Margaret Sanger's 'The Woman Rebel'

In one of her most repeated speeches throughout the 1920’s, Margaret Sanger said, “More than ever in history, women need to realize that nothing can ever come to us from another. Everything we attain we must owe to ourselves. Our own spirit must vitalize it. Our own heart must feel it. For we are not passive machines. We are not to be lectured, guided, and molded this way or that. We are alive and intelligent, we women, no less than men, and we must awaken to the essential realization that we are living beings, endowed with will, choice, comprehension, and that every step in life must be our own initiative”. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Feminism is “ the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”.

Feminism holds the belief that men and women deserve equal rights and it surrounds the idea that women need a voice to fight for themselves in the patriarchal society they are surrounded in. Margaret Sanger was a feminist and was an important figure in American History because she fought for women to have the right to prevent unwanted pregnancies with what is now known as Birth Control.
On September 14, 1879 Margaret Higgins( later known as Margaret Sanger) was born in Corning, New York. She was the sixth of eleven children born into a once nuclear household. Growing up, Sanger was a very independent spirit who always fought for any injustice she felt. After an incident at school in her eighth grade year, Sanger was ready to quit school. Her older sisters resolved that Margaret should have more education and thereafter arranged with a Methodist school called Claverack where she would earn her board by waiting on tables and washing dishes. They knew that Margaret had dreams of attending Cornell University and they believed this school was the first step toward her reaching this goal. After spending a successful three years at Claverack, Sanger’s, mother became severely ill and passed soon after the severity of the illness prevented itself. After her mother’s death, the seventeen year old now held majority of her mother's responsibilities around the house. This was a very significant event that helped shape Sanger to be so strong and independent for the rest of her life.As time went on, Sanger made the crucial decsion to leave her family and begin nursing training for her road to medical school.She moved on to a new nursing school in White Plains, NY. There, She found that her most prominent challenge in training was maternity work. In her third year she was called out to night cases where she would bear the responsibility of delivering infants when the doctors were late or had not showed. According to author Emily Douglas, “ Some patients who had already had several children and miscarriages begged Margaret to tell them how to prevent another pregnancy. She had no idea.” Seeing these women suffer with agony at the thought of conceiving another unwanted child spurred something in Sanger that would drive her future. She wanted to give these women a choice. In 1902, Margaret married William Sanger, an architect, and eventually had three children with him. Living in the suburbs presented some limitations for Sanger. It created a feeling as though life was passing her by and that they had “drifted into a swamp”. She wanted to help shape events in the outside world and had a strong desire to contribute to society in some way. So, she eventually pushed for the couple to move into the city of Manhattan.
The city brought a heap of opportunity in Sanger’s eyes. Sanger began her campaign to educate women in a newspaper series titled, “What Every Girl Should Know”. This series served as an introduction for adolescents to the subject of sex. Concurrently, Sanger continued practicing majority of her nursing skills on the lower East Side of New York. At that time majority of residing citizens in the area were poor immigrants. There she was faced with tragic stories of in-home abortions ending with terrible infections, long term physical consequences and even death. These women were obsessed by their need to prevent another pregnancy and begged Sanger for a solution for what seemed to be a terrible life sentence. There was a considerable amount of women who were desperate enough to try to self terminate their pregnancies by rolling themselves down stairs, and even inserting knitting needles into their bodies. It came to Sanger’s attention that France had a consistent decline in birth rates for three generations: France. Sanger decided that it would be a good investment to take the family to France temporarily for some investigation. Sanger found that French wives had created their own protection using homemade devices and formulas including tampons, douche’s amongst other things. However, it was not these women’s new found protection that had greatly affected the birth rate. Rather it was their husbands seeing an economic motive for doing so. Napoleon created a legal code that stated a man’s children share equally in his estate. This new code was reversal of the old which sought all priority in the eldest son and for the first time men “saw an advantage in contraception”. After fourteen months of investigating, Sanger returned to the U.S. ready to share her new found knowledge.
Upon her return, Sanger started a feminist journal titled, The Woman Rebel.

Her goals for this publication were to share the freely used safe methods used to prevent pregnancies in France.This radical publication covered topics from child labor to social hygiene and stressed the importance of women empowerment. Thousands of letters from labor wives proved to be filled with gratitude of the publications and Sanger could she that she was changing lives. It was through The Woman Rebel that Sanger found a name for her movement: birth control. Sanger defied the postal authorities that tried to silence her freedom of press by writing yet another radical series in a form of a sixteen page pamphlet she titled, Family Limitation. This pamphlet contained detailed descriptions and advice on how to prevent pregnancy in a safe way for American women. Unfortunately, Sanger had to flee the U.S. to avoid imprisonment for violating postal obscenity laws. Before leaving, Sanger wrote a letter entitled “Letters to the readers of the Woman rebel” in which she said, “ My work in the nursing field. . . that the workers desire the knowledge of the prevention of conception. . . [they] are suffering because of the law which forbids the imparting of information. To wait for this law to be repealed would be years and years hence.Thousands of unwanted children may be brought into the world in the meantime, thousands of women made miserable and unhappy. Why should we

wait?”.
After spending about a year in England, Sanger returned when the charges were dropped and continued to fight and spread awareness for her cause. By 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States.There she and her staff provided information about contraception and introduced women to diaphragms. In England she found this system which involves a shallow dome shaped cup used to cover the cervix by way of entering through the vagina. Consequently, Sanger and her entire staff were arrested nine days after opening for fitting women for these devices. After appealing her conviction of her 30 day sentence in jail,the court ruled in her favor. In Summary it made an exception to the existing law by allowing medical practitioners to grant their female patients contraception for medical reasons under their discretion.
Margaret Sanger impacted America in a great way.

She was the trailblazer in fighting for women's rights to have a choice for their families. Sanger gave women a voice in their own household and endured many obstacles along the way to do so. In 1921 she established the American Birth Control League which has evolved to today’s Planned Parenthood. Without her, I fear that it would have taken much longer for something like this to spark. Sanger though outside the box and was willing to be ridiculed because she had passion for what she was fighting for. Her consistency, perseverance, and genuine work ethic made her a very successful leader in her time. What makes her so inspiring is that not only did she want to change the lives of suffering women in the U.S., she wanted to change the lives of women globally. She used her drive to reach out to several countries through means of international conferences in Asia and Europe. It is because of her that India began its birth control movement for themselves. Margaret Sanger touched lives and truly impacted the world in a positive way. What is truly amazing about her

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