Happy 140th Birthday Margaret Sanger

NAME: Margaret Sanger

А я пропустил :(

Sep 14, 2019 Margaret Sanger

Today is the 140th birthday of Margaret Sanger. We all owe her a great deal of gratitude for the her perseverance for a cause we all but take for granted today. The world is a better place because she was in it and still feels the loss that she has left.

BIRTH DATE: September 14, 1879
DEATH DATE: September 6, 1966
EDUCATION: Claverack College, Hudson River Institute
PLACE OF BIRTH: Corning, New York
PLACE OF DEATH: Tucson, Arizona
CAUSE OF DEATH: Heart Failure
REMAINS: Buried, Fishkill Rural Cemetery, Fishkill, NY

BEST KNOWN FOR: Margaret Sanger was an early feminist and women’s rights activist who coined the term “birth control” and worked towards its legalization.

Activist, social reformer. Born Margaret Higgins on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York. She was one of 11 children born into a Roman Catholic working-class Irish American family. Her mother, Anne, had several miscarriages, and Margaret believed that all of these pregnancies took a toll on her mother’s health and contributed to her early death at the age of 40 (some reports say 50). The family lived in poverty as her father, Michael, an Irish stonemason, preferred to drink and talk politics than earn a steady wage.

Seeking a better life, Sanger attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute in 1896. She went on to study nursing at White Plains Hospital four years later. In 1902, she married William Sanger, an architect. The couple eventually had three children together.

In 1910, the Sangers moved to New York City, settling in the Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village. The area was a bohemian enclave known for its radical politics at the time, and the couple became immersed in that world. They socialized with the likes of writer Upton Sinclair and anarchist Emma Goldman. Sanger joined the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party and the Liberal Club. A supporter of the Industrial Workers of the World union, she participated in a number of strikes.

Sanger started her campaign to educate women about sex in 1912 by writing a newspaper column called “What Every Girl Should Know.” She also worked as a nurse on the Lower East Side, at the time a predominantly poor immigrant neighborhood. Through her work, Sanger treated a number of women who had undergone back-alley abortions or tried to self-terminate their pregnancies. Sanger objected to the unnecessary suffering endured by these women, and she fought to make birth control information and contraceptives available. She also began dreaming of a “magic pill” to be used to control pregnancy. “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother,” Sanger said.

In 1914, Sanger started a feminist publication called The Woman Rebel, which promoted a woman’s right to have birth control. The monthly magazine landed her in trouble, as it was illegal to send out information on contraception through the mail. The Comstock Act of 1873 prohibited the trade in and circulation of “obscene and immoral materials.” Championed by Anthony Comstock, the act included publications, devices, and medications related to contraception and abortion in its definition of obscene materials. It also made mailing and importing anything related to these topics a crime.

Rather than face a possible five-year jail sentence, Sanger fled to England. While there, she worked in the women’s movement and researched other forms of birth control, including diaphragms, which she later smuggled back into the United States. She had separated from her husband by this time, and the two later divorced. Embracing the idea of free love, Sanger had affairs with psychologist Havelock Ellis and writer H. G. Wells.

Sanger returned to the United States in October 1915, after charges against her had been dropped. She began touring to promote birth control, a term that she coined. In 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. Sanger and her staff, including her sister Ethel, were arrested during a raid of the Brooklyn clinic nine days after it opened. They were charged with providing information on contraception and fitting women for diaphragms. Sanger and her sister spent 30 days in jail for breaking the Comstock law. Later appealing her conviction, she scored a victory for the birth control movement. The court wouldn’t overturn the earlier verdict, but it made an exception in the existing law to allow doctors to prescribe contraception to their female patients for medical reasons. Around this time, Sanger also published her first issue of The Birth Control Review.

In 1921, Sanger established the American Birth Control League, a precursor to today’s Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She served as its president until 1928. In 1923, while with the league, she opened the first legal birth control clinic in the United States. The clinic was named the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. Also around this time, Sanger married for her second husband, oil businessman J. Noah H. Slee. He provided much of the funding for her efforts for social reform.

Wanting to advance her cause through legal channels, Sanger started the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control in 1929. The committee sought to make it legal for doctors to freely distribute birth control. One legal hurdle was overcome in 1936, when the U.S. Court of Appeals allowed for birth control devices and related materials to be imported into the country.

For all of her advocacy work, Sanger was not without controversy. She has been criticized for her association with eugenics, a branch of science that seeks to improve the human species through selective mating. As grandson Alexander Sanger, chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council, explained, “She believed that women wanted their children to be free of poverty and disease, that women were natural eugenicists, and that birth control, which could limit the number of children and improve their quality of life, was the panacea to accomplish this.” Still Sanger held some views that were common at the time, but now seem abhorrent, including support of sterilization for the mentally ill and mentally impaired. Despite her controversial comments, Sanger focused her work on one basic principle: “Every child should be a wanted child.”

Sanger stepped out of the spotlight for a time, choosing to live in Tucson, Arizona. Her retirement did not last long, however. She worked on the birth control issue in other countries in Europe and Asia, and she established the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952. Still seeking a “magic pill,” Sanger recruited Gregory Pincus, a human reproduction expert, to work on the problem in the early 1950s. She found the necessary financial support for the project from Katharine McCormick, the International Harvester heiress. This research project would yield the first oral contraceptive, Enovid, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.

