Planned Parenthood of El Paso

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clinic, feminism, history, margaret sanger, news, reproductive rights

After seventy two years of providing services to the community the Planned Parenthood in El Paso has been left with no choice but to shut down due to lack of funding. When the clinic first opened in 1937 Margaret Sanger made a trip to El Paso to deliver an opening speech in order to help draw funds to the clinic.

February 9th, 1938 Sanger wrote to Ms.  Betty Goetting, the Chairman of the El Paso Mother’s Health Center (which would later become the El Paso Planned Parenthood). In this letter she commended the center:

“I am particularly proud of the fine work being done in El Paso and I feel that your group has much to offer to others interested in advancing the birth control cause in Texas.”

During the past year the clinic had improved the lives of many women in the area, serving over 600 patients!  Some of the case histories featured in their yearly report included:

“Patient 27 years of age, married 8 years, 7 living children, husband W.P.A. Laborer. When patient came into Clinic her baby was two months of age. It is not ten months of age. This is the first time in her married life that she has gone so long without another pregnancy.“

“Patient 29 years in age, married 10 years, 8 pregnancies, 5 living children, 3 died at the age of a few months. Last baby was instrumental delivery. When patient first applied to Clinic she weighed 89 pounds; 7 months later she weighed 105 pounds and was greatly improved in health.“

Money has been a problem for the clinic since it first opened. On March 28th 1939 Ms.  Betty Goetting said the following in a letter to Margaret Sanger:

“Our patients have increased beautifully with double the number this month already that we had last month. They are the very poor ones that we wish to reach but here again the mean problem of money, for these, many of them cannot pay one cent. We have depended on patients’ fees to pay our doctors. But when the few of us who really raise the money get discouraged, I remind them of you and how you managed to somehow get enough money to run things.“

Sanger made several trips out to visit the El Paso Clinic over the course of her activism, helping them to organize and using her influence to aid in raising money so that the clinic could remain open.

It truly is sad to see a clinic that has provided such wonderful services to so many people over the last century have to close down after seventy two years of being a valuable community resource.

[Picture Source]
All quotes from documents accessed through the MSPP’s Microfilm Files.

Feminists for Choice Explore Issues of Sanger and Race

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feminism, history, link, margaret sanger, reproductive rights

On the Feminists for Choice blog, Serena Freewomyn posted “Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?” The post offers a quick look at a topic much in the blogosphere, and while we don’t entirely agree with the author’s analysis, it at least adds some context to the debate .  The comments posted on the article are just as interesting as the blog itself.

In the interest of adding to the conversation, we’d like to provide a bit more information about Sanger and the Negro Project.

The Negro Project was an attempt to empower the black community to rise out of poverty through the use of birth control. The project was widely supported by black leaders, including Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Sanger proposed this project because she wanted to help  “a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste’ system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation.”

– Margaret Sanger to Mary Lasker on July 10, 1939. [Source]

Sanger was targeting the black community because, at the time, most of that community was at a disadvantage. The racism that wove through American history made it consistently more difficult for people of color to get ahead was the ‘caste’ system that left the black community, “notoriously underprivileged and handicapped”  according to Sanger. In conceiving this project Sanger wasn’t trying to use birth control as a means of getting rid of people of color; instead, she wanted the Negro Project to give a marginalized community power over their bodies and the ability to decide how many children to have. This would, in turn, make it easier for them to provide for themselves and get ahead.

Furthermore, Sanger did not enter the project without first observing a desire for reproductive health information from black women in the communities that she intended to work within.

Hazel Moore, a veteran lobbyist and health administrator, ran a birth control project under Sanger’s direction and found that black women in several Virginia counties were very responsive to birth control education. A 1938 trip to Tennessee further convinced Sanger of the desire of African-Americans in that region to control their fertility and the need for specific programs in birth control education aimed at the black community.

After observing this need Sanger teamed up with the Birth Control Federation of America to get funding for a campaign that would teach Southern black women about contraception. Unfortunately once they secured funding the project left Sanger’s control. She had wanted to train a black minister and a black doctor to tour the South, preaching about contraception in every city, church, and organization that they could. She believed that this step was necessary to drum up support and gain the community’s trust before launching a practical campaign that would actually supply contraception to black mothers.

The men running the Birth Control Federation of America decided that they wanted to go a different route, to include working birth control services for the black community into the general public health program, without any prior education in the community. They also refused Sanger’s idea to build a black-staffed clinic within the community, choosing instead a more mobile plan that swept in and out of the area like the vaccination caravans of the time.

