A short life of the author
Margaret Sanger was the most consequential American activist of the twentieth century whose primary medium was the written word. She was not primarily a literary figure — she was a nurse, an organiser, a political strategist, and a public speaker of formidable force — but her books, pamphlets, and periodicals were the instruments through which she educated millions of women about contraception, built a mass movement for reproductive rights, and challenged laws that had criminalised the distribution of birth control information since the Comstock Act of 1873. Her legacy is simultaneously celebrated and contested, her achievements in reproductive rights shadowed by her association with the eugenics movement — a complexity that makes her one of the most important and most difficult figures in American social history.
Corning
Margaret Louise Higgins was born in 1879 in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children in an Irish-American Catholic family. Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, endured eighteen pregnancies — eleven live births and seven miscarriages — before dying of tuberculosis at age fifty. Sanger later wrote that watching her mother’s health destroyed by repeated pregnancies was the formative experience of her life. Her father, Michael Hennessey Higgins, was a stonemason and freethinker who encouraged Margaret’s education and independence.
She trained as a nurse and in 1911 moved to New York City, where she worked as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side among immigrant women whose lives were dominated by unwanted pregnancy, self-induced abortion, and the constant fear of conception without any reliable means of prevention. This experience radicalised her. She began writing a column on sex education for the Socialist newspaper The Call, titled “What Every Girl Should Know” — which was censored by the Post Office under the Comstock laws for discussing venereal disease.
The Woman Rebel
In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, a monthly newspaper that advocated for birth control (a term she coined) and challenged the Comstock Act directly. She was indicted for violating postal obscenity laws and fled to Europe, where she studied contraceptive methods in the Netherlands and England. Upon her return in 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic in America in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn — it was raided by police nine days later, and Sanger was arrested and jailed.
These confrontations with the law — arrests, trials, jailings — were central to Sanger’s strategy. She understood that legal persecution generated publicity, and publicity educated the public. Each prosecution brought more press coverage, more public sympathy, and more supporters to the cause. By the 1920s, she had built a national movement.
The Books
Woman and the New Race (1920) was Sanger’s most important book — a manifesto arguing that women’s ability to control their own fertility was the key to every other form of liberation. The book argued that involuntary motherhood was the root cause of poverty, disease, infant mortality, and women’s subordination, and that voluntary motherhood — made possible by contraception — would transform society. It sold over 200,000 copies and made Sanger a national figure.
The Pivot of Civilization (1922) was more controversial. It extended the argument of Woman and the New Race into territory that now makes for uncomfortable reading: Sanger advocated for birth control as a eugenic measure, arguing that the unrestricted fertility of the “unfit” threatened civilisation. The book’s association with eugenic thought — which was mainstream progressive opinion in the 1920s — has become the most contested aspect of Sanger’s legacy.
My Fight for Birth Control (1931) and Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938) told the story of her crusade in compelling narrative form. Happiness in Marriage (1926) was a sex-education manual. Family Limitation (1914), a pamphlet, was the most practically useful of her publications — a straightforward guide to contraceptive methods that was distributed by the hundreds of thousands and was the text for which she was most frequently prosecuted.
Planned Parenthood and Legacy
Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. She funded the research that led to the development of the birth control pill, persuading Katharine McCormick to finance Gregory Pincus’s research at the Worcester Foundation. The pill, approved by the FDA in 1960, was the culmination of Sanger’s lifelong campaign.
Her legacy remains fiercely debated. Her contributions to reproductive rights are indisputable — she did more than any single individual to make contraception legal, accessible, and socially acceptable in the United States. But her advocacy of eugenic sterilisation, her alliances with eugenics organisations, and the racial implications of some of her population-control rhetoric have made her a deeply problematic figure, particularly for communities of colour. Planned Parenthood itself has reckoned publicly with Sanger’s eugenic associations while affirming the core mission she established.
Collecting Sanger
Family Limitation (privately printed, 1914), the pamphlet that launched Sanger’s legal battles, is extremely rare — most copies were seized and destroyed. Woman and the New Race (Brentano’s, 1920) and The Pivot of Civilization (Brentano’s, 1922) are the primary book-length collecting targets. Signed copies are scarce. Sanger’s extensive archives — including correspondence with H.G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, and other figures — are held at the Library of Congress and Smith College.