Margaret Sanger

Source

• Born: 14 September 1879
• Birthplace: Corning, New York
• Died: 6 September 1966
• Best Known As: Co-founder of what became Planned Parenthood

Name at birth: Margaret Louise Higgins

Margaret Sanger, a nurse in the poor neighborhoods of New York City, founded the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in 1916. At the time it was illegal to publish and distribute information on contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. An advocate for birth control and women's rights, she founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. Later the organization became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

According to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Sanger was born in 1879 rather than the often-listed date of 1883: "She provided inaccurate dates to contemporary biographical dictionaries, which is why so many sources have the 1883 date."

(click to enlarge)
Margaret Sanger. (credit: Courtesy of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc.)

(born Sept. 14, 1879, Corning, N.Y., U.S. — died Sept. 6, 1966, Tucson, Ariz.) U.S. birth-control pioneer. She practiced obstetrical nursing on New York's Lower East Side, where she noticed a relationship between poverty, uncontrolled fertility, and high rates of infant and maternal deaths. In 1914 she published The Woman Rebel (later Birth Control Reviews), which was banned as obscene. She was arrested in 1916 for mailing birth-control literature and again when she opened the country's first birth-control clinic. Her legal appeals brought publicity and support to her cause, and the federal courts soon granted physicians the right to prescribe contraceptives. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League. She soon took her campaign worldwide, organizing the first World Population Conference (1927) and becoming the founding president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (1953).

For more information on Margaret Sanger, visit Britannica.com.

Born in Corning, New York, Margaret Sanger (1883–1966) became a public health nurse and a pioneer in the birth-control movement when contraception and any publications dealing with it were illegal. Her concern about prevention of repeated pregnancies and the heavy toll of sickness and premature deaths they caused among working-class women was aroused when she worked in the poorest neighborhoods of New York early in the twentieth century. She traveled to Europe and trained in aspects of human sexuality with Havelock Ellis. Upon returning to the United States, she embarked on a campaign to improve access to family-planning information for women in their childbearing years. In 1915 she was indicted for sending birth-control pamphlets through the U.S. mails, and in 1916 she was arrested for conducting a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn. She set out her manifesto on family planning in many books and pamphlets, including What Every Girl Should Know (1913). This contained chapters on girlhood; puberty; the sexual impulse; reproduction; some consequences of ignorance and silence (such as venereal diseases); and menopause. There were oblique but not direct references to ways that the risk of pregnancy could be reduced, but these and her frankness about taboo topics such as masturbation were enough to make her reviled among leaders of the medical and nursing professions of the day. However, her enlightened attitudes ultimately prevailed. Her first family planning clinic opened in New York in 1923; she organized national (1921) and international (1925) conferences on family planning. She founded the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control and presided over this committee until it was disbanded after federal birth control legislation was enacted in 1937. She traveled widely, lecturing on birth control on many countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia and helping to establish family planning clinics in many of them. Her life's work immensely enhanced the lot of women everywhere.

(SEE ALSO: Abortion; Condoms; Contraception; Family Planning Behavior)

Bibliography

Sanger, M. (1927). What Every Boy and Girl Should Know. New York: Bretano's.

—— (1938). Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

— JOHN M. LAST

The pioneering work of Margaret Higgins Sanger (1884-1966), American crusader for scientific contraception, family planning, and population control, made her a world-renowned figure.

Margaret Higgins was born on Sept. 14, 1884, in Corning, N.Y. Her father was a thoroughgoing freethinker. Her mother was a devout Roman Catholic who had eleven children before dying of tuberculosis. Although Margaret was greatly influenced by her father, her mother's death left her with a deep sense of dissatisfaction concerning her own and society's medical ignorance. After graduating from the local high school and from Claverack College at Hudson, N.Y., she took nurse's training. She moved to New York City and served in the poverty-stricken slums of its East Side. In 1902 she married William Sanger. Although plagued by tuberculosis, she had her first child, a son, the next year. She had another son by Sanger, as well as a daughter who died in childhood.

Margaret Sanger's experiences with slum mothers who begged for information about how to avoid more pregnancies transformed her into a social radical. She joined the Socialist party, began attending radical rallies, and read everything she could about birth control practices. She became convinced that oversized families were the basic cause of poverty. In 1913 she began publishing a monthly newspaper, the Woman Rebel, in which she passionately urged family limitation and first used the term "birth control." After only six issues, she was arrested and indicted for distributing "obscene" literature through the mails. She fled to Europe, where she continued her birth control studies, visiting clinics and talking with medical researchers.

