74 Facts About Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking.

Margaret Sanger was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914.

Margaret Sanger feared the consequences of her writings, so she fled to Britain until public opinion had quieted.

Margaret Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States.

Margaret Sanger drew a sharp distinction between birth control and abortion, and was opposed to abortions throughout the bulk of her professional career, declining to participate in them as a nurse.

Margaret Sanger remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement.

Margaret Sanger has been criticized for supporting negative eugenics; Sanger opposed eugenics along racial lines and did not believe that poverty was hereditary.

In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the US, which led to her arrest for distributing information on contraception, after an undercover policewoman bought a copy of her pamphlet on family planning.

Margaret Sanger felt that for women to have a more equal footing in society and to lead healthier lives, they needed to be able to determine when to bear children.

Margaret Sanger considered contraception the only practical way to avoid them.

In 1921, Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

From 1952 to 1959, Margaret Sanger served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Margaret Sanger died in 1966 and is widely regarded as a founder of the modern birth control movement.

Margaret Sanger was the sixth of 11 surviving children, spending her early years in a bustling household.

In 1902, she married architect William Margaret Sanger, giving up her education.

Margaret Sanger would become a member of an Episcopal Church which would later hold her funeral service.

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

Margaret Sanger joined the Women's Committee of the New York Socialist party, took part in the labor actions of the Industrial Workers of the World and became involved with local intellectuals, left-wing artists, socialists and social activists, including John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge and Emma Goldman.

Margaret Sanger opposed abortion, but primarily as a societal ill and public health danger which would disappear if women were able to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

Margaret Sanger launched a campaign to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information through confrontational actions.

Margaret Sanger became estranged from her husband in 1913, and the couple's divorce was finalized in 1921.

In 1914, Margaret Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight-page monthly newsletter which promoted contraception using the slogan "No Gods, No Masters".

Margaret Sanger spent much of her 1914 exile in England, where contact with British neo-Malthusians such as Charles Vickery Drysdale helped refine her socioeconomic justifications for birth control.

Margaret Sanger shared their concern that over-population led to poverty, famine and war.

Margaret Sanger organized the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth-Control Conference that took place in New York in 1925.

Early in 1915, Margaret Sanger's estranged husband, William Sanger, gave a copy of Family Limitation to a representative of anti-vice politician Anthony Comstock.

William Margaret Sanger was tried and convicted, spending thirty days in jail while attracting interest in birth control as an issue of civil liberty.

Margaret Sanger later became the first legal manufacturer of diaphragms in the United States.

Some countries in northwestern Europe had more liberal policies towards contraception than the United States at the time, and when Margaret Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in 1915, she learned about 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.

On October 16,1916, Margaret Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States.

Margaret Sanger's bail was set at $500 and she went back home.

Margaret Sanger continued seeing some women in the clinic until the police came a second time.

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

Only when Margaret Sanger pledged that Byrne would never break the law was she pardoned after ten days.

In February 1917, Margaret Sanger began publishing the monthly periodical Birth Control Review.

Margaret Sanger's visit fueled the belief among elites in Nationalist-era China that the use of contraception would improve the "quality" of the Chinese people and resulted in many newspaper articles addressing the benefits and shortcomings of birth control.

Also following Margaret Sanger's visit, a wide range of texts on birth control and population issues were imported into China.

Chinese feminists inspired by Margaret Sanger's visit went on to be significantly involved in the subsequent Chinese debates on birth control and eugenics.

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

In 1928, conflict within the birth control movement leadership led Margaret Sanger to resign as the president of the ABCL and take full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, marking the beginning of a schism that would last until 1938.

Margaret Sanger invested a great deal of effort communicating with the general public.

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 all half-wits, and, therefore, spoke to them in the simplest possible language, as if she were talking to children.

Margaret Sanger wrote several books in the 1920s which had a nationwide impact in promoting the cause of birth control.

Margaret Sanger wrote two autobiographies designed to promote the cause.

Margaret Sanger worked with African American leaders and professionals who saw a need for birth control in their communities.

Margaret Sanger secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund and opened the clinic, staffed with Black doctors, in 1930.

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

Margaret Sanger advised Gamble on the utility of hiring a Black physician for the Negro Project.

Margaret Sanger advised him on the importance of reaching out to Black ministers, writing:.

New York University's Margaret Sanger Papers Project says that though the letter would have been meant to avoid the mistaken notion that the Negro Project was a racist campaign, detractors of Sanger, such as Angela Davis, have interpreted the passage "as evidence that she led a calculated effort to reduce the Black population against its will".

Margaret Sanger believes that Sanger wanted to overcome the fear of some black people that birth control was "the white man's way of reducing the black population".

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

That effort failed to achieve success, so Margaret Sanger ordered a diaphragm from Japan in 1932, in order to provoke a decisive battle in the courts.

In 1937, Margaret Sanger became chairman of the newly formed Birth Control Council of America, and attempted to resolve the schism between the ABCL and the BCCRB.

Margaret Sanger's efforts were successful, and the two organizations merged in 1939 as the Birth Control Federation of America.

In 1948, Margaret Sanger helped found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood, which evolved into the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952, and soon became the world's largest non-governmental international women's health, family planning and birth control organization.

Margaret Sanger was the organization's first president and served in that role until she was 80 years old.

Margaret Sanger called herself an Episcopalian by religion and her funeral was held at St Philip's in the Hills Episcopal Church.

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

Margaret Sanger blamed Christianity for the suppression of such discussions.

Margaret Sanger believed that exercising such control would lead to the "strongest and most sacred passion".

Margaret Sanger grew up in a home where orator Robert Ingersoll was admired.

Margaret Sanger's view put her at odds with leading American eugenicists, such as Charles Davenport, who took a racist view of inherited traits.

Margaret Sanger had no reservations about relying on flawed and overtly racist works to serve her own propaganda needs.

Margaret Sanger believed that self-determining motherhood was the only unshakable foundation for racial betterment.

Margaret Sanger opposed abortion and sharply distinguished it from birth control.

Margaret Sanger believed that the latter is a fundamental right of women and the former is a shameful crime.

Sanger's story features in several biographies, including David Kennedy's biography Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John Gilmary Shea Prize.

Margaret Sanger is the subject of the television films Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs Sanger, and Choices of the Heart: The Margaret Sanger Story.

Margaret Sanger was an inspiration for Wonder Woman, the comic-book character introduced by William Marston in 1941.

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.

In 1930, Margaret Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Harlem that sought to enlist support for contraceptive use and to bring the benefits of family planning to women who were denied access to their city's health and social services.