Woman Rebel
Margaret Sanger’s Crusade
Against Ignorance
Margaret Sanger had just witnessed a preventable death. Her blood poisoned from an illegal abortion, Sadie Sachs passed painfully in the slums. Sachs would not have had enough money to raise the child.
Had she access to information on contraception, Sachs would not have needed the abortion. But it was 1912, and such information was illegal to obtain, even from a doctor.
That night Sanger stood in her darkened house, waiting for sunrise. “As I stood there the darkness faded,” she later wroter in her autobiography. “The sun came up and threw its reflections. It was the dawn of a new day in my life also.”
“What Every Girl Should Know”
An outspoken feminist, it is fitting that Sanger was born and grew up in Corning, New York, just fifty miles from Seneca Falls, home of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights. Born Margaret Higgins in 1879, she was one of eleven children, and knew before adulthood the strain those eleven pregnancies and seven miscarriages had on her mother’s body. A devout Roman Catholic, Anne Purcell Higgins died in her forties.
Margaret Sanger was living comfortably with her husband William and their three children when a job with the Visiting Nurses Association exposed her to the sexual ignorance of working-class women. Few of these people had access to birth control information. In addition to medically known methods of contraception like the rhythm and withdrawal methods, pharmacies sold contraceptives such as condoms, sponges and spermicides, and doctors and nurses could fit women with diaphragms. Working-class women were unaware of such methods, and it was illegal for doctors or anyone else to provide information concerning them.
Insufficient information led to women weakened by multiple pregnancies and illegal abortions. Some families simply could not afford to properly care for new children. And preventing pregnancy was so easy if the proper methods were used. Sanger wrote of her frustration in her autobiography, “Women should have knowledge of contraception. I will strike out—I will scream from the housetops.”
In 1912, Sanger began writing a column titled “What Every Girl Should Know” in the socialist newspaper, New York Call. It brought about her first clash with Anthony Comstock.
Comstock was the mastermind behind the 1873 Comstock Act, which in part made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” material through the mail. The penalty for mailing information on abortion and contraception as well as contraceptives themselves was a $5,000 fine and five years in prison. Comstock served as an inspector for the U.S. Post Office for 40 years, during which time he targeted peddlers of “obscene” work, such as free-love proponent Victoria Woodhull and poet Walt Whitman.
When Comstock censored her February 1913 column on sexually transmitted diseases, the Call ran an empty box in place of her column, with the headline, “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing: by order of the U.S. Post Office.” The column later resumed, but Sanger would never tone down her work
Woman Rebel
In March 1914 Sanger published the first issue of Woman Rebel. With the motto, “No Gods No Masters,” it rallied for women’s rights, especially birth control. The front-page editorial in the inaugural issue read, “The aim of this paper will be to stimulate working women to think for themselves and to build up a conscious fighting character.” Further in, Sanger wrote, “It will also be the aim of the Woman Rebel to advocate the prevention of conception and to impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper.”
In bold terms, Sanger derided the Comstock laws and “that apologetic tone of the new American feminists” who were content with seeking petty rights like the “right to keep her own name.” This was still six years before women were granted the right to vote.
Sanger continued her tirade by blaming Capitalism for the dearth of contraceptive information. Without this information, the working-class would stay poor with caring for numerous (and incidentally unplanned) children. The New York Times later wrote she “expressed the belief that there were altogether too many children in this world and advocated race control.”
The first issue was snatched up by the U.S. Post Office, which informed Sanger the material could not be mailed under federal law. Newspapers were unsympathetic. A New York Times article wrote of the confiscated copies that were “littering up” the post office, while a Pittsburgh Sun editorial read, “The thing is nauseating.” Max Eastman wrote in the Masses, “the Woman Rebel has fallen into that most unfeminist of errors, the tendency to cry out when a quiet and contained utterance is indispensable.” But Sanger would not concede any of her beliefs for the greater cause of feminism. She would not play nice.
The monthly was back in April. Under the headline “Humble Pie,” Sanger’s searing editorial read, “It is a crime to have honest convictions in these United States. It is a crime to express them publicly. It is a crime to send them through the mails. Therefore the Woman Rebel has not yet been informed which of her views were so displeasing to the Postmaster, but whatever they were, she hastens to agree with the postmaster that she was absolutely mistaken in these views.”
Sanger was following in the footsteps of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who in his paper The Liberator printed responses to his articles and responded to them, creating a sort of conversation. The exchange between Sanger and her detractors exposed the debate and won her notoriety. Even bad press was press.
Sanger continued publishing the Rebel, even after being arrested in August 1914 for nine articles deemed indecent. The charges would carry a 45-year sentence if she were found guilty. She fled to Europe, ordering that 100,000 copies of a contraception pamphlet titled “Family Limitation” be distributed throughout America. The pamphlet was a huge success, capturing the attention of America’s intellectual elite.
