Margaret
Higgens was born in Corning, New York, in 1883. Educated at Claverack
College, she became a trained nurse and married William Sanger, an
architect, in 1902. Over the next 12 years she devoted herself to
being a housewife and mother.
When
her three children were old enough to go to school she returned to
work as a public health nurse in the slums of New
York. Upset by the poverty she experienced as a nurse in New
York she founded a radical feminist magazine,
The Woman Rebel.
After
the death of a patient during childbirth Sanger decided to devote
her life to making reliable contraceptive information available to
women. She published the Birth Control Review
and persuaded Lou Rogers and Cornelia
Barns to be co-art editors of the journal. The magazine provided
advice on contraception and after meeting Marie
Stopes in England founded the American Birth Control League.
In 1921 Sanger, with the help of Kitty
Marion,
established America's first birth-control clinic. The clinic in Brooklyn
was closed by the police and Sanger was imprisoned for 30 days. She
continued her campaign and dissemination of birth control information
by doctors legalized in the United States in
1937.
Sanger,
a member of the Socialist Party, wrote
several books including What Every Mother
Should Know (1917), Motherhood
in Bondage (1928), My Fight for
Birth Control (1931) and Autobiography
(1938). Margaret Sanger died in 1966.
Cornelia Barns,
We Accuse Society,
Birth Control Review (December, 1917)
(1)
Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (1938)
My own motherhood was joyous, loving, happy. I wanted to
share these
joys with other women. Since the birth of my first child I had realized
the importance of spacing babies, but only a few months before had
I fully grasped the significant fact that a powerful law denied and
prevented mothers from obtaining knowledge to properly space their
families.
(2)
Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (1938)
During these years in New York more and more my calls began to
come from the Lower East Side, as though I were being magnetically
drawn there by some force outside my control. I hated the wretchedness
and hopelessness of the poor, and never experienced that satisfaction
in working
among them that so many noble women have found. My concern for my
patients was now quite different from my earlier hospital attitude.
I could see that much was wrong with them that did not appear in the
physiological or medical diagnosis. A woman in childbirth was not
merely a woman in childbirth. My expanded outlook included a view
other background, her potentialities as a human being, the kind of
children she was bearing, and what was going to happen to them.
As soon
as the neighbors learned that a nurse was in the building they came
in a friendly way to visit, often carrying fruit, jellies, or fish
made after a cherished recipe. It was infinitely pathetic to me that
they, so poor themselves, should bring me food. Later they drifted
in again with the excuse of getting the plate, and sat down for a
nice talk; there was no hurry. Always back of the little gift was
the question, "I am pregnant (or my daughter, or my sister is).
Tell me something to keep from having another baby. We cannot afford
another yet."
I tried
to explain the only two methods I had ever heard of among the middle
classes, both of which were invariably
brushed aside as unacceptable.. They were of no certain avail to the
wife because they placed the burden of responsibility solely upon
the husband - a burden which he seldom assumed. What she was seeking
was self-protection she could herself use, and there was none.
Pregnancy
was a chronic condition among the women of this class. Suggestions
as to what to do for a girl who was "in
trouble" or a married woman who was "caught" passed
from mouth to mouth - herb teas, turpentine, steaming, rolling downstairs,
inserting slippery elm, knitting needles, shoe-hooks.
(3)
It was the death of Sadie Sachs that convinced Margaret Sanger to
devote her life to making reliable contraceptive information available
to women. She
wrote about the death of this woman in her autobiography published
in 1938.
Then one stifling mid-July day of 1912 I was summoned to a Grand
Street tenement. My patient was a small, slight Russian Jewess, about
twenty-eight years old, of the special cast of feature to which suffering
lends a madonna-like expression. The cramped three-room apartment
was in a sorry state of turmoil. Jake Sachs, a truck driver scarcely
older
than his wife, had come home to find the three children crying and
her unconscious from the effects of a self-induced abortion. He had
called the nearest doctor, who in turn had sent for me. Jake's earnings
were trifling, and most of them had gone to keep the none-too-strong
children clean and properly fed. But his wife's ingenuity had helped
them to save a little, and this he was glad to spend on a nurse rather
than have her go to a hospital.
The doctor
and I settled ourselves to the task of fighting the septicemia. Never
had I worked so fast, never so concentratedly.
Jake was
more kind and thoughtful than many of the husbands I had encountered.
He loved his children, and had always helped his wife wash and dress
them. He had brought water up and carried garbage down before he left
in the morning, and did as much as he could for me while he anxiously
watched her progress.
After
a fortnight Mrs. Sachs' recovery was in sight. As I was preparing
to leave the fragile patient to take up her difficult life once more,
she finally voiced her fears, "Another baby will finish me, I
suppose?"
"It's
too early to talk about that," I temporized.
But when
the doctor came to make his last call, I drew him aside. "Mrs.
Sachs is terribly worried about having another baby."
"She
well may be," replied the doctor, and then he stood before her
and said, "Any more such capers, young woman, and there'll be
no need to send for me."
"I
know, doctor," she replied timidly, "but," and she
hesitated as though it took all her courage to say it, "what
can I do to prevent it?"
The doctor
was a kindly man, and he had worked hard to save her, but such incidents
had become so familiar to him
that he-had long since lost whatever delicacy he might once have had.
He laughed good-naturedly. "You want to have your cake and eat
it too, do you? Well, it can't be done."