Sanger returned to the United States in 1916 and, after dismissal of the indictment against her, began nationwide lecturing. In New York City she and her associates opened a birth control clinic in a slum area to give out contraceptive information and materials. This time she was arrested under state law. She spent a month in prison, as did her sister. Leaving prison in 1917, Sanger intensified her activities, lecturing, raising money from a group of wealthy patrons in New York, and launching the Birth Control Review, which became the organ of her movement for 23 years. Encouraged by a state court decision that liberalized New York's anti contraceptive statute, she shifted her movement's emphasis from direct action and open resistance to efforts to secure more permissive state and Federal laws. Although regularly in trouble with New York City authorities, she continued lecturing to large crowds and keeping in touch with European contraceptive research. Her brilliantly successful visit to Japan in 1922 was the first of several Asian trips. A year later she and her friends opened clinical research bureaus to gather medical histories and dispense birth control information in New York City and Chicago. By 1930 there were 55 clinics across the United States. Meanwhile Sanger obtained a divorce and married J. Noah H. Slee.

Margaret Sanger's fame became worldwide in 1927, when she helped organize and spoke before the first World Population Conference at Geneva, Switzerland. She and her follower continued to lobby for freer state and Federal laws on contraception and for the dissemination of birth control knowledge through welfare programs. By 1940 the American birth control movement was operating a thriving clinic program and enjoying general acceptance by the medical profession and an increasingly favorable public attitude.

For most Americans, Margaret Sanger was the birth control movement. During World War II her popularity continued to grow, despite her opposition to United States participation in the war based on her conviction that wars were the result of excess national population growth. In 1946 she helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation. This was one of her last great moments. She was troubled by a weak heart during her last 20 years, although she continued traveling, lecturing, and issuing frequent statements. She died in Tucson, Ariz., on Sept. 6, 1966.

Further Reading

Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938) incorporates much of Sanger's earlier My Fight for Birth Control (1931). The most recent biography is Emily Taft Douglas, Margaret Sanger (1969), a carefully researched and sympathetic account. See also Lawrence Lader, The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control (1955). David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970), focuses on her public career and examines the whole controversy over birth control. Less solid but of possible interest is the fictionalized biography by Noel B. Gerson, The Crusader (1969). Brief treatments of her are in Mary R. Beard, Woman as a Force in History (1946); Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (1963); and Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (1968).

(1879-1966), pioneer birth-control advocate. Sanger was born in Corning, New York, one of eleven children of Irish-American parents. Her mother was Catholic, her father a radical follower of freethinker Robert Ingersoll and single-taxer Henry George. Sanger later attributed the family's lack of prosperity and her mother's death at forty-nine to her parents' having had so many children. The inequality she observed between them stimulated her lifelong social activism.

Margaret, with help from her sisters, attended Claverack College, after which she went to nursing school. She did not immediately use her medical training because, she later wrote, William Sanger "pressured" her into marrying and leaving school in 1902. Sanger, an artist and architect, moved the family (soon to include three children) to suburban Westchester. While he commuted to New York, Margaret grew restless as a result of her isolation and full-time housekeeping.

In 1910 the Sangers moved back to Manhattan, and Margaret began working as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side. She became active in radical politics, joining the Socialist party and working with the Industrial Workers of the World in supporting several militant strikes. From this network she absorbed feminist ideas and came to agree with Emma Goldman that women had a right to control their sexual and reproductive lives. Her work as a nurse with the poor further convinced her that birth control was vital to women's health and freedom.

In 1912 she began to write and speak on sexual and health issues under socialist auspices and was encouraged by her enthusiastic reception. The censorship of one of her columns by the U.S. Post Office in 1913 brought her more publicity. In 1914 she published several issues of the Woman Rebel, a radical feminist newspaper, and Family Limitation, a pamphlet intended for mass distribution and containing explicit instructions for contraception. A warrant was issued for her arrest, and she fled to Europe, where she studied with Havelock Ellis and Dutch feminist physician Aletta Jacobs.

She returned to the United States in 1915 to find a nationwide birth-control movement under way; the charges against her were dropped. In 1916 she and her sister Evelyn Byrne established a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn as an act of civil disobedience, since providing birth control remained illegal. Such clinics were opening throughout the country, in defiance of laws against them, and attracted many clients.

Sanger became increasingly angered by the Left's refusal to make birth control a priority and decided on a strategy of making legalization of contraception a single-issue campaign. Distancing herself from her left-wing friends, she now sought support from physicians and academic eugenicists. Their influence replaced that of the feminist and socialist movements, then in retreat, and Sanger sometimes used eugenic arguments for birth control--that it could help reduce the birthrate of "inferiors." In 1921 she established the American Birth Control League, a national lobbying group, which became Planned Parenthood in 1942. Very much needing personal recognition, Sanger came to think of birth control as virtually her own invention and her leadership as irreplaceable. Her aggressive campaigning, however, did play a large part in the legalization of contraception by many states between the 1920s and 1960s, though the success was qualified in that contraception became understood not as a woman's right but as a medical matter requiring a doctor's prescription.

