Sanger, Margaret

Margaret Sanger was the single most influential crusader for safe, legal, and effective birth control in the United States. From the 1910s through the 1950s, she fought to grant women the ability to limit their own fertility. Her phenomenal energy, charismatic personality, and single-minded focus made her a highly successful activist. Yet Sanger remains a controversial figure. In her own day, conservatives accused her of undermining public morality; today, commentators on both the left and the right have criticized her support of eugenics and population policies in the developing world.

Sanger's convictions derived from her own familial history. She was the sixth of 11 children, born in 1879 to an Irish-Catholic family in Corning, New York. Her mother, a devout Catholic, endured 18 pregnancies before succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 49. Sanger's father, a stonecutter who held a variety of iconoclastic and radical views, did not earn enough to support the family comfortably. From a young age, Sanger associated large families with ill-health and poverty, and small families with prosperity and progress.

Sanger's older sisters helped to send her to boarding school, and thereafter she studied nursing. In 1902, at age 23, she married William Sanger, an architect with artistic ambitions. She spent the next decade living a fairly conventional domestic life in Westchester County, New York. Despite her own struggles with tuberculosis, Sanger gave birth to a son in 1903. In 1908, she had another son, and in 1910, she gave birth to daughter who died at age 5—a loss that would haunt Sanger for the rest of her life.

By 1910, the Sanger's marriage had begun to fray, and the family relocated to Manhattan. Sanger began working as a home nurse on the Lower East Side, where she acquired first-hand knowledge of poor mothers' vulnerability and desperation. She also immersed herself in the bohemian culture that flourished in Greenwich Village; she was particularly influenced by anarchist Emma Goldman's advocacy of free love and birth control. In 1912, Sanger joined the Socialist Party and allied herself with the radical labor movement. However, she soon came to believe that, for poor women, the ability to restrict childbearing was even more crucial than the fight for higher wages and better working conditions.