Anniversary of Spanish-language publication of Family Limitation

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birth control, Censorship, Family Limitation, margaret sanger

To celebrate the publication of a Spanish-language translation Margaret Sanger’s  Family Limitation’s in Merida, Mexico, her grandson Alexander Sanger wrote the following new introduction:La brújula del hogar

Introduction to Family Limitation – La Brujula del Hogar
By Alexander Sanger

La brújula del hogar

“In the summer and fall of 1914, my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, nascent birth control advocate and a public health nurse in New York, wrote a pamphlet entitled, Family Limitation, in which she described various methods of contraception which she recommended to enable couples to plan, space and limit their children. It was this pamphlet that was translated into Spanish as La Brujula del Hogar and published in Merida in 1922.
My grandmother, a mother of three, knew what she was talking about, not just because she had only three children, but because she had been working in the poorest slums of New York City, taking care of mothers who had children they did not want and could not afford. She often talked of one patient, Sadie Sachs, who in 1912 went to a back alley abortionist and almost died in the attempt. My grandmother nursed her back to health. When the doctor made his final visit, Sadie Sachs asked what she could do to not have any more children. The doctor responded,”“So you want to have your cake and eat it too. The answer is, tell Jake (her husband) to sleep on the roof.’”

“Three months later, Sadie Sachs was pregnant again, went to a back alley abortionist and died in my grandmother’s arms.”

“My grandmother said, ‘Enough.’”

“She went to Europe to research contraceptive methods and put all her knowledge of methods available in the United States and in Europe into Family Limitation.”

“In the United States at that time, both the Federal Government and the states had Comstock Laws, which prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and supplies. The laws also criminalized advocating the legality of birth control.”

“In March of 1914, my grandmother announced in the first issue of her monthly newspaper, The Woman Rebel, her intention to ‘advocate the prevention of conception’ and ‘impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper.’ She never actually imparted any contraceptive information in The Woman Rebel, but nonetheless the authorities confiscated the newspaper. In it she first used the phrase ‘birth control.’  My grandmother kept printing the paper and the government kept confiscating it, and finally indicted her on obscenity charges, since birth control under the Comstock laws was considered ‘obscene.’”

“The indictment made headlines, spreading birth control far beyond the limited readership of her paper and agitating women and men to support her cause.”

“She decided to ‘give them (the government) something to really indict me on,’ she wrote to her muckraker friend, Upton Sinclair. She printed 100,000 copies of Family Limitation. It was immediately translated into multiple languages, including in 1919 and again in 1922 into Spanish. Her willingness to put women’s rights and health above the law launched the United States birth control movement, and soon the worldwide movement.”

“What my grandmother saw in the slums of New York and on her visits to Mexico (she made at least a half dozen), was enormous inequality between the classes. In New York and in poorer areas of the United States, the rich and poor often lived near each other but had vastly different incomes, access to health care and numbers of children, both born and surviving. There were scandalously high infant and maternal mortality rates. If women used contraception, it was a traditional method, often ineffective if not dangerous, and when it failed, the women often resorted to unsafe abortion. There were Sadie Saches in Mexico as well as New York, and my grandmother vowed to put an end to it. In her campaign she was repeatedly imprisoned but she never wavered.”

“Imprisonment also seemed likely for the translators, printers and publishers of La Brujula del Hogar in 1922. The pamphlet fell into the hands of birth control opponents in Merida, the Knights of Columbus, who drew up a petition seeking the prosecution of the publishers. Newspapers took both sides, cartoonists got busy, public became aroused and Birth Control became the most discussed topic of the hour. The first edition of the pamphlet, all 5,000 copies, was exhausted in one day, and a second edition of 10,000 copies was immediately re-printed.”

“The Knights of Columbus petition was forwarded on from the District Attorney, Arturo Cisneros Canto, to the Governor of Yucatan, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who at once remitted instructions to refuse it. Incidentally, Carrillo, a Socialist, was one of 14 children. In compliance, District Attorney Canto issued a statement published in the March 14 Diario Official, which was reprinted in Meridá newspapers, which said, in part:”

“The Attorney General’s Office cannot shape its manner of proceedings to the narrow-minded and antiquated criteria of morality, the result of deep-rooted religious prejudices, which crops out in your petition. The Executive of the State wishes to have it made clear that forever have gone the prosecutions, which have no other cause than moral fanaticism, which filled with horror the vast period of clerical domination of the Middle Ages. As long as the present socialist government directs public destiny, the Attorney General’s office will not undertake any prosecutions for futile ideas of morality, since prosecutions in the name of morality have at all times been the most odious pretext of which religion made use so as to destroy its enemies.”