Sanger lived to see another important reproductive rights milestone in 1965, when the Supreme Court made birth control legal for married couples in its decision on Griswold v. Connecticut. She died a year later on September 6, 1966, in a nursing home in Tucson, Arizona. Across the nation, there are numerous women’s health clinics that carry the Sanger name—in remembrance of her efforts to advance women’s rights and the birth control movement.



Is the subject of books:
The Margaret Sanger Story and the Fight for Birth Control, 1955, BY: Lawrence Lader, DETAILS: (biography)

Author of books:
What Every Mother Should Know (1917)
My Fight for Birth Control (1931)
Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938, memoir)

Sex research in America

From here to eternity

When the United States thought sex was as dangerous as communism

Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America. By Christopher Turner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 544 pages; $35. To be published in Britain in August as “Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex” by Fourth Estate; £25.


“TREAT yourself”, the advertisements say. “You’re worth it”. The image may be a woman bending over or a man with a seductive grin. As for the product, it hardly matters whether it is soap or a car: sex is being used to sell, and latent desires will move consumers to buy—or at least feel titillated by the prospect.

What a darkly ironic epilogue for the sexual revolution, observes Christopher Turner in “Adventures in the Orgasmatron”. Progressive attitudes were meant to free society from the dangers of conformity. Yet some of the most radical ideas about our primal urges have been harnessed by those who want everyone to drink the same brand of beer.

Wilhelm Reich, a charismatic and gifted psychoanalyst who trained with Sigmund Freud, coined the phrase “sexual revolution” in the 1930s. Reich had high hopes for sex. He spent his life insisting that a bone-rattling orgasm was the best way to ensure personal health and a more humane society. Human desires are natural, he argued; it is only when society represses these instincts that problems arise.

As the hero of this erudite and engaging work of social history, Reich is a fascinating subject. He was arrogant and influential, tyrannical and abusive. He fell out with Freud and alienated his peers by insisting not only that orgasms were a panacea, but also that psychoanalysis should be a tool for social change. In his mid-30s when the Nazis came to power, he saw fascism as an inevitable product of repressive social structures, such as the patriarchal family. If the instincts of children weren’t repressed, he argued, then adults wouldn’t crave being told what to do. Reich wanted to apply the revelations of psychoanalysis to reforming sex laws (by, for example, lifting bans on abortion and prostitution) and updating social mores about marriage and children. Free sex, he believed, was the best check on totalitarianism.

Freud found this naive, maintaining that psychoanalysis was not about changing the world, but about helping people to adapt to it. Repression wasn’t something to throw off, but a part of the human condition. “To Freud, misery came from within; to Reich, it was imposed from without.”

Time, however, made Reich’s grasp on reality more tenuous, particularly after he fled to America in 1939. Like a mad scientist, he grew convinced that sexual electricity was quantifiable. His big invention was something called an “orgone energy accumulator”, a box about the size of a telephone booth which collected good atmospheric energy. Time inside the box would not only improve one’s “orgastic potency”, Reich claimed, but also treat cancer, among other maladies (including his own psoriasis). Scientists refused to confirm Reich’s orgone theories, but a generation of young progressives heralded these boxes as sources of sexual liberation, something Woody Allen parodied with his “Orgasmatron” in his 1973 film, “Sleeper”. Norman Mailer had one (though he later described it as “kind of crap”). William Burroughs claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in the wooden shack he built.

These pleasure-seeking bohemians gave Reich pause. He rued that they were hijacking his Utopian concepts to unleash “a free-for-all fucking epidemic”. Post-war America was an all too fertile ground for his radical ideas, it seems, as leftist intellectuals flailed about for a new language of opposition to replace Marxist dogma. Reich’s theories about sex made promiscuity seem rebellious and self-affirming.

In 1947 Reich was accused in the press of starting a “new cult of sex and anarchy”. A year later Alfred Kinsey published his explosive report about sexuality, which found that American Puritanical mores were out of sync with reality. The McCarthy trials—which sought links between sexual liberation and communism—added to the hysteria. The Food and Drug Administration began a crackdown on Reich’s work, finding it menacing. The government ultimately demanded that all of Reich’s orgone boxes be incinerated along with his books, and then sent him to prison, where he died of a heart attack in 1957.

Why was Reich considered so dangerous? Though possibly a paranoid schizophrenic, who spent the last years of his life convinced that the world was under attack by UFOs, he offered an intellectual rationale for the sexual revolution. But he also came to regret opening this Pandora’s box. Reich predicted that America’s liberated excesses would be countered by repression, just like in Stalin’s Russia.

Yet Mr Turner suggests a different legacy, one that haunted Herbert Marcuse. The German sociologist, disillusioned by the sexually omnivorous 1960s, came to believe that liberated sexual desires had been co-opted to serve capitalism; advertisers had figured out how to exploit libidinal urges to inspire “false needs”. But this overlooks the benefits. The sexual revolution may not have yielded a neurosis-free Utopia soundscaped with the glorious yelps of orgasms. But a more open society and greater sexual tolerance (at least in the West) means fewer people are looking for pleasure in a funny wooden box.
from The Economist