kPARA cPAR@ ` TEXT ` ⌡Sanger, Margaret Higgins1883╨1966social reformerBorn on September 14, 1883, in Corning, New York, Margaret Higgins was one of eleven children. She attended school in Claverack and then taught school herself until her mother╒s death turned her attention to medicine. She completed nurse╒s training at the White Plains Hospital in New York and at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Clinic. In 1900 she married William Sanger. (She retained that surname, by which she was well known, after they were divorced; she remarried in 1922.) In New York City the Sanger home became a popular meeting place for socialists and radical intellectuals and writers. She contributed articles on health to the Socialist party╒s organ, the Call; these were later collected in What Every Girl Should Know, 1916, and What Every Mother Should Know, 1917. In her nursing career she ministered primarily to maternity cases from the city╒s crowded lower East Side, coming directly into contact with her patients╒ desperate financial circumstances and seeing those circumstances exacerbated by the birth of unplanned, unwanted children. She saw also the staggering toll of infant mortality and of deaths from self-induced abortions. Sanger gave up nursing in 1912 to devote herself to the cause of birth control (a term she is credited with originating). Gathering and disseminating information legally, however, was nearly impossible because of the federal Comstock Act of 1873, which classified contraceptive data with obscene matter and forbade its passage in the mails. Late in 1913 she traveled in Scotland and France as an observer of conditions there. In 1914 she returned to the United States and began publishing the Woman Rebel, a magazine addressed to her cause, and was indicted for sending an obscene publication through the mails. She fled to Europe on the eve of her trial and for a year continued her study of the question of birth control there. Soon after her return to New York in 1915 her indictment was quashed largely as a result of widespread sympathy aroused by the case. Also in 1914 she had founded the National Birth Control League, of which she lost control (to Mary Ware Dennett and others) during her absence in Europe. In 1917, soon after setting up the nation╒s first birth control clinic in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn, she was sent to the workhouse for 30 days on the charge of creating a public nuisance. But her appeal, bolstered by mounting public sympathy, led to a favorable decision from the New York Court of Appeals granting doctors the right to give advice about birth control to their patients. (In 1936 a further interpretation of the law granted doctors the right to import and prescribe contraceptive devices.) Sanger organized numerous conventions in the United States and abroad, beginning with the Birth Control Conference in New York City in 1921 and continuing through the International Birth Control Conference in New York in 1925, the World Population Conference in Geneva in 1927, the International Contraceptive Conference in Zurich in 1930, and others. In 1921 she established the American Birth Control League, of which she served as president until 1928, to educate and mobilize public opinion behind efforts to alter restrictive legislation. In 1931 she founded the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control. In 1939 the American Birth Control League combined with the education department of the Birth Control Research Bureau and became the Birth Control Federation of America, renamed in 1942 the Planned Parenthood Federation, of which she was named honorary chairman. She was elected first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation on its organization in Bombay, India, in 1953. She worked throughout her active career to further the cause of family planning in the Far East, notably in India and Japan. In 1935 she began the Journal of Contraception (later called Human Fertility). Her many books included The Case for Birth Control, 1917, The Pivot of Civilization, 1922, Women, Morality, and Birth Control, 1922, Woman and the New Race, 1923, Happiness in Marriage, 1926, Motherhood in Bondage, 1928, My Fight for Birth Control, 1931, and Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, 1938. She died in Tucson, Arizona, on September 6, 1966. .styl ` ( ! ¬ 5¬ # 5¬ 4 !I ╤ !I ╒ !I ⌡ !I !I !I 9 !I ║ 5¬ ╗ !I ½ !I ╢ !I ~ !I ▐ Å !I
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