Margaret Sanger

59

Margaret Sanger : biography

14 September 1879 – 06 September 1966

Margaret Sanger spent much of her 1914 exile in England, where contact with British neo-Malthusianists helped refine her socioeconomic justifications for birth control. She was also profoundly influenced by the liberation theories of British sexual theorist Havelock Ellis. Under his tutelage she formulated a new rationale that would liberate women not just by making sexual intercourse safe, but also pleasurable. It would, in effect, free women from the inequality of sexual experience. Early in 1915, Margaret Sanger’s estranged husband, William Sanger, was entrapped into giving a copy of Family Limitationto a representative of anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock. tried and convicted, he spent thirty days in jail, while also escalating interest in birth control as a civil liberties issue.

Birth control movement

Some countries in northwestern Europe had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States at the time, and when Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she learned about diaphragms and became convinced that they were a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had been distributing back in the United States. Diaphragms were generally unavailable in the United States, so Sanger and others began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States law.

In 1917, she started publishing the monthly periodical The Birth Control Review.The first issue of Birth Control Review was published Feb 1917

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.Selected Papers, vol 1, p 199 Baker, p 115 Nine days after the clinic opened, Sanger was arrested for breaking a New York state law that prohibited distribution of contraceptives, and went to trial in January 1917.Engelman, p 101 Sanger was convicted; the trial judge held that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception." Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised to not break the law again, but she replied: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today."Cox, p 65 For this, she was sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. An initial appeal was rejected, but in a subsequent court proceeding in 1918, the birth control movement won a victory when Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals issued a ruling which allowed doctors to prescribe contraception.Engelman, pp 101–3 The publicity surrounding Sanger’s arrest, trial, and appeal sparked birth control activism across the United States, and earned the support of numerous donors who would provide her with funding and support for future endeavors.McCann 2010, p 751

Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and the couple’s divorce was finalized in 1921.Cox, p 76

American Birth Control League

After World War I, Sanger shifted away from radical politics, and she founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 to enlarge her base of supporters to include the middle class.Freedman, Estelle B., The essential feminist reader, Random House Digital, Inc., 2007 p 211. The founding principles of the ABCL were as follows:"Birth control: What it is, How it works, What it will do", The Proceedings of the First American Birth Control Conference, Nov 11,12 1921, pp 207–8 The Birth Control Review, Vol V. Num 12, December 1921, Margaret Sanger (Ed), p 18. Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, 2001 reprint edited by Michael W. Perry, p 409 These principles were adopted at the first meeting of the ABCL in late 1921

We hold that children should be (1) Conceived in love; (2) Born of the mother’s conscious desire; (3) And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health. Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied.