“Dear Madam, I Abhor You”: Hating on Margaret Sanger, Then and Now

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birth control, documents, letters, margaret sanger, Michael Steele, reproductive rights

Margaret Sanger has always been a controversial figure. Her radical feminism, associations with eugenicists, and passionate support of birth control riled many both in her lifetime and today. Currently women’s rights are under attack from segments of the American right who are attempting to discredit Margaret Sanger in order to attack the reproductive freedoms she helped establish. The most common approach is to recycle well-worn myths about Sanger, like Michael Steele’s recent claims that Sanger advocated black genocide, or supported the Nazis. (You can find the Sanger Papers’ analysis to these faulty claims here and here). Many haters also insist incorrectly that Sanger was an advocate of abortion. Here are some particularly juicy tweets we encountered while trying to encourage a more historically sound interpretation of Sanger’s legacy:

Bzzz, sorry @SangerPapers, Planned Parenthood was setup by an elitist bitch as a eugenics operation to murder Black & Jew babies@trutherbot

— Broken Sidewalk Farm (@BrknSdwlkFrm) June 8, 2012

Margaret Sanger’s eugenics beliefs intertwined her with Nazis who were influenced by her. She is truly Hitler’s Valkyrie

— ANNA RAND (@OBAMA_CZAR) June 6, 2012

Much of this vitriol stems from hatred and misunderstanding of Planned Parenthood’s abortion services. As the founder of Planned Parenthood, Sanger is an easy target for these partisans because she is no longer able to speak for herself. Yet Planned Parenthood did not offer abortions until Roe v. Wade in 1973, seven years after Sanger’s death. Although Sanger founded the organization, she had little to do with the practices that they so vehemently contest. They are manipulating the legacy of Sanger to fight contemporary battles and disregarding context and historical accuracy in the process. They need to reimagine Sanger as a racist abortion advocate in order to have her fit into today’s ideological schisms, schisms that hardly existed in her era.

But hatred towards Sanger is nothing new. In her lifetime, she received quite a bit of hate mail, some of which has been preserved in the archive. In the mid-twentieth century, the most outspoken critics of Sanger were Catholics who objected to her public criticism of the Pope and support of family planning. Others were worried about the future of population growth -particularly of white Americans and Europeans- and worried that family planning would weaken these groups. Here is a favorite that we found in the Margaret Sanger Papers:

“Dear Madam: You have been a shameless “murderess on parade” for a long while. However, you never looked more hellishly ludicrous than at present when the government is about to launch a campaign to encourage as many births as possible as has been done for sometime in Europe. Perhaps this will see and end to your shameless debasing of Parenthood. You, if you ever had any real Christian upbringing, must have developed a cast iron conscience to be able to carry on your soul the innumerable times you are guilty of having the Commandment–Thou shalt not kill–broken by poor innocent people who listened to your advice. The average schoolboy or girl knows more about contraceptives than you do and that is well-known; which makes your birth-controllers hopelessly out-dated. If you were a sincere person you would devote your time to something clean worthwhile.” (Aug. 28, 1941, Brooklyn, N.Y. [LCM 50:135].)

If you want to read more on the hate mail that Sanger received in her lifetime, visit our article “Dear Madam, I Abhor You” at the Sanger Papers Newsletter!

Margaret Sanger’s Views on Abortion

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Abortion, document, margret sanger, reproductive rights

Sanger’s Flyer for the first Birth Control Clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. “Do not kill, do not take a life, but Prevent”

Margaret Sanger was a pioneer of women’s reproductive rights, dedicating her life to opening family planning clinics around the world and making knowledge about birth control easily available. When Sanger began her life as an activist, the political struggle over women’s rights was very different than it is today. The Comstock Laws that Sanger was arrested for violating illegalized merely sending information regarding birth control in the mail! With that in mind, it comes as little surprise that Sanger’s views do not fit easily into today’s debate about women’s reproductive rights. Sanger was ambivalent, to say the least, about  most important issue in recent years : access to abortions.

In Sanger’s opinion, abortion was an evil practice that would become obsolete once birth control was practiced and understood by women and families throughout the world. In 1932, Sanger wrote: “Although abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.” Although she strongly condemned the practice, she felt even more strongly that “it is  a woman’s duty and right to have for herself the right to say when she shall and shall not have children.”  Women’s right to control their reproduction took precedent over any moral or religious position. Unlike many today, Sanger trusted women to make the best decision for themselves:

“The only weapon that women have and the most uncivilized weapon that they have to use if they will not submit to having children every year or every year and a half, the weapon they use is abortion. . . . What does this mean? It means it is a very bad sign if women have to indulge in it, and it means they are absolutely determined that they cannot continue bringing children into the world that they cannot clothe, feed, and shelter. It is woman’s instinct, and she knows herself when she should and should not give birth to children, and it is just as natural to trust that instinct and to let her be the one to say and much more natural than it is to leave it to some unknown God for her to judge her by.”(MS, “Debate On Birth Control: First Speech,” Dec. 12, 1920 [MSM S76:0923 ].)