The Negro Project was fairly problematic  because, as devised, it centralized control in the hands of white physicians, which did not empower the black community. It is important to note that this was not Sanger’s vision, this is what happened after her input in the project was ignored and her influence taken away.

Margaret Sanger’s papers make it clear that she wanted to develop a project that would empower black community leaders to bring contraception options and education to the people of their own communities. It’s unfortunate that she lost control of the project and it did not become what she had envisioned. It is also unfortunate that her efforts on behalf of people of color and other impoverished mothers have been turned into an example of some evil plot by writers who do not take the time to understand Sanger’s intentions.

Further Reading:

Sanger’s papers related to the Negro Project can be found in The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 3.

“Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project,” #28, Fall 2001.

Sanger’s First Clinic

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feminism, history, margaret sanger, reproductive rights

“The poor, century-behind-the-times public officials of this country might as well forget their moss-grown statutes and accept birth control as an established fact. My new national plan makes it as inevitable as night and day.”

– Margaret Sanger as quoted by the New York Call. Reprinted in The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 1 on page 200.

************

94 years ago today (October 26th, 1916)  a police raid shut down the nation’s first birth control clinic on Amboy Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Sanger had opened the clinic just ten days before, on October 16th 1916, along with her sister Ethyl Byrne, who was a registered nurse, and  an interpreter named Fania Mindell. Sanger chose Brownsville for her first clinic because she knew from her conversations with residents that the neighborhood would welcome the clinic.

The Brownsville Clinic was modeled after the birth control clinics that Sanger observed in Holland in 1915. Each woman who visited the clinic received Sanger’s pamphlet What Every Girl Should Know, a short lecture on the female reproductive system, and instructions on the use of various contraceptives for a charge of ten cents.

A flyer made to advertise the Brownsville Clinic,
printed in English, Yiddish and Italian.

The Clinic operated secretly, relying on word of mouth and covert advertising to get women into the door. It served more than 100 women on its first day, and reached approximately 400 in the ten days that it was operational.  On October 26th an undercover police woman and vice-squad officers raided the clinic and arrested Sanger, Byrne and Mindell.

Sanger was released from jail the following morning. She re-opened the Clinic on November 14, but was arrested again, this time charged with maintaining a public nuisance. She opened the Clinic once more on November 16, but police forced the landlord to evict Sanger and her staff, and the Clinic closed its doors a final time.

Sanger’s trial began on January 29. Sanger was convicted and offered a suspended sentence if she promised not to repeat the offense, but she refused to make that promise.  As a result of this she was given a choice of a fine or jail sentence; she chose to spend thirty days in the Queens County Penitentiary, and finished her sentence without incident.

Sanger appealed her conviction, and her case journeyed through the courts for a year until the New York Court of Appeals sustained her conviction in January of 1918. Despite ruling against her Judge Frederick Crane’s decision included a more liberal interpretation of New York State’s “Little Comstock” law, enabling physicians for the first time to legally prescribe contraception for general health reasons rather than exclusively for venereal disease.

The ruling, brought about by Sanger’s bravery and willingness to break laws , became the bedrock for doctor-staffed birth control clinics, an integral part of the birth control movement’s goal to afford all women, regardless of income, access to effective contraceptives.

[Information from The MSPP Website]

Beginning quote: New York Call, Oct. 22, 1916, 8. The article by George Martin ran under the title “‘Police can’t Stop Me,’ Says Margaret Sanger,” with the subheading “Birth Control Clinic Secret and Oral, She Declares – More to Be Opened Soon.”

What Every Girl Should Know

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document, feminism, history, margaret sanger, reproductive rights

“To the working girls of the world this little book is lovingly dedicated.”

– Dedication Page, What Every Girl Should Know

Some of the information in Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know, first published in 1913 as a column in the socialist newspaper, The Call is outdated. For instance, Sanger’s belief that masturbation, “gives the individual unlimited opportunity for indulgence, and consequently drains and exhausts the system of the vitality necessary for full development” [Page 39] and that sex can do the same thing if not approached mindfully (“A girl can waste her creative powers by brooding over a love affair to the extent of exhausting her system, with results not unlike the effects of masturbation and debauchery” [Page 46]) doesn’t really stand up to to knowledge that modern science has about our bodies and how they work.

Lady Gaga may not have gotten this memo (“I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.” – Lady Gaga, 2010) but most people can agree that these ideas are a bit outdated.