“My grandmother touted the Yucatan government’s support of birth control, noting that Arturo Cisneros Canto’s statement’“is a remarkable document and one that might be recommended to the attention of police departments in some American cities–especially in New York, where a meeting for the discussion of the morality of birth control was broken up not six months ago.’”

“The Yucatan’s socialist experiment was short-lived. In 1924 Governor Carrillo Puerto was assassinated, and support for feminist and socialist reforms there evaporated. But, as historian Dan La Botz noted, ‘revolutionary Yucatan set the long-term agenda of the Mexican women’s movement, and many of its demands are still being fought for.’”

Excavating a Footnote: Unpacking Margaret Sanger’s Views on Charity and the Unfit

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Allen M. Hornbuth, charity, Edwin Black, eugenics, Gregory J. Dober, Judith Lynn Newman

Complete with Comic Sans font sign

Here at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, we’re no strangers to misquotes, misinterpretations, and all sorts of other misinformation about Sanger. It often originates from anti-abortion proponents deliberately attempting to discredit Sanger and, by extension, Planned Parenthood.

Just do a search through Twitter for Margaret Sanger, and you’ll likely find one particularly sloppy Photoshopped picture of her speaking to a group of KKK members. Deliberate misinformation is common–but it is also fairly easy to misunderstand or overly simplify Sanger’s intentions by relying highly interpretive secondary sources.

Recently brought to our attention was a book containing a section on eugenics that mentions Sanger—titled Against Their Will:The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America by Allen M. Hornblum, Judith Lynn Newman, and Gregory J. Dober (2013).  You would not expect to find Margaret Sanger mentioned in this sad history, but she does turn up in the overview of the eugenics movement that opens the book.

Its only coverage is a short, but fairly harsh mention of Sanger that appears to quote her:

Margaret Sanger, the great social activist and birth control proponent, was even more strident in her denunciation of society’s unfit elements, ‘vigorously oppos[ing] charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden’ and arguing that ‘it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help’ so the eugenically fit would face less of a challenge from ‘the unfit.’ She often compared the poor and the great mass of dispossessed to ‘human waste’ and ‘weeds’ needing to be ‘exterminated.’

Now, it’s true that Margaret Sanger believed in eugenics, though she despised the eugenics of the Nazis and other extremists. But I found these quotes unlikely words of Sanger, so I dug through the notes to find the source. Sure enough, the quotes come from a secondary source—Edwin Black’s War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003). Black did read primary sources–chiefly Sanger’s 1922 The Pivot of Civilization, and determined that Sanger was so anti-charity that she encouraged leaving those in need to die.

But in reading Pivot myself, it seems far more likely that Sanger criticized charity for its approach–treating the problem rather than preventing it. Black quoted Sanger, who said that “organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease,” the disease being the “constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents” (Pivot of Civilization, 109). Her purpose here does not seem to be the end of charity towards the poor and mentally ill. But the larger point of the chapter was that it was perhaps more kind to—through the use of birth control—prevent the birth of people who would grow up poor and dependent on the state, rather than offering them meager charity after they were born. Sanger’s views on philanthropy can be summed up neatly:

The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth. (Pivot of Civilization, 116).

As for the ugly terms attributed to Sanger, the story is more complex. For Sanger, the unfit referred to the mentally ill, physically disabled and otherwise “unfit.” The context of her discussion of them as “human waste”  was in terms of the cost to society of supporting those who
could not support themselves.

The term “human weeds” comes from botanist Luther Burbank,

“America . . . is like a garden in which the gardener pays no attention to the weeds. Our criminals are our weeds, and weeds breed fast and are intensely hardy. They must be eliminated. Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce. All over the country to-day we have enormous insane asylums and similar institutions where we nourish the unfit and criminal instead of exterminating them. Nature eliminates the weeds, but we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce.”-Burbank, quoted by Sanger in “Is Race Suicide Possible?” (1925)

In her 1923 article “A Better Race Through Birth Control,” Sanger herself points out the dangers of

The object of civilization is to obtain the highest and most splendid culture of which humanity is capable. But such attainment is unthinkable if we continue to breed from the present race stock that yields us our largest amount of progeny. Some method must be devised to eliminate the degenerate and the defective; for these act constantly to impede progress and ever increasingly drag down the human race.–A Better Race Through Birth Control” (Nov. 1923)

but the method Sanger suggested was birth control:

