69 Facts About Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, founded Planned Parenthood, and was instrumental in the development of the first birth control pill.

Margaret Sanger was a first-wave feminist and believed that women should be able to decide if and when to have children, leading her to campaign for the legalization of contraceptives.

Margaret Sanger was influenced by Malthusian concerns about the detrimental effects of overpopulation.

Margaret Sanger deliberately flouted laws that prohibited distribution of information about contraceptives, and was arrested eight times.

Margaret Sanger established a network of dozens of birth control clinics across the country, which provided reproductive health services to hundreds of thousands of patients.

Margaret Sanger discouraged abortion, and her clinics never offered abortion services during her lifetime.

Margaret Sanger founded several organizations dedicated to family planning, including Planned Parenthood and International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Margaret Sanger's parents were Irish Catholics who separately emigrated from Ireland.

Margaret Sanger spent her early years in a bustling household, under the influence of her father, who was a free-thinker, a socialist, and an agnostic.

Margaret Sanger died at the age of 50, when Margaret was 19 years old.

Margaret Sanger worked as a nurse, making house calls in the slums of the East Side, while her husband worked as an architect and artist.

Sanger and her husband embraced socialism; Margaret joined the Women's Committee of the Socialist Party of New York and took part in the labor actions of the Industrial Workers of the World, including the 1912 Lawrence textile strike and the 1913 Paterson silk strike.

The hardships women faced were epitomized in a story that Margaret Sanger often recounted in her speeches: while working as a nurse, she was called to the apartment of a woman, "Sadie Sachs", who had a severe sepsis infection due to a self-induced abortion.

Margaret Sanger opposed abortion, not on religious grounds, but as a societal ill and public health danger, which would disappear, she believed, if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

Margaret Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and their divorce was finalized in 1921.

Margaret Sanger's strategy was to deliberately violate the Act, hoping that the confrontation would eventually lead to amendment of the law.

Margaret Sanger shared the concern of Malthusians that overpopulation led to poverty, famine, and war.

Margaret Sanger was offered a plea bargain, but refused, because she wanted to use the trial as a forum to advocate for the right of women to control their own bodies.

Early in 1915, an undercover representative of anti-vice politician Anthony Comstock asked Margaret Sanger's estranged husband, William, for a copy of Family Limitation, and William obliged.

When Margaret Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she encountered diaphragms and became convinced that they were a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had been distributing back in the United States.

Margaret Sanger was unable to find a physician to join the staff, so she turned to her sister, Ethel Byrne, to fill the medical role.

Nine days after the clinic opened, Margaret Sanger was arrested for giving a birth control pamphlet to an undercover policewoman.

Margaret Sanger was force-fed, the first woman hunger striker in the US to be so treated.

In February 1917, Margaret Sanger began publishing the periodical Birth Control Review, serving as its editor until 1929.

Margaret Sanger asserted that women have always fought back against this oppression through secretive use of abortion, contraception, or infanticide.

Margaret Sanger believed that these efforts to limit family size were a manifestation of women's desire for freedom, writing:.

Support from wealthy donors in the early 1920s enabled Margaret Sanger to expand her reach beyond local, small-scale activism, and allowed her to organize the American Birth Control League.

Margaret Sanger ultimately visited Japan seven times, working with feminist Shidzue Kato to promote birth control in Japan.

Margaret Sanger invested a great deal of effort in promoting birth control to the public.

Margaret Sanger's audience included workers, churchmen, liberals, socialists, scientists, and upper-class women.

Margaret Sanger once lectured on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

Margaret Sanger described the experience as weird, and reported that she had the impression that the audience were dull, and so she spoke to them in the simplest possible language, as if talking to children.

Margaret Sanger wrote several books that had a nationwide impact in promoting the cause of birth control.

Those that met Margaret Sanger's standards became official affiliates of the BCCRB.

Margaret Sanger did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects.

In 1924, James H Hubert, an African American social worker and the leader of New York's Urban League, asked Sanger to consider opening a clinic in an African American neighborhood.

Margaret Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic in 1930.

