Margaret Sanger

Sanger's parents were Irish Catholics who separately emigrated from Ireland. Her father, Michael Hennessey Higgins, immigrated to Canada with his family, then moved to the U.S. at the age of 14, and joined the Union army in the Civil War as a drummer at 15. Upon leaving the army, he studied medicine and phrenology but ultimately became a stonecutter. Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, immigrated to the U.S. with her family during the Great Famine. Anne and Michael were married in 1869. Sanger was born Margaret Louise Higgins September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York. She spent her early years in a bustling household, under the influence of her father, who was a free-thinker, a socialist, and an agnostic. In 22 years, Anne Higgins conceived 18 times, and gave birth to 11 live babies. She died at the age of 50, when Margaret was 19 years old. With financial help from two elder sisters, Margaret Higgins attended the Hudson River Institute at Claverack College from 1896 to 1900, then nursing school at White Plains Hospital from 1900 to 1902. After graduating as a nurse, she married architect William Sanger in 1902. Although she suffered from tuberculosis, she settled down to a quiet life in Hastings-on-Hudson and had three children. == Beginning of activism and The Woman Rebel ==

In 1911, after a fire destroyed their home, the Sangers abandoned the suburbs for a new life in New York City. Margaret Sanger worked as a nurse, making house calls in the slums of the East Side, while her husband worked as an architect and artist. The couple socialized with the bohemian community of Greenwich Village, including local intellectuals, left-wing artists, socialists, and social activists, such as John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman. Sanger and her husband embraced socialism; Margaret joined the Women's Committee of the Socialist Party of New York and took part in the labor actions of the Industrial Workers of the World, including the 1912 Lawrence textile strike and the 1913 Paterson silk strike. Working as a nurse, Sanger visited many working-class immigrant women in their homes; many of them underwent frequent childbirth, miscarriages, and self-induced abortions. Availability of contraceptive information was limited, due to the Comstock Act, a federal anti-obscenity law which prohibitedamong other thingsmailing contraceptives, or even information about contraception. In 1913, Sanger visited public libraries, searching for publications that instructed women how to avoid conception, but she found none. The hardships women faced were epitomized in a story that Sanger often recounted in her speeches: while working as a nurse, she was called to the apartment of a woman, "Sadie Sachs", who had a severe sepsis infection due to a self-induced abortion. Sadie begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again. The doctor laughed and said "You want your cake while you eat it too, do you? Well it can't be done. I'll tell you the only sure thing to do .... Tell Jake to sleep on the roof ." A few months later, Sanger was called back to Sadie's apartment and found that Sadie had attempted yet another self-induced abortion; she died shortly after Sanger arrived. Sanger would sometimes end the story by saying, "I threw my nursing bag in the corner and announced ... that I would never take another case until I had made it possible for working women in America to have the knowledge to control birth." The Sadie Sachs episode was described by Sanger as the origin of her commitment to spare women from dangerous and illegal abortions. Sanger opposed abortion, not on religious grounds, but as a societal ill and public health danger, which would disappear, she believed, if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Searching for a way to share her ideas with the public, she wrote two columns for the New York Call socialist magazine: What Every Mother Should Know (1911–12) and What Every Girl Should Know (1912–13). The columns gave advice to women and girls on love, masturbation, and sex; and emphasized the distinction between sex and love. By the standards of the day, Sanger's articles were extremely frank in their discussion of sexuality, and many New York Call readers were outraged by them. Other readers, however, praised the series for its integrity and candor. Both series were later published in book form. Sanger's political interests, her emerging feminism, and her nursing experience led her to believe that only by liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. In 1914, she undertook a decades-long campaign to free women, starting with The Woman Rebel, an eight-page monthly newsletter that used the slogan "No Gods, No Masters." The newsletter contained articles about a variety of progressive subjects, including contraception, and was designed to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information through confrontation. Seven issues of The Woman Rebel were published, from March to September, 1914. The Woman Rebel helped popularize the term "birth control", which was selected by Sanger and fellow activists as a more candid alternative to euphemisms then in use, such as "family limitation". Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and their divorce was finalized in 1921. ==Year as an outlaw==

