Margaret Sanger Founder of the American Birth

Margaret Sanger

Founder of the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger is one of the most influential, and respected, women in American history. Her crusade for birth control and family planning, at a time when she faced strong social, political, and religious opposition, created change and controversy within American society. In addition to ensuring universal availability of birth control and family planning education, her projects and research have led to the creation of organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Planned Parenthood.

Born Margaret Louise Higgins, on September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York, Margaret Sanger was the sixth of her parents' eleven children. Although her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, died from tuberculosis at the age of fifty, Margaret's belief that the frequent pregnancies lay at the root of her premature death was to exert an enormous influence on her life and her work. Aided by her older sisters, Margaret attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute in 1896, and then entered the nursing program at White Plains Hospital in 1900. In 1902 she met and married architect William Sanger, with whom she three children and settled in Hastings, a Westchester County suburb of New York City. While nursing in New York's Lower East Side, Sanger witnessed the needless suffering of many poor women, who were subjected to the pain of frequent childbirth, miscarriage and abortion. This inspired her lifelong campaign for revision of archaic legislation, which prohibited publication of facts about contraception and birth control. In her own words, "I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky."

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Although the death of my mother was a major influence upon my life, and my subsequent work, it was my father, Michael Higgins, who instilled in me the strength to question everything, and to stand up for what I believe. Early in my career, as I practiced nursing among the impoverished families of New York's Lower East Side, I became aware of the interrelationships between overpopulation, high infant and maternal mortality rates, and poverty. These were problems that I could neither accept nor condone, so I set out to inform and educate women on the issues of contraception. In society, at that time, contraceptive information was so suppressed, in particular by the Catholic Church, that it was a criminal offence to send it through the mail. Yet, although condoms were available to the rich, society's perverse sense of justice and morality declared that their only legal use was for the protection from venereal disease while having sex with prostitutes. I sought the advice and support of doctors, but no one that I approached wished to be attached to the stigma associated with birth control. Therefore, in 1912, I began writing a column on sex education for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." The censors, who deemed it to be obscene suppressed my column on venereal disease, and many people, including the public, considered me to be 'criminal'. However, I continued with my quest and, in March 1914, I published the first issue of The Woman Rebel, a radical feminist monthly that advocated militant feminism, including the right to practice birth control. For advocating the use of contraception, three issues of The Woman Rebel were banned, and in August 1914 I was indicted on nine counts of violating postal obscenity laws. After fleeing to Europe, to escape imprisonment, I returned to New York in October 1915, to face The Woman Rebel charges, however, when my only daughter, five-year-old Peggy, died suddenly in November, sympathetic publicity convinced the government to drop the charges against me. After completing a national tour, to promote the ideas of birth control, I opened the nation's first birth control clinic, in Brownsville, Brooklyn on October 15, 1916. However, after only nine days in operation, the clinic was raided, my staff and I were arrested, and I was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in prison. Although my subsequent appeal against this conviction failed, the New York State appellate court made a ruling that exempted doctors from the law prohibiting dissemination of contraceptive information to women, if prescribed for medical reasons. This loophole allowed me the opportunity to open a legal birth control clinic and, in 1923, staffed by female doctors and social workers, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau opened. It served as a model for the establishment of numerous other clinics, and became an important center for collating clinical data on the use and effectiveness of contraceptives.

I went on to found the American Birth Control League, serving as president for seven years and continued to push legal and social boundaries by initiating sex counseling, and founding the American Birth Control League in 1921 (which became, in 1942, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America). In 1927, I organized the first World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, and eventually my work extended as far as Japan and India. Working with family planning leaders in Europe and Asia, I helped set up the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1952, and served as its first president until 1959.