(Image from the New York Call, printed in response to a temporary suppression of Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know by the US Postal Authorities.)

Despite the advances we’ve made in the 97 years since this was published, however, much of Sanger’s writing in this pamphlet still rings true today. For instance…

“The mother is the logical person to teach the child as soon as questions arise, for it is to the mother that the child goes for information before he enters the schoolroom. If, therefore, the mother answers his questions truthfully and simply and satisfies his curiosity, she will find that the subject of sex ceases to be an isolated subject, and becomes a natural part of the child’s general learning.” [Page 8]

In response to a social worker who feared that giving girls and women accurate truths about sex (and STIs especially) would cause them to fear sex so much that they avoid marriage: “To which I replied that my object in telling young girls the truth is for the definite purpose of preventing them from entering into sexual relations whether in marriage or out of it, without thinking and knowing.” [Page 9]

“It is not my intention to thrust upon anyone a special code of morals, or to inflict upon the readers my own ideas of morality. I only presume to present the facts for you to accept according to your understanding.” [Page 10]

“The girl who scoffs at the idea of the Chinese women binding up their feet, is doubtless ignorant of the knowledge that to bind up their own thoracic and pelvic structures, i.e., the chest and abdominal portions of her body, in tight corsets  is doing greater harm to her health and injury to her development than the binding of the feet could possibly do. [Havelock] Ellis brings forth a few words on this subject which shows the the habit of binding the feet of the Chinese women is based on the same idea as the European woman has when she deforms her waist – they are both done for sexual attractiveness.” [Page 13 – 14]

“The women of wealth set certain standards for themselves and their class, but separate and distinct standards for the women of the working class. It is about time the reformers and philanthropists do something other than deal with the symptoms of the great social unrest.” [Page 17]

“No sexual attraction or impulse is the foundation of the beautiful emotion of love. Upon this is built respect, self-control, sympathy, unity of purpose, many common tastes and desires, building up and up until this real love unites two individuals as one being, one life. Then it becomes the strongest and purest emotion of which the human soul is capable.” [Page 42]

“Fortunately this condition of affairs is changing and the knowledge of the human body, which for ages has been most carefully locked within the medical libraries, is fast taking up its abode in the homes of the people — where it belongs.” [Pages 63- 64]

“It is said that in Japan or China, the duty of the physician is to keep his patients in good health, receiving payments only when they are well. Certainly this sounds like civilization.” [Page 64]

“In conclusion I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine. Too long have they allowed themselves to become this, bowing to the yoke of motherhood from puberty to the grave. ” [Page 90]

All quotes pulled from 1920 reprint.
To read the whole pamphlet online, click here!

Opening the Way: A Women’s History Walk

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events, NYC, opening the way, sanger, walking tour, women's e news

Margaret Sanger will be featured as a part of the upcoming Opening The Way: A Women’s History Walk in New York City. The walk will be lead by  former New York Times editor and reporter, Betsy Wade, and James Boylan, a historian of the Progressive era and founder of the Columbia Journalism Review. Sanger’s landmark is the first stop on the tour.

The Sanger portion of the tour will  focus on her federal case for publishing The Woman Rebel in 1914, on charges of mailing indecent material. The tour will also touch on the family planning clinics she opened around the city in order to emphasize the role that Sanger played in the struggle for women to gain control over their own bodies.

Sanger is listed on their website as one of the “seven [women] who invested in better futures.” Sanger is specifically dubbed “healer of women’s bodies” by the organizers of this tour.

Here’s a bit more of what they have to say about her:

“The sixth child of eleven who survived, Sanger watched her mother die of exhaustion, tuberculosis and cervical cancer. As a nurse on the Lower East Side, Sanger met women who were suicidal, so desperate were they to stop childbearing. In March 1914, she launched into the U.S. mails her publication, the Woman Rebel, pledging to give birth-control information. She was arraigned in the federal court at this site for mailing “such a vile, obscene, filthy, and indecent” publication in violation of the Postal Code covering contraceptive information and a fistful of other transgressions.”

“Sanger’s work revolutionized the lives of American families.”

For maps of the walking route click here. The RSVP  for the October 23rd tour check out their official website!

The tour will stop to discuss Margaret Sanger at the southern point of City Hall Park. This spot was chosen because there is a plaque there to commemorate the former site of the Post Office and Federal Building, the location of Sanger’s first trial as well as the place where she sent out the first issue of  The Woman Rebel.

9. Margaret Sanger: Healer of Women’s Bodies