Jacob Riis Slums Analysis

In America, the twentieth century marked the beginning of a pivotal age that contained many social and political reforms for women. Feminists around the country each presented unique ideas for women’s rights, most of them through influential writings and speeches. Margaret Sanger was an undeniably significant contributor who made a huge impact on the future of women’s civil liberties. A nurse with a prolific writing career, Sanger delivered her speech “The Children’s Era” in 1925, a text that advocates for the use of contraceptives to improve the lives of mothers and children. Throughout the speech, she employs the use of analogies to provide clarity to her purpose and deliver a lasting message that women’s bodies must be controlled if they are to effectively fulfill their maternal obligations. Sanger also incorporates two of the Aristotelian appeals, logos and pathos, to accentuate the plight that mothers and children must face despite an accessible solution. The careful application of diction throughout her speech also emphasizes her three main rhetorical strategies. These rhetorical devices support Sanger’s overall message of maternal empowerment and convince her hesitant audience to fully accept her progressive ideals.

I. Introduction. There are many remarkable personalities in our history, which made revolutionary changes in women’s lives. Two of them were Margaret Sanger and Eleanor Roosevelt. They contributed immensely to change the women’s fates and lives and to position them equally with men. Margaret Sanger was born in 1879, in Corning, New York; she was sixth of eleven children of Michel Higgins, an Irish Catholic stonecutter, and religious Anne Purcell Higgins. Her mother went through eighteen pregnancies and died at the age of forty-eight. She studied nursing in White Plains and worked as nurse in one of the poorest neighborhood of New York. In 1902 Margaret Sanger married architect and radical William Sanger. She didn’t finish her studying. Margaret gave birth to three children. In 1912 Sanger’s family moved to Manhattan. All her life Margaret Sanger was a courageous, dedicated and persistent American birth control activist, advocate of eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League. She was first woman opening the way to universal access to birth control.

Parents in the early colonies faced high infant mortality rates, such that every family was apt to lose at least one child. By using Elizabeth Drinker’s diary, Marten allows readers to gain a first-hand account of a mother’s worries and sorrows as her children become sick and some pass away. The agony over the loss of a loved one as well as the loss of the opportunities the child could have had growing up and the ones he would have given his family, are thoroughly expressed through this diary. It strengthens the overall argument that children were highly regarded in early American colonies for their ability to pass on family values and become the future of the society. These children are so important to the history of the United States because their survival in these early colonies led to the populating of the country. They continued to pass on the values of the early settlers so that a combined culture of all the colonies could be born into the country we know today, therefore making a positive impact in history.

Motherhood was an expected part of the wife’s life. Woman would have a large number of babies right after each other although some babies would not survive. “High mortality rates must have overshadowed the experience of motherhood in ways difficult to

There was laws made up to ban birth control because the government did not want women to be able to not to become a mother. Then this woman, Margaret Sanger, who wanted to share about birth control that was part of the new feminism. Shen decided to advertise birth control because women have rights to be able to become a mother or not to become a mother. There are a lot of jobs for a mother to do like taking care of the baby, working, cooking and other house chores. The only freedom of women has choices and decisions to have in their like earning a decision or having a baby. This document is expressing how women who become mothers sacrifice a lot to be able to have a family. (Foner,

Robin Yates’s paper, “Pregnancy and Childbirth, The 1800’s vs. Now: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting,” was filled with many clear points on the advancement of labor and medicine since the 1800s. This essay was filled with interesting and grabbing facts; however, the structure of the essay needs more support.

To the question “Why the Woman Rebel?” Sanger wrote “Because I believe that deep down in woman’s nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt” and “Because I believe that through the efforts of individual revolution will woman’s freedom emerge”. Both highlight how birth control was not a mere technique to personal freedom, but an avenue to power. These quotes emphasize Sanger’s belief that the birth control pill would unleash the spirit of freedom amongst women. She did not argue for the open distribution of contraceptive to promote personal freedom. However, she believed that limitation on family size would free women from the dangers of childbearing and give them the opportunity to become active outside the home. In addition, Document 1 acknowledges birth control’s ability to bring about radical social class change. Sanger includes her belief that women are “enslaved by the world machine…middle-class morality”. Her idea of social change not only involved embracing the liberation of woman, but also the working class. It is believed that the birth control campaign succeeded as it became “a movement by and for the middle class”. Birth control provided middle-class women the opportunity to plan families without the stress of balancing growing expenses for a child that was not planned for. In The Woman Rebel Sanger introduces birth control’s larger mission of power and opportunity for women while incorporating the basis of social class.

