Woman of Valor:
Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America
By Ellen Chesler
Simon & Schuster, 639 pages, $27.50
Quick, when did the following headline appear? ”Birth Control Chapter Too Hot for Feds` Book.” No, not during the repressive early decades of this century-though it could have been then-or even during the continuously provocative sexual revolution of the 1960s. I came across that headline just a couple of weeks ago, on the very morning that I began reading Ellen Chesler`s important new work, ”Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.” Had I tried, I could not have found more convincing proof of the timeliness of Chesler`s absorbing, comprehensive biography.
Sanger, Chesler reminds us, was creating headlines-and being arrested-as early as 1914 for daring to publish articles and pamphlets containing the most rudimentary facts about contraception and the prevention of veneral disease. And we still have much to learn from this woman who, more than any other, served as crusader, lobbyist, and public educator for birth control.
In Chesler`s view, Sanger is a heroine-the woman who ”dedicated herself to the deceptively simple proposition that access to a safe and reliable means of preventing pregnancy is a necessary condition of women`s liberation and, in turn, of human progress.” At the same time, Chesler`s painstakingly detailed research lends an authoritative objectivity to her assessment of her subject`s life. The fascinating portrait that Chesler ultimately paints is that of an often charming, always powerful but not always entirely likeable human being who, through sheer personal force and conviction, became a driving figure in our social history.
Born Margaret Higgins in Corning, N.Y. in 1879, Sanger was the sixth of 11 children. Her father, Michael Higgins, was a social idealist and a political rebel whose outspoken beliefs would set the stage for the iconoclastic reformer his daughter Margaret eventually would become.
But Michael Higgins was also a drinker and a dreamer, a fatal combination when it came to holding down a job that would pay the family bills. As a result, from an early age the oldest children had to help support the always growing family.
When Sanger`s mother died at age 50, the victim of tuberculosis, Sanger came to believe that the true source of her mother`s chronic poor health was too many children and too much work in an increasingly impoverished household. Indeed, some years later, Sanger dedicated her first book on the issue of birth control to her mother`s memory.
Just 19 at her mother`s death, Sanger began training as a nurse, married a man in many ways like her idealistic and impecunious father and had three children in quick succession. Thus she found herself, not unlike her mother, in a marriage where family size exceeded family income.
To support her own family, Sanger began working as nurse in the slums of New York. There, countless women begged for information that would help them limit the continued growth of already indigent families they had no money to feed or clothe. Public ignorance was rampant, yet medical resistance and restrictive laws prohibited the dissemination of the most basic information, and many women perceived no choice but illegal abortion, which all too often led to the death of the pregnant woman.
Horrified by these needless deaths, and remembering her own mother`s fate, Sanger took up the cause of birth control. Already active in socialist circles, Sanger initially learned to publicize her cause from such political pros as anarchist Emma Goldman and radical labor leader ”Big Bill” Haywood, and before long she was as notorious as her mentors.
If the federal government still attempts to suppress birth control information in 1992, imagine the uproar in the years just before World War I when Sanger began publishing articles first in socialist newspapers and then her own journal called, appropriately enough, The Woman Rebel. Sanger was arrested and went on trial several times, but the public outcry became so great, and her personal appeal was such, that each arrest served to gain more respectability for her cause and more personal prominence for herself.
Sanger went on to found and raise funds for an ever-growing number of store-front clinics dedicated to treating women and passing on information about family planning. By the early 1920s, she had organized the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Well into the 1940s she lobbied both the government and the American Medical Association to first legalize, then expand the legitimate sale and prescription of contraceptives. Toward the end of her life, in the 1950s, Sanger helped find funding for the development and research of the birth control pill. She died in 1966.
A persistent and outspoken reformer in her public life, Sanger was no less controversial in her personal life. Dissatisfied with the restraints of conventional marriage, she engaged in a series of long-lived extramarital love affairs with such prominent men as author H.G. Wells and sexologist Havelock Ellis. Even after her first marriage ended in divorce partly as a result of her infidelities, she had no hesitation in continuing these and other affairs throughout her second marriage-a marriage of convenience to a dull but adoring man who just happened to be a millionaire willing to fund her social causes.
Further, when Sanger found herself torn between the call of her work and her maternal responsibilities, typically her work won out. After her first arrest in 1914, for instance, Sanger decided to flee the United States for Europe, leaving her children behind with her husband for a full year. In explanation she wrote her 5-year old daughter Peggy, ”work is to be done dear-work to make your path easier-and those who come after you.” But Peggy died suddenly, within days of Sanger`s return to New York, and Sanger`s relationship with her surviving children remained problematic from then on. She was, Chesler writes, a mother who ”lavished her exuberance on other people and causes but never found enough time” for her two sons.
Contradictions were rampant in other areas, too. ”She embraced wealth and privilege,” Chesler notes, ”but continued her discreet support of radical friends and their causes. . . . Publicly, she identified herself with the increasingly rationalized world of science and medicine, but privately she maintained a fascination with the spiritual and the occult.” And despite her dedication to social ideals, Sanger was known to voice her support on occasion for a variety of loathsome eugenic ideas.
Margaret Sanger was indeed a heroine, but she was hardly a saint. And as this brilliant biography shows, her complex legacy will remain with us for some time to come.
