Margaret Sanger : A Hero In The Life Of Margaret Sanger

Throughout history, leaders of political and social movements have designed slogans and catchphrases to mobilize ordinary citizens into political and social activists. Historically, activists such as Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and countless others have, in their speeches and writings, created a perfect pairing of words that persists in the mind of the listener. Two such activists of the Twentieth Century were Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan. Friedan and Sanger greatly influenced the women’s rights movement; despite both being feminists, however, their personal beliefs in terms of other civil rights movements often fell at opposite ends of the spectrum. Both Friedan and Sanger popularized phrases which empowered their respective followers and similar activists to push back against a system designed to repress them; the phrases that the two activists used, however, reflected their different brands of activism and revealed their differences of opinion on who mattered both for and in the Women’s Rights Movement. : Sanger with the phrase “birth control” and Friedan with the term “feminine mystique.”

Margaret Sanger is one of the top ten most influential women in united states history for her role as an American Birth Control Activist. Margaret fought adamantly for women’s rights throughout her life, becoming the first to open a Birth Control Clinic in the U.S.

Sanger is most well known as being the founder of Planned Parenthood, but most people don’t know the true Margaret Sanger. Sanger was the leader of the Feminist Party. Using her influences from the Nazi ideology, she set out to commit genocide against the poor and minorities. She went about this by creating Planned Parenthood and putting their locations in primarily poor neighborhoods. Planned Parenthood is a place where poor women can get free or low cost abortions. The ulterior motive for providing abortions at Planned Parenthood, was for this genocide that Sanger wanted.

Margaret Sanger was an amazing women who organized many health clinics throughout the country as well helping in the legalization of birth control, she also worked in the creation of the first birth control pill. Sanger opened the first birth control center in the US in 1916, she spent thirty days in jail for opening helping women receive birth control. Sanger started a feminist publication in 1914 called The Woman Rebel, it promoted a woman's right to have birth control. She had many struggles with the laws surrounding providing information on birth control but she stayed fighting. Around the 1950s Margaret Sanger had won many legal victories which helped her to provide contraceptives to all women in America. In 1960 the release of enovid

I. Introduction. There are many remarkable personalities in our history, which made revolutionary changes in women’s lives. Two of them were Margaret Sanger and Eleanor Roosevelt. They contributed immensely to change the women’s fates and lives and to position them equally with men. Margaret Sanger was born in 1879, in Corning, New York; she was sixth of eleven children of Michel Higgins, an Irish Catholic stonecutter, and religious Anne Purcell Higgins. Her mother went through eighteen pregnancies and died at the age of forty-eight. She studied nursing in White Plains and worked as nurse in one of the poorest neighborhood of New York. In 1902 Margaret Sanger married architect and radical William Sanger. She didn’t finish her studying. Margaret gave birth to three children. In 1912 Sanger’s family moved to Manhattan. All her life Margaret Sanger was a courageous, dedicated and persistent American birth control activist, advocate of eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League. She was first woman opening the way to universal access to birth control.

Margaret Sanger was, at large, a birth control activist, but this speech was more about the questioning of birth control corrupting morality in women. People must remember, in the day and age

"A free race cannot be born" and no woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother"(Sanger A 35). Margaret Sanger (1870-1966)said this in one of her many controversial papers. The name of Margaret Sanger and the issue of birth control have virtually become synonymous. Birth control and the work of Sanger have done a great deal to change the role of woman in society, relationships between men and woman, and the family. The development and spread of knowledge of birth control gave women sexual freedom for the first time, gave them an individual

In her argument, Sanger uses four women reaching out to her for help. Each of these women became a mother at a very young age. Her first example was a woman who was married at age 12 and started having children before she even turned 13. This woman gave birth

Regardless of one’s views on the topic of contraception, Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race helped to break new ground through encouraging women to take control of their bodies. Early in her writing, Sanger brings up overpopulation and how women’s primary role as mothers have contributed to this issue. “While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.” This artfully formed passage shows the passion behind Sanger’s beliefs. While on the surface it may seem that she is attacking women, the point of her idea is to frame the passive nature of women in Western Society up to this point.

Thesis Statement: Margaret Sanger changed the world by rallying for the availability and use of contraceptives for all women.

The early twentieth century was a turning point in American history-especially in regards to the acquisition of women's rights. While the era was considered to be prosperous and later thought to be a happy-go-lucky time, in actuality, it was a time of grave social conflict and human suffering (Parish, 110). Among those who endured much suffering were women. As Margaret Sanger found out, women, especially those who were poor, had no choice regarding pregnancy. The only way not to get pregnant was by not having sex- a choice that was almost always the husband's. This was even more true in the case of lower-class men for whom, 'sex was the poor man's only luxury' (Douglas, 31). As a nurse who assisted in delivering

Having gone through the hardships that she did, Margaret Sanger developed her own theories and beliefs about health in women. Through the

Many also believed it was the man’s decision as to how many children his wife should have. Sanger continued her quest opening a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, in 1916; one year later, the authorities arrested her for giving contraceptives to immigrant women (Bowles, 2011). At first glance it appears that Sanger had good intentions. “Others criticized her for involvement with eugenics, which was a scientific movement in which its practitioners advocated the notion that all mental and physical "abnormalities" were linked to hereditary and, with selective breeding, could be eliminated. They questioned whether or not Sanger's insistence on birth control and abortion was in fact a way to limit the growth of ethnic populations” (Bowles, 2011). “Of course, her activism put her directly at odds with law-enforcement officials and the Catholic Church, but little discussed is the actual extent to which her early Marxism guided much of what she managed to achieve. Her good friends included ultra-radicals like John Reed and Emma Goldman, and the truth is that Margaret’s feminism, and her support for eugenic ‘sexual science’, were both simply part-and-parcel of her own unique Marxist vision. Humanitarianism, per se, had little to do with what motivated Margaret Sanger” (Spooner, 2005). Sanger’s actions and motivations are a controversial topic that have been analyzed and debated for years. “According to her New York Times obituary,

Margaret Sanger grew up in a poverty-stricken family that included eleven children. Her mother died when she was young, and Margaret believed that the many successful and not so successful pregnancies she endured might have been the cause. Sanger left her family and worked as a nurse in the Lower East Side, which at the time was a very poor immigrant-filled neighborhood. While working there, she treated many women who had either undergone a “back-alley” abortion or had tried to self-terminate their pregnancy. Sanger believed, “No women can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” Sanger was one of the first women to fight for birth control. She went to jail many times for opening clinics for and advertising contraceptives to the public. She continued to fight and found many ways to get women the birth control they needed. She established Planned Parenthood and helped fund the creation of the first birth control pill to be approved by the Food and Drug

Jane Addams, a pioneering social worker, helped bring attention to the possibility of revolutionizing America’s attitude toward the poor. Not only does she remain a rich source of provocative social theory to this day, her accomplishments affected the philosophical, sociological, and political thought. Addams was an activist of courage and a thinker of originality. Jane Addams embodied the purest moral standards of society which were best demonstrated by her founding of the Hull-House and her societal contributions, culminating with the winning of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.