Vered’s Blog

Freedom is our ability to choose what we wish for. How can we be free if we have limited information? This is the power of education. It gives us the knowledge that allows us freedom to choose our ways. When we are ignorant we are limited and do not have the choice. WE are not free.

Thanks to Margaret Sanger, many of the world’s women live with a freedom they take for granted: to decide when and if to become mothers, without sacrificing sexual expression.

In the words of the futurist and historian H.G. Wells “The movement Margaret Sanger started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time. When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.”

Margaret Sanger taught us, first, to look at the world as if women mattered.

Born on Sept. 14, 1879, Margaret’s quest began long before she was known by the public. It started when she was just a young girl. As with most children, her parents were a large influence on her life, but in a way different than perhaps many others.

Margaret’s father provided her with all the mental tools she would need to succeed. A free thinker and outspoken radical, her father, Michael Higgins, influenced his young daughter to act the same way; to question everything and to stand up for what she believed in.
Though Margaret loved her mother, she conceded that definitely her father was the major influence in her early life.

Her mother however also had a large influence, yet not in quite the same way. Anna Sanger bore ten children other than Margaret, causing her to be both constantly pregnant and constantly sick, leaving little time for her children. Thus Margaret and her siblings were constantly forced to care for themselves.

Anna died at an early age to TB which Margaret attributed to her multiple pregnancies. It was then that she decided to become a nurse and start helping pregnant women.

While working as a practical nurse and midwife in the poorest neighborhoods of New York City in the years before World War I, she saw women deprived of their health, sexuality and ability to care for children already born. Contraceptive information was so suppressed by clergy-influenced, physician-accepted laws that it was a criminal offense to send it through the mail.

Yet the educated had access to such information and could purchase contraceptive in manipulating ways. It was this injustice that inspired Sanger to defy church and state.

In a series of articles called “What Every Girl Should Know,” then in her own newspaper The Woman Rebel and finally through neighborhood clinics that dispensed woman-controlled forms of birth control (a phrase she coined), Sanger put information and power into the hands of women.

In 1921 Sanger founded the American Birth Control League and served as its president until 1928. That and later organizations became in 1942 the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Continued government harassment brought public opinion to her side, and in 1936 the 1873 law was modified.

Sanger organized the first World Population Conference in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927 and was also the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, organized in 1953. She helped promote family planning in India and Japan.

Margaret Sanger envisioned a united front of women who would claim the legalization of contraception, along with greater public openness about sexuality, as a fundamental right. Birth control, Sanger argued, would enhance the opportunities of women beyond the promises of economic reformers, on the one hand, and of feminist movement on the other.

Margaret Sanger believed it would be a tool for redistributing power fundamentally, in the bedroom, the home, and the larger community. Women would achieve personal freedom by experiencing their sexuality free of consequence, just as men have always done, but in taking control of the forces of reproduction they would also lower birth rates, alter the balance of supply and demand for labor, and therein accomplish the revolutionary goals of workers without the social upheaval of class warfare.

Margaret Sanger is a great role model of leading by example. Her brave and joyous life included fulfilling work, three children, two husbands, many lovers and an international network of friends and colleagues. She was charismatic and sometimes idealistic, but she never abandoned her focus on women’s freedom and its larger implications for social justice.

Let’s honor her memory today and cherish our body and remember we always have a right to chose and control our life!

Have a great day! Vered Neta