On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn, NY. Although the authorities shut it down nine days later, the clinic marked a seminal moment for the women’s rights movement. After this setback, Sanger did not give up her fight for the legalization of birth control. Although viewed as a radical by many of her contemporaries, she is considered a key figure in the feminist movement.
Born on September 14, 1879 in Corning, NY, as one of 11 children, her Irish Catholic upbringing had a powerful impact on her views of birth control. Sanger attributed her mother’s early death to a lack of access to family planning. On top of the 11 pregnancies, Sanger’s mother suffered from multiple miscarriages. Interested in medicine and looking to escape her impoverished upbringing, Sanger attended Claverack College and the Hudson River Institute in 1896 and studied nursing at White Plains Hospital in 1900. After starting a family Sanger, her husband and their three children settled in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in 1910. At the time, the downtown neighborhood was teeming with bohemians and political radicals, who she enthusiastically befriended. She hung out with Upton Sinclair and Emma Goldman, joined the Socialist Party and began her lifelong sex education and birth control activism.
As a nurse working with impoverished immigrants on NYC’s Lower Eastside, Sanger was horrified by the countless numbers of young female patients who almost died from back alley or self-terminated abortions. Looking to educate young women about sex and to prevent further suffering, she wrote a 1912 newspaper column, “What Every Girl Should Know.” In 1914, she started a feminist monthly magazine, “The Woman Rebel,” that promoted women’s birth control rights. Since the Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to trade or circulate “obscene and immoral materials,” and publishing and mailing a magazine about birth control fell under that category, Sanger faced a five-year jail sentence. She moved to England to avoid prison. In 1915, the charges against her were dropped, so she returned home with various smuggled forms of birth control from Europe in tow. In Europe, Sanger decided that she preferred to live according to the free love philosophy, so she divorced her husband and had affairs instead, including one with English novelist H.G. Wells.
Despite being placed behind bars for 30 days for opening the first birth control clinic in 1916, by 1921 she established what became the precursor to today’s Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Finally in 1923, she set up the first legal birth control clinic in the United States.
Although she took a break from her women’s rights advocacy, she returned to the scene in the early 1950s. She found a human production expert and the financing needed for her research project that resulted in the first ever oral contraceptive. This “magic pill” that she had been envisioning all her life was approved by the FDA in 1960.
Although Sanger died on September 6, 1966, she lived to see the important day when the Supreme Court in 1965 ruled that birth control was legal for married couples. Sanger said, “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”
Despite her tireless work to help women, Sanger has been criticized for disturbing comments that she made in support of the eugenics movement. In a 1921 article, she wrote that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Although she was wrong in her support of selective breeding, during the 1920s and 1930s, the eugenics movement was supported by many mainstream doctors and scientists. They were wrong in their promotion of what became a racist policy. However, according to Planned Parenthood officials, Sanger did uniformly repudiate the way that racists exploited the eugenics principles.
Although the United States is still divided over birth control rights, Sanger’s hard work provided women with much of the freedom they have today to live life on their own terms.