Give the women of the poorer classes a chance also to limit and control their families, and it will be found that in very many cases the material is equally good. The difference is that, like plants crowded too close together on poor soil, there is no chance to develop and the whole families are left impoverished in mind and body. Give room for each [to] grow and all may become fine and healthy American citizens.–“A Better Race Through Birth Control” (Nov. 1923)

Sanger’s writings were certainly eugenic and not always particularly kind towards those she referred to as “unfit”. However, that she called for the end of philanthropy, thought “it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help”, and was a supporter of “extermination” of the poor and disabled are definitely Black’s interpretation of her work and not quotes from Sanger. The authors of Against Their Will—rather than using Sanger’s words—make assumptions based on a secondary source, one with an interpretation of Sanger that not everyone agrees with. Don’t believe me? I highly encourage you to create your own analysis by skipping the secondary sources, and reading Sanger’s writings for yourself.

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For a more comprehensive look at Sanger’s complicated relationship with eugenics, search the Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger.

The Sanger Paper Project Celebrates Women’s History Month

We are pleased to announce that the Margaret Sanger Papers Project’s website has been primped and updated just in time for Women’s History Month! Thanks to the hard work of our former editorial assistant Angela Wu (NYU 2013), and a University of Michigan intern, Sabarish Raghupathy, the site has a new look that we hope will take us through to the project’s completion. We invite you to explore the site and let us know how you like it.

This March is a very special Women’s History Month, as it also marks the 100th anniversary of the birth control movement. Margaret Sanger’s Woman Rebel, a fiery socialist and feminist journal covered many topics, but is best known for coining the phrase “birth control” and advocating for legalizing contraception. In the first issue Sanger laid out the Woman Rebel’s aims, including:

It will also be the aim of the WOMAN REBEL to advocate the prevention of conception and to impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper. (“The Aim,” Mar. 1914, p. 1)

Margaret Sanger also asked a question still pertinent today in “The Prevention of Conception,” also included in the first issue:

Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception?

Sanger went on to explain why she was fighting for the working-class woman to get this information, claiming:

The women of the upper middle-class have all available knowledge and implements to prevent conception. The woman of the lower-middle class is struggling for this knowledge. She tries various methods of prevention, and after a few years of experience plus medical advice succeeds in discovering some method, suitable to her individual self. The woman of the people is the only one left in ignorance of this information.

The Woman Rebel was just the beginning of Sanger’s life-long campaign to make birth control available to every woman.  One hundred years after the Woman Rebel screeched its way into the public consciousness, the victories that Margaret Sanger fought so hard for are being challenged once again.

We see it most in a war over how Margaret Sanger should be portrayed, with ahistorical treatments commonly found on blogs and other websites. The Sanger Project’s goal is to make her own words accessible to the broadest possible audience. Margaret Sanger was a complex historical figure, and whether you like or loathe her, her efforts shaped the 20th century by empowering women to  take control of their reproductive lives and to devise a plan to fit childbearing in along with other life goals.

What better way is there than to spend Women’s History Month learning about a true Woman Rebel, Margaret Sanger? Our first three volumes are out and available.

And if you have the means, please consider supporting the work of the Margaret Sanger Papers.  We are working to finish up Volume 4, and are mounting and proofreading over 1,000 texts to the Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger.  This digital archive is free to the public and contains one copy of all extant Sanger speeches and short-form publications.

Have a Happy Women’s History Month– and don’t feel the need to stop celebrating when April rolls around!

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For the complete text of the 100 year old “The Aim” and “The Prevention of Conception,” see our digital edition.

“The Joy in the Fullness of Life”: Peggy Sanger

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Emma Goldman, margaret sanger, Peggy Sanger, sanger

Peggy Sanger on the beach in Massachusetts with the cat, Truro, summer 1913.

Margaret Sanger longed for a daughter after the birth of her two sons. She wrote in her Autobiography, “I yearned especially for a daughter, and twenty months later my wish came true.” Peggy, who was born on May 31, 1910, “was so satisfactory a baby” that Margaret was not disappointed when the doctor told her that, due to her illness, she could not have any more children. Peggy contracted polio in 1913 but survived, although her left leg was permanently affected.