After World War II, fears of overpopulation renewed political support for birth control, and Sanger was then instrumental in securing funding for research into hormonal contraception.

Sanger today is still controversial. Planned Parenthood regards her as a modern hero, the founder of birth control, downplaying its longer history as a women's rights issue dating from the early nineteenth century. In contrast, antiabortionists in the 1980s have cited her use of racist and eugenic arguments for birth control in their efforts to discredit the contemporary movement.

Bibliography:

Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976; rev. ed., 1990); James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (1978).

Author:

Linda Gordon

See also Birth Control.

The founder in the 1910s and 1920s of the birth control movement (she coined the term). Sanger overcame the initial hostility of the medical profession and combated laws that in most states prohibited contraception. She later headed the Planned Parenthood Federation.

A feminist and founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Margaret Higgins Sanger battled the government and the Roman Catholic Church to establish the legitimacy of birth control.

Sanger was born September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, to Michael Higgins, an Irish stonecutter, and Annie Purcell Higgins, the daughter of an Irish day laborer. Sanger's mother, who had five more children and suffered chronic tuberculosis, died at the age of fifty in 1899. Sanger blamed her death on the strain of bearing eleven children.

Following her mother's death, Sanger began nursing training at White Plains Hospital. She often accompanied doctors to patients' homes to deliver babies, and she frequently had to deliver children herself. Many of the new mothers asked Sanger what they could do to prevent another pregnancy. She, in turn, asked the doctors, but they gave her no information and took little interest in the women's dilemma.

While completing her nursing training, Sanger met William Sanger, an architect, whom she married in 1902. He was a German Jew and a socialist who was active in the radical causes of the day.

By 1912, the Sangers and their three children had moved to Greenwich Village, where the couple became involved in politics and the arts, and entertained some of the most radical intellectuals of the time. Sanger became deeply involved with the Socialist party. While recruiting for the organization, she visited many working-class families with six and seven children that were forced to make their home in two- and three-room tenements. She found that the women lived in dread of having more children and the resulting increase in poverty, and she concluded that women needed the right to control their own bodies.

She soon began speaking publicly on the problems of family life, connecting the size of the family with the economic problems of the working class. Her speeches became so popular that she was asked to turn them into a series of articles for the Call, a New York socialist newspaper. In her twelve-week series, entitled "What Every Woman Should Know," Sanger explained puberty, the reproductive organs, and sexually transmitted diseases. After the paper printed an article about gonorrhea, the authorities threatened that if it published a planned article on syphilis, its mailing permit would be canceled under the Comstock Act of 1873, a strict censorship law that barred the mailing of "obscene" material. The law was named for Anthony Comstock, a special agent of the post office with authority to open the mail and determine whether materials were obscene.

Along with her speaking and writing, Sanger returned to nursing in New York and spent much of her time assisting with home births and living with the families for several weeks afterward. She observed that the women had repeated pregnancies and were obsessed with methods of preventing conception. They sought illegal and cheap abortions, which often caused injury or death, and tried dangerous cures of their own, such as drinking turpentine and inserting instruments into the uterus. After one woman died following her second self-induced abortion, Sanger was distraught and walked the streets for hours before returning home. That night, Sanger decided to devote her life to educating women about their bodies and methods of contraception.

Sanger began her work by scouring libraries for information on preventing conception. After months of reading and research, she was convinced that no practical information existed in the United States, and she traveled to France with her family. In Paris, Sanger found that French women were well versed in contraceptive methods. She talked to druggists, midwives, doctors, and working women, and noted formulas for suppositories and douches, which she planned to write up as a pamphlet for U.S. women.

Returning home to New York, she began publishing a monthly magazine called the Woman Rebel. She deliberately decided to use the publication to engage in a frank discussion of women's liberation from the fear and reality of unplanned pregnancies, knowing that she would soon run afoul of Anthony Comstock. Sanger realized that the new movement needed a name, and after much discussion, she and a group of supporters agreed to call it birth control.

In April 1914, four weeks after the first issue of the Woman Rebel was published, the post office notified Sanger that the magazine was unmailable under the Comstock Act. While she skirmished with Comstock over her magazine, Sanger worked on her pamphlet on contraceptive techniques, called Family Limitation, in which she described the practical knowledge she had gathered in Europe. Sanger visited twenty-two printers in one week, trying to find someone who would produce the pamphlet. Finally, one hundred thousand copies were printed, addressed, and stored in San Francisco, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, to be mailed on her prearranged signal, when she thought she would be safe from Comstock's interference.

