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Margaret Sanger and Eugenics
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Dresden Dickie
The West: Enlightenment to Present
HSLF 1000: 007/Fall 1997
Professor Halsall
December 2, 1997
Eugenics is the study of racial breeding for racial
betterment. It arose as a scientific solution to social problems.1
This science is highly influenced by Darwinism, (the notion of
survival of the fittest and natural selection.) Social Darwinism
is a form of racism that legitimizes white European domination,
with the exception of various sects. Jews, in particular, were
directly affected by such racism. Eugenics was not only popular,
but also respectable within the Untied States. For example, the
World Fair held ideal family contests, with white suburban
families as the prize-winning archetype. Racism was, and still
is, found in mainstream American society. Therefore, it was no
surprise to see eugenics overlap with the commencement of the
birth control movement. Margaret Sanger's views regarding
eugenics and the need to bring birth control to all who needed it
coincided, resulting in controversy and opposition.
For thousands of years, birth control received little public
attention. It was deemed as both unnecessary and socially
unacceptable. In the early 1900s, the birth control movement
began to flourish. However, many hypocritical impediments stood
in the way. In New York State, laws on birth control were
unclear. Section 1142 of the State Penal Code declared that
nobody could give contraceptive advice to anyone, or for any
reason. Section 1145 allowed doctors to give advice for the "cure
or prevention of disease."2 Section 1145 had been interpreted by
the courts, and medical and legal professions, as meaning that
condoms could be given to men for the prevention of venereal
disease when consorting with prostitutes, but not as birth
control devices when consorting with their wives. Such hypocrisy
deeply disturbed Margaret Sanger, so she decided to devote her
life to spreading knowledge in respect to contraception. However,
her aptitudes towards eugenics corresponded with her teachings.
Margaret Sanger validated her work by convincing the poor
that upper-class women had knowledge of contraceptives, but for
purposes of class subjection refused to give it to others.3 She
justified this by explaining that small families meant wealth,
leisure, and fun with parents. She took note of the antithetical
lifestyles that the rich and the poor led at a very early age.
Margaret Sanger was born in Corning, New York, on September
14, 1879. Her mother had eighteen pregnancies, seven of which
resulted in miscarriages. Eleven growing children constituted a
heavy burden in a family where the father's commissions were
sporadic and uncertain.4 Margaret Higgins was the sixth child.
Margaret was unhappy in Corning, particularly because the family
was poor. As a young girl she noted, "Down by the river flats in
Corning, sprawled the glass factories whose belching smokestacks
dirtied the neighborhood. A dozen shrieking children swarmed
around each of the ugly little houses."5 This convinced her that
large families went with poverty, noise and violence.
Margaret Sanger decided to become a nurse to help those
living in conditions that she once found herself surrounded by.
Her work as a nurse took her to New York's Lower East Side, an
immigrant slum where she found dark, airless tenements that stank
of poverty. The women found themselves pregnant almost
incessantly. Margaret Sanger described a condition that she saw
in many of the tenements:
Women whose weary, pregnant, shapeless bodies
refused to accommodate themselves to the husbands'
desires find husbands looking with lustful eyes
upon other women, sometimes upon their own little
daughters, six or seven years of age.6
These poor women of New York's Lower East Side often were quoted
as saying, "It's the rich that know all of the tricks, while we
have all the kids."7
Margaret Sanger daily saw the unhappiness caused in many
families by the burden of too many children. Most of these women
would turn to harmful methods to terminate their pregnancies.
Margaret Sanger said,
"I heard over and over again of their desperate
efforts at bringing themselves `around' ---
drinking various herb-teas, taking drops of
turpentine sugar, steaming over a chamber of
boiling coffee or of turpentine water, rolling
down stairs, and finally inserting slippery-elm
sticks, or knitting needles, or shoe hooks into
the uterus.8
Many of these women living in poverty had consulted midwives,
social workers, and doctors, seeking a way to limit their
families, but had been denied this help. Working-class women
laughed at her in disbelief when she told them that men in well-
to-do families used a few simple means of limiting the family
like coitus interuptus or the condom.9 She made it clear that
these methods were not practical for women in the slums, and she
implied that a method under the woman's control was necessary.
