Margaret Louise Higgins was born on September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York to Michael Hennessey Higgins and Anne Purcell Higgins. When her mother died from tuberculosis at the age of fifty, Margaret, the sixth of eleven children, pointed to her mother’s frequent pregnancies as the underlying cause of her premature death. With the help of her older sisters she attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute in 1896 and then entered the nursing program at White Plains Hospital in 1900.
In 1902, just months before completing the program she met and married architect William Sanger. Margaret and her husband had three children and the family settled in Hastings — a Westchester County suburb of New York City. Suburban life, however, did not satisfy the Sangers. By 1910 the family moved to New York City where the Sangers became immersed in the pre-war radical bohemian culture flourishing in Greenwich Village. There they joined a circle of intellectuals, activists, and artists.
Margaret’s work as a visiting nurse focused her interest in sex education and women’s health. In 1912 she began writing a column on sex education for the New York Call entitled “ What Every Girl Should Know.” This experience led to her first battle with censors who suppressed her column on venereal disease, deeming it “obscene”.
It was the issue of family size limitation that attracted Sanger’s attention as she worked in New York’s Lower East Side with poverty-stricken women suffering the pain of frequent childbirth, miscarriage and self-inflicted abortion. Shocked by the inability of most women to obtain accurate and effective birth control, which she believed was fundamental to securing freedom and independence for working women, Sanger began challenging the 1873 federal Comstock law and the various “little Comstock” state laws that banned the dissemination of contraceptive information.
In March 1914 Sanger published the first issue of The Woman Rebel, a radical feminist monthly that advocated militant feminism, including the right to practice birth control. For advocating the use of contraception, three issues of The Woman Rebel were banned, and in August 1914 Sanger was eventually indicted for violating postal obscenity laws. Unwilling to risk a lengthy imprisonment for breaking federal laws, Sanger jumped bail in October and, using the alias “Bertha Watson,” set sail for England. En route, she ordered friends to release 100,000 copies of Family Limitation, a 16-page pamphlet which provided explicit instructions on the use of a variety of contraceptive methods.
Sanger broadened her arguments for birth control claiming it would fulfill a critical psychological need by enabling women to fully enjoy sexual relations, free from the fear of pregnancy. In 1915 William Sanger was jailed for 30 days for distributing a copy of Family Limitation to an undercover postal agent. Shortly after, in October of that year, Margaret Sanger, keen to focus media attention on her trial and generate favorable public support, returned to New York to face The Woman Rebel charges. When her only daughter, five-year old Peggy died suddenly in November, sympathetic publicity convinced the government to drop Sanger’s prosecution. Denied the forum of a public trial, Sanger embarked on a nationwide tour to promote birth control. Arrested in several cities her confrontational style attracted even greater publicity for herself and the cause of birth control.
Although Margaret had been promoting woman-controlled contraceptives, such as suppositories or douches, a visit to a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915 convinced her that a new, more flexible diaphragm which was carefully fitted by medically trained staff was the most effective contraceptive device.
After returning from a national tour in 1916, Sanger opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. On October 24, 1916, after only nine days in operation, the clinic was raided, and Sanger and her staff were arrested. Sanger was convicted and spent thirty days in prison. The publicity surrounding the Brownsville Clinic also provided Sanger with a base of wealthy supporters from which she began to build an organized movement for birth control reform.
Her Birth Control Research Bureau (founded in New York in 1923 with the support of her wealthy new husband, J. Noah Slee) was the first doctor-staffed medical clinic in America and a model for the 300 others she helped establish. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League; accused of autocratic tactics, she resigned from its presidency in 1928, but it later merged with her Clinical Research Bureau into the organization that in 1942 became Planned Parenthood. Sanger founded a lobbying group (1929) that successfully sued to allow the mailing of contraceptive materials in the U.S. She was less active from the 1940s on, but in the 1950s she induced philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick to help fund development of a birth control pill, and in 1952 she helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
In 1929 Margaret formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control to lobby for birth control legislation that granted physicians the right to legally disseminate contraceptives. However, most doctors remained hostile to birth control. In addition, Sanger faced strenuous opposition from the Catholic Church. In the end her legislative campaigns and efforts to secure government support for birth control failed. Sanger did however, succeed in the courts.
In 1936 the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that physicians were exempt from the Comstock Law’s ban on the importation of birth control materials. This decision, in effect, gave doctors the right to prescribe or distribute contraceptives (though the ban on importing contraceptive devices for personal use was not lifted until 1971). By the late 1920’s, Sanger’s efforts to broaden support for birth control changed the movement’s focus away from radical feminism toward more conservative mainstream middle-class values.
Increasingly Sanger herself was viewed as too radical for the movement she had launched. In 1928 she angrily resigned as president of the American Birth Control League and as Sanger’s leadership in the movement was eclipsed by younger professionals with more mainstream agendas. With the merger of the American Birth Control League and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau into the Birth Control Federation of America in 1939 (later renamed Planned Parenthood Federation of America) Sanger’s role in the birth control movement became largely honorific.
Working with family planning leaders in Europe and Asia, she helped found the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1952 and served as its first president until 1959. At her retirement, the IPPF was the largest private international organization devoted to the promotion of family planning. Through all her work for birth control, Sanger was consistent in her search for simpler, less costly and more effective contraceptives. Not only did she help arrange for the American manufacture of the Dutch-based spring-form diaphragms she had been smuggling in from Europe, but in subsequent years she fostered a variety of research efforts to develop spermicidal jellies, foam powders, and hormonal contraceptives.
Finally in the 1950s, her role in helping to find critical research funding made possible the development of the first effective anovulant contraceptive — the birth control pill. The 1965 Supreme Court decision, Griswold vs. Connecticut made birth control legal for married couples. Only a few months later on September 6, 1966, Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement died in a Tucson nursing home at the age of 87.
A passionate opponent of racism, Sanger predicted in 1942 that the “Negro question” would be foremost on the country’s domestic agenda after World War II. Her accomplishments on behalf of the African-American community were unchallengeable during her lifetime and remain so today. In 1966 the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts… Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.”