In her Autobiography, Sanger shares several tales of Peggy’s childhood. On Cape Cod during the summer of 1913, their veranda

faced the Bay, and when the tide was high the water came up and lapped at the piles on which the cottage was built. Stuart, Grant, and Peggy used to sit on the steps and dabble their toes. At low tide they had two miles of beach on which to skip and run; it was a wonderful place to play, and all summer we had sunrise breakfasts, sunset picnics.

The Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris today.

Later that year, during the family’s trip to Europe, they sublet an apartment on the Boulevard St. Michel across from the Luxembourg Gardens, “where Grant and Peggy could play” — and what a playground that would be!

After returning to America with the children, Sanger began to publish The Woman Rebel, which naturally drew attention from the press. At one point, when Sanger was talking with a group of reporters,

Peggy, who had never seen a derby before, took possession of their hats and sticks, and in the hall a little parade of children formed, marching up and down in front of the door. One of the gentlemen was so furious that I hid Peggy in the kitchen away from his wrath.

In 1947, Sanger was named the “Ideal American Mother” by the League of American Womanhood, and it is easy to see why when one considers the amount of concern she had for her children. Even caught up in all the drama surrounding her publication of The Woman Rebel, she could not postpone certain things, “the most important among them being to provide for the children’s future… temporarily, I sent the younger two to the Catskills and Stuart to a camp in Maine,” while she made provisions for their schooling for the next year on Long Island.

A undated 1914 letter from Grant Sanger to his mother; he gave Peggy a ‘great big hug’ on Margaret’s behalf.

This happiness was all too suddenly brought to a close; Peggy Sanger died of pneumonia and infant paralysis on November 6, 1915. Sanger wrote in her Autobiography of a persistent feeling of dread while she was away, of fear that

something was wrong with Peggy. Night after night her voice startled me from deep sleep and left me in a state of agitation until I received the next letter containing news that all was going well. I tried to dismiss this fear and would have it partially submerged, but always the same troubled voice rang in my ears, ‘Mother, mother are you coming back?’

All of her problems related to The Woman Rebel and the impending trial were “suddenly swept aside by a crisis of a more intimate nature, a tragedy about which I find myself still unable to write, though so many years have passed.” Her Autobiography was first published in 1938, 23 years after Peggy’s untimely death.

An undated photo of the three Sanger children — Grant, Peggy, and Stuart.

She wrote poignantly that

the joy in the fullness of life went out of it then and has never quite returned. Deep in the hidden realm of my consciousness my little girl has continued to live, and in that strange, mysterious place where reality and imagination meet, she has grown up to womanhood. There she leads an ideal existence untouched by harsh actuality and disillusion. Men and women from all classes, from nearly ever city in America, poured upon me their sympathy. Money for my trial came beyond my understanding… women wrote of children dead a quarter of a century for whom they were still secretly mourning, and sent me pictures and locks of hair of their own dead babies. I had never fully realized until then that the loss of a child remains unforgotten to every mother during her lifetime.

In a letter dated December 7, 1915, just a month after Peggy’s death, Sanger’s friend, Emma Goldman, wrote,

I really think it is impardonable on your part to blame yourself for the death of Peggy. I am sure that it is due only to your depressed state of mind as I cannot imagine anyone with your intelligence to hold herself responsible for something that could not possibly have been in your power… Please, dear, don’t think me heartless. I feel deeply with your loss but I also feel that you owe it to yourself and the work you have before you to collect your strength. After all dear, it is a thing which has passed and cannot be redeemed whereas you need your vitality.

Although the letter from Sanger to which this letter is a response has not been found, it is clear that Sanger blamed herself for Peggy’s death and deeply mourned the loss of her daughter.

Peggy continued to be mentioned in Margaret Sanger’s journals. Peggy’s birthday is noted, and on the anniversary of her death in 1938, Sanger wrote, “Peggy’s anniversary into Life!” In 1944, concerned about Stuart and anxious to hear positive news, she wrote,

Ive always said since Peggys death that life could not hold me long if another of my children went before I do — I still feel that way.

The Origins of the Woman Rebel

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Comstock Law, margaret sanger, sanger, Woman Rebel

The first page of the first issue of Woman Rebel.

Much of my time at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project has been spent thinking about 1914. It was a busy year for Sanger, not least due to her work on the Woman Rebel. Its slogan, “No Gods, No Masters,” first appeared in print, on “eight pages on cheap paper, copied from the French style, mailed first class in the city and expressed outside,” in March of 1914. Sanger defined a woman’s duty:

To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention.

