Margaret Sanger And Women's Rights

Margaret Sanger was a controversial and historical nurse. She lived during a time of revolutionary change when the women’s rights movement was in full motion. Born in 1879, to a large impoverished family, she was the sixth of eleven children. Sanger was part of a family of devoted Catholics. During that time it was a common practice for women to birth as many children as possible. As a result, she was a witness to the effects of diseases, miscarriages, and multiple pregnancies that eventually led to her mother’s premature death. This had a significant impact on her ideologies. She eventually became known for advocating women’s reproductive rights and founding what is now known as Planned Parenthood.

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.

Thesis: Margaret Sanger changed the world by rallying for the availability and use of contraceptives for all women.

Sanger made huge changes in how the society viewed women at that time period. She was influential to women who felt like their life revolved around giving birth only. She also gave many women birth control options which allowed them the freedom of sexuality in everyday life. Sanger advocated and fought for women 's rights throughout her life. Her determination and hard work gave women social rights, which later led to their right to control their own body through birth control.She advocated repeatedly that without birth control women will never be free (Sanger).

In the 1910s, Margaret Sanger, a woman’s rights activist, began to publish articles about birth control, finding National Birth Control League (NBCL). She opened a birth control clinic in New York in the year of 1916. The

Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement highlighted a variety of important issues. These issues include women’s right to make decisions privately versus the right of a community to regulate moral behavior; the ethnic demographics of the American people; the ability of women to control their own physical destinies by limiting family size; and the idea that small families were the way to keep the American dream alive. The debate over birth control spoke to personal and political issues, which poses the question: Was birth control merely a matter of individual choice, or was it about power, wealth, opportunity and similar issues? Birth control was not merely a technique to expand the realm of personal freedom; it grew out of a radical

Margaret Sanger was, at large, a birth control activist, but this speech was more about the questioning of birth control corrupting morality in women. People must remember, in the day and age

"A free race cannot be born" and no woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother"(Sanger A 35). Margaret Sanger (1870-1966)said this in one of her many controversial papers. The name of Margaret Sanger and the issue of birth control have virtually become synonymous. Birth control and the work of Sanger have done a great deal to change the role of woman in society, relationships between men and woman, and the family. The development and spread of knowledge of birth control gave women sexual freedom for the first time, gave them an individual

     Although she had met her goal of legalizing birth control, Margaret Sanger still desired to assist women who were already pregnant but didn’t wish to keep the child. After returning from a national tour in 1916, Sanger opened the nation's first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn (Katz 1). This, however, was a minor advancement considering that the clinic was raided in its first nine days of operation and she was taken to prison. The

Sanger made huge changes in how the society viewed women at that time period. She was influential to women who felt like their life revolved around giving birth only. She also gave many women birth control options which allowed them the freedom of sexuality in everyday life. Sanger advocated and fought for women's rights throughout her life. Her determination and hard work gave women social rights, which later led to their right to control their own body through birth control.She advocated repeatedly that without birth control women will never be free (Sanger).

Many also believed it was the man’s decision as to how many children his wife should have. Sanger continued her quest opening a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, in 1916; one year later, the authorities arrested her for giving contraceptives to immigrant women (Bowles, 2011). At first glance it appears that Sanger had good intentions. “Others criticized her for involvement with eugenics, which was a scientific movement in which its practitioners advocated the notion that all mental and physical "abnormalities" were linked to hereditary and, with selective breeding, could be eliminated. They questioned whether or not Sanger's insistence on birth control and abortion was in fact a way to limit the growth of ethnic populations” (Bowles, 2011). “Of course, her activism put her directly at odds with law-enforcement officials and the Catholic Church, but little discussed is the actual extent to which her early Marxism guided much of what she managed to achieve. Her good friends included ultra-radicals like John Reed and Emma Goldman, and the truth is that Margaret’s feminism, and her support for eugenic ‘sexual science’, were both simply part-and-parcel of her own unique Marxist vision. Humanitarianism, per se, had little to do with what motivated Margaret Sanger” (Spooner, 2005). Sanger’s actions and motivations are a controversial topic that have been analyzed and debated for years. “According to her New York Times obituary,

In Sanger’s autobiography she recalled the death of one woman in 1912 that made her want to change the destiny for mothers. While in New York, Sanger attended speaking events over issues happening in America and she was interested in Emma Goldman’s speech over the issue of birth control (Margaret Higgins Sanger). When she started the Birth Control Review she was saddened by the stories of women in agony on having pregnancies that hurt their health, not being able to prevent childbirth, and having to raise children in poverty. Moreover, women begged Sanger to learn more about the prevention of pregnancies and safe ways to have sexual intercourse (Margaret Louise Sanger). With this being said, Margaret Sanger started a campaign to educate women about sex in 1912 in What Every Girl Should Know. Sanger began treating women who had undergone illegal abortions and women who tried to self-terminate their own pregnancy. Later on, Sanger fled to England to learn more about birth control and make birth control available to women

Jean H. Baker’s book, Margaret Sanger: A life of Passion, tells the evolution of Maggie Higgins, a child born to a catholic mother and a rebellious father in Corning, New York, to Margaret Sanger, pioneer of women's reproductive rights and strong advocate for birth control across America. This book would be of interest to anyone who wishes to learn about the origins of birth control and its effects on the ongoing controversy surrounding women's reproductive rights. Those who wish to know more about Sanger's personal and family life would also greatly enjoy this book. This book was written with the intent to inform people about Margaret Sanger and her life from start to finish.

She began reaching out to women and published her first article What Every Girl Should Know in the monthly newspaper The Call (Sanger). Her article had information on female sexual and reproductive health, which was both surprised many women who read it. Her article was very valuable to women who seeked to understand how their body works. Although many women liked it, it was immediately censored by the newspaper, due to her violation of the Comstock laws. Sanger, refusing to give up, started her own newspaper in 1914 called The Woman Rebel. Her newspaper had information about health education, and outright defied the Comstock laws (Planned Parenthood). Despite the federal government's warnings and the majority of society's disapproval, she still published in order to provide women with information about family planning and reproduction. Her writings sparked the beginnings of the birth control movement, and she was the main leader. Although she had good intentions and there were hopeful reactions, the majority of the people disliked her methods of confrontation and law breaking (Planned Parenthood). But Sanger knew she had to break the law in order to grab the attention of the people and get what she wanted. Over the course of the next few months Sanger sold pamphlets, formed alliances, and toured around the United

In order to break free from the shackles of predestined breeding, Sanger suggests that women “assert their right to voluntary motherhood.” Through thinking on their own, women can be in command of their own bodies and in turn determine how to live their lives. While this may seem absurd to a modern mind, this was truly innovative and dangerous for Sanger to suggest. She was challenging traditions that dated back hundreds of years. “Even as birth control is the means by