REVISITING THE LIFE AND WORKS OF MARGARET HIGGINS SANGER: HER ROLE AS A SOCIAL REFORMER AND A CHAMPION OF THE BIRTH CONTROL MOVEMENT OF AMERICA

Madhubanti BanerjeeGraduate Student

San Jose State UniversityUnited Sates of America.

Early Life of Margaret Louisa Higgins

Sanger was born in Corning, New York on September 14, 1879.

She was the sixth child of eleven children of Anne Higgins, née Purcell, an Irish-born homemaker, and Michael Hennessy Higgins, an Irish-born nonconformist and gravestone maker.

She was the third daughter of four girls: Mary, Nan, Margaret, and Ethel.

She inherited her selfless courage and determination from her mother, and learned from her father to dislike the Catholic Church, to think freely and reject any prejudice.

Most importantly, the way Michael Higgins delivered his newborn children and tended to the sick ones, inspired Sanger to choose nursing as her profession.

Adult Life She studied nursing in White Plains Hospital, near New York,

and took additional training in New York City. In 1902, she married to William Sanger who was an architect,

and they had three children, two boys; Grant and Stuart, and a girl; Peggy.

As a nurse, she was often confronted by a female patients who asked her for the secret of preventing pregnancy.

She came across many women “in trouble” who ended up in hospitals or even dead because they used dangerous and harmful methods and even self-induced abortion.

One such case was a married and young Russian Jewish immigrant woman named Sadie Sachs, whose death changed Sanger’s entire life and gave her “a distinctive resolve to invent a better life for herself and others,” writes Ellen Chesler.

In doing so, she liberated women’s sexuality from the grasp of enforced maternity and empowered women with the ability to choose their pregnancies.

Need for Birth Control

She questioned the current medical profession and the law, and recognized the need for a “simple method of contraception for poor.”

She mapped out plans for a national campaign in four steps: agitation, education, organization and legislation.

To agitate the current law, between 1912 and 1913 she wrote a twelve-part series for The New York Call, the Socialist daily, titled “What Every Girl Should Know.”

To challenge the Comstock Act of 1873, she published her radical periodical, The Women Rebel.

According to Sanger, the aim of the Rebel was “to stimulate working women to think for themselves and to advocate the prevention of conception” because a women’s body belongs to herself.

She saw the birth control movement as part of the fight for freedom of speech.

The Birth Control Movement

Sanger coined the phrase “birth control” in 1915 to signify and strengthen the idea of contraception on a social and public level.

In The Woman Rebel, she attacked the Catholic Church, the state, and businesses by calling them “stupid” and “ignorant” for exploiting women as slaves.

She believed that birth control is a way for humans to progress as a race because it gives power to women by allowing them to consciously control child birth.

Upon publishing an article, “In Defense of Assassination” by Herbert A. Thorpe, in The Woman Rebel, she received a subpoena indicting her on three counts of breaking the law, which could put her in jail for many years, she fled the country. She lived in Europe, mostly in Great Britten.

In 1915, after receiving a letter from William Sanger informing her of his arrest and trial, she arrived in New York to surrender herself to the law and face the trial.

The Birth Control Movement Continues

The death of her six-year-old daughter, Peggy from pneumonia drew enormous public sympathy on her behalf.

In 1916, instead of prosecuting her, all the charges were dropped yet she became more convinced that women in America need birth control.

She inaugurated the first free birth control clinic in America on the morning of October 16, 1916, at 46 Amboy Street, Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York.

In the next ten days before the police closed the clinic down, Sanger and her sister Ethel dispensed contraceptive advice to 488 women.

After her release on $500 bail, she reopened the clinic. This time she was tried for violating the statutory prohibition on providing birth control information and convicted of “maintaining a public nuisance.” She was imprisoned for a month .

Her Work

The years from 1917 to 1921, her role would change from an agitator into a mainstream reformer who would organize the American Birth Control League; publish Birth Control Review, The Case for Birth Control, Women and the New Race, and The Pivot of Civilization; and also become a legislator to carry out the task of the National Committee of Federal Legislation for Birth Control (NCFLBC).

In 1921, she organized the American Birth Control League (ABCL) and in 1923, aided by her second husband, millionaire J. Noah Slee, Sanger opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York City, under the direction of Dr. Hannah Stone.

Because of Sanger, Herbert Simonds founded the Holland Rantos Company, which became the first American company to produce the diaphragm (1925).

To empower a young generation with knowledge of sex and its outcomes, she wrote the What Every Boy and Girl Should Know (September 1927), and in the Happiness in Marriage, she addressed the sexual intimacy between a husband and his wife.

Her Work Continues

Between 1929 and 1936, Sanger and her lobbying group, the Committee on Federation Legislation for Birth Control, waged a series of court battles culminating in United States v. One Package, which overturned the old statutes by permitting the mailing of contraceptive devices intended for physicians.

Sanger’s victory in this case led the American Medical Association to endorse contraception as a legitimate medical service and a vital component of medical education in 1937.

Finally, in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court struck down the remaining contraception Comstock laws.

In Roe v. Wade (1973) would recognize a women’s right to make a decision about an abortion.

Her later work In 1939, with the help of Mary Reinhardt Lasker and Florance

Rose, Sanger drafted a “Birth Control and the Negro” proposal that would ensure a multistate cooperative education plan for African Americans.

In the middle of WWII, ABCL would become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (1942). This organization, with affiliates in one hundred cities and its national headquarters in New York City, spearheaded the birth control movement in America.

By the financial support of philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick, the birth control pill was developed by Gregory Pincus, and it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.

In 1952, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded, and she served as the organization’s first president for seven years.

Margaret Sanger died (on September 6, 1966) of congestive heart failure in Tucson, Arizona.

Legacy of Sanger

According to Robert Allerton Parker, “without [Margaret], birth control would never have become household words.”

Historians David Kennedy and Linda Gordon disagreed about the exact nature of Sanger’s legacy, because they saw her as a failed radical who abandoned her principles to win others’ approval and endear them to her cause.

On the other hand, her biographers; Ellen Chesler, Jean H. Baker, and James Reed, found her work extremely important, presenting her as a leader who sometimes had to make unpopular choices to achieve larger goals.

James Reed felt that not only Sanger “led a successful campaign to remove the stigma of obscenity from contraception” from 1914 to 1937, she also resolved the issue by opening nationwide clinics that would provide scientific advice to women in the matter of birth control.

Sanger pursued for an improvement in the quality of life of those who were less fortunate, and the introduction of birth control brought it one step closer.