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Margaret Sanger
1879–1966 · 87 years Tier II
A nurse who counted her mother's 18 pregnancies and drew a conclusion
Michael Hennessey Higgins joined the Union army as a drummer at 15, studied medicine and phrenology afterward, and settled into cutting stone in Corning, New York, where he raised his children on socialism and unbelief. His wife Anne conceived 18 times in 22 years, delivered 11 living children, and died at 50 — Sanger wrote 48 in her own autobiography, and the record says otherwise. Margaret was 19. Two older sisters paid for her to attend Claverack College, and she went from there to the nursing school at White Plains Hospital, finishing in 1902. She married the architect William Sanger that year, had three children and tuberculosis, and kept a quiet house at Hastings-on-Hudson until it burned in 1911 and the family moved to Manhattan.
She published seven issues of The Woman Rebel in 1914 to be prosecuted, was arrested in August, and sailed for England on a forged passport in November. She opened the country's first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on October 16, 1916, and was arrested nine days later. Offered leniency for a promise to obey the law, she took the workhouse. Then the leagues, the research bureau, the 1936 ruling, Planned Parenthood, and the money that built a pill. BriefHistory follows the campaign and the law it broke. This page is about what it cost and what sits under it.
Her five-year-old daughter Peggy died of pneumonia in December 1915, weeks before the trial Sanger had come home from England to face. She refused the plea bargain anyway. The harder thing is the eugenics. She adopted the movement's goal of fewer unfit people and named the category herself: the insane, the syphilitic, paupers, morons, the feeble-minded, and anyone she judged reckless about children. Where most eugenicists wanted sterilization she wanted contraception, but after the Supreme Court approved compulsory sterilization in 1927 she endorsed the voluntary kind, and the involuntary kind for parents she thought could not manage their own fertility. About 60,000 Americans were sterilized without consent between that ruling and the Second World War.
She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 31 times between 1953 and 1963, and lived to see Griswold v. Connecticut. She died of arteriosclerosis in Tucson on September 6, 1966, at 86, and lies at Fishkill, New York. Martin Luther King Jr. took her award that year and said she had gone to jail for an unjust law. Since Roe the attacks have run on fabricated quotations, while scholars who work the archive conclude she was not a racist but that her alliances served racist ends. Planned Parenthood began pulling away in 2015. Her name came off the awards, then off the Manhattan clinic in July 2020. The Margaret Sanger Square sign, up since 1993, came down in 2021.
Lifespan
Margaret Sanger's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
The Woman Rebel
article
Seven issues, published to provoke a prosecution under the Comstock Act 1914 -
Family Limitation
book
A 16-page pamphlet printed secretly at night. 18 editions and a dozen translations 1914 -
The Brownsville clinic
company
The first birth control clinic in the United States. It lasted a month 1916 -
Woman and the New Race
book
567,000 copies sold with The Pivot of Civilization between 1920 and 1926 1920 -
American Birth Control League
company
Founded at the First American Birth Control Conference in New York 1921 -
The Pivot of Civilization
book
The clearest statement of her eugenic reasoning 1922
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1899 aged ~20 Her mother dies at 50 after 18 pregnancies Sanger was 19. In her 1931 autobiography she gave her mother's age as 48.
- 1902 aged ~23 Finishes nursing school and marries William Sanger
- March 1914 aged 34 Publishes the first issue of The Woman Rebel Its slogan was borrowed from European anarchists. Postal authorities seized five of the seven issues.
- November 1914 aged 35 Flees to England on a forged passport rather than stand trial
- December 1915 aged 36 Her daughter Peggy dies of pneumonia at five Weeks before the trial she had returned from England to face. The prosecutor then dropped the charges.
- October 16, 1916 aged 37 Opens the Brownsville clinic in Brooklyn Her sister Ethel Byrne, a nurse, filled the medical role. Both were arrested within weeks.
- 1927 aged ~48 The Supreme Court upholds compulsory sterilization, and she moves toward it She began endorsing voluntary sterilization and involuntary sterilization in limited cases.
- 1936 aged ~57 United States v. One Package frees physicians to prescribe contraception
- September 6, 1966 aged 86 Dies in Tucson at 86, a year after Griswold v. Connecticut
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