I am sure everyone is exhaling a sigh of relief today in Pittsburgh. It's March 1st which means February's dreaded reign is officially over. Here's hoping the first week of this month is more lamb like than lion. What you may not know is that today is also the first day of Women's History Month. This year's theme is "Writing Women Back into History." When the National Women's History Project began its mission in 1980, less than 3% of the content of teacher training textbooks mentioned the contributions of women. It is all of our responsibilities to recognize the impact of great women in history. PPWP will be blogging all month on the women we've been influenced by.
Today, I thought it was only fitting to do a profile on Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and pioneer of the birth control movement.
Margaret Sanger was the sixth of eleven children born to Anne Purcell Higgins and Michael Hennessy Higgins, a devout Catholic family in New York. As a child, Margaret was profoundly influenced by her mother's seemingly constant state of pregnancy. She often played caretaker to her younger siblings. After her mother's death from tuberculosis and cervical cancer in 1896, Margaret enrolled in a nursing program paid for by her sisters' wages.
When Sanger moved to New York City after a tragic fire destroyed her and her husband's home, things started to get interesting. She went to work in the East Side slums of Manhattan. At the same time she was writing a column called "What Every Girl Should Know" for the New York Call and distributing a highly controversial pamphlet called "Family Limitation." It was her belief that women would never be equal to men as long as they had no self-determination over their reproduction and that women should be allowed to enjoy the sexual freedom experienced by men. Margaret risked imprisonment by writing about birth control during the age of the Comstock Laws. At that time, it was illegal to disseminate contraceptive information and devices on the basis that they were obscene.
In 1916, Margaret opened a family planning clinic in Brooklyn. It was raided by the police soon after and Margaret served a prison sentence for violating the Comstock laws. In 1921, she started the American Birth Control League, the precursor to today's Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger was able to open her first legal family planning clinic not long after when she found a loophole in the Comstock laws that allowed for physicians to disseminate birth control information when prescribed for medical reasons. The clinic was staffed exclusively with female physicians and social workers. Margaret Sanger would later resign as President of the American Birth Control League but served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation from 1952 to 1959.
Margaret Sanger's legacy has often been tainted by rumors of her belief in the practice of eugenics, a philosophy that aims to improve human genetic traits through social intervention. In fact, when googling "Margaret Sanger," the fourth entry is a link to a website called blackgenocide.org. However, it is important to recognize that the "evidence" that depicts her as a eugenicist has been compiled by a anti-choice community that would end the practice of birth control and abortion for all women in the United States. Their motives are questionable at best and the quotes they have used to present the case for Margaret Sanger as a eugenicist, have largely been taken out of context or mis-attributed to her.
Regardless of the controversy, Margaret Sanger is a true hero of the reproductive rights movement. She fought against censorship her entire career and sacrificed her freedom and safety to provide contraceptive information and services to all women. I am happy to tell you that Margaret lived to see the development of the birth control pill and the end of the Comstock laws. She died just a few short months after the Griswold v. Connecticut decision that legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S.
Want more info? Super activist Gloria Feldt tells all about the courageous Margaret Sanger in this speech, Convictions to Action: Margaret Sanger's Legacy and Leadership Lessons.
Check it out and stay tuned for more women's history profiles this month courtesy of PPWP!
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