. Sanger's first obstacle to educating women about contraception was the Comstock Act, which banned dissemination of information about contraception. Her strategy was to deliberately violate the Act, hoping that the confrontation would eventually lead to amendment of the law. Throughout 1914, she attempted to mail copies of the monthly The Woman Rebel newsletter. This was meant to be provocative, rather than effective, as most copies of The Woman Rebel were distributed by a network of activists, not mailed. Postal authorities intercepted five of its seven issues, but Sanger continued publication. In August that year, Sanger was finally arrested for sending The Woman Rebel through the postal system. While awaiting trial, she wrote a 16-page pamphlet, Family Limitation, which detailed several contraceptive methods, discussed marriage and sex, and chided husbands whoafter sex fell asleep without bringing their wife to a climax. Fearing arrest, several printers refused to print the pamphlet; she finally found a socialist printer willing to undertake the job, and he resorted to printing it secretly, at night. The pamphlet was very popular: 100,000 copies were printed of its first edition, it went through 18 editions, and it was translated into a dozen languages. Facing imprisonment if she went to trial, she fled to Canada, where fellow activists forged a passport that permitted her to sail to England in early November. Sanger spent most of her self-imposed exile in England, where contact with British Malthusianssuch as Charles Vickery Drysdale and Bessie Drysdale helped refine her socioeconomic justifications for birth control. She shared the concern of Malthusians that overpopulation led to poverty, famine, and war. She returned to Europe in 1922 to attend the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian Conferencewhere she became the first woman to chair a session; and she organized the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth-Control Conference that took place in New York in 1925. Overpopulation would remain a concern of hers for the rest of her life. During her stay in England, she was profoundly influenced by British physician Havelock Ellisauthor of the multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Under his tutelage, she expanded her birth control strategy to incorporate the additional benefit of stress-free, enjoyable sex; and came to adopt his view of sexuality as a powerful, liberating force. While abroad, Sanger met with several Spanish anarchists, including activist Lorenzo Portet, with whom she had a passionate affair. News reports from America signaled to Sanger that support for birth control was increasing, so she returned from England in October 1915 to face trial. Shortly before the December trial, her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died of pneumonia she caught while at a boarding school. Sanger was offered a plea bargain, but refused, because she wanted to use the trial as a forum to advocate for the right of women to control their own bodies. The prosecutor dropped the charges because he did not want to turn Sanger into a martyr. ==The start of a movement ==

, on the steps of a New York courthouse during a trial in 1917. Some European countries had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States. When Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she encountered 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 due to the Comstock Act, so Sanger and others began importing them from Europe, in defiance of United States law. On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinicthe first in the United Statesin the Brownsville neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York City. She was unable to find a physician to join the staff, so she turned to her sister, Ethel Byrne (a nurse), to fill the medical role. Nine days after the clinic opened, Sanger was arrested for giving a birth control pamphlet to an undercover policewoman. After she bailed out of jail, she continued assisting women in the clinic until the police arrested her a second time. Sanger and her sister were charged with distributing contraceptives in violation of New York state law. They went to trial on 29 January 1917. Byrne was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse, where she went on a hunger strike. She was force-fed, the first woman hunger striker in the U.S. to be so treated. After ten dayswhen Sanger pledged that Byrne would never break the lawher sister was pardoned. Sanger was offered a more lenient sentence if she promised not to break the law again, but she refused and said: "I cannot respect the law as it exists today." Against the wishes of her attorney, she chose a thirty-day sentence in a workhouse, rather than a $5,000 fine. The publicity surrounding Sanger's arrest, trial, and appeal sparked birth control activism across the United States, and generated momentum for the birth control movement. In February 1917, Sanger began publishing the periodical Birth Control Review, serving as its editor until 1929. The magazine was published monthly until 1940. In her 1920 book Woman and the New Race, Sanger framed her fight for birth control in the context of history, psychology, and feminism. She wrote that male-dominated institutions, such as the church and state, have prohibited birth control throughout historyleading women to have too many children, too closely spaced. This, in turn, was a direct cause of mental distress and social pathology, and prevented women from full expression of their "feminine spirit". Sanger asserted that women have always fought back against this oppression through secretive use of abortion, contraception, or infanticide. She believed that these efforts to limit family size were a manifestation of women's desire for freedom, writing: Sanger had a long-term, though infrequent, love affair with the novelist H. G. Wells from 1920 until his death in 1946. In 1922, she married her second husband, businessman James Noah H. Slee. ==Organizing==

sold copies of Birth Control Review on the streets of New York for 13 years. After World War I, Sanger continued to be frustrated by the inverted priorities of charities: they provided free obstetric and post-birth care to indigent women, yet failed to offer birth control or assistance in raising the children. She wrote: "The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid ... her eighth." Sanger saw a societal need to limit births by those least able to afford children: the affluent and educated already limited their childbearing, yet the poor and uneducated lacked access to contraception and information about birth control. Support from wealthy donors in the early 1920s enabled Sanger to expand her reach beyond local, small-scale activism, and allowed her to organize the American Birth Control League (ABCL). The clinic received extensive funding from John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family, who continued to make anonymous donations to Sanger's causes in subsequent decades.