News & Sanger Sightings > 2006
This I Believe
Some of you may have heard Margaret Sanger’s high-toned voice and stilted enunciation emanating from your radio on October 16. The National Public Radio program “Fresh Air” included the opening section of Sanger’s recorded 1954 essay for Edward R. Murrow’s popular radio program “This I Believe.” Independent radio producer Jay Allison has revived the program for NPR and selected new and old “This I Believe” essays for a new book and CD.
From 1950 to 1955, Murrow invited both ordinary Americans and famous figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Jackie Robinson and Harry Truman, to state their personal convictions and philosophies in succinct three to five-minute essays. Sanger had never heard the program and had to query friends for advice just days before she was scheduled to record. “Any suggestions for my theme?” she asked, writing from Tucson to Dorothy Brush, “I never heard the program as it is not given out here. So have not an idea of what I do believe which could be broadcast & not poo pooed.” (MS to Brush, Oct. 15, 1953 [MSM S41:875-878].)
You can listen to an mp3 file of the speech at our website:
Here’s the opening section:
As a child, one of a large family, I learned that the thing I did best was the thing I liked to do. This realization of doing and getting results was what I have later called an awakening consciousness.
Glimpses
The reopening of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in June gives visitors a chance to once again view Joy Buba’s exquisite bust of Sanger, a bronze cast after her 1964 original, donated to the museum by Cordelia Scaife May. Another version of the bust resides in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.
The Southeast Steuben County Library in Corning, NY, Sanger’s birth place, included an article on July 5 about the MSPP, this newsletter and our web site in the library’s on-line newsletter, The Circulator (www.thecirculator.org).
A new novel, Hidden, by Victoria Lustbader has been receiving many favorable reviews this summer. It features a main character whose sister works as a nurse in Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.
Another book set in the 1920s, a breezy history titled Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz, has also been getting some attention in the press. His drive-by treatment of Sanger links flappers with autos and birth control in a sexual coming out party. Sounds like a lot of honking.
Posted: Sept. 2, 2006
Holy Double Agent!
As Neela Banerjee pointed out in her “Political Memo” column for the New York Times (April 3, 2006), it’s not surprising these days to run across prayer breakfasts going on in the big convention hotels in the Nation’s capital. But an Interfaith Prayer Breakfast at PPFA’s annual convention?
Did someone steal the opposition’s play book? Turns out that PPFA has included the breakfast for the past four years. “To its critics,” writes Banerjee, “Planned Parenthood is the godless super-merchant of abortion. To its supporters, it is the dependably secular defender of abortion rights.
But at this breakfast, God was everywhere, easily invoked by believers of various stripes.” As readers of our publications know, it turns out that the birth control movement and PPFA have a long history of interaction with various religious groups, most of which have steadfastly supported the movement. “Margaret Sanger,” Banerjee continues, paraphrasing the Rev. Thomas R. Davis, author of Sacred Work, Planned Parenthood and its Clergy Alliances, “. . . drew clergy members in the early 20th century by relating the suffering of women who endured successive pregnancies that ravaged their health and sought illegal abortions in their desperation.”
Posted: Sept. 2, 2006
The Ninety-Three Years War
Gloria Feldt, who recently stepped down as president of PPFA, criticized the May 7, 2006 New York Times Magazine article by Russell Shorto, “The War on Contraception,” for ignoring the early years of the birth control movement. In “Core Issue Missing in Birth-Control War Reports” in the June 28, 2006 edition of Women’s enews (www.womensenews.org), Feldt points out that the Times article finds the origins of organized opposition to birth control in the two most momentous Supreme Court reproductive rights decisions: Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973), “as though,” she writes, “it was only women’s recent and brazen push for this form of reproductive control that ignited the conflict. In truth, contraception has been a political football in the United States for a long time. In 1913, Margaret Sanger, founder of the American birth control movement, wrote a sex education column for The Call newspaper, entitled ‘What Every Girl Should Know.’” Feldt recounts how the article was pulled because the “Comstock Laws . . . made it a crime to circulate ‘obscenity’ through the mail. In place of the column, The Call’s editors ran an empty box reading: ‘What Every Girl Should Know – nothing, by order of the U. S. Post Office!’” Feldt goes on to argue that Comstock is still around today in the form of people who can’t tell the difference between medical information and pornography, between healthy sexuality and promiscuity.”