In August 1914, Sanger was indicted on charges of violating the Comstock Act. When it became clear that the judge hearing her case was biased against her, she fled to Europe to gain time to prepare her case properly. She sailed from Canada under a false name and without a passport. From the ship, where she was safely outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, Sanger sent telegrams containing the prearranged code word that indicated it was time to send out her pamphlet on contraception. After landing in Liverpool, she traveled on to London, where news of the Woman Rebel had made her a celebrity in radical circles. She later moved to Holland, which had the lowest infant death rate in the world and where all mothers were taught about contraception. There, Sanger learned how to examine women and advise them on which of the fifteen available birth control devices were appropriate. As a result of her experience in Europe, she learned the necessity of the medical community's involvement in the birth control movement and the importance of keeping thorough records and conducting follow-up studies.

In October 1915, Sanger sailed home. She contacted the district attorney about her case, and a hearing was scheduled for the following January. But in November 1915, the Sangers' daughter, Peggy, died of pneumonia, and Sanger sank into a severe depression. She insisted on going ahead with her trial, however, and received an outpouring of support from people across the country who had heard of her loss. Eventually, the charges were dismissed on the grounds that they were two years old and that Sanger had not made a practice of publishing obscene articles. Although this dismissal prevented the Comstock Act from being challenged in the courts, the publicity surrounding Sanger's case made the entire country aware of the birth control movement.

Sanger next notified her supporters of her intent to establish free clinics throughout the country, at which women could receive instruction in birth control. Sanger rented a storefront tenement in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where many newly arrived immigrants lived. The three women printed five thousand circulars in English, Yiddish, and Italian, advertising the clinic and offering contraceptive information for ten cents, and posted them around the neighborhood. The posters read, "Mothers! Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them?"

In October 1916, Sanger, along with her sister Ethel Byrne, who was a nurse, and another supporter, Fania Mindell, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. After only nine days, over four hundred women had come to the clinic for assistance. Among them was an undercover policewoman, who arrested Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell and confiscated all the patient records, pamphlets, and contraceptives. The women were charged with disseminating birth control information and maintaining a public nuisance. Byrne was found guilty and sentenced to thirty days in jail, where she nearly died from a hunger strike before the governor pardoned her. Mindell was found guilty of selling copies of "What Every Woman Should Know" and fined fifty dollars. Sanger was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse, where she gave lectures on birth control to the other inmates and taught them to read and write.

After her release, Sanger decided to focus on changing the laws on contraception and educating women about birth control techniques. Her conviction for running the birth control clinic had been upheld by the New York Supreme Court in People v. Sanger, 179 App. Div. 939, 166 N.Y.S. 1107 (1917), and she appealed to the state's high court, the New York Court of Appeals. In January 1918, in an opinion that became known as the Crane decision after the authoring judge, Frederick Crane, the appellate court upheld the lower court (Sanger, 222 N.Y. 192, 118 N.E. 637). But the court interpreted the criminal laws broadly, holding that doctors could give out birth control information to any married person to protect his or her health. This meant that clinics could operate freely and that they would be under the supervision of medical personnel, where Sanger thought they belonged.

By 1920, over twenty-five birth control leagues were operating, and Mindell's conviction for distributing literature about contraception was reversed, which meant that pamphlets and books could more easily be distributed. In 1921, Sanger formed the American Birth Control League. The Catholic Church came to lead the opposition to Sanger's efforts, and she continued to battle the church throughout her life.

Sanger attacked the Comstock law, establishing the National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control, headquartered in Washington, D.C., to gather support for federal legislation dubbed the Doctor's Bill. By 1931, hundreds of medical, political, religious, and labor organizations supported the bill. When Sanger appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Judicial Committee in February 1931, she testified that based on statistics for the period since the Comstock Act took effect in 1873, one-and-a-half million women had died during pregnancy and childbirth; seven hundred thousand illegal abortions had been performed each year; and fifteen million children had died during their first year because of poverty or their mother's poor health. But the proposed legislation was vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church, the Patriotic Society, the Purity League, and other groups, and was defeated.

After further attempts to pass the legislation were unsuccessful, Sanger decided to turn to the courts. In 1933 she had had a new type of pessary (vaginal suppository) sent to Dr. Hannah Stone, in New York, and the package had been seized under the Comstock Act. Stone filed charges. After a trial, the court ruled that the doctor was entitled to the package (United States v. One Package, 13 F. Supp. 334 [S.D.N.Y. 1936]). The government appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which upheld the lower court, ruling that the aim of the Comstock law was not to "prevent the importation, sale, or carriage by mail of things which might intelligently be employed by conscientious and competent physicians for the purpose of saving life or promoting the well being of their patients" (One Package, 86 F.2d 737 [2d Cir. 1936]). In 1937 the American Medical Association adopted the position that all doctors should receive information about the legal dispensation of contraceptives and that new contraceptive techniques should be studied.

