Jean Baker: "Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-11-15/jean-baker-margaret-sanger-life-passion
Margaret Sanger spent her life fighting to enable women to plan how many children to have and how often. Working in the slums of New York in the early 1900s, she saw the toll frequent childbirth took on women. She began to view birth control - a term she coined - as a way to help poor families. She was vilified and even jailed for her efforts. More than a century later, Sanger and the Planned Parenthood organization she founded are still under attack. GOP candidate Herman Cain recently called the group "Planned Genocide." The author of a new biography of Sanger tells the story of her battle for women's reproductive rights and why she remains controversial today.
Guests
Jean Baker
professor of history at Goucher College and author of many books on 19th-century American history.
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Program Highlights
Margaret Sanger began her campaign to legalize birth control 100 years ago. At the time, even written literature about contraception was banned as pornography. Sanger died in 1966, a year after a Supreme Court decision protected an American's right to use contraceptives. Jean Baker's new book on Sanger examines the woman's life and motivations.
Sanger's Early Life
Sanger's mother had 18 pregnancies in 22 years, dying at age 48. Sanger herself was the sixth child of 11 in a poor Irish family in Corning, New York. Sanger grew up to marry an architect, move to Hastings-on-Hudson, and have several children, but Baker says Sanger would never have been happy to have lived a calm, suburban life there. She encouraged her husband to move the family to New York City, where she began associating with radicals and intellectuals in Greenwich Village.
A Growing Interest in Reproductive Rights
After moving to the city, Sanger became more interested in birth control methods and women's reproductive rights. She believed that no woman was free who could not control her body. She traveled to Europe, where developments of new kinds of birth control were happening. At the time, the only widely available contraceptives in the U.S. were pessaries and diaphragms, and early researchers were focusing on developing spermicides. But Sanger started supporting new work in endocrinology that would allow women to have greater control over their reproductive cycles.
Opening the First Clinic
Sanger's opening of the first women's clinic in 1916 was, according to Baker, "an act of civil disobedience." Sanger went around her New York neighborhood handing out posters asking, "Do you want to have another child?" Can you afford another child?" and imploring people to come to the Brownsville clinic for help. "And they lined up. The women came," Baker said. Within a few days, an undercover policewoman visited the clinic, and a few days after that, police came to shut down the clinic and arrest Margaret Sanger, her sister, and a translator who had been helping to run the clinic. Sanger made the best of the setback, insisting on walking to the jail and taking the opportunity to turn the situation in to a public relations win. In jail for a month, Sanger taught the women in prison about birth control.
Sanger's Legacy
Some people mistakenly believe that Sanger was a proponent of abortion, but Baker say this is simply not true. Baker points out that Sanger died in 1966, and abortion was not legalized in the U.S until 1971, so abortion was still often dangerous and harmful for women in her lifetime. Today, there is a common misconception that one of Planned Parenthood's main goals is to provide abortion services to women. But Planned Parenthood has stated that its abortion services amount to about 3 percent of its total services, with 90 percent of its services classified as "preventive."
You can read the full transcript here.
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Read an Excerpt
Excerpted from Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion by Jean H. Baker. Published November 2011 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright 2011 by Jean H. Baker. All rights reserved:
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I had formed the impression that Ms Sanger made her now-odious eugenics-oriented statements when she found that rich people really wouldn't part with money out of any concern for the health and happiness of the poor, but were swayed by modern-sounding, scientistic, racialist, alarmism.
I guess I would rather believe that she was an hypocrite in a very good cause than that she believed in that stuff, but then again so many of the forward-thinking people of the time believed so---e.g. H.G. Wells thought the "Celestials" (Chinese) and Hebrews racially incompatible with the American future---and it's very easy to believe your own spiel after awhile....
What would Ms Baker's opinion of her actual beliefs be?
I have been under the impression that some of Margaret Sanger's passion resulted from her experiences as a public health nurse who visited families in poor neighborhoods in New York City. Is this true?
Carol
Indianapolis
I, along with many mothers of daughters, am grateful for the protection from unwanted pregnancies, in addition to the primacy of empowerment of women over their bodies, in the legacy of Margaret Sanger's pioneering work.
The November 14, 2011 issue of the New Yorker has an excellent article on Margaret Sanger and the evolution of what is now Planned Parenthood. The focus of the article is on the politics of birth control. Ironically, in the 1940's and 1950's, Republicans were supportive of family planning to not only address the issue of overpopulation but also to use the knowlege of how spacing children was better on the mother's health and, consequently, the health of the entire family.
Sanger was also an early eugenicist. In her own book, "Woman and the New Race", she writes in reference to her own work that it was "nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or those who will become defectives."
And how about her relationship with Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote "The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy"?
Considering the policies of the conservatives and the Rethuglican Party to starve minority people through limiting access to entitlement programs while at the same time supporting discrimination in employment and education they are hardly in a position to criticize anyone else as being racist or eugenicists.
There was/is a difference between positive eugenics and negative eugenics, although the word eugenics carries its own well-deserved stigma. I believe Ms. Sanger's association with Havelock Ellis, who sheltered her in England, strengthened her own views with regard to social Darwinism.
Why can't people admit that eugenics would make us better? We manipulate animals to a ridiculous degree. We make animal machines that can't even physically breed, simply produced to kill and yet the thought of not letting people with mental and physical genetic impairments breed more of these weaknesses so abhorrent.
Why do we want more of this to be P.C.?
Yes, Carol, that is absolutely correct.
She was a visiting nurse in New York City during some of the biggest waves of immigration, when poor immigrants lived in terrible overcrowded conditions, and women often died young from childbirth, or from the toll that repeated pregnancies took on their health.
