/mlpol/ - My Little Politics

http://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1500598;jsessionid=50B6B7F230FD91DE5A1502AB6840B455

Sanger, Margaret (14 September 1879–06 September 1966), birth control advocate, was born Margaret Higgins in Corning, New York, to Michael Hennessey Higgins, an Irish-born free thinker who eked out a meager living as a stonemason, and Anne Purcell Higgins, a hard-working, devoutly Roman Catholic Irish-American. Deeply influenced by her father’s iconoclasm, Margaret, one of eleven children, was also haunted by her mother’s premature death, which she attributed to the rigors of frequent childbirth and poverty. Determined to escape a similar fate, Margaret Higgins, supported by her two older sisters, attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute before enrolling in White Plains Hospital as a nurse probationer in 1900. She was a practical nurse in the women’s ward working toward her registered nursing degree when her 1902 marriage to architect William Sanger ended her formal training. Though plagued by a recurring tubercular condition, she bore three children and settled down to a quiet life in Westchester, New York. In 1911, however, in an effort to salvage their troubled marriage, the Sangers abandoned the suburbs for a new life in New York City.

The radical activism and bohemian culture that permeated New York in the prewar years created a formative educational environment for Margaret Sanger. “Our living-room,” she recalled in her autobiography, “became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, socialists and IWW’s could meet.” Exposed to modernist notions of political, social, and personal revolution, Sanger discovered the ideological justifications and practical outlets for her rebelliousness and unconventionality. She joined the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist party and participated in several labor actions undertaken by the Industrial Workers of the World, including the notable 1912 strike of textile workers at Lawrence, Massachusetts. Sanger’s emerging feminist/Socialist interests, coupled with her nursing background, led in 1912 to an invitation to write “What Every Girl Should Know,” a column on female sexuality and social hygiene for the New York Call. The series quickly drew the attention of postal authorities, which in 1913 banned her article on venereal disease as obscene.

Sanger’s general interest in sex education and women’s health soon focused on family limitation. Returning to work as a visiting nurse among the immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side, she saw graphic examples of the toll taken by frequent childbirth, miscarriage, and self-induced abortion. With access to contraceptive information prohibited on grounds of obscenity by the 1873 federal Comstock law and a host of state laws, Sanger realized that poor women did not have the same freedom from the physical hardships, fear, and dependency inherent in unwanted pregnancy as did those radical middle-class women who were espousing sexual liberation. Awakened to the connection between contraception and working-class empowerment by anarchist/feminist Emma Goldman, Sanger became convinced that liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would effect fundamental social change. With older feminists espousing family limitation through sexual abstinence and Socialists unwilling to be distracted by a fight for birth control, Sanger launched her own campaign, challenging governmental censorship of contraceptive information by embarking on a series of law-defying confrontational actions designed to force birth control into the center of public debate.

In March 1914 Sanger began publishing The Woman Rebel, a radical feminist monthly that advocated militant action and the right of every woman to be “absolute mistress of her own body.” The educational, economic, and political equality espoused by most feminists were irrelevant, Sanger declared, unless women first had the means to avoid the burden of unwanted pregnancies. Only birth control, a term coined in The Woman Rebel, would free women from the tyranny of uncontrolled childbirth. Although she did little more than espouse birth control in The Woman Rebel, postal authorities suppressed five of its seven issues. Sanger defied the authorities by continuing publication while preparing her next salvo against the obscenity laws: Family Limitation, a sixteen-page pamphlet containing the most precise evaluations and graphic descriptions of various contraceptive methods then available to American women. In August 1914 Margaret Sanger was indicted for violating postal obscenity laws in The Woman Rebel. Unwilling to risk imprisonment, she jumped bail in October and, using the alias “Bertha Watson,” set sail for England via Canada. En route she ordered the release of Family Limitation. A few weeks later William Sanger was tricked into providing a copy of the pamphlet to an operative of antivice crusader Anthony Comstock and went to jail for thirty days. This escalated interest in birth control as a civil liberties issue.
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Every solution is the next problem in a closed system.