Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,383
By This is the grave of Margaret Sanger.
Born in 1879 in Corning, New York, Margaret Higgins grew up with Irish Catholic parents who had left the church and rejected its doctrines. I’d say they passed that down to their daughter. On the other hand, birth control was not part of the family. Margaret was the 6th of 11, but that’s live births. Her mother was pregnant…..18 times.
Margaret was not really that educated, but for a working class family she was. She got some level of higher education, attending a couple of trade schools and the like. But in 1902, she married the architect William Sanger. She also suffered from tuberculosis so her health in these early days wasn’t great, though she beat it. She had three children of her home and they lived in a nice home in Hastings-on-Hudson. There was no sign of any kind of exceptional life here. But then in 1911, their house burned down. They decided to start over in the city. He could work as an architect and she wanted to use her nurse’s training. So she started working at settlement houses.
The conditions for immigrant women in the Lower East Side were….unspeakably awful. I recently read S. Josephine Baker’s (the health reformer, not the dancer) remarkable memoir Fighting for Life and she describes just the absolute horror show of both mother and child mortality. This was the world Sanger started working in and she was also horrified. She and her husband threw themselves into avant-garde New York life. They became socialists and got to know people such as Emma Goldman, Mabel Dodge, and John Reed. She became part of the New York elite support committee for the IWW actions at Lawrence and especially Paterson.
So Sanger started combining her experiences with the general socialist politics of the time and began to write about sex education. Remember, the Comstock Laws were still in force. Birth control was illegal and while those laws were only sporadically enforced, to talk about it publicly was inviting problems. Sanger liked trouble. After a patient of hers died of a botched self-abortion, she decided to break those laws. Sanger actually opposed abortion personally, but understood why it would be necessary for some women.
So in 1914, Sanger and some friends came up with the term “birth control” and started a little paper called The Woman Rebel to push for contraception, sex education, and other forms of radicalism. It didn’t take long for her to get in trouble. Anthony Comstock was still (unfortunately) alive after all and ranting against the birth control. She was indicted later that year for violating obscenity laws and went to England to avoid prosecution.
Now, did Sanger believe in eugenics? Yes. There is no way around this. Most of the Progressives did in one form or another. However, we do need to temper this a bit. First, there were plenty of Black eugenicists too. In fact, this one of the only things that united W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington! The idea of scientific breeding is a very, very bad one in retrospect, but it came out of a place where a) these people witnessed some pretty bad things in immigrant households and b) ethnic stereotypes were literally everywhere. To reference the Baker book again, she doesn’t really go into eugenics per se, but is there massive ethnic stereotyping? Yes. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we throw out all the positive things people accomplished because they also believed some very bad things? Across the political spectrum. people are doing this all the time, very much including in comments here. The right throws completely disingenuous comments about Sanger’s eugenics beliefs at the left (even though the contemporary right are hard racists) and they aren’t total lies. But the left will say that Thomas Jefferson has nothing to offer because he raped his slave. And of course Abraham Lincoln issued orders for the largest mass execution in American history against the Dakota. These are very bad things! But we have to take the good with the bad sometimes. Or at least find a way to use the good and avoid the bad without ignoring it. That’s what we have to do with Sanger too.
While in England, Sanger met some of the higher end eugenicists and she definitely fell under their spell, more than a bit. She was big into the neo-Malthusian movement. Overpopulation would remain a big thing for her. It is what it is. She never was a hard-core person on this. She hardly believed in the kind of thing that would lead to the Nazis. Like most Progressives, she would support immigration restriction, but she didn’t come out in favor of excluding entire ethnicities, at least not to my knowledge. But she was also happy to take money to fund her work from horrible people such as Lothrop Stoddard, not to mention her good friend in England H.G. Wells, who had some very bad racial politics. Mostly, she just remained quiet about the open racism because she wanted the support for her agenda. It’s sad, but at this point, we just need to acknowledge it and deal with it.
In 1913, Sanger and her husband split. A newfound commitment to radicalism will do that to a marriage. Although Sanger and her husband were personally estranged they were still political allies. In 1915, Comstock jailed him for distributing one of her birth control pamphlets. They didn’t actually divorce until 1921. She quickly married James Slee after this. He was big into smuggling diaphragms into the U.S. to help her campaigns out. She had learned about these in 1915 while still in Europe. The Dutch were using them in their birth control clinics and she resolved to get them to America.
In 1916, Sanger, back in America, decided to open the nation’s first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn. She was arrested nine days later. Her sister Ethel Byrne was also involved. Side note: Ethel’s daughter Olive is often credited as the inspiration for Wonder Woman! Anyway, this time Sanger was not going to avoid prison. She took the trial. She was sentenced to 30 days when she would not agree to close the clinic. But she did appeal and in 1918, a judge ruled her clinic legal.
By the 20s, Sanger had mostly left the open radicalism behind and went all in on a more middle class movement. She started the American Birth Control League to promote birth control among the middle class as well as the working class. The more open sexuality of this decade made this more possible. If you have never seen the remarkable and bizarre Where Are My Children? from the 20s, it is a pro-birth control, anti-abortion film that really sums up these politics well. She established the Clinical Research Bureau in 1923 as a loophole around anti-birth control laws and John D. Rockefeller Jr was happy to fund it. This was just a different world than 15 years before, even if the laws really hadn’t changed. She traveled the world in the 20s promoting birth control, including to Asia. She would speak to literally anyone about it, including the Ku Klux Klan. She also worked closely with Black women on these issues. She and W.E.B. DuBois were close and they founded a birth control clinic in Harlem. Later in life, she got to know Coretta Scott King, who was a big supporter of her mission. Yeah, Sanger lived a long time. Some, including Angela Davis, have argued that Sanger wanted to reduce the Black population, but this probably is not true and I will take the DuBois and King recommendations as solid evidence in favor of Sanger. Again though, there’s no shortage of complications to Sanger’s racial politics.
Still, birth control was still illegal. She founded the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in 1929 to fight for overturning the laws. But in this conservative country, it wasn’t happening. So she ordered a diaphragm from Japan in 1932 to push the issue and create another court case. This helped lead to a judge throwing out most of the Comstock Act in 1936. Based on that, the American Medical Association started promoting contraception among its members in 1937.
After this case, Sanger planned to retire. She liked it warm and she moved to Tucson, Arizona. But she really couldn’t leave the movement, even though after this she definitely took a back seat. As per usual among reform organizations, the main birth control movement split among a number of factions. Sanger tried to bring them together and in 1948, created the International Committee on Planned Parenthood. This is root for the modern Planned Parenthood organization. She was the nominal head until 1959, but really she was mostly retired.
Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson. She was 86 years old. She got to witness Griswold the year before.
Margaret Sanger is buried in Fishkill Rural Cemetery, Fishkill, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other important American feminists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Barbara Deming is in Hanover, New Hampshire and Valerie Solanas is in Fairfax Station, Virginia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.