Seeks Pity for Teenage Mothers and Abstinent Couples,” is that the woman’s inability to be decisive in whether or not she will assume the role of motherhood is symbolic of slavery. Furthermore, Sanger maintains that denying women the freedom of choice essentially impedes their constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These assertions are substantiated through a series of letters that are written to Sanger by mothers who are overwhelmed with anguish and dismay due to their prominent rate of unplanned pregnancies and the complications that ensue as a result. The common thread indicated in all of the letters is the pursuit of relief in the form of prevention. The series of correspondences also addresses the invariable plight of poverty, illness, fear, physiological defects, sexual servitude, and the lack of social enterprise, which all seem to be exacerbated by the immense number of unplanned pregnancies. Sanger subscribes to the belief that the woman’s right to control her body is the foundation of her human rights; and the freedom of choice is the stimulus to safer, healthier and happier lives. One writer discloses her struggle to efficiently care for her eight children on her husband’s minimal income of $1.oo per day. Her failure to adequately nurture her eight children and ensure their normal development is created by her inability to work outside of the home to

On a hot July day in 1965, Gertrude Baniszewski was living on the edge. A once beautiful woman, she was worn out from parenthood and poverty. With practically no income, she had to raise seven children by ironing and

The early twentieth century was a turning point in American history-especially in regards to the acquisition of women's rights. While the era was considered to be prosperous and later thought to be a happy-go-lucky time, in actuality, it was a time of grave social conflict and human suffering (Parish, 110). Among those who endured much suffering were women. As Margaret Sanger found out, women, especially those who were poor, had no choice regarding pregnancy. The only way not to get pregnant was by not having sex- a choice that was almost always the husband's. This was even more true in the case of lower-class men for whom, 'sex was the poor man's only luxury' (Douglas, 31). As a nurse who assisted in delivering

Scheper-Hughes provides a controversial breakdown of the mothers' evident lack of concern to the death of their babies as not a repression of grief, but as a plan for endurance. The mothers, by allowing themselves to form attachment to only the babies who have already verified their capability to survive by doing so during early infancy, these women can increase the existence odds of their strongest children. Modern ideas about "mother love," and about mother-infant bonding as a naturally occurring process that in general occurs in the first few moments of a baby's life, are the cultural result of the statistical differences which allows women to give birth to just a few children, each of which she may be expecting to raise to adulthood.

However, when their mother came through the door and told them of a hungry family, the 4 women did not hesitate in giving away their luscious breakfast to those in need. The children delivered the food to the family and “a poor, bare, miserable room it was, with broken windows, no fire, ragged bedclothes, a sick mother, wailing baby, and a group of pale, hungry children cuddled under one old quilt, trying to keep warm”(24). The sisters realize what a harsh environment they live in, and because the setting is so pessimistic, they try to share the little wealth they have so that everyone may live long full lives. The setting in which they live, houses many people who have even less wealth than their own family. However, because of this dreadful place, they try and make sure that their community, or their family, is taken care of, even at the expense of their luxuries.

Regardless of one’s views on the topic of contraception, Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race helped to break new ground through encouraging women to take control of their bodies. Early in her writing, Sanger brings up overpopulation and how women’s primary role as mothers have contributed to this issue. “While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.” This artfully formed passage shows the passion behind Sanger’s beliefs. While on the surface it may seem that she is attacking women, the point of her idea is to frame the passive nature of women in Western Society up to this point.

In the context of classical Marxism, the moral permissibility of surrogate motherhood is forcefully negated. Marxism condemns the practice of surrogacy as an exemplification of commodity fetishism in capitalist society, viewing surrogacy arrangements as a commercialization of the female womb. The term, “commodification of the womb,” thus arises to describe the process by which services carried out by the female womb are sold and purchased on the market. Through such transactions, the surrogate’s body and the infant it produces are transformed from subjects to objects that have both exchange value and use value in their commodified state.

“There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below” (Morrison 163). Toni Morrison, in her novel A Mercy, suggests that women in 17th century American society were constantly subjugated as inferiors no matter their class or privilege. Although Rebekka and Widow Ealing were both privileged, white women, they still faced the societal pressures that harmed the mother-child relationships among the slaves – Lina, Florens, and Sorrow. Each chapter of A Mercy is told from a different character’s perspective, allowing readers to understand the similarities among the female characters’ standpoints during this time period. By depicting the tribulations of motherhood that extend beyond society’s narrow stereotype, Morrison exposes how societal pressures of the late 17th century America influenced the complexities of motherhood.