In 1939 the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and the Birth Control League merged into the Birth Control Federation of America, which was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. Sanger continued her work, initiating birth control programs in rural clinics. Here, she decided that the relatively expensive and difficult-to-use diaphragm was impractical and that women needed a birth control pill or injection. In the 1950s, she supported the work of Dr. Gregory Pincus, whose research eventually produced the birth control pill.

In 1966 at the age of eighty-two, Sanger received the Presidential Medal of Valor from Lyndon B. Johnson. Later that year, she died in Tucson, Arizona.

Quotes:

"A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not desired on the part of the woman and she gives no response, it should not take place. The submission of her body without love or desire is degrading to the woman's finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding."

"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother."

Margaret Higgins Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Born	September 14, 1879(1879-09-14) Corning, New York, United States
Died	September 6, 1966 (aged 86) Tucson, Arizona United States
Occupation	Activist
Religious beliefs	Atheist
Spouse(s)	William Sanger (1902-1913) James Noah H. Slee (1921-1966)

Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). Although she was initially met with opposition, Sanger gradually won some support for getting women access to contraception. In her drive to promote contraception and negative eugenics, Sanger remains a controversial figure.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Family planning clinics 3 Philosophy 3.1 Psychology of sexuality 3.2 Eugenics and euthanasia 3.3 Freedom of speech 3.4 Abortion and related issues 4 Legacy 5 Notes 6 See also 7 References 7.1 Books 7.2 Journals 7.3 Websites 8 Further reading 8.1 Works by Sanger 8.2 Mike Wallace video interview 8.3 Works by other authors

Early life

This article may contain inappropriate or misinterpreted citations that do not verify the text. Please help improve this article by checking for inaccuracies. (help, talk, get involved!) (May 2007)

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)^[1] before dying of tuberculosis and cervical cancer. Sanger's father, Michael Hennessy Higgins, earned his living "chiseling angels and saints out of huge blocks of white marble or gray granite for tombstones,"^[2] and was also an activist for women's suffrage, free public education, and socialism. Sanger was the sixth of eleven children^[3] and spent much of her youth assisting in household chores and care of her younger siblings. Sanger attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Claverack for two years. Her sisters paid her tuition. Sanger returned home in 1896 following her father's request to come home to nurse her mother. Her mother died March 31, 1896. Toward the end of the century the mother of one of her Claverack friends arranged for her to enroll at a nursing program at a hospital in White Plains, an affluent New York suburb. In 1902, Margaret Higgins married architect William Sanger and the couple settled in New York City. Sanger had developed tuberculosis as a result of the care of her ill mother and her own overwork, and the Sangers moved to Saranac, New York in the Adirondacks, for health reasons. In 1903, she gave birth to her first child, Stuart.

In 1912, after a fire destroyed the home that her husband had designed, Sanger and her family moved to New York City, where she went to work in the 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 women, Sanger repeatedly caused scandal and risked imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices.

Sanger felt that in order for women to have more “equal footing” in society and to have physically and mentally healthy lives, they needed to be able to decide when a pregnancy would be most convenient for themselves.^[4] In addition, access to birth control would also fulfill a critical psychological need by allowing women to be able to fully enjoy sexual relations, without being burdened by the fear of pregnancy.^[5]

Sanger and her husband William moved to New York City in 1910. Now in the big city they became immersed in the radical bohemian culture that was then flourishing in Greenwich Village.^[5] The Sangers became involved with local intellectuals, artists, and activists. Some of the better-known acquaintances they were affiliated with were John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman.^[5]

As Sanger worked in New York's Lower East Side with poor women who were repeatedly suffering due to frequent childbirth and self induced abortions, she began to speak out for the need of women to become knowledgeable about birth control. While she was working on duty as a nurse, Sanger met Sadie Sachs when she was called to her apartment to assist her after she had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sachs begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply gave the advice to remain abstinent.^[4] A few months later, Sanger was once again called back to Sach’s apartment, only this time, Sachs was found dead after yet another self-induced abortion.^[4] This was a turning point in Sanger’s life. Sachs’ predicament was not at all uncommon during that time period. Because of this particular incident, Sanger was able to see firsthand that women were literally dying to learn how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. She knew then, more than ever, that she needed to do something to help these desperate women before they were driven to pursue dangerous and illegal abortions.^[4]

Margaret separated from her husband William in 1913. In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight page monthly newsletter promoting contraception, with the slogan "No Gods and No Masters" (and coining the term "birth control"^[6][7]) and that each woman be "the absolute mistress of her own body." She was indicted for violating US postal obscenity laws in August 1914, but jumped bail and fled to England under the alias "Bertha Watson". Sanger returned to the US in October 1915 and her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died November 6.^[8]

In 1915, William Sanger distributed a copy of his wife’s publication, “Family Limitations,” to a postal worker who was actually working undercover. Because he was found to have been distributing “obscene” material, he was jailed for 30 days while his wife was still in Europe.^[5]

Family planning clinics

It has been suggested that Negro Project conspiracy theory be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

This article may contain inappropriate or misinterpreted citations that do not verify the text. Please help improve this article by checking for inaccuracies. (help, talk, get involved!) (May 2007)

Margaret Sanger, birth control advocate, and her two sons.

