HERSTORY:

Few of us learned about Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) in school although she created what is probably the only significant material improvement in the quality of women's lives in modern times-birth control. She is known the world over as a great American woman. Everywhere, except in our own public schools where sex and female topics of inter est are strictly tabooed.

THE SECRET

These subjects were forbidden in Margaret's schools also even in nursing school. But Margaret learned about birth attending her own mother in childbirth (who had 11 chil dren) and many other women in the slums of New York City as a nurse. The women were always pregnant but they saw that the rich had small families. They would beg Margaret to tell them the secret, but she was as ignorant as they were. Often her patients died in childbirth

"I folded her still hands across her breast, remembering how they had pleaded with me, begging so humbly. for the knowledge which was her right."

She didn't learn about the control of birth there. Rather she was to learn that the control of birth was held by men like Anthony Comstock who engineered the passage of strict laws against obscene literature (,,the Comstock laws." 1873), and various officials of the Catholic Church. These groups kept the United States one of the most backward nations in the world in the field of reproductive health. While Europeans had birth control, we had purity and enforced ignorance and one of the highest maternal death rates in the world.

BIRTH CONTROL, AN OBSCENITY

Later this "roundsman of the Lord", Comstock, whose motto was, "morals, not art or literature," made it his personal crusade to try to wipe out Margaret Sanger's educational efforts. His enthusiastic troops were postal and customs officials as well as the police and grand juries. His lunatic fringe group served maily as a front for Catholics and other prominent men who believed in keeping women barefoot and pregnant,

Men like the owner of the large American Woolen Company in Lawrence, Connecticut, employed unskilled women and children at an average salary of 15 cents an hour for 56 hour weeks.

page 2/What She Wants/September 1974

Margaret Sanger

MARGARET THE UNION MAID

When in 1912 the work week for women and children was shortened to 54 hours by the state (there was no protective legislation as we know it yet) he promptly cut wages. 25,000 men, women and children went on strike. It was winter and the children were suffering badly. Margaret, who worked with the Irish women in the laundry union and Scandinavian women in the housemaids unior.. was sent to Lawrence by the IWW (Inter. national Workers of the World) to bring these children back to New York where "friends of labor'would care for them until the stroke ended. The shock she felt upon exarnining these starving, scantily clothed children would haunt her for the rest of her life along with the phrase she had heard so often, "Tell me the secret" on the lips. of dving women.

HER POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

During this period, in her early twenties, Margaret, a feminist since high school days, had an awakening of political interest. Her home had been the scene of many a lively "free-thinking" discussion between her socialist father and his friends. Now after completing her nurses training and living as a married suburbanite, she longed to trade housewifery for midwifery again. When her dream house burned down she reached a major turning point.

"Somewhere in the back of my mind saw the absurdity of placing all one's hopes, all one's efforts, in the creation of something external that could perish in a few moments. I must have learned the lesson of the {futility of material things."

She joined the Socialist party, went back to work and back to studying.

THE SEARCH

Her studies were a search to find the secret that would end the "enslavement of motherhood." Doctors would not tell her, out of fear of the Comstock laws, and almost no materials were published on the subject. Finally a doctor advised her to go to France where birth control was common (in the form of condoms, medicinal douches, and diaphragm-like sponges). She went to France and continued to search the world over again and again for new methods. She discovered the diaphragm in France, the spermacídal jelly in Germany, the pill in Russia and the pessary (cervical cap) in Japan.

ON INVENTION

None of these inventions would be available to us today without Ms. Sanger's tire. less labor. The men who invented these things were often anxious not to lose lucra tive patent rights or were anxious to limit their use for political reasons (desires to keep large populations for war). But she was not interested or held back by their petty or ruthless plans. In every case she manager to make off with a sample or description and later found ways to have it manufac tured elsewhere at reasonable cost and often in a more effective, sophisticated form. "I didn't have time to waste on people unless they would do some thing to help forward the movement."

In order to do these things she went to jail nine times and once nearly died of a hunger strike (she was the first prisoner ever to be force-fed in the United States), argued against Mahatma Gandhi (who believed in devine self-control only) and Douglas McArthur (who tried to keep her from entering Japan), fled the country and lived in exile for several years, defied her father and left her husband (who would later go to jail for 30 days for distributing one of her pamphlets). She founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the American Birth Control League, the National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control, the World Population Conference and established clinics the world over, She worked to free women her entire adult life. Her convictions were so strong that she was never turned aside by anyone, she battered down their arguments until she convinced them instead. Even the Cath olic press eulogized her after her death in 1966.

Where did this woman, born into a large Irish family, who suffered from tuberculosis all her life, find the strength and courage to accomplish this work? She did not fight her battles alone-many women were drawn to her, worked for her, nursed her and fought for her. Her two sisters worked to put her through high school and nursing. They then worked in her first clinics. Dr. Hannah Stone left all respectability behind to work in Margaret's first clinic and stayed until she died of a heart attack. Her mother-in-law raised her children from infancy. Wives of wealthy men financed the clinics, campaigns, trips abroad and manufacture of devices. Poor women knocked on doors, sold her pamphlets on street corners, went to jail with her and build her popular birth control Behind every herstory are a hundred more herstories. The love of women for each other makes us all stronger.

movement.

NOTE: Most of the material for this Herstory was taken from the excellent Dell paperback, Margaret Sanger, Pioneer of Birth Control. (95 cents, 1969). The authors, Lawrence Lader and Milton Meltzer reveal all the fascinating details of Ms. Sanger's life which they have obviously researched in detail. Not only is the book thorough, it explains birth control and human reproduction so that it is suitable for use by junior high school and high school readers. Nor do the authors try to distort or ignore Ms. Sanger's political beliefs. Rarely have I read a book I could recommend so highly.