Then picking
up his hat and bag to depart he said, "Tell Jake to sleep on
the roof."
I glanced
quickly to Mrs. Sachs. Even through my sudden tears I could see stamped
on her face an expression of absolute despair. We simply looked at
each other, saying no word until the door had closed behind the doctor.
Then she lifted her thin, blue-veined hands and clasped them beseechingly.
"He can't understand. He's only a man. But you do, don't you?
Please tell me the secret, and I'll never breathe it to a soul. Please!"
What was
I to do? I could not speak the conventionally comforting phrases which
would be of no comfort. Instead, I made her as physically easy as
I could and promised to come back in a few days to talk with her again.
Night
after night the wistful image of Mrs. Sachs appeared before me. I
made all sorts of excuses to myself for not going back. I was busy
on other cases; I really did not know what to say to her or how to
convince her of my own ignorance; I was helpless to avert such monstrous
atrocities. Time rolled by and I did nothing.
The telephone
rang one evening three months later, and Jake Sachs' agitated voice
begged me to come at once; his wife was sick again and from the same
cause. For a wild moment I thought of sending someone else, but actually,
of course, I hurried into my uniform, caught up my bag, and started
out. All the way I longed for a subway wreck, an explosion, anything
to keep me from having to enter that home again. But nothing happened,
even to delay me. I turned into the dingy doorway and climbed the
familiar stairs once more. The children were there, young little things.
Mrs. Sachs
was in a coma and died within ten minutes. I folded,her still hands
across her breast, remembering how they had pleaded with me, begging
so humbly for the knowledge which was her right. I drew a sheet over
her pallid face. Jake was sobbing, running his hands through his hair
and pulling it out like an insane person. Over and over again he wailed,
"My God! My God! My God!"
I left
him pacing desperately back and forth, and for hours I myself walked
and walked and walked through the hushed streets. When I finally arrived
home and let myself quietly in, all the household was sleeping. I
looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city. Its pains
and griefs crowded in upon me, a moving picture rolled before my eyes
with photographic clearness: women writhing in travail to bring forth
little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in
newspaper to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children with pinched,
pale, wrinkled faces, old in concentrated wretchedness, pushed into
gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small scrawny
hands scuttling through rags, making lamp shades, artificial flowers;
white coffins, black coffins, coffins, coffins interminably passing
in never-ending succession. The scenes piled one upon another on another.
I could bear it no longer.
As I stood
there the darkness faded. The sun came up and threw its reflection
over the house tops. It was the dawn of a
new day in my life also. The doubt and questioning, the experimenting
and trying, were now to be put behind me. I knew I could not go back
merely to keeping people alive.
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.
(4)
As editor of The Masses,
Floyd Dell gave Margaret Sanger
support in her campaign in favour of birth control.
Margaret Sanger had begun her work on behalf on women's freedom
from unwanted pregnancies; she renamed the prevention of conception
'birth control', and under that name it began to get attention in
the newspapers. The propaganda went on under the threatening shadow
of a federal statute, passed under the influence of that strange moral
monstrosity, Anthony Comstock, which classed such information as 'obscene'.
In New York City a woman police spy, pretending to be a wife desperately
in need of birth control information, got a pamphlet from William
Sanger, as he was arrested. The Masses published articles in
defence of him and of Margaret Sanger, and the magazine was immediately
flooded with thousands of letters from women, asking for information
about the methods of birth control, and giving the best as well as
the most heartbreaking reasons for needing such information.
(5)
In July 1915, the American birth-control campaigner, Margaret Sanger,
met Marie Stopes in London. She wrote about
their meeting in her book My Fight for Birth Control.
Marie Stopes was then writing a book, Married Love, which was
to deal with the plain facts of marriage. She expected it to "electrify"
England. She then explained to me that, owing to her previous unfortunate
marriage she had no experience in matters of contraception nor any
occasion to inform herself of their use. Could I tell her exactly
what methods were used? I replied that it would give me the greatest
pleasure to bring to her home such devices as I had in my possession.
Accordingly, we met again the following week for dinner in her home,
and inspected and discussed the French pessary which she stated she
then saw for the first time. I gave her my own pamphlets, all of which
contained contraceptive information.
(6)
Crystal Eastman, Birth Control
Review (January, 1918)
Whether other feminists would agree with me that the economic
is the fundamental aspect of feminism, I don't know. But on this we
are surely agreed, that Birth Control is an elementary essential in
all aspects of feminism. Whether we are the special followers of Alice
Paul, or Ruth Law, or Ellen Key, or Olive Schreiner, we must all be
followers of Margaret Sanger. Feminists are not nuns. That should
be established. We want to love and to be loved, and most of us want
children, one or two at least. But we want our love to be joyous and
free - not clouded with ignorance and fear. And we want our children
to be deliberately, eagerly called into being, when we are at our
best, not crowded upon us in times of poverty and weakness. We want
this precious sex knowledge not just for ourselves, the conscious
feminists; we want it for all the millions of unconscious feminists
that swarm the earth, - we want it for all women.
(7)
Margaret Sanger described why she joined the Socialist
Party in her autobiography published in 1938.
A religion without a name was spending over the country. The converts
were liberals, Socialists, anarchists, revolutionists of all shades.
They were fixed in their faith in the coming revolution as ever any
Primitive Christian in the immediate establishment of the Kingdom
of God. Some could even predict the exact date of its advent.
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