In 1915, Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in which she became convinced that a diaphragm was actually a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had already been distributing back in the United States.^[5] This realization began the slow introduction of the diaphragm to the United States due to Sanger later illegally smuggling them into the country.^[5]

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 provided information about such topics as menstruation and 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 to the Socialist Party paper, The Call.

On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood 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 in 1918 an opinion written by Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals allowed doctors to prescribe contraception.

Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921. 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 married her second husband, the oil tycoon, James Noah H. Slee.

In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established the Clinical Research Bureau (CRB). Sanger eventually found a loophole in the system when she had learned that physicians were exempt from the law that prohibited the distribution of contraceptive information to women when prescribed for medical reasons.^[5] With the help of her wealthy supporters, Sanger was finally able to open the first legal birth control clinic that was staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers. It was the first legal birth control clinic in the US (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1940). It received crucial grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1924 onwards, which were made anonymously to avoid public exposure of the Rockefeller name to her agenda. The family also consistently supported her ongoing efforts in regard to population control.^[9]

Also in 1923, she formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control and served as its president 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.^{[citation needed]} 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."^[10]

In 1926, Sanger even gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.^[11] She described it as "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing," and added that she had to use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand."^[11] Sanger's talk was well-received by the group and as a result "a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered."^[11]

In 1928, Sanger resigned as the president of the ABCL, severing all legal ties, and took full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.^[12] Two years later, she became president of the Birth Control International Information Center. 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.^[13] 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, which included a supervisory role with the Negro Project, alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble.^[14] From 1952 to 1959, she served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; at the time, the largest private international "family planning" organization.

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, eight days shy of her 87th birthday and only a few months after the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the US, the apex of her 50-year agenda.

Sanger's books include Woman and the New Race (1920), The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Happiness in Marriage (1926), My Fight For Birth Control (1931), and an autobiography (1938).

The book, “Motherhood in Bondage”, is a large compilation of actual letters that were written to Margaret Sanger in desperation by thousands of women who were begging to be given information on how they could prevent unwanted pregnancies for a vast number of different reasons.^[15] Many women were simply too young, too unhealthy, or too poor to take care of a child. Other women were in abusive relationships or already had too many children to care for.

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 what she saw as the evils of contemporary capitalism for the unsatisfactory conditions of young white working-class women. Her very personal 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:

Sanger was also influenced by psychologist Havelock Ellis, especially in regards to his theories on female sexuality and its importance.^[5] His views inspired Sanger to broaden her arguments for birth control claiming that in addition to an already large number of reasons, it would also fulfill a critical psychological need by enabling women to fully enjoy sexual relations, free from the fear of an unwanted pregnancy.^[5] After Sanger and her husband divorced later on, Sanger had an affair with Ellis and also reportedly had an intimate relationship with H.G. Wells.^[5]

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.^[16]

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.^[17]

Sanger, like most of the population of her time, 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.^[18]

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.^[19]

Eugenics and euthanasia

Sanger was a proponent of negative eugenics, a social philosophy which claims that human hereditary traits can be improved through social intervention. Methods of social intervention (targeted at those seen as "genetically unfit") advocated by some negative eugenicists have included selective breeding, sterilization and euthanasia. In A Plan for Peace (1932), for example, Sanger proposed a congressional department to:

Keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.^[20]

And, following:

Apply 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.^[20]

Her first pamphlet read:

It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. Herein lies the key of civilization. For upon the foundation of an enlightened and voluntary motherhood shall a future civilization emerge.^[21]

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 negative eugenics movement were calling for active euthanasia of the "unfit," Sanger spoke out against such methods. She believed that women with the power and knowledge of birth control were in the best position to produce "fit" children. She rejected any type of eugenics that would take control out of the hands of those actually giving birth. 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.'^[22]

While comparisons are made, Sanger's views diverged from Nazi eugenics—an aggressive, and lethal, program. In April, 1933, the Planned Parenthood publication Birth Control Review printed an article by Ernst Rüdin (who became a member of the Nazis' Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy in June) which declared "the danger to the community of the unsegregated feeble-minded woman," and called for action "without delay."^[23] Sanger did not agree with Nazi Germany, however, and in May Sanger wrote in a letter:

"All the news from Germany is sad & horrible, and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right. The sudden antagonism in Germany against the Jews & the vitriolic hatred of them is spreading underground here & is far more dangerous than the aggressive policy of the Japanese in Manchuria.."^[24]

