Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966

Margaret Louise Higgins was born in Corning, New York, on September 15, 1879, the sixth of eleven children and the third of four daughters born to Anne Purcell Higgins and Michael Hennessey Higgins, a stone mason. Her two elder sisters worked to supplement the family income, and financed her education at Claverack College, a private coeducational preparatory school in the Catskills. After leaving Claverack, Higgins took a job teaching first grade to immigrant children, but decided after a short time that the work did not suit her temperament. She returned to Corning where her mother, then only forty-nine years old, was dying of tuberculosis. Margaret Higgins blamed her mother's untimely death, as well as her sisters' need to sacrifice their own ambitions to support the family, on her parents' high fertility. Though she loved and admired her father, she resented his demand that she take her mother's place managing the household. Shortly after her Anne Higgins's death, Margaret Higgins left Corning for White Plains, New York, where she entered nursing school.

In 1902, after completing two years of practical nursing training and gaining acceptance to a three-year degree program, Higgins met and married William Sanger, an architect and aspiring artist. By 1910 Margaret Sanger had survived her own bout with tuberculosis and given birth to three children (Stuart, 1903; Grant, 1908; and Peggy, 1910), but was chafing inside her role as a traditional housewife and mother in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Later that year the family moved to Manhattan where, through her work as a home nurse on the Lower East Side and her political involvements with the International Workers of the World and anarchist Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger was drawn into the burgeoning struggle for women's right to control their sexuality and fertility. By 1912 Sanger was widely recognized as a writer and speaker about sex reform. Later that year she became a regular contributor to the socialist newspaper The Call, where she published a series of articles on sexual hygiene. One of these, an article about syphilis published in February 1913, was targeted by the U.S. Post Office under the Comstock Act of 1873, which banned the distribution of sexually-related material through the U.S. mail. This repression of her writings, combined with her exposure to the damages done to women by repeated childbirths and self-induced abortions, led to Sanger's decision to devote herself entirely to the birth control movement. By 1914 she had separated from her husband, written a pamphlet entitled Family Limitation which coined the term "birth control," traveled to Europe to research new contraceptive methods, and set out to establish a system of advice centers where women throughout the U.S. could obtain reliable birth control information.

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