In June 1932, Margaret Sanger published a special issue of Birth Control Review titled "The Negro Number".

Margaret Sanger knew that the church played an important role in African American communities, so she advised Gamble on the importance of affiliating with African American ministers, writing:.

However, most scholars interpret the passage as Margaret Sanger's effort to prevent the spread of unfounded rumors about nefarious purposes, and they find no evidence that Margaret Sanger was a racist.

In 1929, Margaret Sanger formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control to lobby for legislation to overturn restrictions on contraception.

The lobbying did not produce results, so Margaret Sanger changed tack and in 1933 she ordered diaphragms from Japan to trigger a decisive battle in the courts.

Margaret Sanger was the organization's first president and served in that role from 1952 to 1959.

Pincus would later say that Margaret Sanger's role was essential in the development of the pill.

In 1954, Margaret Sanger returned to Japan for her fourth visit, and gave a speech before a committee of the National Diet on the topic of "Population Problems and Family Planning".

Margaret Sanger moved to Arizona full-time in 1943, after her husband died.

Margaret Sanger died of arteriosclerosis on September 6,1966 in Tucson, Arizona, aged 86.

Margaret Sanger's funeral was held at St Philip's in the Hills Episcopal Church in Tucson, followed a month later by a memorial service at St George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan.

Margaret Sanger is buried in Fishkill, New York, next to her sister, Nan Higgins, and her second husband, Noah Slee.

Margaret Sanger focused all her efforts on promoting contraception, rather than campaigning to make abortion legal.

The majority of the educational material that Margaret Sanger produced was focused on contraception, and abortion was rarely mentioned.

In 1932, sixteen years after the first clinic opened, Margaret Sanger authorized staff to refer patients to hospitals for medically necessary abortions.

One of the most formidable opponents to birth control in the 1920s was the Catholic Church, which often tried to prevent Margaret Sanger from giving speeches.

Catholics persuaded the Syracuse city council to ban Margaret Sanger from giving a speech in 1924; the National Catholic Welfare Conference lobbied against birth control; the Knights of Columbus boycotted hotels that hosted birth control events; the Catholic police commissioner of Albany prevented Margaret Sanger from speaking there; and several newsreel companies, succumbing to pressure from Catholics, refused to cover stories related to birth control.

Margaret Sanger turned some of the boycotted speaking events to her advantage by inviting the press, and the resultant news coverage often generated public sympathy for her cause.

Margaret Sanger found common ground between eugenics and her birth control movement: both endeavors would benefit if contraception were legal and readily available.

From her perspective as an activist struggling to develop support for her cause, Margaret Sanger viewed the eugenics movement as scientific, respectable, growing, international, and popular.

Margaret Sanger adopted the fundamental eugenic goal of reducing the number of unfit people.

Margaret Sanger began to support involuntary sterilizations in limited circumstances: for parents who were incapable of managing their own fertility and were likely to produce disabled children.

The consensus of scholars is that Margaret Sanger was not racist, but her collaboration with eugenicists indirectly assisted racist causes.

The reasons were that Margaret Sanger was a woman, she had no academic credentials, and she insisted that mothers should have the power to decide if and when to have children, which ran contrary to the mainstream eugenic policy that the state should order fit women to produce abundant offspring.

Margaret Sanger achieved her goal of improving the well-being of women around the world through family planning: contraception is legal in the US, family planning clinics are commonplace, contraception is taught in medical schools, tens of millions of women have made use of Planned Parenthood services, and hundreds of millions of women around the globe have access to birth control pills.

Several biographers have documented Sanger's life, including David Kennedy, whose 1970 book Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger won the Bancroft Prize and the John Gilmary Shea Prize.

Television films Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs Sanger and Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story have portrayed Sanger's life as well as two graphic novels.

Margaret Sanger launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions.

Between 1953 and 1963, Margaret Sanger was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 31 times.

In 1981, Margaret Sanger was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Since the legalization of abortion in 1973, Margaret Sanger has become a target of frequent attacks by opponents of abortion.

The attacks usually include falsehoods, and they often attribute quotes to Margaret Sanger that are either fabricated or presented out of context.