Margaret Sanger abandoned nursing to devote herself to the
spreading of birth control methods to prevent unwanted
pregnancies among the poor.
In September of 1913, Margaret and her husband William
traveled to Paris. She saw that this would be an opportunity for
her to learn about the contraceptive methods that appeared to
keep the French birth rate low. Smaller families were in vogue in
France after the Napoleonic Code provided that children share
equally in a father's estate, rather than the inheritance going
to the eldest son.10 With help from French labor leaders, Margaret
Sanger looked into how families remained small, and found that,
despite the Catholic church, French mothers passed birth control
information on to their daughters. She found that `every married
woman knew all there was to know about contraception as well as
the art of love.'11
Returning to America with facts and enthusiasm, Margaret
Sanger established the first American birth control clinic in
1914. She picked the Brownsville area of Brooklyn for its
location. Five thousand handbills were quickly printed in
English, Yiddish, and Italian once a willing printer was found.
The handbills read:
Mothers
Can you afford to have a large family?
Do you want anymore children?
If not, why do you
have them?
DO NOT KILL.
DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT.
Safe, harmless information can be
obtained of trained Nurses
46 AMBOY STREET
Near Pitkin Ave.---Brooklyn
Tell your friends
and neighbors. All mothers welcome.
A registration fee of
ten cents entitles any mother to this information.12
An hour before the clinic opened on October 16, 1916, a line of a
hundred and fifty waiting women had formed. The news spread
quickly, and hundreds more arrived. Some were hoping for an
abortion. All of the women's tales were alike: homes with only
two rooms, in which seven people slept; homes where the husband
earned fifteen dollars a week when he worked; wives who had eight
children, two abortions, and so many miscarriages that they could
not remember the number.
Margaret Sanger was arrested for illegally dispensing
contraceptive information at the clinic. The district attorney
charged that the clinic was a "money-making affair" because of
the ten-cent charge, and that it was "anti-Semitic and anti-
Italian" because it was trying to reduce the number of Jews and
Italians in Brooklyn.13 This accusation was not far from the
truth. Advocates of birth control, Sanger included, have often
been accused of prejudice in cases when minorities such as Jews
or blacks were a large part of the poor or immigrant population
to whom contraception was offered.14 To legitimize her aims,
Margaret Sanger had developed a body of arguments that
demonstrated the desirability and practicability of contraception.
Her case for birth control took on an emphasis of
eugenics. She believed that the scientific regulation of
reproduction would prevent the social waste of abortion and
infanticide, and would reduce maternal mortality by preventing
pregnancy among women with tubercular, coronary, or renal
disorders.15 She also believed that birth control would eliminate
the weakening effects of hereditary afflictions, especially those
caused from venereal disease.
Margaret Sanger made a powerful propaganda appeal when she
pointed out the relation of birth control to the health and
welfare of children. Backed by statistical reports by the Federal
Children's Bureau, she said that most infant deaths were due to
malnutrition, or to other diseased conditions resulting from
poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother. Sanger also
argued that birth control could eradicate poverty and its
consequences. If the individual family and the nation restricted
their numbers, she said, all manner of social evils-insanity,
crime, unemployment, slums, and prostitution-would disappear.16
Sanger portrayed birth control as a one stroke solution to
several problems. She depicted it as a means to destroy the
existing social structure. Only birth control, she said, could
help the laboring class. Working women, she argued repeatedly,
should not "produce children who will become slaves to feed,
fight, and toil for the enemy-Capitalism."17 She also wrote in
1918 that "all our problems are the result of over-breeding among
the working class."18 Despite her poor childhood, her sympathetic
identification with the lower class disappeared.
Margaret Sanger began to believe that birth control was an
instrument with which the dominant classes could check threatened
social disruption. After 1920, she capitalized on the alarm that
many Americans had felt for a generation over the drastically
declining birthrate of the white, native, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant
stock and the high fertility among immigrants. Margaret Sanger
described how birth control would protect the rest of society
from the "unfit."19 Unfitness is a word that is too frequently and
lightly used by eugenicists. A eugenicist will regard the unfit
as entirely useless. They are an economic burden, a source of
waste, an impediment to human progress, and a menace to
civilization.20 The eugenicist is tempted to place in the category
of the unfit everyone who occupies a lower social level than
him/herself. Margaret Sanger depicted birth control as a device
to alleviate the suffering of the poor and as a means of social
control. That notion attracted to her a large number of middle-
class reformers fascinated with the idea of biologically
regulating society according to the principles of eugenics.21
Heredity principally determined the quality of life and was the
key to social change.
