Margaret Sanger and Birth Control
Margaret Sanger was born in 1879 to parents Michael and Anne. Margaret’s mother died at age 49 after bearing 11 children. Supported by her two older sisters, Margaret attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, before enrolling in 1900 at White Plains Hospital to be a nurse probationer. In 1902, she married architect William Sanger and gave up her education.Though she was victim to a recurring and active tubercular disease, Margaret gave birth to three children, and eventually settled down in Westchester, New York.
A birth control pioneer, Margaret Sanger campaigned to provide different contraceptives to women, including contraception through pills, family planning’, and abortions. (Although not
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as publicly advocated for). Margaret became a coordinator for the IWW in 1912 and began to write a series of articles on female sexuality for a local socialist newspaper. She was tried in court for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914, and fearful of what would happen, she fled to Britain until she felt it was safe to return to the U.S. While Margaret was gone, countless women in the socialist party took up her cause. While in Europe, Margaret studied new forms of contraception which she would later bring back to the U.S. After returning to New York, Sanger started her own magazine, the Woman Rebel.
She hoped to challenge the obscenity statutes with this magazine, which celebrated the female body, control over one’s own body without the influence of the sexual demands of the husband, and the right to sexual expression. Women advocated for the right to say no to their husbands’ sexual demands, and the new birth control was an avenue through which sexual freedom was …show more content…
achieved. In 1916, Margaret violated the law yet again by opening the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn and was later arrested for handing out birth control without proper licensing and was put on trial. In 1918, the birth control movement celebrated a large advancement when Judge Frederick Crane of the New York Court of Appeals issued a ruling that allowed doctors to prescribe contraception.The publicity surrounding Margaret’s arrest and trial fueled birth control advocates across the United States. Margaret earned the support of numerous donors, who would provide her with funding and support for future endeavors. From then on, Margaret lectured in churches, homes, women's clubs, and more. She once gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. Eugenics After World War I, Margaret moved away from radical politics and founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL). The principles upon which the ABCL were built are: “We hold that children should be (1) Conceived in love; (2) Born of the mother's conscious desire; (3) And only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health.
Therefore we hold that every woman must possess the power and freedom to prevent conception except when these conditions can be satisfied.”
In 1922, Margaret traveled to China, Japan, and Korea. In China, it was observed that the primary method of ‘family planning’ was female infanticide. She later partnered with Pearl Buck to institute a family planning clinic in Shanghai. Margaret visited Japan multiple times, partnering with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue to promote birth control.
After World War I, Margaret appealed more and more to the societal necessity to limit births by those least able to afford children. She was an advocate of negative eugenics, which sought to improve human traits through social intervention by reducing the reproduction of those who were considered “unfit”. Margaret's eugenic policies included an exclusionary immigration policy, free access to birth control methods, and complete family planning for the able-minded. She also advocated for the mandatory segregation or sterilization for the "profoundly retarded". Sanger wrote, "We [do not] believe that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent
breeding."
Dorothy Wardell’s article titled “Margaret Sanger: Birth Control’s Successful Revolutionary” explains what inspired Sanger ideas on contraception and what problems she faced while working to change the notions and laws on Birth Control. The central argument presented by Wardell is that Sanger’s efforts led to privileges for women’s bodies and health centers providing methods for women to act on these privileges (Wardell, 736). Although Wardell is effective in supporting her argument, it would be stronger if she included some historical context and evidence of Sanger’s opinion in her own words found in a speech of hers and in Family Limitation. Wardell begins by addressing that “…a definitive biography and assessment has yet to be written.”,
Margaret Sanger was, at large, a birth control activist, but this speech was more about the questioning of birth control corrupting morality in women. People must remember, in the day and age where Sanger presented this speech, November 1921, women were considered very far from equal and much closer to servants or maids. In her speech, I saw that ethos was present in the sense that she gave herself credibility. Through Sanger’s detailed words and actions, and her statements including the presence of scientists and, or, professionals, the masses of listening people could infer that she was very well informed and solid in her statements. Though she presented herself as agreeable, Sanger was firm in her beliefs. In addition, Sanger says, “We desire to stop at its source the disease, poverty and feeble-mindedness and insanity which exist today, for these lower the standards of civilization and make for race deterioration. We know that the masses of people are growing wiser and are using their own minds to decide their individual conduct” (Sanger, par.15). To me, Sanger made herself appeal to the audience by using the word ‘we.’ In the practice of ethos, this focused on the author more than...
On September 14, 1879, Margaret Sanger was born in Corning, New York. She was the sixth child of eleven children and realized early what being part of a large family meant; just making due. Although her family was Roman Catholic both her mother and father were of Irish descent. Her mother, Anne Purcell had a sense of beauty that was expressed through and with flowers. Her father was an Irish born stonemason whose real religion was social radicalism. Her father was a free thinker and strong believer in eugenics which meant Margaret possessed some of the same values. (Sanger, Margaret) Eugenics is the belief that one race is better than a different race just because they are not like them, kind of like Hitler and the holocaust. “He expected me to be grown up at the age of ten.” (Source 4.3 page 30) Coming from a family of eleven children she did have to grow up fast. Faster than most kids should have to. She left her house as a teenager and came back when she needed to study nursing. It was during this time that Margaret worked as a maternity nurse helping in the delivery of babies to immigrant women. She saw illegal abortions, women being overwhelmed by poverty, to many children, and women dying because they had no knowledge of how to prevent one pregnancy after another. This reminded her of the fact that her own mother had eighteen pregnancies, eleven children, and died at the age of forty-nine. Margaret dropped out of school and moved in with her sister. She ended up teaching first grade children and absolutely hated it. She hated children at that time. When Margaret was a child herself however, she would dream about living on the hill where all the wealthy people lived. She would dream of playing tennis and wearing beautiful c...
