Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History: Margaret Sanger

There is no question that when we look into the lives of inspirational women, every woman born in the Western world today has been influenced by Margaret Sanger. The fact that as women we enjoy reproductive rights stems from a the vigilant hard work of this very controversial woman. She is still controversial (the web being filled with claims of racism, eugenics, etc.) and this is indicative of the time she lived and the kinds of ideas that thinking people were hashing about during the early 1900s. But who was this woman who had such effect? This article tries to unpack the life and ideas of this inspirational woman.
Difficulties of women in childbirth, and strong radical political activities were used to gather through out Margaret's life. Born Margaret Louise Higgins she was the middle child in a family of 11 children. Her father was known as a freethinking man and his politics must have had influenced her, as did watching her mother died at age 50 after 18 pregnancies. Her own reproductive life was made more difficult by frequent bouts of tuberculosis, although she had three children with her husband William Sanger. Two other influences come into play as she and her husband enjoyed the radical political intellectual world of Greenwich Village in New York City in the early 1900s, at the same time she worked as a visiting nurse in city tenements.
Who knows or understands the difficulties taken on during a single-handed pursuit of what you think is right? That both of the Sanger stopped at reproductive rights were right is clear when you follow their history from 1910 to 1920. First Margaret wrote a pamphlet called family limitation, at the same time she wrote articles and a free publication known as the woman radical. This brought her up against the federal postal obscenity laws of the time and she flees to England while her husband remained in the US distributing her work. In 1915 when he was arrested she came home to face the charges against her but personal tragedy in the form of the death of her five-year-old daughter aroused public sympathy and the charges were dismissed. While in Europe, she visited Holland, thinking back to the United States with a sense of what birth control could be. This prompted her work in public health resulting in lines of Jewish Italian immigrant women crowding into our clinics daily.
Courageous work in the fight of the norm of the time always brings backlash from the people in power. As was true with many suffragettes, Margaret and her sister were convicted, JL, and engaged in hunger strikes. The publicity surrounding these activities made birth control a matter of public debate, thus turning the tide so that by the 1920s public favor towards her ideas began to make legislative change possible. Her work branched out from the United States to the international level, where she lectured to large audiences throughout the rest of her life. It is sobering to note that it was not until 1965, a few months after her death, that the Supreme Court of the United States made birth control legal for married couples.
Nevertheless, the controversy that caused her racist and points to her eugenics philosophies are not wrong when viewing her with the eyes of the 21st century woman. And I think that is one potential outcome of single-minded focus -- it becomes easier to lose sight of the broader picture, in this case human rights. Nor did she consider the rights of the unborn child when she discussed abortion. These issues are still being sorted out by cultures around the world. In his book,Leadership without Easy Answers, one Heifetz discusses the changes brought forth by Margaret Sanger as an example of informal leadership. One person, doggedly pursuing what they believe is right in one area can create great change because they don't have to be responsible for the outcome of anything other than what they are focused on.
This is a different type of inspirational story, then the previous article in this series on Roosevelt. Margaret devoted her life to one thing, being a formal leadership, had to consider the broader range of people's needs and ideas. Nevertheless, both women lived lives that remain inspirational many years after their death.
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