. Darwin's theory of natural selection had encouraged
interest in eugenics. In 1908 the Eugenics Society was
established. Frances Galton, its president, advocated "for the
more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of
prevailing speedily over the less suitable."22 By the 1920s,
American eugenicists were well organized and some joined the
birth control movement. According to Sanger, "The eugenicists
wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from fewer children
for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back of that
and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit."23 She
strongly advocated the prevention of the unfit from reproducing,
and was backed by many states. Some states had compulsory
sterilization laws for conditions such as insanity,
feeblemindedness, and inherited or transmissible disease.
The eugenics movement drew its greatest support from people
who saw daily the tragic consequences of hereditary
disease-social workers, public health officers, charity workers,
and supervisors of institutions for the defective. Margaret
Sanger had learned of eugenics form Havelock Ellis. She first
acknowledged the place of birth control in the eugenicists'
program when she announced in 1919: "More children from the fit,
less from the unfit---that is the chief issue of birth control."24
Margaret Sanger usually used the term "unfit" to refer to the
mentally retarded and physically deformed. "Birth control," she
said in 1920, "is nothing more or less than the facilitation of
the process of weeding out of the unfit, or preventing the birth
defectives or of those who will become defectives."25
In 1922, Margaret Sanger said that if society applied to
reproduction the techniques employed by "modern stock-breeders,"
there would be no need for measures that were "fostering the good-
for-nothings at the expense of the good."26 She suggested that
parents should have to "apply" for babies, just as immigrants had
to apply for visas to enter the country. Those "foreigners," she
complained, were ignorant of hygiene and the conditions of modern
life.27 They filled the slums and made the cities wretched. They
threatened to replace native workers in many industries.
The Birth Control Review, (1917-1940), had since its very
beginning carried articles by leading eugenicists. During its
first year of circulation, it leapt from 2,000 to 10,000 copies
within a few months. By 1920 the eugenicists were specifically
advocating the adoption of birth control by the slum-dwellers and
the impoverished, who had always been Margaret Sanger's chief
concern.
Despite the optimism that many eugenicists spread, others
noted possible dilemmas that could erupt. Arthur J. Barton wrote:
You have a very wrong estimate as to what effect
birth control would have on the population and on
the morals of our people. My observation leads me
to believe that the Negroes and the poorer element
of the white population are not interested in
birth control and would not be materially affected
by it. My judgment is that if there should be a
general dissemination of information about birth
control such information would be used mainly by
white people in better circumstances, among whom
birth rate is already too low, and that the poorer
white element and the Negroes would continue to
have large families which would increase the
disproportion in the increase of population as
among the different classes of our people. 28
Many eugenicists, at this point, reversed their attitude toward
the birth control movement. However, the attitudes and actions of
the opponents of birth control probably did more to influence
American opinion in its favor than any action in its defense.
Eugenics and birth control made an effective propaganda
combination throughout the 1920s. Margaret Sanger had at first
embraced eugenics as a way to pull supporters in. However,
eugenics soon dominated birth control propaganda.
Margaret Sanger's influence even today still prevails in
society. Margaret Sanger established and consolidated the notion
of birth control with the science of eugenics.29 Today geneticists
are combining the study of genetic flaws in infants with
eugenics. The Human Genome Project is an ongoing experiment to
try to characterize the genome, (the sum collection of one's
genetic material), of humans. Genetic tests are being performed
today on fetuses to determine what genetic conditions the child
could have or develop. Eugenics is directly involved in this
study, for the parents determine whether or not to terminate the
pregnancy based on the test results. Barbara Katz Rothman did
pioneering work in the field of reproductive technology. She said
in an interview,
"We've been down this road before, with
Margaret Sanger and the birth control
movement's involvement with eugenics. This
was a big mistake that did a lot of damage.
