Margaret Sanger and the Pill

Of the millions of women who take the pill each day, most think about it only during the second or two it takes to swallow it; for the most disciplined among us, taking it requires no thought at all. We pop the it out of simple packages in pastel colors, but where did the pill really come from? The story of the pill is much more complex than the packaging suggests.
The FDA approved the first birth control pill in 1960. Within five years, more than six and a half million women were using it to regulate their families! This new medication completely revolutionized relationships, society, and the workplace by allowing women to postpone having children. The pill seems entirely commonplace today, a benign if essential prop in our social landscape, yet its development was entirely dependent on the intertwining lives of a few key personalities, one of whom was Margaret Sanger.

For years, Sanger had been searching for an affordable and discreet method of family planning. The common methods of douching and pulling out were unreliable and distasteful to many; diaphragms were more dependable but were expensive and required multiple visits to the doctor’s office for fittings (see her 1916 pamphlet Family Planning ). At the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in Manhattan, Sanger investigated various alternatives, such as spermicidal foams and powders, but none were universally effective. Chemicals that worked well in one climate spoiled in another. Other options were prohibitively expensive for most women.

As early as August 1939, Sanger wrote to Clarence Gamble, describing the urgency for a more effective birth control method: “I’ve got herbs from Fiji which are said to be used to prevent Conception.  I’m hoping this may prove to be the ‘magic pill’  I’ve been hoping for since 1912 when women used to say ‘Do tell me the secret’ ‘Can’t I get some of the medicine too?.'” The pressure continued to build and in 1946 Sanger confided to a friend that she was “feeling more and more despondent as I saw and realized more than ever the inadequacy of the diaphragm reaching millions of women who need and should have something as simple as a birth control pill.”

Gregory Pincus (1903-1967)

The forecast on gender relations changed at a dinner party in London in early 1951, when Sanger was introduced to biologist Gregory Pincus. Pincus had been studying hormones and fertility since the 1930s, and had determined that estrogen temporarily prohibited ovulation in rabbits in the lab. His work was highly controversial and had cost him a professorship at Harvard in 1937, but he continued working by securing private funds with Hudson Hoagland, founding an independent research laboratory that would become the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. Sanger was fascinated by the potential of Pincus’s research, over dinner asking the question that had burned in her for years: “Do you think it would be possible  to develop an efficient contraceptive that would be easy to take, for example, a cheap pill?” Pincus was also greatly impressed with Sanger, who spelled out for him the important implications his research had for ameliorating poverty.

Sanger immediately set out securing funding for Pincus’s research. She introduced him to the wealthy philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick in 1953, who at the time was 76 years old. An avid supporter of the birth control movement, McCormick recognized the revolutionary potential of Pincus’s work and became a major benefactor, personally donating virtually all of the two million dollars (twelve million in today’s dollars!) required for research and field trials of Pincus’s experiments with progesterone. This direct sponsorship allowed Pincus and his colleagues to pursue research at a fast clip. In 1953, the first human trials began with medical students in Puerto Rico, which unlike many U.S. States had no laws on the books banning contraception.

On May 9, 1960, they announced that the FDA had approved in the first birth control pill, called Enovid. Margaret Sanger, who was 80 years old and in failing health at the time, didn’t hear about the FDA’s decision until the next day, after her children had read about it in the morning papers. Upon learning that her life long search for an discrete, affordable and easy birth control method had finally come to fruition, Sanger reportedly sighed, saying “It’s about time.” She called for a toast, but her children had to go into work. In true pioneer fashion, Sanger went ahead and celebrated, alone.

“Family Limitation”: A Book That Shaped America

On Monday June 25, the Library of Congress opened an exhibit in Washington on “Books That Shaped America”. The exhibit celebrates 88 works that shaped American life and thought, including Margaret Sanger’s 1914 pamphlet “Family Limitation”, which was a basic instructional manual of basic family planning techniques. The Library of Congress writes:

Margaret Sanger, “Family Limitation” (1914): While working as a nurse in the New York slums, Margaret Sanger witnessed the plight of poor women suffering from frequent pregnancies and self-induced abortion. Believing that these women had the right to control their reproductive health, Sanger published this pamphlet that simply explained how to prevent pregnancy. Distribution through the mails was blocked by enforcement of the Comstock Law, which banned mailing of materials judged to be obscene. However, several hundred thousand copies were distributed through the first family-planning and birth control clinic Sanger established in Brooklyn in 1916 and by networks of active women at rallies and political meetings.

