Madam Speaker, I rise today to submit an article highlighting the life and work of Margaret Sanger authored by Dr. Ellen Chesler, distinguished lecturer at Hunter College of the City University of New York and Director of the Eleanor…
Madam Speaker, I rise today to submit an article highlighting the life and work of Margaret Sanger authored by Dr. Ellen Chesler, distinguished lecturer at Hunter College of the City University of New York and Director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Policy.
Margaret Sanger, who lived from 1879 to 1966, was a nurse, educator, birth control pioneer, women's health activist, and founder of the American Birth Control League which eventually became Planned Parenthood.
Her commitment to improving the health and lives of women was a testament to her belief that all women are entitled to basic health care and the ability to plan their pregnancies, and ultimately control their own destiny.
Madam Speaker, I am proud to recognize Margaret Sanger for her tireless efforts on behalf of women and for fighting for those unable to fight for themselves.
Margaret Sanger--Setting the Record Straight
(By Ellen Chesler)
Birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917
for distributing simple contraceptives to immigrant women
from a makeshift clinic in a tenement storefront in the
Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. When she died
nearly fifty years later, the cause for which she defiantly
broke the law had achieved international stature, and she was
widely eulogized as one of the great emancipators of her
time.
A visionary thinker, relentless agitator, and gifted
organizer, Sanger lived just long enough to savour the
historic 1965 US Supreme Court decision in Griswold v.
Connecticut, which established privacy protections as a
framework for legalizing basic reproductive rights. Elderly
and frail, she watched Lyndon Johnson finally incorporate
family planning into US public welfare and foreign policy
programs. She saw the birth control pill developed and
marketed by a team of doctors and scientists she had long
encouraged and found the money to support. She saw a global
family planning movement descend from her own international
efforts.
The years since have not been as good to Sanger's
reputation, even as they have witnessed measurable progress
for women in achieving reproductive freedom. Today, outside
of a small minority of countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in
parts of the Muslim world that are now high-profile
exceptions to the global norm, a typical woman bears no more
than two children over the course of several years and spends
another 30 to 40 years avoiding pregnancy. More than 60
million women around the world use oral contraception daily,
a dramatic increase since organized interventions began. The
right of women to plan their families remains at least for
the time being enshrined in the US constitution and in
international human rights law, where it is widely recognized
as a necessary condition to improve women's status, and in
turn to sustain democratic institutions, promote social and
economic progress, and help sustain fragile environments.
Still, universal standards for women's human rights offer
no sure cure for violations that persist with uncanny
fortitude and often unimaginable cruelty in so many places
around the world. Harsh fundamentalisms are resurgent in many
countries, where women's bodies remain an arena of intense
political conflict, as a perhaps predictable response to the
social dislocations resulting from changing gender roles and
to the larger assaults on traditional cultures from the many
real and perceived injustices of modernization
and globalization. Even back at home in the United States,
decades of substantial progress by women have fuelled a
fierce backlash.
Wih an intensity that few would have predicted in 1992 when
Bill Clinton was elected as America's first pro-choice
president, a powerful conservative minority has eroded
abortion rights along with funding for family planning at
home and abroad, while dollars have surged instead for
abstinence programs known to be ineffective and often
harmful. We have tolerated the impunity of daily campaigns of
intimidation and outright violence against courageous
providers of contraception and abortion, culminating most
recently in the tragic assassination of Dr. George Tiller of
Kansas. Planned Parenthood affiliates have been repeatedly
targeted, and Sanger herself has become a collateral victim
of this frenzy, her reputation savaged by opponents who
deliberately misrepresent the history of birth control and
circulate scurrilous, false accusations about her on the
Internet.
A particularly harsh example of this campaign of distortion
and outright misrepresentation came in response to recent
Congressional testimony by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton. Secretary Clinton was chastised for her
unwavering support of comprehensive sexual and reproductive
health rights and services for women and for having accepted
with pride the highest honour of the Planned Parenthood
Federation of America, its Margaret Sanger Award, a prize
bestowed in the past on some of this country's most
distinguished supporters of reproductive justice, beginning
with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
This statement is offered in response to false accusations
about Margaret Sanger made on that occasion. It investigates
Sanger's core beliefs and major contributions and reexamines,
in the face of so much continued controversy, her
unquestioning confidence in the power of medicine and science
to shape human conduct and alleviate suffering, a confidence
that fuelled her interest in trying to make birth control
serve as a tool of both individual liberation and social
betterment.