About placing the responsibility for eugenic control in the hands of individual parents rather than the state, she wrote:

"The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics.... We are convinced that racial regeneration, like individual regeneration, must come 'from within.' That is, it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without."^[25]

We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother... Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment.^[26]

She nevertheless advocated certain instances of coercion, in cases where she considered the parents unfit to decide whether they should bear children:

"The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."^[27]

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 favor 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.^[28]

Abortion and related issues

In a chapter from Woman and the New Race (1920) entitled "Contraceptives or Abortion?," Sanger wrote, "While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization."^[29]

Roger Streitmatter has claimed that Sanger's opposition to abortion stemmed primarily from a concern for the dangers to the mother rather than moral issues.^[30] Nonetheless, in her 1938 autobiography, Sanger notes that her 1916 opposition to abortion was based on 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."^[31]

In a 1916 edition of Family Limitation, Sanger advised women douche with boric acid and to take quinine to prevent implantation. She wrote further, "No one can doubt that there are times when an abortion is justifiable but they will become unnecessary when care is taken to prevent conception. This is the only cure for abortions."^[32]

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, pro-life groups condemn Sanger's 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.^[33] Despite allegations of racism, Sanger's work with minorities earned the respect of civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr.^[34] 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. Du Bois.^[35]

In 1957, the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year.

A residential building is named after her on the Stony Brook University campus.

Sanger's story has been the subject of numerous movies, including Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story starring Dana Delany and Henry Czerny,^[36] Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance (1992)^[37]

Notes

1. ^ Steinem.
2. ^ Sanger, Margaret (1938). Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton. p. 13. 
3. ^ James L. Cooper and Sheila McIsaac Cooper, The Roots of American Feminist Thought (Alvin and Bacon, 1973), p219
4. ^ ^{a b c d} Viney, Wayne; King, D. A. (2003). A history of psychology: ideas and context. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0-205-33582-9. 
5. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Chesler, Ellen (1992). Woman of valor: Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement in America. New York: Simon Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60088-5. 
6. ^ Galvin, Rachel. Margaret Sanger's "Deeds of Terrible Virtue" Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, September/October 1998, Volume 19/Number 5
7. ^ Margaret Sanger Clinic, Statement of Significance (September 14, 1993) National Historic Landmarks Program
8. ^ Kennedy, David M. (1970). "3". Birth Control in America. Yale University Press. p. 77. ISBN 0300014953. http://books.google.com/books?id=-CojUQpSS6wC. 
9. ^ Crucial, anonymous Rockefeller grants to the Clinical Research Bureau and support for population control — see John Ensor Harr, and Peter J. Johnson. The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988. (pp. 191, 461-62)
10. ^ Sanger, Margaret (2004). The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger. Courier Dover Publications. p. 366. ISBN 0486434923. 
11. ^ ^{a b c} Sanger, Margaret (1938). Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. 361, 366–7. 
12. ^ "MSPP > About > Birth Control Organizations > Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau". Nyu.edu. 2005-10-18. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/secure/aboutms/organization_bccrb.html. Retrieved 2009-10-07. 
13. ^ Pouzzner.
14. ^ Birth Control Federation of America, The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
15. ^ Sanger, Margaret (2000). Motherhood in bondage. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 0-8142-0837-1. 
16. ^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 46 (PDF available here)
17. ^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 47
18. ^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, pp. 39-40
19. ^ Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 39
20. ^ ^{a b} Sanger, "A Plan For Peace", Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 106
21. ^ Sanger, What Every Boy and Girl Should Know, 1915, p. 140
22. ^ Black (The War Against the Weak), 251.
23. ^ Rüdin, "Eugenics Sterlization: An Urgent Need", Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 102-104
24. ^ "The Sanger-Hitler Equation", Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, #32, Winter 2002/3. New York University Department of History
25. ^ Margaret Sanger. "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5
26. ^ Sanger, "Birth Control and Racial Betterment." The Birth Control Review, 3(2), 11-12
27. ^ Sanger, quoted in Charles Valenza: "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" Family Planning Perspectives, January-February 1985, page 44.
28. ^ "The Child Who Was Mother to a Woman" from The New Yorker, April 11, 1925, page 11.
29. ^ Margaret Sanger (1920). "Contraceptives or Abortion?". Woman and the New Race. http://www.bartleby.com/1013/10.html. 
30. ^ Streitmatter, Rodger (2001). Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 169. ISBN 0-231-12249-7. 
31. ^ Sanger, Margaret (1938). Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton. p. 217. 
32. ^ Sanger, Margaret (1917). Family Limitations. p. 16. http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/familylimitations.pdf. 
33. ^ Marshall.
34. ^ Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
35. ^ Knowles.
36. ^ "'Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story (1995)'". IMDb (The Internet Movie Database). 1995-03-08. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112664/. Retrieved 2009-07-29. 
37. ^ "Margaret Sanger: A Public Nuisance (1992)". The New York Times. 1992. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/185777/Margaret-Sanger-A-Public-Nuisance/overview. Retrieved 2009-07-29. 