them to have an identity that separates from their spouses. Birth control helped shift slightly the balance of power from only being masculine to shared between the sexes. Margaret did so much to bring the issue of birth control and its benefits in to the for fount in her time. Her writings and actions better the lives of women in America then, and today more then ever. Margaret Sanger wrote the woman "...must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility..." of her own body and "...the first step is Birth Control. Through Birth Control [the woman] will attain voluntary motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, [the woman] will cease to enslave herself…[the woman] will not stop at patching up the world; she will remake it" (Sanger A 36).
Margaret Sanger was the founder of The American League of Birth Control which later became Planned Parenthood and her argument in those times was that it was not fair for women who were from a lower class could not have access to Birth Control.
This essay will analyse whether the iconic representation of the roaring twenties with the woman's new right to sexuality, was a liberal step of progression within society or a capitalist venture to exploit a new viable market. Using Margaret Sanger's work in comparison with a survey conducted by New Girls for Old, the former a more mature look at the sexuality and ownership to a woman's body and the second a representation of girls coming of age in the sexually "free" roaring twenties. Margaret Sanger is known as "the mother of planned parenthood", and in the source she collates a collection of letters to speak of the sexual enslavement of motherhood through the fulfilment of the husbands desires. While Blanchard and Manasses of New Girls for Old suggests the historical consensus that the flapper is a figment compared to the reality where promiscuity was largely condemned.
The Roaring Twenties were known as a time of economic boom, pop culture and social developments. This was a time when women began to break norms, they acted rebelliously such as wearing releveling clothing, smoking, and drinking. These women were known as “flappers” who wanted to change their roles in the 1920’s. Birth control activist, Margaret Sanger sought to change the world where women had access to a low cost, effective contraception pill. In “The Morality of Birth Control” Sanger battled opponents who claimed that contraception would cause women to become immoral. The author uses rhetorical devices such as ethos, pathos, and fallacies to back up her claim while touching on issues in the church, advancements of women, and the source of disease in the world.
Margaret Sanger’s monthly publication The Woman Rebel released its first issue in 1914, creating a nationwide dispute concerning the publication and distribution of birth control devices. However, Sanger’s initial goal went beyond simply legalizing the distribution of contraceptives; her aim was to create “radical social change, embracing the liberation of women and of the working class” (6, 1.120). In document one, the essay “Why the Woman Rebel?” Sanger makes a strong political statement on the social implications of legalizing birth control. Drawing heavily from the plight of the working class Sanger makes her case on the grounds that the legalization of birth control is the first step to the liberation of the disenfranchised working class at the hands of capitalism. The essay is a rebellious prose intended to inspire “revolt”, a call to arms for the case for birth control. Later in Sanger’s care...
Sanger, one of the pioneers of modern birth control, founded Planned Parenthood which was an
The eugenics movement started in the early 1900s and was adopted by doctors and the general public during the 1920s. The movement aimed to create a better society through the monitoring of genetic traits through selective heredity. Over time, eugenics took on two different views. Supporters of positive eugenics believed in promoting childbearing by a class who was “genetically superior.” On the contrary, proponents of negative eugenics tried to monitor society’s flaws through the sterilization of the “inferior.”
Most cases of censorship have been driven by a fear of vice. Many early feminists who published pamphlets about methods of birth control were censored and their writing was rejected as sexually explicit. In 1914 a woman named Margaret Sanger started a pamphlet called “The Woman Rebel” which was an advocate of, and informer about birth control. Her pamphlet was suppressed by the United States Post office and deemed inappropriate. There has also be question about whether sexual expression should be treated the same as political or religious expression.
During the early 1900s, American nurse Margaret Sanger led the birth-control movement in the United States. She and others opened clinics to provide women with information and devices. Although frequently jailed, she and her followers were instrumental in getting laws changed. In subsequent years, laws against birth control gradually weakened, and more effective methods were developed.
n “I Resolved that Women should have knowledge of Contraception,” Margaret Sanger describes women’s desperate attempts to limit their family size by efforts such as drinking various herb-teas, inserting foreign objects into their uterus and even rolling down the stairs. Sanger also describes the reasons behind women’s desperate attempts to prevent or eliminate pregnancy, along with the story of her mother’s death; a major inspiration for her desire in the birth control movement. Women in the twentieth century were dominated by their husbands
She acquired some core principles such as,“Every person should decide when to have a child. Every child should be wanted and loved. Women deserve sexual pleasure and fulfillment” (Simpson). Birth control made a big impact in the world. It prevents women from having children unintentionally. Could you imagine a couple having a child and they not wanting it? As Margaret said, every child should be wanted and loved. On the more descriptive side of things, many people would like to have intercourse and not be worried of becoming pregnant. That is where birth control comes in. To help women in America,
"People and Events: The Pill and the Sexual Revolution." PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 12 May 2014.