Bio.com tells us that Margaret Sanger was an early feminist and women's rights activist who coined the term "birth control" and worked towards its legalization (pg. 1). Margaret was born in New York and raised in a Catholic family of 11 children. She witnessed the struggles her mother encountered raising a large family and felt that lack of birth control education contributed to her mother’s young death. Margaret sought higher education, studied nursing and relocated to the “progressive” area of Greenwich Village. Her passion to educate and provide birth control to women was born after working with and witnessing the hardships women encountered trying to raise children while pregnant and living in poverty. She opened the first birth control clinic in the US, was arrested and actually fled the country in pursuit of reproductive rights for women. She held controversial ideas for her times—specifically eugenics. I feel the statement below taken from bio.com illustrates the motives behind such contentious debate…
For all of her advocacy work, Sanger was not without controversy. She has been criticized for her association with eugenics, a branch of science that seeks to improve the human species through selective mating. As grandson Alexander Sanger, chair of the International Planned Parenthood Council, explained, "She believed that women wanted their children to be free of poverty and disease, that women were natural eugenicists, and that birth control, which could limit the number of children and improve their quality of life, was the panacea to accomplish this." Still Sanger held some views that were common at the time, but now seem abhorrent, including support of sterilization for the mentally ill and mentally impaired. Despite her controversial comments, Sanger focused her work on one basic principle: "Every child should be a wanted child."
(bio.com, page 2)
Margaret passed away in 1966; however, she did witness her hard work justified in 1965 as an important reproductive rights goal was met with passed ground-breaking legislation--Griswold v. Connecticut which legalized birth control for legal married couples.
Reference:
Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/margaret-sanger-9471186, pgs. 1-3.
I believe that Margaret was a very commendable woman for what she did for the rights of women to choose and take control of their own bodies. Birth control was very controversial at first, but it took women like Margaret to stand up for these important rights for women. It should be a woman's right to choose if she would like to get pregnant or not and it should be a woman's right to take control of her sexuality and her own body.
ReplyDeleteWe need more women like Margaret to stand up for women's rights for equal pay and working conditions and other areas that women still lack equality in.
I loved reading your blog and learning about Margaret. Before reading this I had never heard of her before, but it seems like she has made great strides women to be able to choose what they wanted for their bodies. Margaret is a great role model for women to look up too and strive to be like.
ReplyDeleteIf being a natural eugenicists means that women tend to go for strong healthy men in a subconscious effort to have children that will be strong and healthy as well, then that is a very intriguing thought, and I tend to agree. Women generally do not want a man that is weak either in character or in genetics. Unfortunately, in our instinctive efforts to obtain such a father for our children, we tend to be overly optimistic that we can make them as we want them to be instead of seeing them as they truly are. That is a generalization, but it seems more true than not.
ReplyDelete