News & Sanger Sightings > 2005
Exposing Poverty
Historian Eric Foner, in his recent article in The Nation (October 3, 2005), sees some parallel between the raised public consciousness during the recent hurricane disaster and the increased public interest in the 1912 Lawrence strike following the "evacuation" of the strikers' children. “Thousands of poor immigrant workers,” he writes, “walked off their jobs in the city's giant woollen mills to protest a wage reduction. Bill Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World, who had been invited in to help direct the strike, devised a plan to send the workers' children to live with sympathetic families in other cities for the duration.
Even in 1912 the sight of the pale, emaciated children marching up Fifth Avenue transformed public opinion regarding the strike, leading the governor of Massachusetts to pressure the mill owners to accede to the workers' demands. More important, it broadened public support for efforts to uplift the poor and placed the question of poverty, and the federal government's obligation to combat it, front and center in that year’s presidential campaign.
‘I have worked in the slums of New York,’ wrote Margaret Sanger, ‘but I have never found children who were so uniformly ill-nourished, ill-fed and ill-clothed.’ Today, as in 1912, the shameful (and growing) presence of poverty has been thrust from invisibility onto the center stage of national discussion.
Posted: Dec. 8, 2005
Roberts v. Privacy?
The summer issue of Ms. Magazine is devoted to the inevitable battle over a new Supreme Court justice and the threat posed to women’s and reproductive rights. Included is the article “Public Triumphs, Private Rights” by MSPP board member and Sanger biographer Ellen Chesler. Chesler reviews the 1965 landmark Supreme Court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut, that legalized a married person’s access to contraceptives, and discusses how Griswold paved the way for several other important birth control decisions leading up to Roe v. Wade in 1973. “What motivated Margaret Sanger and Estelle Griswold,” writes Chesler, “was more than a simple desire for freedom in this most private of matters — the decision of whether or not to bear a child. These pioneers of modern feminism also understood that the ability to plan and space one’s family is a necessary condition for women to achieve equality in all walks of life.” Might even the decisions legalizing birth control be in jeopardy when the new court convenes? Chesler warns: “the appointment of just one new conservative justice to the Court could threaten all constitutional protections for abortion — and perhaps for contraception, as well — thereby reversing history and sending the responsibility for regulating these practices back to politicians in state legislatures. And that’s where the Comstock laws were first created so many years ago.”
Posted: Sept. 10, 2005
Having It All
Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio’s legal affairs correspondent, gave the commencement address at Mount Holyoke College this spring. She included “a little ditty for the occasion” called “Having It All.” Here are a few lines:
Don’t tell me that I can’t have my druther –
I’ll be a lawyer, doctor, historian, or other.
And yes indeed, I’ll also be a mother.
I’ll be undeterred like Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
To the gender bring honor
like Sandra Day O’Connor.
Then too I want to indulge a little greed,
play the market or own a steed.
I want to be Donna Shalala, Donna Summers, Donna Reed.
I want to be Margaret Sanger, Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Mead.
Posted: Sept. 10, 2005
Movers and Shapers
Newsweek recently asked readers to write in about the public figure they most respect and admire – “men and women” who “shaped our country and inspired us to do more.” Among those listed in the June 6, 2005 issue: Lucretia Mott, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Davis Thoreau and—Margaret Sanger. Amy Rankin of Ponte Verde, Florida wrote: “Sanger knew the damage multiple pregnancies without medical care could do. She had witnessed her own mother, who had given birth 11 times and suffered seven miscarriages, weaken under the strain and die of tuberculosis at the age of 50.”
Posted: Sept. 10, 2005
Waltzing with Adolf
Talk about dirty dancing – Sanger and Hitler are still going strong. Here’s a quick rundown of some of their recent appearances together:
“Before the United States’ entry into World War II,” one writer alleges, “Margaret Sanger and her organization shared sympathies and ideas for human experimentation and extermination with the Nazis. The war’s end and the exposure of the death camps led to a cooling of domestic sentiment toward Mrs. Sanger. But she regrouped, repackaged her message, and Planned Parenthood has since succeeded in killing more people than Adolf Hitler ever dreamed.” (Letter to the Washington Times, Feb. 1, 2005.)
