Margaret Sanger

From Philosopedia

Sanger, Margaret (14 September 1879 - 6 September 1966)

Sanger, the American leader in the birth-control movement, was the daughter of a pious Catholic mother who died at age forty-nine after having had eleven babies and seven miscarriages. Her father was a freethinking, socialist Irishman.

Sanger was jailed in 1915 because the Comstock Act classified birth control data as obscene and not fit for the US mails and she had mailed such material. Her clinic at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn was closed in 1916 when a policewoman posed as a patient. In 1917, given a choice of a fine or thirty days in the workhouse, she chose the jail time. Refusing to be fingerprinted, proclaiming she was a political prisoner, she also refused a physical examination. During her thirty days in jail, she read aloud to the thirty-seven women in her cellblock, giving them birth-control advice. Upon her release, she was met by society women, working mothers, and militant feminists singing the “Marseillaise,” joined in by female prisoners still inside.

A believer in “free love” and sensual, spiritual sex, Sanger had many lovers. (She called sexologist Havelock Ellis “King” but enjoyed sex more with historian H. G. Wells, according to Irving Wallace’s The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People [1981].)

To her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, she once advised,

• Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are all right as long as they are sincere. I have never given a kiss in my life that wasn’t sincere. As for intercourse, I’d say three times a day was about right.

In 1957, the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year. One reason for her nomination was that the nominating committee (Harold Rafton, Edwin H. Wilson, Malcolm Bissell, Sherman D. Wakefield, and Warren Allen Smith) recognized that honors to women had woefully been overlooked in past years. According to Wakefield, Sanger’s father was a great admirer of Robert G. Ingersoll, and when Margaret was a young girl in Corning, New York, her father took her to welcome Ingersoll to town for a lecture that her father had arranged. Her admiration for Ingersoll is shown in Margaret Sanger's An Autobiography (1938).

In 1992, Ellen Chesler’s Woman of Valor sympathetically details her sex-without-fear views. Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, disliked Sanger, saying her “legacy is fifty-seven types of sexually transmitted disease.” Others who disliked her pointed to her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, in which she urged the segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted” and called for sterilization of “genetically inferior races.” Later and in her autobiography, she singled out “the Asiatic races,” lamenting that “the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread like a plague.”

Alexander Cockburn is one of her few negative critics, writing (New York Press, 23-29 September 1998) that she “was a monster, racist, and not much discomfited by Nazi ‘family planning’ in the Dachau manner.”

As for religion, Sanger stated, “No gods, no masters.”

{CE; FFRF; HNS2; TRI; TYD; WWS