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control advocate; born in Corning, N.Y. The sixth of eleven children, she
married architect William Sanger (1902) and had three children before leaving
him in 1913. She moved to New York City (1912) where she became active
in the women's labor movement and the Socialist Party. She concluded that
control over childbearing was the key to female emancipation and was appalled
by women's ignorance of contraception, which she experienced first-hand
working as a practical nurse in New York City (1912). She wrote newspaper
articles on feminine hygiene, put out a militant journal entitled Woman
Rebel, and published a pamphlet, Family Limitation (1914), in which she
coined the term "birth control" and called for legalization of contraception;
indicted for violating postal laws, she fled to Canada and then England
(1914), where she was influenced by sex reformer Havelock Ellis to tone
down her radical tactics. After her return (1915), the government dropped
its charges and she began lecturing widely, also founding the Birth Control
Review (1916), which she edited until 1928. She and her sister served 30
days in prison for opening a birth control clinic in Brooklyn (1916), but
an appeal judge's decision allowed for doctors to provide birth control
information to married women. Her Birth Control Research Bureau (founded
in New York in 1923 with the support of her wealthy new husband, J. Noah
Slee) was the first doctor-staffed medical clinic in America and a model
for the 300 others she helped establish. In 1921 she founded the American
Birth Control League; accused of autocratic tactics, she resigned from
its presidency in 1928, but it later merged with her Clinical Research
Bureau into the organization that in 1942 became Planned Parenthood. She
founded a lobbying group (1929) that successfully sued to allow the mailing
of contraceptive materials in the U.S.A. She was less active from the 1940s
on, but in the 1950s she induced philanthropist Katharine Dexter McCormick
to help fund development of a birth control pill, and in 1952 she helped
found the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She was undeniably
difficult to work with, and close examination of her writings shows that
she endorsed birth control in part to maintain the position of the white
race, but she was just as certainly a courageous pioneer. |