Margaret Sanger was born
on September 14th, 1879 in Corning, New York. She was one out of the eleven
children that survived from her mothers eighteen pregnancies before her mother
passed away from tuberculosis. Her Father was an atheist who worked as a sculptor.
He was also an activist for free public education and woman suffrage. She spent
her youth helping at home doing chores and looking after her siblings. She didn’t
stay home for all her life. She attended Claverack College only for two years
because she was asked to come home and look after her sick mother who later
died at the age of 31 in 1896. Her first marriage was to architect named
William Sanger in 1902. She moved to Saranac, New York for health reasons since
she had developed Tuberculosis from her sick mother. Later on, she started
getting back into working and started writing for a column in the New York
Call newspaper called "What
Every Girl Should Know". Around this time she realized what she
wanted to do with her life. She dedicated herself to the promotion of
birth control and how she wanted woman especially those of the poor class to
have full control over them selves and wanted them to know when it was right for
them to be pregnant, how many kids they should have, have the only say in
abortion.
“As an advocate of birth
control I wish… to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the
'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization,
can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between
these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the
fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken
classes, should not be held up for emulation....
On the contrary, the most
urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the
mentally and physically defective” (The Eugenic Value of Birth Control
Propaganda)
Even though she knew that she was taking actions against the Comstock
law of 1973 she risked being arrested. She also worked with many other activist
such as Emma Goldman, John Reed, & Mable Dodge. The death of Sadie Sach’s
led her to think that she really had to get out there and help the woman so
they too wouldn’t try to do illegal abortions. She launched The Woman Rebel a
newspaper column.