Why do we love Margaret?

Born to an Irish Catholic family in the late 19th century, Margaret Sanger saw first-hand the toll exhaustion and ill health wreaked on her mother after eighteen pregnancies and eleven live births. She became a midwife and nurse who, along with her husband, moved to bohemian Greenwich Village in the 1910s and began assisting poor women in the slums of Manhattan’s lower east side to take control of their reproductive lives. Under the 1873 federal Comstock law, it was illegal to disseminate contraceptive information (this law was upheld, even for married couples, until 1972). Convinced that unwanted parenthood kept women in bondage and squalor as much as poverty, Margaret set out working to fight the church’s disapproval and the state’s laws against contraception. Through her self-published journal, The Woman Rebel, in 1914, Sanger disseminated birth control (a term she coined) information, an act that ran her afoul of U.S. postal decency laws. Fleeing to England, she broadened her knowledge and her mission, and began promoting birth control not only as a way for women to free themselves from the physical rigors of excessive childbearing, but also as a tool for the exploration of their sexual freedom. Margaret returned to the U.S. where the charges against her were dropped due to public sympathies.

Margaret continued her tireless work as an advocate and crusader for birth control education and the repeal of restrictive birth control laws. She founded the organizations that would eventually become the Planned Parenthood Federation of American and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Instrumental in every political, legal, and medical advance in contraception in the United States in the 20th century, up to and including the development and legalization of the pill in the 1950s, Margaret Sanger was an activist who propounded the revolutionary notion that a woman should have dominion over her own body.

Biography:

Born - September 14, 1879
Corning, New York
Died - September 6, 1966
Tucson, Arizona

Achievements:

• 1914 – Publishes her own newspaper, The Woman Rebel, with birth control information and family planning advice.
• 1916 – Opens the first family-planning clinic in the United States in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Though it is raided shut down in a matter of months, the notoriety brings needed resources and attention to Sanger’s crusade.
• 1917 – Establishes the monthly journal, Birth Control Review.
• 1921 – Founds the American Birth Control League, which would eventually become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
• 1929 – Creates the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control to lobby Congress and state legislatures for loosening of restrictions on birth control and other reproductive freedoms.
• 1930 – Co-founds the Birth Control International Information Centre with Briton Edith How-Martyn to serve as a clearinghouse for information.
• 1952 – Co-founds the International Planned Parenthood Federation and serves as president until 1959.
• 2000 – Chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.