Showing support for reproductive rights by raising “Sanger’s name in a public forum is akin to expressing your love for the new Volkswagen Beetle by thanking Adolf Hitler.” (Andrea Mrozek, “No Role Model for Modern Women,” The Calgary Herald, Apr. 15, 2005)
“Legalized abortion is not born of the contrived constitutional right to privacy, but is the bastard offspring of an illegitimate union of elitist judges and eugenicists, such as Margaret Sanger, Allan Guttmacher, Julian Huxley and Adolf Hitler.” (Editorial in The Augusta Chronicle, April 21, 2005)
“Pro-abortion advocates can't stand the truth and now there is a new tool that pro-life organizations can use to present the facts on abortion in a compelling way. This 14-page booklet exposes the Margaret Sanger, Hitler, Planned Parenthood eugenics connection.” (Advertisement for the pamphlet, The Choice Nazi, on KlanParenthood.com.)
Posted: Sept. 10, 2005
There’s No “W” in Sex
Nicholas D. Kristof’s February 16, 2005 New York Times column, “Bush’s Sex Scandal,” took Bush to task for allocating in his budget more money for “abstinence only” sex education, even as he has proposed drastic cuts for many school and health programs. While abstinence education has become the front line for social conservatives in their battle against sex, in the old days, Kristof points out, they “simply fought any mention of sex.” He writes: “In 1906, The Ladies Home Journal published articles about venereal disease – and 75,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions. Congress banned the mailing of family planning information, and Margaret Sanger was jailed in 1916 for selling a birth control pamphlet to an undercover policewoman.” Though Kristof is a little off on his Sanger history – she was arrested in 1916 and jailed in 1917 for dispensing contraceptive information out of the Brownsville clinic in Brooklyn, the first clinic in the country – he argues convincingly that abstinence-only programs and keeping silent about sex undermine the need for greater awareness of and access to contraception.
Posted: April 8, 2005
Leading Edge
Sanger is popping up regularly in the literature of the growing field of leadership studies. Most recently she was mentioned in an article that suggests foundations for social causes employ creative and even controversial leadership in order to move beyond traditional approaches to organizational leadership. Ronald A. Heifetz, John V. Kania and Mark R. Kramer write in “Leading Boldly,” in the Winter 2004 Stanford Social Innovation Review, that “Presidents of the United States occupy a position of formal authority; sometimes they lead, other times they do not. But many others who are seen to be leaders do not occupy such power perches, such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Margaret Sanger. They led with virtually no formal authority, and even their moral authority accumulated long after their leadership was under way.” In other words, the authors suggest, leaders of foundations must be more adaptive and rely to a greater extent on moral authority – and the passion of the cause – to extend their foundation’s reach. Sanger is a perfect example of a leader who broke away from a traditional organizational framework, adapted her leadership to new situations and achieved broad influence without a base of formal power.
Posted: April 8, 2005
Fewer Cats in the Cradle
“Ah, springtime in my back yard. Bursting buds, longer days, mating cats.” So starts Suzanne S. Cushing’s “My Turn” piece, “Kitty Birth Control and the Rebirth of Tomcat Earl,” in the Portland Oregonian (March 10, 2005). She goes on to discuss the thousands of unwanted cats sent to shelters and euthanized each year because people neglect to spay or neuter. “If one cat and all her offspring had just one litter of four, in nine years there would be 349,525 additional cats.” She did her part in trapping “a thug” tomcat named Earl and having him neutered. “Yes, I’m the Margaret Sanger of kitty birth control – thanks to my black and white tomcat, Earl.”
Posted: April 8, 2005
Don’t Touch That Dial
On December 19, 2004, Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcast a biography of Sanger as part of its “Special English Program, People in America” series. Two correspondents took turns reading a standard summary of Sanger’s life and career and concluded that “She was an important part of what has been called one of the most life-changing movements of the Twentieth Century.” VOA, funded by the government, reaches over 100 million people worldwide.
Posted: April 8, 2005
Photo courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
Revised: July 25, 2007