It's not that different to say that you don't
want to birth a child with disabilities than
to say you don't want an immigrant woman to
have a fifth child. And we can't be involved
with that."30
ENDNOTES
1 David M. Kennedy, Birth Control In America: The Career of
Margaret Sanger, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 114.
2 Madeline Gray, Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of
Birth Control, (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), 125.
3 Kennedy, 113.
4 Moira Davison Reynolds, Women Advocates of Reproductive Rights:
Eleven Who Led the Struggle in the United States and Great
Britain, (London: McFarland & Company, 1994), 48.
5 Emily Taft Douglas, Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future,
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 7.
6 Reynolds, 50.
7 Peter Fryer, The Birth Controllers, (New York: Stein and Day
Publishers, 1966), 202.
8 Fryer, 203.
9 Fryer, 203.
10 Reynolds, 53.
11 Fryer, 203.
12 Gray, 128.
13 Gray, 131.
14 Reynolds, 65.
15 Kennedy, 109.
16 Kennedy, 110.
17 Kennedy, 110.
18 Kennedy, 112.
19Kennedy, 113.
20 Charles P. Bruehl, Birth Control and Eugenics: In Light of
Fundamental Ethical Issues, (New York: John F. Wagner, 1928). 70.
21 Kennedy, 114.
22 Reynolds, 65.
23 Reynolds, 65.
24 Kennedy, 115.
25 Margaret Sanger, Woman and the New Race, (New York: Brentano's,
1920), 229.
26 Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, (New York:
Brentano's, 1922), 262, 105.
27 Kennedy, 117.
28 Kennedy, 120.
29 Daniela Dell'Orco, "From Women's Rights to the Eugenics of
Race: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in the
United States," Storia Nordamericana, 5(2), (1988), 23-49
30 Laura Briggs, "Gatekeeping at the Gates of Life," Sojourner:
The Women's Forum, 20(5), (1995), 1.
Annotated Bibliography:
Briggs, Laura, "Gatekeeping at the Gates of Life," Sojourner: The
Women's Forum, 20(5), (1995), 1.
Laura Briggs interviews reproductive technologist
Barbara Katz Rothman. They discuss how eugenics
continues to play an active role in regard to
genetically testing fetuses. Parents will abort fetus
if genetically flawed with disease.
Bruehl, Charles P., Birth Control and Eugenics: In Light of
Fundamental Ethical Issues, (New York: John F. Wagner,
1928).
Charles Bruehl condemns eugenics, and upholds beliefs
of the Catholic church. He discusses the moral aspects
and degrades terms such as the "unfit."
Dell'Orco, Daniela, "From Women `s Rights to the Eugenics of
Race: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in the
United States," Storia Nordamericana, 5(2), (1988), 23-49.
Daniela Dell'Orco traces the role of Margaret Sanger
within the birth control movement. She examines
Margaret Sanger's emphasis on the compatibility of
birth control and eugenics.
Douglas, Emily Taft, Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future, (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
Emily Douglas describes, in great detail and with much
admiration, the life of Margaret Sanger. This is a
biographical account.
Fryer, Peter, The Birth Controllers, (New York: Stein and Day
Publishers, 1966).
Peter Fryer discusses various advocates of birth
control. He gives a brief, but detailed, account of
Margaret Sanger's life. He addresses how eugenics
played an important role in her work, and accounts
specific details that no other book touched.
Gray, Madeline. Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of
Birth Control, (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979).
Madeline Gray gives a biographical account of Margaret
Sanger's life.
Kennedy, David M., Birth Control In America: The Career of
Margaret Sanger, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
David Kennedy explores the relation between Margaret
Sanger's character and the nature of the birth control
movement. He intertwines her personal beliefs with a
biography of her life. Concentration on the chapter
directly referring to eugenics was undergone.
Reynolds, Moira Davison, Women Advocates of Reproductive Rights:
Eleven Who Led the Struggle in the United States and Great
Britain,
(London: McFarland &Company, 1994).
Moira Davison discusses the lives of eleven women who
impacted woman's rights. The book was very written in
very simple terms, speculating Margaret Sanger's views
and life.