Margaret Sanger

The Pivot of Civilization By Margaret Sanger

A 1926 marriage manual by the mother of the birth control movement in America. Sanger offers practical and intimate advice for achieving the ideal relationship. Today, more than 80 years later, her advice is both valuable and thoroughly modern.

When Margaret Sanger returned to Europe in 1920, World War I had altered the social landscape as dramatically as it had the map of Europe. Population concerns, sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use had entered public discussion, and Sanger's birth control message found receptive audiences around the world. This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's dramatic birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her tireless efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's contentious dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's own dramatic evolution from gritty grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat. A powerful documentary history of a transformative twentieth-century figure, The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Volume 4 is a primer for the debates on individual choice, sex education, and planned parenthood that remain all-too-pertinent in our own time.

Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography is a memoir written by Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist and women's rights advocate. In this book, Sanger recounts her life story, from her childhood in a large family in upstate New York to her work as a nurse in New York City's slums, where she witnessed the devastating effects of unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions. Sanger describes her journey to become a birth control advocate and the challenges she faced in promoting contraception, including censorship, legal battles, and public backlash. She also discusses her personal life, including her marriages and relationships, and the impact they had on her activism. Throughout the book, Sanger argues passionately for women's reproductive rights and the importance of access to birth control. She shares her vision for a world in which women have control over their own bodies and can make informed decisions about their reproductive health. Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography is a powerful and inspiring account of one woman's fight for reproductive freedom and gender equality. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of women's rights and the ongoing struggle for reproductive justice. This is a new release of the original 1938 edition. This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Birth control crusader, feminist, and reformer Margaret Sanger was one of the most controversial and dynamic figures of the twentieth century and one of the great women reformers in history. Volume 3: The Politics of Planned Parenthood, 1939–1966 of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger highlights Sanger's quest for the "magic pill," the non-barrier method of birth control she had envisioned since the early 1930s. These lively and fascinating letters and other writings tell the story of Sanger's consequential collaboration with the philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick and their masterful direction of scientists, physicians, and birth control bureaucrats toward the production of the first contraceptive pill--the catalyst for the sexual revolution. Volume 3 also chronicles Sanger's attempt to guide the American birth control movement during World War II and its immediate aftermath, when many were calling for increased fertility, not family planning. And it documents her controversial efforts to expand birth control services to African Americans in the rural South and to incorporate contraceptive health care into state and federal public health programs. All the while she was engaged in a contentious battle with the leadership of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America over the direction of the movement, with Sanger pushing to revive a feminist rationale for birth control and to emphasize the needs of the poor, and the Federation looking to extend its services beyond contraception and to encourage middle-class childbearing. Constructed to be read as the last chapter of her domestic biography, this volume documents the final turbulent decades of a remarkable life and includes important material on the efforts of biographers, film makers, journalists such as the young Mike Wallace, and Sanger herself, to assess her motivations and affirm her pivotal role in the history of reproductive rights. As with volumes 1 and 2, the documents assembled here, more than eighty-four percent of them letters, were culled from the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition, edited by Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, and Peter C. Engelman. Volume 4 will cover Sanger's international work in the birth control struggle.

The birth control crusader, feminist, and reformer Margaret Sanger was one of the most controversial and dynamic figures of the twentieth century. Volume 2 chronicles Sanger’s efforts during the Depression years to legalize contraception. These significant and engaging letters and writings, constructed to be read as biography, tell the story of Sanger’s frank discussion of birth control before an uneasy Congress, her quest for a judicial test case, and her ongoing public relations campaign in the face of powerful opposition from the Catholic Church, to convince Americans about the benefits of birth control. Volume 2 also documents Sanger’s complicated personal life, her unstable marriage, loss of wealth, and love affairs in middle age. Required reading for anyone interested in the emergence of planned parenthood and the life of its extraordinary leader.