The New York Post Office quickly sent her a letter stating:

Dear Madam: In accordance with the advice from the Assistant Attorney General for the Post Office Department, you are informed that the publication entitled “The Woman Rebel”, for March 1914, is unmailable under the provisions of Section 211 of the Criminal Code as amended by the Act of March 4, 1911.

The letter from the postmaster stating that Woman Rebel was unmailable.

The law prohibiting the mailing of the paper was the Comstock Law, a moral law intended to prevent the mailing of “obscene” material. Since she had mentioned that the Woman Rebel planned to discuss birth control and provide advice in future issues. Sanger commented in her Autobiography that, “To me it was outrageous that information regarding motherhood, which was so generally called sacred, should be classed with pornography.”

Nevertheless, Sanger decided to continue publishing and attempting to mail Woman Rebel, and this led to her indictment. When she learned that she was likely to receive the severest sentence possible if found guilty, she fled the country for England in November, where she remained until October of 1915. The trial was eventually scheduled to begin on January 18, 1916, but was postponed several times for various reasons. Ultimately, the case ended a month later, on February 18, when it was dismissed by the United States District Court of New York.

The story of Woman Rebel is only partially illustrated by the events that occurred after its publication, however. Sanger’s Autobiography provides one window on the start of the paper. She says that the idea came to her on the ship back to New York from Paris on New Year’s Eve, the idea “of a magazine to be called the Woman Rebel, dedicated to the interests of working women.” Sanger was conscious that she had to limit the paper to claims on which she could follow through. One of the primary concerns was, of course, money, but moral support was also an issue. The feminists, led by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, provided neither, but the socialists and trade union organizations turned out to be more helpful in terms of support and subscriptions.

Sanger also told the story of Queen Vashti, wife of King Ahasuerus, which appears in the Book of Esther. Ahasuerus had been showing off all the fine decorations and possessions in his palace, and then commanded his wife to appear. She refused, not wanting to be viewed as a possession like the rest of the king’s riches. He cast her aside and married the meek Esther instead. Sanger said:

Often I had thought of Vashti as the first woman rebel in history… I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.

William Sanger’s letters in February of 1914 to Margaret are another interesting source for the planning stages of Woman Rebel. Unfortunately, her letters to him outlining these early stages of preparing the paper do not survive. In a letter written on February 5, he said,

now dear love its great that you are going to start that paper… Now I think we ought to make the paper have an international character — Im going to work Victor Dave to write a short article and the leading women agitation here you know. I can reach Miss Pankhurst going to try & get her too — You ought to have the England exchanges — that is all the English sufferget radical & Red Papers to keep — touch — I shall write at once to get them & will forward as soon as I receive them… perhaps I can act as your Paris correspondant how often will the paper come out.

William Sanger’s letter from February 14, 1914, using the name Woman Rebel to refer to the project.

William did send the promised foreign papers to his wife a few days later, and also discussed the topic with Victor Dave, who thought that the title (presumably Woman Rebel) was “a good name.” He mentioned that he was still trying to convince Victor Dave to write an article, and would call on Mrs. Pankhurst, if she was in Paris, and try to convince her to write something as well. He also wonders if Margaret has considered “better paper and better printing.”

About a week later, William Sanger provided some extremely detailed advice on the Woman Rebel, which was by this point known by that name:

I am particularly anxious that you get the Exchanges in all the English Radical & Revolutionary papers, that is you to send on the Woman Rebel & they will exchange theirs. This will keep you in touch with the movement in England, the same [?] for France & Germany… I have given the question of the weekly issue of the paper a great deal of thought… the work on getting out a weekly paper now would be too much for you. Why not a semi monthly — this would insure the cooperation of regular correspondents who would be willing to contribute. This will give the paper some class. Especially if the contributors came from England, France, Germany… I would like to see the paper have distinction — if you name is to be associated with it… I will be glad to see it rise than flare up so to speak but a paper that fills a want & fills it well. Perhaps a monthly with good illustrations good paper something on the order of The Forerunner.

It does seem as though William hoped to get some of his own “good illustrations” published in his wife’s paper! He certainly had quite a catalog of opinions about the paper; Margaret Sanger expressed very different ideas in her Autobiography:

I was solely responsible for the magazine financially, legally, and morally; I was editor, manager, circulation department, bookkeeper, and I paid the printer’s bill.

For more information, see Margaret Sanger’s Autobiography, especially chapter nine, “The Woman Rebel.” Also see William Sanger’s letters to Margaret Sanger, February 5, 8, 14, and 14, 1914.