Description

Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer and nurse. She popularized the term 'birth control', opened the first birth control clinic in the US, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. Publication of her pamphlet Family LImitation (1914) led to her prosecution, and when in 1916 she was arrested for distributing information on contraception, her subsequent trial and appeal generated controversy. Sanger wrote several books in the 1920s which had a nationwide impact in promoting the cause of birth control. Between 1920-26 567,000 copies of Woman and the New Race (1920) and The Pivot of Civilisation (1922) were sold. She also wrote two autobiographies designed to promote the cause - My Fight for Birth Control (1931) and Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938). During the 1920s she received hundreds of thousands of letters, many written in desperation by women begging for information on how to prevent unwanted pregnancies, and 500 of these where compiled into the 1928 book, Motherhood in Bondage. Sanger died aged 86 in 1966, a year after birth control was legalized in the US.