many states and led to the founding of what later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

For more than half a century, Sanger battled religious and political opponents who identified birth control with moral and sexual license. At her death, contraception was publicly funded and constitutionally protected. The oral anovulant contraceptive pill had been developed privately with her assistance. And a world population movement had emerged from her pioneering efforts.

But controversy remains over the extent to which Sanger's pragmatic alliances with middle‐class reformers and social and professional elites, many of whom espoused eugenic arguments for limiting fertility, compromised her early idealism. Under the sanitized guise of family planning, has contraception primarily been a force for social reconstruction or a tool of social control?
See also Birth Control and Family Planning; Censorship; Progressive Era; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Socialism.

Bibliography

Linda Gordon , Woman's Body: Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, 1976.
James Reed , The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue, 1984.
Ellen Chesler , Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, 1992.

Ellen Chesler