In light of the current national conversation on whether or not women can “have it all”, it seems important to remember that less than 100 years ago women were widely viewed as baby-making machines. Sanger’s efforts to educate women to be more than that were punishable by law! Although the current debates about work-family balance point to how far we have to go for real gender equality, we should also be mindful of how far we have come. Sanger was already thinking about these issues these issues in the introduction of Family Planning:

“Of course, it is troublesome to get up to douche, it is also a nuisance to have to trouble about the date of the menstrual period. It seems inartistic and sordid to insert a pessary or a suppository in anticipation of the sexual act. But it is far more sordid to find yourself several years later burdened down with half a dozen unwanted children, helpless, starved, shoddily clothed, dragging at your skirt, yourself a dragged out shadow of the woman you once were.”

Read more about “Family Limitation” in this blog post, or read the pamphlet yourself here!

The London Family Planning Summit: 1921 / 2012

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#FPSummit, birth control, Family Planning Summit, London, Marie Stopes, Queen's Hall Meeting

This past Wednesday, the UK government, along with UNFPA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, hosted a Family Planning Summit in London. According to the Summit website, the “the Summit will call for unprecedented global political commitments and resources that will enable 120 million more women and girls to use contraceptives by 2020. Reaching this goal could result in over 200,000 fewer women and girls dying in pregnancy and childbirth and nearly 3 million fewer infants dying in their first year of life.” No doubt the Summit was particularly welcome in the wake of the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which was regrettably silent on the importance of contraception and family planning to emancipating women around the world. Here are some of the conference’s inspiring messages that we found on Twitter:

Dr Chan: Access to modern contraception is a fundamental right of every woman. goo.gl/YoJiY #FPSummit

— WHO (@WHO) July 11, 2012

“If you take the energy of innovators & use it on behalf of the poor… it can be absolutely transformative.” -@melindagates #FPsummit
— Gates Health (@gateshealth) July 11, 2012

One of the goals of the conference is to “revitalize global commitments to family planning and access to contraceptives as a cost-effective and transformational development priority.” Revitalize is the key word here. Over the past two decades, access to family planning has often been taken for granted as a battle that has been won. In America recently we’ve seen the possible consequences of not fighting for these hard-won gains. In many places around the world family planning resources have never been widely available. It’s inspiring to see activists recommit to making modern contraception available to women around the world! If donors follow through with the promised 2.6 billion, this meeting could really be a turning point for the future of family planning!

Marie Stopes, British birth control activist (1880-1958)

Summits like these were crucial to the emergence of family planning. London also hosted one of the first birth control meetings approximately ninety years ago, which was organized by British birth control activist Marie Stopes. Margaret Sanger, who was visiting London on her way to Germany, was in attendance, although she was not a featured speaker. Coincidentally, we recently came across a 1921 pamphlet that documented the minutes of the conference, which was called the Queen’s Hall Meeting on Constructive Birth Control. Stopes’s conference was one of the many steps that led birth control becoming mainstream, and yet many of the speakers’ messages resonate with the goals of this week’s Family Planning Summit.