Sanger returned in 1916 with a wealth of new information about birth control. She came under the wing of the American elite, and as a celebrity became too popular to prosecute. The charges against her were dropped for fear Sanger would become a martyr figure.
With her newfound celebrity Sanger led rallies and gave lectures. She attempted to found the nation’s first birth control clinic, for which she spent 30 days in jail for violating Comstock laws. There was victory even in this. The judge ruling wrote in his decision that while Sanger could not legally give advice regarding contraceptives, licensed physicians could. This was a huge victory for Sanger.
Birth Control Review and Beyond
With the Woman Rebel defunct, Sanger in 1917 turned to a new venture, the Birth Control Review, a monthly that picked up where the Rebel left off.
In February 1918, the New York Women’s Publishing Company was formed to finance the Review. With the help of Julia Rublee, who provided initial money and found other benefactors, one thousand shares of stock, $10 each, were issued, and a board of directors was formed. Financing of Review began with the May 1918 issue and lasted until the American Birth Control League took control in May 1923. The Review then became the official propaganda tool of that organization.
With this funding, the magazine did not need to run advertisements and therefore did not succumb to any bottom-line interests. Sanger was free to write as she pleased. Indeed, it might have been difficult to find advertisers, and even the Woman Rebel was printed through the help of Sanger’s philanthropic lovers.
The magazine enjoyed 23 years of continuous publication, continuing the Rebel’s tradition of vehemence. A 1920 editorial echoed Sanger’s quasi-eugenicist sentiments in the inaugural issue, calling for a five-year “birth strike to avert world famine.”
The Review had an impact. People were reading and asking for advice, which Sanger sometimes dispensed illegally through the U.S. Postal Service. Sanger was still getting in trouble with the law, but her publication had the financial backing it needed.
It was not an easy life for women such as British feminist Kitty Marion, who wrote for and peddled the periodical. Marion was verbally abused by those she hawked the magazine to on the streets of New York. She was arrested under the Comstock laws for hawking “obscene literature.” Still she continued her pursuit, writing the very columns she was cursed for.
Sanger was not content with merely being a dissident journalist. She took many actions to advance her agenda. Sanger created the American Birth Control League in 1922, which sought to distribute information about contraception. The ABCL became Planned Parenthood in 1946.
Not content with simply writing, Sanger continued to give lectures, and even when her events were cancelled, she would speak on the steps, attracting an even larger crowd than she would have indoors.
Sanger lived to see her movement catch on. By the mid-1920s she was being praised by the New Yorker and New York Times. By the 1930s circulation was over 30,000. During the height of its popularity, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’ and Susan B. Anthony’s The Revolution only reached one-tenth of that. But it was their work that paved the way for “dissident” women like Sanger.
In 1936 The New York Appeals Court found birth control information was not obscene and therefore could be sent through the mail. The same year a national poll found a full 70 percent of Americans supported birth control.
By the time Sanger died in 1966, one in every three non-Catholic American women of child-bearing age used the pill, a contraceptive Sanger was instrumental in creating. The same year, President Lyndon Johnson cited a lack of family planning as one of the four critical health problem America faced in the War on Poverty. Programs were enacted to provide contraceptive services to low-income, married women. More funds were dedicated to family planning. Contraceptives were used in international development programs.
Legacy
According to a 2002 study, 98 percent of sexually active women have used birth control at least once. The Planned Parenthood study found that 62 percent of all women age 15 to 44 used contraception. The same study also found eighty-one percent of Americans feel birth control access is a good way to prevent abortions.
Today Anthony Comstock is probably spinning in his grave with the content available through the mail: Cosmopolitan, Playboy, Penthouse. And some of the content on the Internet makes Sanger’s “obscenity” seem prudish.
But Sanger didn’t publish for the thrill of obscenity. She published to inform her readers on health issues. Thanks in part to Sanger’s efforts, and largely to the internet and Net neutrality, Americans today enjoy access to an abundance of health information. WebMD.com, Health.com, Health.gov, MayoClinic.com. These are just a few of the websites dedicated to their readers’ health. Plus there are plenty of niche sites, such as the Cancer Resource Center of the Finger Lakes (ibca.net) and the American Heart Association (americanheart.org).
The problem with navigating through health sites is that not all might be reliable. There are web sites that extol anorexia and others that offer quack cures for everything from hangovers to cancer. Snake oil is nothing new, and indeed, magic elixirs have always enjoyed aggressive advertising. Misinformation has always been a problem when seeking medical advice, and perhaps more so with the advent of the Internet.
But Margaret Sanger would be pleased to see the effect she has had on America, how far we have come in the use of birth control. Today a woman, even as poor as Sadie Sachs, is not denied the resources she needs.
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