Woman Crush Wednesday: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger is one of the most influential women in the history of women’s reproductive rights in the United States. As the middle child of a family with eleven children, Margaret saw, first hand, the toll that too many pregnancies can have on a woman’s body. Her mother died at the young age of 50 from tuberculosis, because her body had been worn down from birthing eleven children and going through seven miscarriages. Soon after her mother’s death, Margaret left her family home and attended nursing school in the Catskills in 1896. She completed her education in 1902, and soon after married her first husband, William Sanger. They moved to Hastings, NY and had three children. 

In 1910 the family moved to New York City where Margaret found work as a visiting nurse to families on the Lower East Side. In the homes of these immigrant families, she saw a lot of women going through the same hardships her mother did, as they were having multiple unwanted or unplanned pregnancies that were deteriorating their bodies. Many of these women would ask her to tell them “the secret” of how to make it stop. Seeing the desperation in these women made Sanger realize that the ability to control one’s family size was necessary to end the cycle of women’s poverty and allow them to have control of their body and families. The obstacle she was running into was that it was illegal to distribute obscene materials under the Comstock Law, which at the time included information about contraception and birth control methods. During her days of caring for these families, she was becoming more involved with various progressive era activists and activities. She became a member of the Women’s committee of the New York chapter of the Socialist Party and participated in women’s labor protests and strikes. 

Sanger eventually had enough of the government censorship and in 1914 she started her own feminist publication called The Woman Rebel, which openly advocated the use of birth control. Soon after the initial publication, she was charged with violating Comstock Law and she fled to England for a year until her trial. Meanwhile, in her absence, she had her friends continue to pass out flyers she had written about contraceptive methods. Around this time she also divorced her first husband. 

A year later she returned to the United States for her trial, and tragically around the same time her five year old daughter passed away, which caused a lot of public pressure on the courts and they dropped the charges against her.

Only a few years later, Sanger opened up her first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Within a week of opening the clinic, she was arrested and put in jail for 30 days. Again this caught press attention, as well as the attention of several affluent individuals who supported her and her cause. Although the appeal for her conviction was unsuccessful, the courts did rule that physicians could prescribe contraceptives to women for medical reasons. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League which quickly gained support from social workers, medical professionals and the public, as it advocated for birth control methods for families and women. The loophole from her trial allowed Sanger to repon her clinic in 1923. She staffed it full of female doctors and social workers. This same clinic would later serve as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. 

During this time she remarried to her second husband, James Noah Slow and continued her advocacy work. In 1929 she formed yet another group named the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, which was formed to lobby congress for legislation that allowed doctors to prescribe birth control to all women who wanted it. Although she faced a lot of resistance from both the medical community and the catholic church throughout her career, her work eventually led to the legalization and widespread use of contraceptives in the United States. 

In 1942 Sanger retired and moved to Arizona, but her passion for the cause never died. So, during the 1950s she teamed up with Gregory Pincus to develop the oral contraceptive. At the time they had other more expensive and awkward forms of birth control, but her desire was to create something “as easy as taking an aspirin”. Their research was funded by Katharine McCormick and was approved by the FDA in 1960. She later died in 1966 at the age of 86. 

Margaret Sanger is a hero and has positively impacted so many women and families. Her work has allowed women to have a right to choose when to start their families, has helped countless women gain financial freedom from poverty and has helped others with medical conditions that can be controlled through an oral contraceptive. Sanger’s legacy lives on today and her spirit and passion will never be forgotten.

If you would like to learn more about Margaret Sanger, our information was sourced from National Women’s History Museum and PBS