One activist, Maude Royden, sent a message of greeting that said

“Every child has a right to be desired before it is conceived, loved before it is born, and provided for while it is helpless. Every mother should have time and health to give the fullest measure of love and care to every child she bears, and to give it without an intolerable strain upon her own vitality. Who will deny these things in theory? Who will not admit that they are so true as to be truisms? And yet the brutal denial of these “truisms” in actual everyday life is seen everywhere, and gives us our terrible infant death-rate, our perhaps still more terrible infant “damage-rate” and a mass of almost inarticulate suffering amongst married women…”

Featured speaker Dr. E Killick Millard implored the audience open up to revolutionary new ideas (ie birth control) that could shape the world for the better:

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is time, high time, that we abandoned old ideas, swept away misapprehension and prejudice; it is high time we abandoned false sentimentality and faced facts as they really are. Now, we know, or we ought to know, that means do exist for preventing concpetion and restraining excessive fertility without the mutilation of marriage or the placing of an intolerable and entirely unnatural strain upon married couples. I submit that the experience of vast number of intelligent and thinking people who have used these mean has demonstrated that they are on the whole effective and harmless. I do not think that we can overestimate the fundamental and far-reaching importance of this great question. This question of birth control really underlies so many other great questions of the day. The whole welfare of humanity may be said without exaggeration to be bound up with it.”

On the one hand, the 2012 London Family Planning Summit called for an internationalist agenda that is fairly cutting edge today. On the other hand, the Summit is part of a long tradition of birth control reformers coming together in order to realize an ideal of women’s emancipation that is still out of reach.

Birth Control and Eugenics: Uneasy Bedfellows?

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document, eugenics, Historical Legacy, history, margaret sanger, New York Historical Society, reproductive rights

Margaret Sanger blurb in New York Historical Society Exhibit

Recently on a visit to the New York Historical Society (NYHS), we noticed a small exhibit in the front hall on the history of reform movements in New York that featured Margaret Sanger. The blurb read: “Though best known for her role in promoting women’s access to legal birth control (for which she was indicted for obscenity in 1914) Margaret Sanger was also a proponent of eugenics, suggesting that the fertility of the “unfit” ought to be restricted.” At the Sanger Papers we spend our time going over the entirety of Sanger’s life, so it strikes us as curious (and particularly presentist) that this stage of her career has come to define her so extensively.

In the wake of media attention following the 1917 Brownsville Clinic trial, Margaret Sanger broadened her arguments for birth control in an effort to appeal to a wider audience that included wealthy women, doctors and academics. Sanger added eugenic and public health reasons to support birth control, which essentially overshadowed her earlier feminist and socialist rationales. These conservative arguments had far more widely spread support. Eugenics, in particular, was a respectable scientific field,  widely advocated by leading intellectuals, scientists and politicians. Students were taught eugenics in college courses; state fairs had booths educating visitors on “racial hygiene,” and proponents of eugenics populated the faculty of schools like Yale, Stanford and Harvard. Sanger believed that if she could secure the support of the eugenics movement, she could win legitimacy and gain prestige for the birth control movement. Sanger, like many others of her time, was swayed by the arguments of eugenics, though she did not adopt them wholesale. Her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization, offers the most detailed explication of her views on eugenics, and shows where she differed with so-called positive eugenics. Her efforts to win the acceptance of the eugenics movement did not succeed, as Sanger and the birth control movement remained at the fringe of the mainstream eugenics movement.

The differences between Sanger and the birth control movement and the academics who lead the eugenics movement have been summarized by the Eugenics Archive site, in part:

Margaret Sanger and leaders of the birth control movement, predominantly women, believed that people should be empowered, by education, to make choices to limit their own reproduction. In a society that frowned on open discussion of sexuality and where physicians knew little about the biology of reproduction, Sanger advocated that mothers be given access to the scientific information needed to thoughtfully plan conception.

Davenport and other eugenic leaders, predominantly men, believed that the state should be empowered, by statute, to control reproduction by whole classes of people they deemed genetically inferior. Eugenicists focused on segregating the “feebly inherited” in mental institutions, ultimately seeking the legal remedy of compulsory sterilization. (They also employed immigration restriction to limit the growth of certain population groups.)

Evidence of the distrust and antipathy that some eugenicists felt for Sanger and her colleagues can be seen in the following excerpts from a 1928 letter from Paul Popenoe to Madison Grant, in which Popenoe bemoans the possibility of an alliance with Sanger’s American Birth Control League. The original can be found in the Charles B. Davenport Papers, at the American Philosophical Society Library.

“Dear Mr. Grant,

I have been considerably disquieted by the letter you showed me yesterday, suggesting a working alliance between the American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League. In my judgement we have everything to lose nothing to gain to such an arrangement.

