Word: sanger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While watching TV the other night, my wife and I saw part of A will of Their Own, a miniseries that traced the women of an American family over several generations. In one scene, the young female granddaughter attends a rousing speech by Margaret Sanger, whom we all know as the founder of Planned Parenthood. The portrayal of Sanger was as a heroic crusader for women's rights to birth control and reproductive freedom...
...Sanger has also been the subject of at least two television movies within the past few years: HBO's Woman of Valor, which starred Demi Moore, and Lifetime's Crusader: The Margaret Sanger Story, which starred Dana Delany. Life magazine in 1991 named Sanger one of the "100 Most Important Americans of the Century" (apparently operating on the belief that the succeeding nine years would offer no further examples of importance). Whenever the media takes notice of Sanger, she is lionized as the ultimate champion of women's rights, as was the case in A Will of Their Own. This...
What are mistakes in our era that parallel those of Sanger's? There is still an effort to distort her goal of giving women control over their bodies by attributing such quotes to Sanger as "More children from the fit, less from the unfit--that is the chief issue of birth control." Sanger didn't say those words; in fact, she condemned them as a eugenicist argument for "cradle competition." To her, poor mental development was largely the result of poverty, overpopulation and the lack of attention to children. She correctly foresaw racism as the nation's major challenge, conducted...
Nonetheless, expediency caused Sanger to distance herself from her radical past; for instance, she used soft phrases such as "family planning" instead of her original, more pointed argument that the poor were being manipulated into producing an endless supply of cheap labor. She also adopted the mainstream eugenics language of the day, partly as a tactic, since many eugenicists opposed birth control on the grounds that the educated would use it more. Though her own work was directed toward voluntary birth control and public health programs, her use of eugenics language probably helped justify sterilization abuse. Her misjudgments should cause...
...Sanger led by example. Her brave and joyous life included fulfilling work, three children, two husbands, many lovers and an international network of friends and colleagues. She was charismatic and sometimes quixotic, but she never abandoned her focus on women's freedom and its larger implications for social justice (an inspiration that continues through Ellen Chesler's excellent biography, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America). Indeed, she lived as if she and everyone else had the right to control her or his own life. By word and deed, she pioneered the most radical, humane...