If you are interested in reading more about Margaret Sanger’s position on abortion, be sure to read our “interview” with Sanger in the Margaret Sanger Paper Project Newsletter!

Margaret Sanger Papers in the national spotlight

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eugenics, Herman Cain, Racism, Sanger Project

Although Margaret Sanger died in 1966, debates about her legacy still shape how politicians talk about the important issue of abortion rights. On Sunday, October 30, Republican candidate for president Herman Cain gave an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. He claimed that if voters wanted to understand the real meaning of abortion in America, they needed to “go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words.” But Cain’s knowledge of Sanger seems more rooted in convenient myth than in historical fact. The phone has been ringing off the hook today at the Margaret Sanger Papers with journalists and commentators calling to find out the real history.

Cain claimed that early Planned Parenthood clinics were build predominately in black neighborhoods as part of a plan of racial extermination. He said, “So if you go back and look up the history–secondly, look at where most of them were build, 75 percent of those facilities were built in the black community– and Margaret Sanger’s own words, she didn’t use the word ‘genocide’ but she did talk about preventing the increasing numbers of poor blacks in this country by preventing black babies from being born.”

Although Sanger allied birth control with the eugenics movement that was popular in her era, Planned Parenthood in no way encouraged abortion among black communities. In fact, none of Sanger’s clinics performed abortions before Roe v. Wade in 1973.  Racism in the world of family planning tended to express itself in the reverse: blacks were often excluded from clinics offering birth control services. Here at the Sanger Papers, we frequently write about the issue of race in our newsletters and publications. Cathy Moran Hajo, associate editor of the Margaret Sanger Papers, has recently addressed this in her book, Birth Control on Main Street (2010). There were a handful of clinics that serviced specifically black communities, but these received little assistance from white activists. Cain’s suggestion that 75% of clinics were in black neighborhoods is completely unfounded. “Whatever the activists’ personal beliefs about race may have been,” writes Hajo, “there was no grand program to exterminate nonwhites or the poor.”

This is not the first time Cain has distorted the history of birth control in order to advance his political views. In April of 2010, Cain made claims about Planned Parenthood’s alleged genocide plan that earned PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire” status, meaning that they found no truth to the claim whatsoever. In fact, PolitiFact said, “Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card.”

Sunday’s interview is no different. In the Washington Post today, Glenn Kessler decries Cain’s rewriting of birth control history, relying on the research of Hajo and others to discredit this misuse of the past for politically expedient ends. CNN and Factcheck.org have also called the Sanger Papers looking for more information, and we expected to see pieces from them soon.

Margaret Sanger: Closeted Atheist Marxist? Probably Not.

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apologetics, atheist, birth control, history, marxist

“Sanger was in fact a Marxist, an atheist and a racist with some real enthusiasm for human eugenics.“

– UK Apologetics Margaret Sanger Page

This quote, part of a factually questionable “biography” of Sanger written by Robin A. Brace, makes some interesting claims… interesting, but untrue all the same. We’ve covered the charge of racism before on this blog, but we haven’t touched on Sanger’s supposed Marxism yet, mostly because this claim seems to have been pulled out of thin air.

In her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, Sanger makes her feelings about the incompatibility between Marxism and the Birch Control Movement crystal clear:

“No thorough understanding of Birth Control, its aims and purposes, is possible until this confusion has been cleared away and we come to a realization that Birth Control is not merely independent of, but even antagonistic to the Marxist dogma. “

“”Critics have often been puzzled by the tremendous vitality of [Marx’s] work. Its predictions have never, despite the claims of the faithful, been fulfilled. Instead of diminishing, the spirit of nationalism has been intensified tenfold.”

– From the Pivot of Civilization. Chapter VII: Is Revolution the Remedy?

[Full document here.]

Marxists don't wear mink! Margaret Sanger and J. Noah Slee in 1927. Image credit: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

As for the claim that Sanger was an atheist, one who denies the existence of god, it too is untrue. Sanger herself identified as Episcopalian in a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace. She was raised Catholic, married a Jewish man, and eventually joined her second husband, J. Noah Slee, in the Episcopalian Church. She had both of her sons baptized in the Episcopalian faith, a choice that was obviously her own because their father, William Sanger, was Jewish and, thus, would not have advocated for baptism. While it is true that told her son, Grant, that she had “outgrown the need of Church” in a letter written in 1928, she also said in the same letter that she has “no objection to [Grant] joining the church & being confirmed.” [This letter can be found in The Selected Papers of Margraret Sanger: Volume I,  page 474]

When looking at all of this information together, it is certainly fair to assume that Sanger considered herself more spiritual than religious, having eschewed the need for a church. However, nothing that she has said – in early letters, or later interviews – indicates that she was an atheist.

As always, we would like to implore authors like Robin A. Brace to do some research and consider the truth before publishing work like this.

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.