[The American Birth Control League] is controlled by a group that has be brought up on agitation and emotional appeal instead of on research and education… With this group, we would take on a large quantity of ready-made enemies which it has accumulated, and we would gain allies who, while believing that they are eugenics, really have no conception of what eugenics is and are actually opposed to it.

[At a recent international birth control conference] two members of our advisory council … put through a resolution at the final meeting, urging that people whose children gave promise of being of exceptional value to the race should have as many children, properly spaced, as they felt that they feasibly could. This is eugenics. It is not the policy of the American Birth Control League leaders, who in the next issue of their monthly magazine came out with an editorial denouncing this resolution as contrary to all the principles and sentiments of their organization.

If it is desirable for us to make a campaign in favor of contraception, we are abundantly able to do so on our own account, without enrolling a lot of sob sisters, grand stand players, and anarchists to help us. We had a lunatic fringe in the eugenics movement in the early days; we have been trying for 20 years to get rid of it and have finally done so. Let’s not take on another fringe of any kind as an ornament.

Sincerely,

Paul Popenoe

In 1928, at the height of the popularity of the eugenics movement, this letter makes clear how peripheral Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement were to eugenics, and how much at odds she was with many of its central tenants. Fast forward to 2012, where the dominant interpretation of Sanger’s work is her critical role in the eugenics movement.  It is rather ironic that her legacy today has been yoked to a discredited ideological movement that hardly accepted her at the time.

So why did the NYHS accept a portrayal of Sanger that depicts her eugenics period as definitive of her life time of advocacy? In today’s popular discourse, Sanger’s historical legacy has been appropriated by opponents of reproductive rights and used as an easy target to defame and discredit the work that has continued in the almost 50 years since Sanger’s death. Embellishing her role within the eugenics movement is a key feature of this agenda. With a single sentence, the NYHS lent its institutional authority to legitimizing this problematic interpretation.  When we asked them, via Twitter, about their curatorial choices, they responded that their exhibit “reveals history’s complexity”. Certainly, history is complex; yet this exhibition piece reveals more about the complexity of the present than that of the past.

#SayVagina: Legislating Women’s Bodies, 1932

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Abortion, birth control methods, documents, Politics

Our Facebook feed this week has been overflowing with jokes and outrage about the Michigan State Congress where Rep. Lisa Brown was banned from speaking on the floor after saying “vagina” in a debate over an abortion bill. Brown’s sound response: “It’s an anatomically correct term for woman’s anatomy. It actually exists in Michigan statutes in three different places. This bill was about abortion. That doesn’t happen without a vagina.” Unsurprisingly, male lawmakers’ discomfort about speaking openly about the very bodies they are attempting to regulate is not new. In 1932, Margaret Sanger went to Washington to lobby against a provision in the Comstock Law that categorized birth control information as obscene and punished those who distributed it, including health care professionals (seriously). Below are two passages from her papers that illustrate some of the all-to-familiar attitudes she encountered there.

Sanger lobbying Congress, 1932

American Woman’s Association Award Speech, April 20, 1932:
“We found that the great difficulty was misunderstanding. We further found that the great majority of these men were both badly informed and misinformed. Of course, we found that the younger men, some of the newer ones, knew something of the pros and cons of birth control. One could easily know that by the size of their own families. But when it came to asking for a law to allow others to have the same privileges that they had, the subject became a serious one that had to have their due consideration.”

Letter to Mary Hope Macaulay, May 21, 1932:
“But Mary dear their arguments grow weaker, they put up a very poor case this time never have we so thoroughly aroused the people as this year. Thousands wrote to Congressmen and oh Mary such letters!! Many of them classics. Just to arouse people to ask, to demand this right makes me feel the victory is near. And oh Mary you would love to see the look on the men’s faces… when I replied to pertinent questions & talked about “douches” — Their faces were scarlet! Poor darlings they wanted to escape but they had to sit & listen to what women endure. I read letter from Mothers & their old tired eyes were moist & I knew they understood & were moved.”