A Life of Controversy
Chicago History Museum, Getty Images
Margaret Sanger in 1917.
Enlarge Image
By Nina C. Ayoub
With uncanny timing, Jean H. Baker's new biography of Margaret Sanger
is hitting the shelves as Sanger is in the news—once again. This time
it was Herman Cain, the Republican presidential hopeful, who invoked
the ever-controversial, though long-dead, birth-control pioneer. In a
recent Face the Nation television interview, Cain charged that Planned
Parenthood had established 75 percent of its clinics in black
communities as a means to prevent the birth of black babies.
Cain is "playing his race card," says Baker, the author of Margaret
Sanger: A Life of Passion (Hill & Wang). The candidate is "using
factually incorrect information about Sanger to inhibit black women
from getting abortions," she adds, e-mailing from Goucher College,
where she is a professor of history.
"In the fact-free, let's-just-make-it-up style of partisan history,
the vilification of Margaret Sanger has become useful for those who
would defund Planned Parenthood and thereby deprive American women,
black and white, of essential health services."
"Herman Cain complains of the large political bull's-eye on his back.
He has put it there himself as he—and his party—in their chronic abuse
of history work to take Americans backward to a past when sex
education was denied, disseminating birth control was prohibited, and
undergoing an abortion was illegal."
As for Sanger, while her first clinic was established in a largely
Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1916,
the activist did establish a clinic in Harlem in 1930. She was
invited, Baker writes, by leaders in the black community. Among
Sanger's supporters at the time was W.E.B. Du Bois, who Baker says was
present at the clinic's opening. "Those who would confine women to
childbearing are reactionary barbarians," wrote Du Bois in his essay
"The Damnation of Women." In later ventures in the South, Sanger
recruited a National Negro Advisory Council, whose members, including
Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and E. Franklin Frazier, "read like a who's who
of black Americans," Baker writes.
Yet, black sentiment was divided. One opponent of Sanger's was Marcus
Garvey, who saw birth control as against nature and "a white man's
trick to limit the number of blacks," Baker writes. Asked if Cain
follows in Garvey's footsteps, the scholar is skeptical. "Clearly Cain
is not the kind of authentic black nationalist that Garvey, who wanted
to increase the numbers of blacks in America, represented."
Enlarge Image A Life of Controversy 2
Baker says her biography "seeks to interlard the personal with the
political, not as hagiography but as authenticity." Some of that
authenticity has to be wrestled from the subject herself. Sanger could
be, Baker writes, an "adroit fabulist," who revised accounts of her
life.
She was born Margaret Higgins in 1879, the sixth child of Irish
immigrants in the factory town of Corning, N.Y. Her mother, a devout
Catholic, would experience 18 pregnancies and 11 births before dying
young of tuberculosis. Margaret's father, an iconoclast in church
matters, seems to have inspired her defiance of authority.
Part of Margaret's way out of Corning was nursing education, as well
as marriage to an aspiring architect and artist, William Sanger, with
whom she had three children. While Sanger never became fully licensed,
it was her work as a nurse that led to an epiphany when, she said, she
witnessed a woman from the Lower East Side—desperate not to have more
children—die from a self-inflicted abortion. "Controlling conception
now became the plot of Margaret Sanger's life," writes Baker. Sanger
would become globally known for the cause and would live long enough—a
week shy of age 87—to see many of her goals accomplished, including
the creation of oral contraceptives. But her early career saw arrests
and jail time and unceasing controversy.
Sanger's first arrest came in 1914 when she fell afoul of a law
crafted by America's chief prude, Anthony Comstock, which included
bans on sending written materials related to contraception through the
mail. Sanger was indicted for her magazine The Woman Rebel, even
though that publication only advocated birth control but did not
describe it. The graphic details would fall to Family Limitation, a
pamphlet by Sanger that in four years sold more than 160,000 copies in
the United States. Sanger also personally gave demonstrations of the
proper use of pessaries and spermicides in the clinics she
established.
Sanger was as passionate about her sexuality as her politics. She
pursued sex with a frankness and enthusiasm that concurred with her
philosophy of a liberated life for women. "Sex had become something
she could study through practice," the author wryly observes. Sanger's
partners included two husbands, but also numerous extramarital
relations with, as she put it, "chemically fascinating men."
She succeeded in getting contraceptives into the hands of women by
exploiting the laws that allowed condoms for the prevention of
venereal disease, a central concern as America mobilized for World War
I. "The army which is the least syphilized will, other things being
equal, win," said an official of the American Social Hygiene
Association. She enlisted physicians for her clinics who agreed to
have an expansive notion of disease so as to be able to prescribe
birth control to all women who asked. Some feminists have condemned
Sanger for contributing to the medicalization of women's reproduction.
However, her reputation has been vastly more tarnished by links to
eugenics.
Though abhorrent and indefensible by today's standards, Baker says
that Sanger's eugenicist views must be seen in the context of her era.
Baker also identifies W.E.B. Du Bois as a eugenicist for, among other
things, his notion of a "talented tenth."
Tentatively in the late 1910s and wholeheartedly by the 1920s, "Sanger
became a fellow traveler and then a promoter of the eugenics
movement," Baker writes in the book. She casts Sanger's initial ties
to eugenics as a strategic, pragmatic choice. In the beginning, Baker
adds in an e-mail, "Sanger embraced the eugenicists because they were
scientists who would bring authenticity to her efforts to encourage
birth-control research. She needed their imprimatur." By the late
1920s and early 1930s, "Sanger had embraced some of the harsher
positions of the eugenicists, though in two important ways she opposed
the standard views of their establishment: She never accepted ideas
about the hierarchy of races." Sanger's approach was "individualistic—
that some individuals (never ethnic groups or African-Americans)
carried genetic material that should not be passed down to their
descendants."
Sanger, argues Baker, "never believed in the popular position of Teddy
Roosevelt (who never gets called out about this) of more children from
the fit and its derivative, fewer from the unfit." Also, while she did
indeed support the practice of involuntary sterilization, she
"positively opposed what we call castration—removing ovaries and
testicles by surgery. She came to support the ruling practice of our
day—vasectomy and salpingectomy, which retained the sexual feelings
she felt were so important for all individuals."
So ultimately, how does Baker feel about her controversial subject?
"I ended up admiring Margaret Sanger for her commitment, her
perseverance, her ability to retain over a long career her passion for
a cause that has changed all of our lives." But, she adds, "Often our
heroes have messy lives and don't do the things we would like them to
do."
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