Sanger's contribution and legacy
Margaret Sanger's fundamental contribution was in claiming
every woman's right to experience her sexuality freely and
bear only the number of children she desires. Following in
the footsteps of a first generation of educated women who had
proudly forgone marriage in order to seek fulfilment outside
the home, she offered birth control as a necessary condition
to the resolution of a broader range of personal and
professional satisfactions. The hardest challenge in
introducing her to modern audiences, for whom this claim has
become routine, is to explain how absolutely destabilizing it
seemed in her own time.
Even with so much lingering animus toward changes in
women's lives around the world, it is difficult to inhabit an
era in our own history when sexuality was considered more an
obligation of women than an experience from which to derive
contentment, let along pleasure. It is hard to remember that
well into Sanger's own time motherhood was accepted as a
woman's principal purpose and primary role. It is even harder
to fathom that American women just a century ago, were still
largely denied identities or rights of their own, independent
of those they enjoyed by virtue of their relationships
with men, and that this principle was central to the
enduring opposition they encountered in seeking access to
full rights of inheritance and property, to suffrage, and
most especially to birth control. This unyielding
principle of male ``coverture'' defined women's legal
identities even with respect to physical abuse in the
family, which the U.S. Supreme Court condoned in 1910,
denying damages to a wife injured by violent beatings on
the grounds that to do so would undermine the peace of the
household.
Re-examining this history in the context of the recent
expansion of civil and human rights to incorporate women's
rights underscored Sanger's originality as a feminist
theorist who first demanded civil protection of women's
claims to reproductive liberty and bodily integrity, in and
outside of marriage. As a result of private arrangements and
a healthy trade in condoms, douches, and various contraptions
sold largely under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene, the
country's birth rate began to decline long before she came on
the scene. But it was she who invented ``birth control'' as a
comfortable, popular term of speech, and in so doing gave the
practice essential public and political currency. It was she
who first recognised the far-reaching consequences of
bringing sexuality and contraception out in the open and
claiming them as fundamental women's rights. She won legal
protection for birth control, and by winning scientific
validation for specific contraceptive practices, she also
helped lift the religious shroud that had long encased
reproduction in myth and mystery, thereby securing medical
and social science institutions--as much as houses of
worship--as arbiters of sexual behaviours and values. And
from this accomplishment, which many still consider
heretical, a continuing controversy has ensued.
When Sanger opened her clinic and deliberately staged an
arrest in 1916, she challenged anachronistic obscenity laws
that remained on the books as the legacy of the notorious
anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock, whose evangelical
fervour had captured late 19th century Victorian politics and
led to the adoption by the states and federal government of
broad criminal sanctions on sexual speech and commerce,
including all materials related to contraception and
abortion. Her critique, however, was not just of legal
constraints on obscenity, but also of legal constraints on
women's place. In this respect, she also helped inaugurate a
modern women's rights movement that moves beyond traditional
civil and political claims of liberty to embrace social and
cultural ones. She understood that to advance women's rights
it is necessary to address--and the state has an obligation
to protect--personal as well as public spheres of conduct. It
must establish broad safeguards for women and intervene to
eliminate everyday forms of discrimination and abuse.
from the past to the present
Observing the contorted politics of sexuality in recent
years only reinforces one's sympathy for Margaret Sanger's
predicament as a wildly polarizing figure in her own day and
clarifies the logic of her decision after World War I to
mainstream her movement by identifying reproductive freedom,
not just as a woman's right, but also as a necessary
foundation for broader improvements in public health and
social welfare. Her decision to adopt the socially resonant
content of ``family planning'' over birth control, when
the Great Depression encouraged attention to collective
needs over individual ones and when the New Deal created a
blueprint for bold public endeavours, was particularly
inventive, and in no way cynical. Nor as some of her
harshest critics have since have charged, did she ever
define family planning as right of the privileged, but as
a duty or obligation of the poor, any more than we do so
today when we call for increased public expenditure on it
as a matter of simple justice.
To the contrary, Sanger showed considerable foresight in
lobbying for voluntary family planning programs to be
included among the benefits of any sound public investment in
social security. Had the New Deal included public health and
access to contraception in its social welfare package, as
most
European countries were then doing, protracted conflicts over
welfare and healthcare policy in the years since in the
United States might well have been avoided. Where she went
wrong was only in failing to anticipate the force of the
opposition her proposal would generate from a coalition of
religious conservatives of her own day, including urban
Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants to whom
Roosevelt Democrats became captive, much as Republicans have
become in recent years.
What is a good deal harder to deconstruct and understand is
Sanger's engagement with eugenics during these years, the
then still widely respectable and popular intellectual
movement that addressed the manner in which biology and
heredity affect human intelligence and ability. Like many
well-intentioned secularists and social reformers of her day,
Sanger took away from Charles Darwin the essentially
optimistic lesson that men and women's common descent in the
animal kingdom makes us all capable of improvement, if only
we apply the right tools. Eugenics, in the view of most
prominent progressive thinkers of this era, from university
presidents, to physicians and scientists, to public
officials, held the promise that merit would replace
birthright and social status as the standard for mobility in
a democratic society.
