Margaret Sanger

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Margaret Sanger: A Life Of Passion

Jean H. Baker

c. 2011

DDS: 363.9BAK

Chapter 1: Maggie Higgins: Daughter of Corning

• US Civil War
• Corning glassworks
• Erie Canal
• Maggie Higgins: born 1879
• family's relationship with their Catholic church
• poor upbringing
• Erie Railroad bridge that spanned the Chemung River
• 1895, 16 years old, boarding school
• failed to complete 8 grades by school, by two weeks
• enrolled at the Claverack College and Hudson River Institute in 1895/96?
• a coeducational boarding school near Hudson, NY
• originally a girls' school; then coeducational; good regional reputation
• family unable to finance her through graduation; she completed only three years; did not graduate

Chapter 2: Mrs William Sanger of Hastings-on-Hudson

• 1899, mother dies; Maggie brought home to tend to her dying mother
• 1900: enters nursing school at the White Plains Hospital outside NYC
• her goal: medical school; Cornell University in nearby Ithaca, NY 
• only 5% of US doctors female at that time
• many male suitors, despite being poor and uneducated
• new opportunity, coincidentally: nurses needed for the Spanish-American War, in the Philippines
• nursing schools increased in the US
• White Plains Hospital was one of the beneficiaries of this new phenomenon
• tuberculosis scare
• meets William Sanger, a handsome, freelance draftsman, an aspiring architect and artist; at a dance
• six months later, abruptly married
• no longer "Higgins"
• nurses forbidden to marry and she was expelled from nursing school
• again, did not graduate
• five months later, pregnant
• tuberculosis, national epidemic
• in a TB sanatorium while pregnant
• shortly after baby Stuart's birth, Maggie relapsed (TB)
• second son, born 1908; defiantly pregnant again 13 months later; Margaret (Peggy - born 1910)
• never pregnant again
• obviously the couple employed some form of birth control
• US declining birth rates: by 1900, typical American woman had 3.2 children compared to 7.4 one century earlier
• doctors saw birth control not as an opportunity to improve women's health, but rather as a hazard threatening their professional practices
• overwhelmingly, physicians opposed any form of artificial contraception
• Harvard graduate, president Teddy Roosevelt spoke of "race suicide"
• in 1910, tranquil life
• she joined a literary club, reading papers on George Eliot and Robert Browning

Chapter 3: Comrade Sanger

• 1910; William, 36; Maggie, 32 -- move to NYC
• 1911 garment worker fire; locked doors; 146 die, mostly Jewish girls; owners not punished
• activists, socialists, Socialist Party; movements including birth control
• Comstock Laws
• abortions
• Sadie Sachs
• marriage falling apart
• family takes trip to Europe, all five, 1913; try to save marriage
• three months later, Margaret and three children return to NYC (Greenwich Village); William (Bill) is left in Paris

Chapter 4: Creating Margaret Sanger

• three months later, Margaret and three children return to NYC (Greenwich Village); William (Bill) is left in Paris
• William, artist, Provincetown-inspired The Dunes
• no money, but she intended to start a magazine
• March, 1914, her first edition, The Woman Rebel
• Bill still loved her; missed her; she had affairs
• WWI begins
• arrested; she became a fugitive -- did not show for her hearing; left the US, October, 1914
• flees to England (first Liverpool, then London) via Canada under an assumed name
• Bill, meanwhile, was back in NYC; he was arrested for having a copy of his wife's magazine; imprisoned for a short period
• Maggie to the Netherlands during the height of WWI
• romantic affair with a Spaniard in Spain
• October, 1915, Maggie returns to NYC
• Comstock died in 1915; had testified against Bill Sanger

Chapter 5: On Trial

• Maggie, a fugitive overseas; Bill in NYC with the children; Peggy was farmed out; she came down with lethal pneumonia; died at 5 years of age four weeks after Maggie arrived back home in NYC
• Peggy's death awoke feelings of mysticism in Sanger, a woman who had always credited her Celtic origins for her childhood premonitions and extraterrestrial visitations
• Freud; levitating; seances; the number six; Peggy died on November 6
• Sanger to stand trial
• three days before case goes to court, the government drops the case; did not want to make her a martyr
• in fact, national opinions were shifting, in her favor
• rich had birth control (mostly expensive pessaries); poor did not
• national speaking tour; 119 speeches in every major city in the US
• standard speech: "Birth Control"
• in 1916, upon return to NYC, wants to open a "free clinic"
• Sanger's "competitor: Mary Ware Dennett -- former leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association; established the National Birth Control League in 1915; activist in several areas
• Dennett considered Sanger too extreme in her defiance of the law, while Sanger thought Dennett too slow
• established first free clinic, downtrodden immigrant neighborhood of Brownsville, near the central shopping  area of Pitkin Street in Brooklyn; no physiican
• arrested; Brownsville trials opening in 1917; in her late 30's, facing a jail sentence, but had time for an interlude of romance -- "during a life of many, even concurrent lovers, she discovered her answer to a personal question, rarely asked by most women of her generation. It involved the reasons for unrequited affection, which did not preclude sex ... 'chemical love' ... sex, for Sanger, was an essential part of love, but not all of love...
• chronicled that in her diary
• found guilty; but court said she could avoid jail by paying $5,000; she refused; went to jail for 30 days; Queens Penitentiary; now a birth control martyr
• separation agreement signed by Sanger and husband; he was very, very much against