Posted: Sept. 2, 2006
National History Day Winners
We congratulate Sophia Nguyen and Neha Mukunda for their Junior Group Performance, “Margaret Sanger: A General in the Battle for Birth Control, a Soldier in the War for Women’s Rights,” which won New Jersey’s Outstanding State Entry in the Junior Division and placed seventh in the National competition. Every year hundreds of students use the Project’s web guide to the National History Day program to inspire their entries, coming up with creative ways to interpret Margaret Sanger and her legacy.
Posted: Sept. 2, 2006
A Historic Place
Adrienne Lehrer, a friend of the Project and the current owner of the house Margaret Sanger built in Tucson in 1950, recently notified us that the house, designed by architect Arthur Brown, has been listed in the National Registry of Historic Places.
Posted: Sept. 2, 2006
How to be a Good Liberal
Some edge-of-the-forest humor from the web site of Backwoods Home Magazine. No doubt it’s Sanger’s first mention in the bi-monthly publication of “practical ideas for self-reliant living.” Similar versions of the list have run on conservative Internet sites. Included in a list of 21 items under the heading “How to be a Good Liberal” are these gems:
2. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.
4. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding.
7. You have to be against capital punishment but support abortion on demand.
14. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, General Robert E. Lee, or Thomas Edison.”
Posted: May 22, 2006
Mail-Order Margaret?
In his recent book, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York, 2004), author Gerard Jones highlights the role played by the poet and editor Harold Hersey in the pulp publishing industry. Hersey, one of Sanger’s lovers in the late 1910s, later wrote an unpublished biography of Sanger. He worked closely with Sanger in the early days of the Birth Control Review. “We didn’t only sell magazines,” Jones quotes Hersey as saying, “but also razor blades and other items.” “The ‘other items’,” Jones explains, “were contraceptives. Sanger was not only a proponent of birth control but a mail-order dealer, with her own line of condoms, diaphragms, and ‘Dainty Maid’ douche kits.” That is new information to us. Sanger was always extremely careful never to associate with the commercial trade of contraceptives. Her opponents often accused her of profiting from her cause, but there has never been a shred of evidence she received money for selling birth control or taking part in a mail order business – under or above ground. It is possible that one distributor of the Review, Eastern News, used its sales network to send illegal publications, condoms and liquor around the country, but most likely Sanger had no knowledge of it. For his sources, Jones cites Hersey’s autobiography, Pulpwood Editor, which does not mention the mail order venture, and unspecified collected material by Michael Feldman, a researcher on the comic book business. Thanks to Professor Ed Shannon for bringing this one to our attention.
Posted: May 22, 2006
The Modern Researcher
Those bagel crumbs again (see this issue’s lead article): On February 12, 2006, the Juneau Empire, the daily paper in Juneau, Alaska, published readers’ responses to a question posed by its editor: “Planned Parenthood is planning to open a Juneau clinic to deal with reproductive issues and provide abortions. Do you think that such a clinic should be opened?” 55% said yes; 45% said no. Here’s one of the responses: “When I heard Planned Parenthood was coming to town, I was shocked. It was as if the business came slinking in while many of us were unaware. I knew little about the business itself. Gathering information about Planned Parenthood seemed vital and I looked on the Internet. In researching it, I found many references to Margaret Sanger, racism, bigotry and even Hitler. The people of Juneau should educate themselves. Simply look online. Type in ‘facts about Planned Parenthood’ as a general subject. You will find some surprising links full of information on the subject. Remember, this business is coming to town to do abortions. They are not only going to be passing contraceptives or giving advice.”
Posted: May 22, 2006
Photo courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
Revised: July 25, 2007