In this respect, the most enduring bequest of eugenics is
standard IQ testing. Its most damning and unfathomable legacy
is a series of state laws upheld by a 9 to 1 progressive
majority of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1929, including
Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who in the
landmark decision of Buck v. Bell authorised the compulsory
sterilisation of a poor young white woman with an
illegitimate child, on grounds of feeble-mindedness that were
never clearly established. This decision, incidentally, was
also endorsed by civil libertarians such as Roger Baldwin and
civil rights advocates, including W.E.B. Dubois of the NAACP,
both of whom Sanger counted among her supporters and friends.
For Sanger eugenics was meant to begin with the voluntary
use of birth control, but many conservative eugenicists of
the day actually opposed the practice on the grounds that the
fit should procreate. Sanger countered by disdaining what she
called a `cradle competition' of class, race or ethnicity.
She publicly opposed immigration restrictions which grew out
of conservative interpretations of a eugenics that reinforced
racial and ethnic stereotypes she opposed. She framed poverty
as a matter of differential access to resources, including
birth control, not as the immutable consequence of low
inherent ability or poor character, a view some
conservative eugenicists embraced. She argued for broad
government safety nets for social welfare and public
health, including access to safe and reliable
contraception. And she proudly marshalled clinical data to
demonstrate that most women, even among the poorest and
least educated populations, embraced and eagerly used
birth control voluntarily, when it was provided them.
At the same time, however, Sanger did on occasion engage in
shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families
among individuals of low intelligence and defective heredity.
Her language had no intended racial, ethnic, or class
content. She argued that all women, no matter where they are
situated, should be encouraged to bear fewer, healthier
children, but her words have since been lifted out of context
and tragically misquoted to provoke exactly the kind of
intolerance she opposed. Moreover, in endorsing the Supreme
Court's decision about compulsory sterilization, and also on
several occasions the payment of pensions or bonuses to women
of low intelligence who would with this inducement agree to
the procedure, Sanger quite clearly failed to consider the
fundamental rights questions raised by such practices or the
validity of the aptitude assessments on which determinations
of low intelligence were based. Living in an era indifferent
to the firm obligation to respect and protect the rights of
individuals whose behaviours do not always conform to
prevailing mores, she did not always fulfil it.
The challenge for historians has been to reconcile these
apparent contradictions in her views. Sanger was actually an
unusually advanced thinker on race for her day, one who
condemned discrimination and encouraged reconciliation
between blacks and whites. She opened an integrated clinic in
Harlem in the early 1930s and then facilitated birth control
and maternal health programs for rural black women in the
south, when local white health officials denied them access
to the New Deal's first federally funded services . . . She
worked on this project with the behind the scenes support of
Eleanor Roosevelt, whose progressive views on race were well
known but whose support for birth control was silenced by her
husband's Catholic political handlers, at least until he was
safely ensconced in the White House for a third term.
Historically specific circumstances of this complexity,
however, are hard to untangle and convey, and this in large
part explains why Sanger's legacy has been so easily
distorted by contemporary abortion opponents who believe they
can advance their own ideological and political agendas by
undermining her motives and her character.
America's intensely complicated politics of reproduction
has long ensnarled Margaret Sanger and all others who have
tried to discipline it. Birth control has fundamentally
altered private and public life over the past century. No
other issue has for so long captivated our attention or
polarized our thinking. As the psychologist Erik Erikson once
provocatively suggested, no idea of modern times, save
perhaps for arms control, more directly challenges human
destiny, which alone may account for the profound social
conflict it tends to inspire.
As many scholars of the subject in recent years have also
observed, much of the controversy around birth control
proceeds as well from the plain fact that reproduction is by
its very nature experienced individually and socially at the
same time. In claiming women's fundamental right to control
their own bodies, Sanger always remained mindful of the dense
fabric of cultural, political, and economic relationships in
which those rights are exercised. And almost, if obviously
not always, the policies she advocated were intended to
facilitate the necessary obligation of public policy to
balance individual rights of self-expression with the
sometimes contrary social and political obligation to
promulgate and enforce common mores, rule, and laws.
That Margaret Sanger failed to get this balance quite right
in one important respect is certainly worthy of respectful
disagreement and commentary, but it is no reason to poison
her reputation or to abandon the noble cause of reproductive
freedom to which she so courageously and indefatigably
dedicated her life.