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Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of Birth Control

© Elissa A. Lowe

Margaret Sanger was born in 1883. She grew up in Corning, New York, but longed for a more exciting life than she led. She eventually moved to New York City, hoping to find the life she had always desired in the hustle and bustle of the large urban area. Margaret married and bore three children, but grew restless even in her marriage.

Sanger soon became a member of the Socialist party, and began to pursue a career in nursing. During these times, people were frightened to go to hospitals. The new ideas and treatments becoming available in medical science were so foreign that most feared they were only being experimented on. Because of this, nurses were in very high demand. Margaret made house calls to the people of the city. Sometimes she would be called to the homes of the middle class, but more often than not she found herself in the Lower East Side.

The conditions in the Lower East Side were wretched. The tenement housing sprawled for city block after city block. Garbage cluttered the streets and the hallways of the tenement buildings. Since the people who dwelled in this region were poor, most were not educated in the least. The majority of the house calls she made were to pregnant women or women in labor. Most of whom wanted to know how to avoid becoming pregnant once again.

Margaret began to feel overwhelmed by the lack of knowledge these women had of their own beings. In 1912, she began writing articles concerning venereal diseases and hygiene. But because of the Comstock Act of 1873 which forbade any written information on birth control, deeming it “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” the United States Postal Service banned the articles from being delivered via mail.

Sanger watched women line up in droves outside abortionists’ buildings. She watched women die from trying to do abortions on themselves. Knowing these women had no one to turn to, because not even doctors or pharmacists would aid them in obtaining birth control, Sanger set out on a mission. Sanger vowed “to seek out the root of the evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were as vast as the sky.”

In 1914, Margaret began a newspaper that was considered radical during these times. The first issue contained an article entitled “The Prevention of Conception.” Sanger resolved to disregard the law that prohibited distributing any information on birth control and how to obtain it. During this time, it was Margaret Sanger herself who coined the term of “birth control.”

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