Rather than organizing a defense, Sanger sat down and wrote a pamphlet called “Family Limitation,” which analyzed in detail all the chief methods of contraception in use at that time. Then she left for England. Once her ship was safely at sea, she cabled a friend back home, who quickly distributed 100,000 copies of the pamphlet. Thousands more circulated for the next two decades. Eventually the charges were dropped, but Sanger was arrested again in 1916–this time for operating a birth-control clinic–and briefly jailed. Not until 1972 did the Supreme Court catch up with Sanger and millions of others, finally affirming the right to birth control.
This incident reveals much about Sanger, her tactics and the vision that kept her hammering away at seemingly intractable opposition until her death, in 1966. As Ellen Chesler makes plain in this massive, absorbing study of Sanger’s life and times, Sanger didn’t invent a birth-control device or found an organization that survives today, but it was she who brought the notion of birth control from the shadows into the light of public discussion. She often described the incident that she said “awakened” her: working as a nurse on New York’s Lower East Side, she watched a poor immigrant woman die from a self-induced abortion. From then on, as a writer, organizer, speaker, fund raiser, publicist, lobbyist and legal tactician, she dedicated herself to birth control, becoming a symbol of the movement worldwide. In Japan, 50 kimono-clad women wreathed her with a garland of chrysanthemums; in India, she met with Mahatma Gandhi (they agreed to disagree).
Many of her convictions were forged in the radical politics of the early 1900s, and although she became more moderate (and more pragmatic) with age, she was inspired early on by such firebrands as Emma Goldman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Believing in women’s rights to an unfettered sexuality, she had numerous lovers–including H. G. Wells and Havelock Ellis–before, during and after her two marriages. Long absences from her children distressed but didn’t stop her. “I could weep from loneliness for you,” she wrote to her small daughter as she fled the country in 1914. “But work is to be done dear–work to make your path easier–and those who come after you.” The path was indeed made easier for those who followed. Today the importance and morality of birth control is taken for granted virtually everywhere except in the Roman Catholic Church. Too bad Sanger’s opponents in government and the church fought her–and American women–so long and furiously. If instead they had worked with Sanger, the battle over abortion rights might be close to moot.