Chapter 6: The Birth Control Review

• early 1917, Woodrow Wilson brings US into WWI
• change in sexual mores; sex had changed in behavior as well as perception; what was once limited to Greenwich Village, now spread across the US
• so upset with war, resigned from the Socialist Party -- felt that workers were going to war to protect capitalist bosses
• WWI: enlistees needed contraception instruction
• the battle against venereal disease
• prostitutes set up camp near military bases; govt rounded them up; detention camps
• new publication: The Birth Control Review
• page 132

Chapter 7: Voyages

• 1920: back to England; left US for seven months
• left The Birth Control Review in the hands of Juliet Rublee
• successful surgery to remove TB-tonsils; by 1922 she had conquered the Higgins legacy of TB
• open marriage; English bohemians
• Wantley Circle created not sexual triangles, but rather a revolving interlocking circle of intimacies
• (Virginia Woolf in 1920s: 1882 - 1941, so VW, in her late 30's must have known about the Wantley Circle)
• over time, sexual civility provied difficult, even for these believers in free love
• H. G. Wells, not a member of the Wantley Circle, but a sexual voyager, welcomed Sanger in "the secret places of the heart" (the title of his 1922 novel).
• page 167
• page 179
• marries J Noah Slee in the district of St Giles, Bloomsbury, London; marriage kept secret
• an angry Bill Sanger learned of the marriage from Sanger's father in 1923 and Bill, himself, remarried two years later;
• 20-year marriage, Sanger and Slee; she taught him all about romantic love (page 180)
• Slee's wedding present: a $1 million home near Fishkill, on the Hudson, 70 miles from NYC
• page 180
• American Birth Control League (ABCL)
• page 185
• still wanted clinics; model -- the clinics in the Netherlands
• her clinic opened January 1, 1923; female physician, Dr Dorothy Bocker
• page 188

Chapter 8: Spreading The Word

Chapter 9: All Things Fade

• November, 1935; in Bombay, India; 10-week visit
• Mahatma Gandhi
• page 233
• page 242
• pessary trial; Comstock laws re-written; Sanger's associates were jubilant; the birth control movement enjoyed a sudden burst of favorable publicity, mostly focused on Margaret Sanger
• page 242
• page 243
• James Joyce's Ulysses mentioned
• One Package ruling
• page 245
• page 253
• huge advances in the 1930s and 1940s
• page 254
• page 261
• in the late 1930s' the world began to fall apart; the world traveler Sanger watched its destruction
• page 263
• July 1939: 80-year Havelock Ellis died; 
• 1943: husband Slee suffered a stroke and died
• 1943, sons Stuart and Grant overseas  in the medical corps; Stuart in the Normandy landing and the Battle of the Bulge; Grant on an aircraft carrier, and then a casualty ship in the Pacific
• touched base with Bill Sanger who wanted to know where his sons were; he was fairly poor (page 265)
• Christmas Day, 1945, the Sanger family reunited in Tucson, where Stuart intended to establish his practice and live next door to his mother

Chapter 10: World Leader

• war over
• for the next 15 years Sanger orchestrated the formation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF)
• her major initiative during the 1950s [Linda, a bit older than I would have been very aware of this, I suppose)
• travels the world; her home in Tucson
• summer of 1949: first of several heart attacks; in her 80s
• 1950: another heart attack while on a fishing trip with Stuart and his family in the White Mountains in eastern Arizona; blood thinner dicumeraol with mood swing side effects
• focused on her clinics in the southwest, stretching from El Paso to Phoenix
• page 292, in the early 1950s
• activist Sanger and philanthropist McCormick, neither with medical or scientific degrees, thought McCormick had majored in biology at MIT, pondered their choice (previous pages); scientists working on birth control
• 1953, Sanger and McCormick decide: Gregory Pinkus, Worcester, MA -- progesterone studies
• serendipitous findings: progesterone (having been used to help women become pregnant) also found to stop pregnancy (Dr John Rock -- page 293)
• page 293 - 296: story of the pill
• 1957: Searle filed for a license, this time for a contraceptive, based on a study of 897 women and 10,427 cycles of no ovulation; ENOVID
• Sanger knew Enovid was less dangerous than pregnancy or abortion, still illegal
• FDA delayed for moral reasons (for which they were not mandated; only safety was their concern -- after the thalidomide scandal simmering in Europe)
• laer there would be complaints about the effects of the pill, but prior to this time no medicine in teh US had received such extensive field trials
• 1959: Sanger attended her last IPPF conference; this time in New Delhi

Epilogue: Last Years

• 1960: JFK
• Sanger did not play any role in the crusade to make abortion legal -- page 302
• 1972: Supreme Court -- Eisenstadt v Baird, the right to use birth control was guaranteed to the unmarried
• by 1962, Sanger struggling against leukemia; mostly bedridden, confused, unable to care for herself;
• nursing home outside Tucson
• died, just before 87th birthday, September 6, 1966