Social Reformer and Advocate for Women's Rights. Margaret Sanger was the leading crusader in America for birth control, which is a term she coined. She was arrested eight times in a tumultuous career that brought her condemnations as a "lascivious monster" and praise by H.G. Wells as "the greatest woman in the world." At one point, she had to sail to England to escape charges. On October 16, 1916 she opened in Brooklyn, New York the first birth-control clinic in America, the first clinic staffed by doctors, and led the 1921 national movement, American Birth Control League, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation. Born Margaret Louise Higgins, her parents were Irish Catholics, and her mother conceived 18 times with 11 babies living to age one, then dying at the age of 49. She attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, before she enrolled in the nurse probation program at White Plains Hospital in 1900. She left the program when she married architect William Sanger in 1902; the couple had three children. She suffered from tuberculosis. After her divorce, she remarried in 1922 to James Noah H. Slee. In 1922 she wrote "Pivot of Civilization," which is said to had radical ideas and not-so-flattering statements about the medical profession of the 1920s with no preventive medicine for females or males. Besides her books, she gave lectures, wrote newspaper columns and published a magazine, "Woman Rebel," as part of her sex education to females. For years, she fought the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned dissemination of information about contraception. She stated it suppressed her freedom of speech. She lived to see that the United States Supreme Court legalized in 1965 birth control throughout the United States with the Griswold v. Connecticut case.
Social Reformer and Advocate for Women's Rights. Margaret Sanger was the leading crusader in America for birth control, which is a term she coined. She was arrested eight times in a tumultuous career that brought her condemnations as a "lascivious monster" and praise by H.G. Wells as "the greatest woman in the world." At one point, she had to sail to England to escape charges. On October 16, 1916 she opened in Brooklyn, New York the first birth-control clinic in America, the first clinic staffed by doctors, and led the 1921 national movement, American Birth Control League, which became the Planned Parenthood Federation. Born Margaret Louise Higgins, her parents were Irish Catholics, and her mother conceived 18 times with 11 babies living to age one, then dying at the age of 49. She attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, before she enrolled in the nurse probation program at White Plains Hospital in 1900. She left the program when she married architect William Sanger in 1902; the couple had three children. She suffered from tuberculosis. After her divorce, she remarried in 1922 to James Noah H. Slee. In 1922 she wrote "Pivot of Civilization," which is said to had radical ideas and not-so-flattering statements about the medical profession of the 1920s with no preventive medicine for females or males. Besides her books, she gave lectures, wrote newspaper columns and published a magazine, "Woman Rebel," as part of her sex education to females. For years, she fought the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned dissemination of information about contraception. She stated it suppressed her freedom of speech. She lived to see that the United States Supreme Court legalized in 1965 birth control throughout the United States with the Griswold v. Connecticut case.
Bio by: mj
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