by John Simkin

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I am sorry you did not like my pages on Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger. It is true that I admire both women. This is because of they spent their life campaigning for equal rights for women. Both are known for their fight to make sure that reliable contraceptive information was available to women. Sanger became involved in the campaign while working as a public health nurse in the slums of New York.

In 1921 Sanger established America's first birth-control clinic. The clinic in Brooklyn was closed by the police and Sanger was imprisoned for 30 days.

Marie Stopes was influenced by Sanger’s work and she also opened the first of her birth-control clinics in Holloway, North London in 1921. Unlike Sanger she was not prosecuted. However, two of her friends, Guy and Rose Aldred, who published a pamphlet written by Margaret Sanger, were found guilty of selling an obscene publication.

I believe both women contributed a great deal to reducing the suffering of women. Although, I admit that did severely damage the credibility of the Roman Catholic Church.

Sanger and Stopes were not single issue political figures. Both were involved in a whole range of campaigns to improve the quality of life of women. They got most of these issues right. However, as you point out they were both involved with the Eugenics movement. You fail to point out what these two women meant by this. At the time Eugenics meant the study of improving hereditary qualities by socially controlling human reproduction. It was something that was believed in by a great number of progressive thinkers during the 1920s and '30s, when treatments for many hereditary and disabling conditions were unknown.

For example, why have you only concentrated on these two women. What about people like H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw who were also supporters of this movement? I have not mentioned they supported Eugenics in the 1920s on their web pages. Nor did I mention it on my pages on Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, two great men who supported Eugenics in the 1920s.

It is a common trick of those opposed to birth control and the liberation of women to associate these women with the views of Adolf Hitler. It might interest you to know that Sanger's books were among the very first burned by the Nazis. He was opposed to both her socialism and her belief in birth control.

Hitler’s views on Eugenics was very different from those of Sanger and Stopes. This is what Sanger has to say about this in The Birth Control Review of February 1919:

Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother.

Sanger and Stopes always believed that reproductive decisions should be made on an individual and not a social or cultural basis, and she consistently repudiated any racial application of eugenics principles. For example, Sanger vocally opposed the racial stereotyping that effected passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, on the grounds that intelligence and other inherited traits vary by individual and not by group.

1. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wstopes.htm
2. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jsanger.htm