Defiant nurse promoted women's health issues On the 100th anniversary of Einstein's miraculous year of 1905: Moments of genius and how they moved us forward.
By Adrienne Harrison Posted: December 30, 2005
Margaret Sanger was a dedicated, caring advocate of the human right of every woman to control her body - and thus her destiny. Her "aha moment" was her fervent belief in every woman's entitlement to decide if and when, to have a child; every child's right to be wanted, planned for, and loved; and the equal importance of sexual enjoyment and fulfillment for women as for men.
She was born Margaret Louise Higgins on Sept. 14, 1879, the sixth of 11 children of Irish part-time stonemason and free-thinker Michael Higgins and Anne Purcell Higgins in Corning, N.Y. Margaret nursed her mother, a tubercular woman worn out from the endless cycle of pregnancy (18 in all), childbearing, child-rearing, household duties, inadequate diet, and sickness - a fate common to many impoverished, overburdened women who frequently died far too young. Margaret saw firsthand the need for a better existence for families such as hers, and for women like her mother.
A year after her mother's death, Margaret began nurse's training at White Plains Hospital. While studying nursing at Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital, she met architect William Sanger. They were married in 1902. By 1912, they had three children, but suburban family life was not satisfying for her. They moved to New York, where she did childbirth nursing in the overcrowded tenements of Brownsville in the lower East Side. These desperate women begged her to tell them how to prevent pregnancies. Sanger saw their plight as a kind of servitude and resolved to lessen the burden.
On Nov. 17, 1912, Sanger published the first of her columns for the Social paper the New York Daily Call titled "What Every Girl Should Know." It was a column on women's health and sometimes touched on subjects such as menstruation and sexual feelings. In 1916, it would give rise to a book by the same title. This was the first time any such information had been printed in the United States since Congress, back in 1873, passed the powerful censorship law, the Comstock Act. Like many state laws, the act prohibited the dissemination of any data about sexual matters for any reason, by anyone, including doctors. When Comstock interfered with the publication of Sanger's subsequent articles, she decided to challenge the law in court.
Sanger began publishing her own monthly newspaper, the Woman Rebel, in March 1914, to support the use of contraception, thus launching the birth-control movement in the United States. (The phrase birth control first appeared in print in the Woman Rebel.) Comstock retaliated: The post office refused to mail her newspaper. Her work continued, including the pamphlet "Family Limitation," which described methods of birth control.
In August 1914, she was indicted on nine violations of the Comstock law and was scheduled to stand trial. Needing time to prepare her facts and rally support, she fled to Europe for a year and learned all she could about birth control there. After she returned home, the government dismissed her case due to the vast public outcry for her and her cause.
On Oct. 16, 1916, Sanger, her sister, Ethel, and a friend, opened America's first birth-control clinic, in Brownsville. Nine days later, all three were arrested. Sentenced to jail, Ethel courageously endured a 103-hour hunger strike to aid the cause. It roused national sympathy, and the governor's pardon saved her life. Sanger served 30 days in prison. It would be one of nine jail stays.
In January 1918, a judge ruled that doctors were allowed to offer birth-control advice to married women to protect their health. Sanger's challenges to New York state law brought forth widespread birth-control clinics - 55 in 23 cities by 1930. In January 1937, the U.S. government approved the mailing of contraceptive materials among medical personnel - thereby designating contraception a vital health issue.
In 1952, Sanger founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation and served as its first president until 1959. Although the Catholic Church interfered with and denounced her and her work, she persevered, crusading for her cause here and abroad.
At last, in 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed in Griswold v. Connecticut that no state law could prohibit birth-control clinics and access to contraceptive education, Only a few months later, in 1966, Sanger died.
Sanger's lifelong work helped extend equality and human rights to women everywhere, and although the reproductive revolution was one of the most important of the 20th century, what lay behind it - the insistence that women had rights equal to those of men, and deserved the fruits of democracy just as much as men did - was, if anything, even more revolutionary. She is one of the handful of people most directly responsible for the social progress of the last half century.
Adrienne Harrison is a freelance writer.
Adrienne Harrison lives and writes in Philadelphia. |
