Margaret Sanger coined a campaign around two words: birth control
In 1914 it was a federal offence in the United States even to mail information about contraception. Margaret Sanger broke that law on purpose, was arrested eight times, and popularised the blunt phrase birth control. She went on to found Planned Parenthood and to find the money behind the first contraceptive pill.
Sanger was born Margaret Higgins on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, to Irish Catholic immigrants. Her father, a stonecutter, was a freethinker and socialist. Her mother conceived 18 times in 22 years, bore 11 living children and died at 50, when Margaret was 19. Trained as a nurse at White Plains Hospital, she married the architect William Sanger in 1902 and, after a fire destroyed their suburban home in 1911, moved to New York, mixing with Greenwich Village radicals such as Emma Goldman and joining textile strikes.
Nursing in the tenements of the East Side, she met immigrant mothers worn out by repeated pregnancies and dangerous attempts to end them. The Comstock Act, a federal obscenity law, banned mailing contraceptives or even facts about them, and in 1913 she searched public libraries for guidance and found nothing. Her monthly newsletter The Woman Rebel, launched in 1914 under the slogan No Gods, No Masters, was designed to provoke; postal officials seized five of its seven issues, and in August she was arrested. Her pamphlet Family Limitation, printed secretly at night, ran to 18 editions and a dozen languages.
She fled to England on a forged passport, where Havelock Ellis and British Malthusians shaped her thinking, then came home in 1915 to face trial. Weeks before it, her five-year-old daughter Peggy died of pneumonia. Sanger refused a plea bargain, and the prosecutor dropped the charges rather than make her a martyr. Having seen diaphragms at a Dutch clinic, she began importing them in defiance of the law.
Her record is contested. She championed women's right to decide when to have children, discouraged abortion, which her clinics never provided in her lifetime, and also embraced eugenics, arguing birth control would reduce the number of people she deemed unfit. Court cases stemming from her activism, including Griswold v. Connecticut, legalised contraception. In the early 1950s she persuaded donors to fund Gregory Pincus's work on the pill. She died in Arizona in 1966.
Source: Margaret Sanger