She also took care of women who were dying from septic abortions, and then she returned to care for the children left motherless after their mothers' deaths.
Her patients begged her for help, making it clear that abstinence was not an abortion because they could not refuse their husbands.
I'm afraid the callers this a.m. caused a tilt toward discussing her later involvement with eugenics and eugenicists, but this was not her focus, and certainly not how she began. Ms. Baker did a less vigorous defense of Sanger's motives than I would have hoped; Jill LePore's interview with Terry Gross last week (11/9) was much better and more detailed. Listen to the podcast while you're here.
It's a pity so much disinformation has been put out about Sanger in the name of anti-abortion. LePore even says Sanger was not terribly likeable, but that doesn't change her very real achievements.
l
Politifact has a very good analysis of Herman Cain's allegations of racism and genocide. His statements are so wrong that they gave them a rating of "Pants on Fire!"
Interesting that Ms. Baker would dispute the woman who was discussing Margaret Sanger's own words in her own books as "incorrect information". Either Margaret Sanger wrote that she wanted to eliminate weaker races and people or she didn't. As she did write these things in more than one book, paper, and speech, don't lie about it now and say that we are misunderstanding or need to be nuanced. If you truly believe the Margaret Sanger was good, then say she was a product of her time (that is no excuse in my mind), but don't claim the words don't exist.
Ms Baker seems to be too entranced with Sanger to create a truly balanced portrait of her. If she was more balanced, perhaps she wouldn't be so "surprised" by the remaining controversy.
I'd say that part of the problem is distrust of any mechanism deciding which and what degree of impairment might disqualify one from breeding. Our past experience shows that forced sterilisation works better as a measure of which sorts of person were unpopular at the time than for anything else.
Qui custodiet...?
I, for example, might be tempted to take any degree of interest in organised sport or religious superstition as indication of "defectiveness"; others might say exactly the same about my atheism and my disinterest in games. That is to say, it's not like we're a society with many universally-held values which we could apply----some people think a blastula an unremarkable bunch of cells, others seem close to wanting to give it voting rights; some people consider a life without genitals not worth living, whilst others make themselves eunuchs for whatever's sake. Some people think control of fertility a right, others consider it an abomination.
To draw an analogy: it might be better if truly heinous drugs were illegal, but history shows that which drugs get defined so is more a matter of tribal purity codes than anything else.
So, to sum it up: I _might_ trust myself to make this sort of decision for other people, but I wouldn't trust anyone else to make it for me, and I don't see them willing to trust me with it, so that leaves...just us, for ourselves.
The discussion on eugenics is disappointing and frustrating. The author's comments attempt to frame Cain's comments as being from one of those "paranoid black people" is not effective and might even be countering the main thrust of the author. There is nothing to gain from evading the inherent link between the ideologies of racism and eugenics. The author has a unsettling willingness to avoid acknowledging why so many folks find that Sanger's eugenic affinities disturbing. Baker seems to be bypassing an opportunity to let the discussion move on to topics that might enrich out understanding of Sanger and her legacy.
There is negative eugenics and there is positive eugenics. Sanger was a propionate positive eugenics, period. This is not debatable point.
Sanger's organization has grown and changed a lot since then. America has a racist past but it has changes a lot since then too.
Eugenics is a sad chapter in world history, and Sanger is one of the few recognizable names that appear in that chapter. This too is not debatable.
Why would we want to white-wash the past? The utility and success of birth control speaks for itself. The phase "every baby should be a wanted baby" speaks to the laudable legacy of Sanger; a legacy that began during an ugly chapter of history, but is nevertheless quite laudable.
I found the interview very dishonest, especially when Ms. Baker was asked about the racism issue and Ms Rehm allowed her to lie on air. A simple Google search will show various sources, but neither the writer or the interviewer had enough integrity to do the research.
Ms. Rehm has no problem asking the tough questions to those she disagrees with, and all I ask is she do the same for all guests.
Sadly, this type of biased psuedo journalism is why many want NPR to be dismantled.
I came to burn my bridges not to sniff your ridges [is she looking?].
If a privileged upper class "fair european american" or royalty of any race is born with gene-ral deformities of dangerous undeSirAbilities, in HIS grandfathers culturally esteemed house, should that "person" be reproducing? and what about true-love passion? Is... it all or NUThing? or can the smartest person in the room compose a "compassionate solution" {news alert, stock market rallies! passionately at con-genial technology} that makes morality the new love? and dis-guard?? the deGene-rat-ED thug?
is it all or nothing??? who will fight the war or service our imported score?
Yes, some kings were "choosen" to be in this land, and it is safe and prosperous by those passionately honest choices. But genocide and eugenics are only BLURRED! by dissonant maniacs. Honesty is safely clarified, and propaganda is not safe.
Regarding Margaret Sanger and the largely religiously inspired eugenics:
Please read "PREACHING EUGENICS - Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement" by Christine Rosen.
I think Sanger's dalliance with eugenics was a relatively brief detour from her otherwise tremendous career.
And I think Sanger's participation was no more than a footnote in the eugenics movement.
Pants on fire!? Says what objective rating source? Herman Cain's pants were doused with the petrol of ignorance, ignited by hatred and fanned by racism. He did NOT lie, he told the inconvenient truth:
"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population," she said, "if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon
"...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born." Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, referring to immigrants and poor people
"More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control." Birth Control Review, May 1919, p. 12
Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child, she wrote in her "Plan for Peace." Birth Control Review, April 1932
On the purpose of birth control:
The purpose in promoting birth control was "to create a race of thoroughbreds," she wrote in the Birth Control Review, Nov. 1921 (p. 2)