See also

• Anthony Comstock
• C. C. Little
• Emma Goldman
• Ernst Rüdin
• Havelock Ellis
• H.G. Wells
• Houghton family
• Lothrop Stoddard
• Mary Ware Dennett

References

Books

• Black, Edwin (2003) [2003]. The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York City, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows. ISBN 1-56858-258-7. 
• Chesler, Ellen (1992). Woman of valor: Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement in America. New York: Simon Schuster. ISBN 0-671-60088-5. 
• Cox, Vicki (2004). Margaret Sanger: Rebel For Women's Rights. Chelsea House Publications. p. 136. ISBN 0791080307. 
• Gordon, Linda. Woman's Body,Woman's Right:A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976. 
• Gray, Madeline (1979). Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control. New York City, NY: Richard Marek Publishers. p. 280. ISBN 0-399-90019-5. 
• Kennedy, David (2008). Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. ACLS Humanities. p. 340. ISBN 1597404276. 
• Marshall, Robert G.; Donovan, Chuck (October 1991). Blessed Are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood. Fort Collins, CO: Ignatius Press. ISBN 0898703530; ISBN 978-0898703535. 
• Sanger, Margaret (1920). What Every Girl Should Know. Springfield, Ill.: United Sales co.. 
• Sanger, Margaret (1938). An Autobiography. New York, NY: Cooper Square Press. ISBN 0-8154-1015-8. 
• Sanger, Margaret (2000). Motherhood in bondage. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 0-8142-0837-1. 
• Viney, Wayne; King, D. A. (2003). A history of psychology: ideas and context. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0-205-33582-9. 

Journals

• Sanger, Margaret (April 1932). "A Plan For Peace". The Birth Control Review: 106. http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/ms_apwp.html. 

Websites

• Planned Parenthood Federation of America (2004). "The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Upon Accepting the Planned Parenthood Sanger Award". http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/the-reverend-martin-luther-king-jr.htm. 
• Knowles, Jon (2004). "The Truth About Margaret Sanger" (PDF). Katharine Dexter McCormick Library. http://www.plannedparenthood.org/files/PPFA/fact-margaret-sanger.pdf. 
• McElderry, Michael J. (1976). "Margaret Sanger: A Register of Her Papers in the Library of Congress". Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/text/sanger.html. Retrieved 2009-03-30. 
• Steinem, Gloria (April 13, 1998). "Time's 100 Most Important People of the Century: Margaret Sanger". Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/time100/leaders/profile/sanger.html. 

Further reading

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Margaret Sanger

Works by Sanger

• Family limitations (1917; 6th ed.) (Michigan State University)
• The Case for Birth Control: A Supplementary Brief and Statement of Facts‎ by Margaret Sanger (1917) (Google Books)
• Woman and the New Race c.1920 (Harvard University); [1] (Project Gutenberg); [2] (Google Books)
• What Every Girl Should Know (1920 ed.); (1922 ed.) (Michigan State University)
• What Every Mother Should Know (1921) (Michigan State University)
• Debate on birth control (c1921) (Michigan State University)
• The Pivot of Civilization (1922) (Project Gutenberg); via Google Books
• "The Case for Birth Control" (first published in the Woman Citizen, February 23, 1924)
• My Fight for Birth Control (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931)
• Correspondence between Sanger and Katharine McCormick
• Works by Margaret Sanger at Project Gutenberg
• The Margaret Sanger Papers at Smith College
• The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University
• Margaret Sanger (2002). Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, Peter Engelman. ed. The selected papers of Margaret Sanger. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252027376. http://books.google.com/books?id=pUZLM6IVBO4C&pg=PA257&dq=. 

Mike Wallace video interview

Mike Wallace interviews Margaret Sanger about over-population, the Catholic Church, morality, and, most importantly, why she became an advocate for birth control, Sept. 21, 1957. Hosted at the Harry Ransom Center. [3]

Works by other authors

• Profile in Women's History section of About.com
• The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
• "Birth Control and Free Speech". The Outlook 129: 507. November 30 1921. http://books.google.com/books?id=sVroBrOJL64C&pg=PA507. Retrieved 2009-07-30.  Reports suppression of a November 1921 meeting.

Persondata
NAME	Sanger, Margaret Higgins
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American Birth Control Activist
DATE OF BIRTH	September 14, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH	Corning, New York
DATE OF DEATH	September 6, 1966
PLACE OF DEATH	Tucson, Arizona

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)