Margaret Sanger was arrested 100 years ago this week for having opened her New York City birth control clinic, America’s first. The illegal clinic was by no means covert, Sanger herself having defiantly alerted city authorities before opening her doors. After monitoring the situation for ten days, during which some 500 women had lined up to learn, as Sanger put it, how “not to have any more children than their health could stand or their husbands could support,” the police moved in on October 26, 1916, charging her with distributing obscene material.
Birth control was a highly debated topic in the early decades of the century, and Sanger was far from its only advocate. In 1915 the activist Mary Ware Dennett had founded the National Birth Control League, and the cause was widely promoted on the lecture circuits. But Sanger had a provocative personality, experience as a maternity nurse, and, says Jean H. Baker in her biography Margaret Sanger, a determination to take the issue to the streets:
Sanger meant her clinics to demonstrate a bold new phase of educating poor women about birth control beyond speeches, meetings and lobbying. Their establishment would mark the first free health clinics for women in the United States, an event, though largely forgotten today, that Sanger properly recognized as “of social significance in the lives of American womanhood.” Additionally, a Margaret Sanger birth control clinic, where self-help techniques were actually demonstrated, would raise her to the national standard bearer the movement required.
Sanger made a point of setting up her first clinic in a poor section of Brooklyn and of making clear, in pamphlets distributed in Yiddish and Italian as well as English, that birth control was a better choice than poverty or abortion:
MOTHERS!
Can you afford to have a large family?
Do you want any more children?
If not, why do you have them?
DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT
Safe, Harmless Information can be obtained at
46 AMBOY STREET.
Recognizing that the birth control methods she could make available in 1916 were largely inconvenient or unreliable, Sanger spent the rest of her life in search of a better option. Jonathan Eig’s The Birth of the Pill begins with the winter evening in 1950 when the seventy-one-year-old Sanger took her hopes for an oral form of contraception to Gregory Goodwin Pincus, a biologist whose work on reproduction had attracted as much controversy as Sanger’s. He also shared, says Eig, her driven and defiant personality:
He looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx. He would speed into a room, working a Viceroy between his yellowed fingers, and people would huddle close to hear what he had to say. He wasn’t famous. He owned no scientific prizes. No world-changing inventions were filed under his name. In fact, for a long stretch of his career he had been an outcast from the scientific establishment, rejected as a radical by Harvard, humiliated in the press, and left with no choice but to conduct his varied and oftentimes controversial experiments in a converted garage.
Sanger always insisted that her campaign was all about giving women options. In Making Babies, the award-winning Irish author Anne Enright humorously describes exercising hers by, as her subtitle puts it, “Stumbling into Motherhood.” In the passage below, from somewhere in the fourth month aboard the postpartum rollercoaster, both mother and child pause for a mutual look around:
The baby is becoming herself. Every day she is more present to us. A personality rises to the surface of her face, like a slowly developing Polaroid. She frowns for the first time, and it looks quite comical — the deliberate, frowny nature of her frown . . . She gets rounder. Her features begin to look strangely confined, like a too-small mask in the middle of her big, round face.
It is now that babies look like Queen Victoria or Winston Churchill, or anyone fat, and British, and in charge. She is most imperious when her father picks her up. She sits in his arms and looks over at me as if to say, So who are you?
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Sig Nordal 