With uncanny timing, Jean H. Baker’s new biography of Margaret Sanger is hitting the shelves as Sanger is in the news—once again. This time it was Herman Cain, the Republican presidential hopeful, who invoked the ever-controversial, though long-dead, birth-control pioneer. In a recent Face the Nation television interview, Cain charged that Planned Parenthood had established 75 percent of its clinics in black communities as a means to prevent the birth of black babies.
Cain is “playing his race card,” says Baker, the author of Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (Hill & Wang). The candidate is “using factually incorrect information about Sanger to inhibit black women from getting abortions,” she adds, e-mailing from Goucher College, where she is a professor of history.
“In the fact-free, let’s-just-make-it-up style of partisan history, the vilification of Margaret Sanger has become useful for those who would defund Planned Parenthood and thereby deprive American women, black and white, of essential health services.”
“Herman Cain complains of the large political bull’s-eye on his back. He has put it there himself as he—and his party—in their chronic abuse of history work to take Americans backward to a past when sex education was denied, disseminating birth control was prohibited, and undergoing an abortion was illegal.”
As for Sanger, while her first clinic was established in a largely Italian and Jewish immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1916, the activist did establish a clinic in Harlem in 1930. She was invited, Baker writes, by leaders in the black community. Among Sanger’s supporters at the time was W.E.B. Du Bois, who Baker says was present at the clinic’s opening. “Those who would confine women to childbearing are reactionary barbarians,” wrote Du Bois in his essay “The Damnation of Women.” In later ventures in the South, Sanger recruited a National Negro Advisory Council, whose members, including Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and E. Franklin Frazier, “read like a who’s who of black Americans,” Baker writes.
Yet, black sentiment was divided. One opponent of Sanger’s was Marcus Garvey, who saw birth control as against nature and “a white man’s trick to limit the number of blacks,” Baker writes. Asked if Cain follows in Garvey’s footsteps, the scholar is skeptical. “Clearly Cain is not the kind of authentic black nationalist that Garvey, who wanted to increase the numbers of blacks in America, represented.”
Baker says her biography “seeks to interlard the personal with the political, not as hagiography but as authenticity.” Some of that authenticity has to be wrestled from the subject herself. Sanger could be, Baker writes, an “adroit fabulist,” who revised accounts of her life.
She was born Margaret Higgins in 1879, the sixth child of Irish immigrants in the factory town of Corning, N.Y. Her mother, a devout Catholic, would experience 18 pregnancies and 11 births before dying young of tuberculosis. Margaret’s father, an iconoclast in church matters, seems to have inspired her defiance of authority.
Part of Margaret’s way out of Corning was nursing education, as well as marriage to an aspiring architect and artist, William Sanger, with whom she had three children. While Sanger never became fully licensed, it was her work as a nurse that led to an epiphany when, she said, she witnessed a woman from the Lower East Side—desperate not to have more children—die from a self-inflicted abortion. “Controlling conception now became the plot of Margaret Sanger’s life,” writes Baker. Sanger would become globally known for the cause and would live long enough—a week shy of age 87—to see many of her goals accomplished, including the creation of oral contraceptives. But her early career saw arrests and jail time and unceasing controversy.
Sanger’s first arrest came in 1914 when she fell afoul of a law crafted by America’s chief prude, Anthony Comstock, which included bans on sending written materials related to contraception through the mail. Sanger was indicted for her magazine The Woman Rebel, even though that publication only advocated birth control but did not describe it. The graphic details would fall to Family Limitation, a pamphlet by Sanger that in four years sold more than 160,000 copies in the United States. Sanger also personally gave demonstrations of the proper use of pessaries and spermicides in the clinics she established.
Sanger was as passionate about her sexuality as her politics. She pursued sex with a frankness and enthusiasm that concurred with her philosophy of a liberated life for women. “Sex had become something she could study through practice,” the author wryly observes. Sanger’s partners included two husbands, but also numerous extramarital relations with, as she put it, “chemically fascinating men.”
She succeeded in getting contraceptives into the hands of women by exploiting the laws that allowed condoms for the prevention of venereal disease, a central concern as America mobilized for World War I. “The army which is the least syphilized will, other things being equal, win,” said an official of the American Social Hygiene Association. She enlisted physicians for her clinics who agreed to have an expansive notion of disease so as to be able to prescribe birth control to all women who asked. Some feminists have condemned Sanger for contributing to the medicalization of women’s reproduction. However, her reputation has been vastly more tarnished by links to eugenics.
Though abhorrent and indefensible by today’s standards, Baker says that Sanger’s eugenicist views must be seen in the context of her era. Baker also identifies W.E.B. Du Bois as a eugenicist for, among other things, his notion of a “talented tenth.”
Tentatively in the late 1910s and wholeheartedly by the 1920s, “Sanger became a fellow traveler and then a promoter of the eugenics movement,” Baker writes in the book. She casts Sanger’s initial ties to eugenics as a strategic, pragmatic choice. In the beginning, Baker adds in an e-mail, “Sanger embraced the eugenicists because they were scientists who would bring authenticity to her efforts to encourage birth-control research. She needed their imprimatur.” By the late 1920s and early 1930s, “Sanger had embraced some of the harsher positions of the eugenicists, though in two important ways she opposed the standard views of their establishment: She never accepted ideas about the hierarchy of races.” Sanger’s approach was “individualistic—that some individuals (never ethnic groups or African-Americans) carried genetic material that should not be passed down to their descendants.”
Sanger, argues Baker, “never believed in the popular position of Teddy Roosevelt (who never gets called out about this) of more children from the fit and its derivative, fewer from the unfit.” Also, while she did indeed support the practice of involuntary sterilization, she “positively opposed what we call castration—removing ovaries and testicles by surgery. She came to support the ruling practice of our day—vasectomy and salpingectomy, which retained the sexual feelings she felt were so important for all individuals.”
So ultimately, how does Baker feel about her controversial subject?
“I ended up admiring Margaret Sanger for her commitment, her perseverance, her ability to retain over a long career her passion for a cause that has changed all of our lives.” But, she adds, “Often our heroes have messy lives and don’t do the things we would like them to do.”
