This is really, really a hot button with me. It has all of my long life astonished me that ALL women do not stand up on their tippy toes and scream at the constant put downs coming from the male overlords.
In previous centuries men frequently had two, three, even more wives in succession BECAUSE THEY DIED IN CHILDBIRTH. Look at your own family trees, and you will find this over and over and over.
Even in the first decades of the 20th century most females were married before they got out of their teens. The law was, and actually I believe it still is, that men had a legal right to demand their "conjugal rights," which meant the wife must assent to sex upon demand. To refuse sex could mean automatic divorce (or in the Church, annulment), and being tossed out to terrifying lack of support for someone unskilled for the work force.
So women frequently got pregnant every year, until they died (in or from childbirth) or finally went through menopause and were no longer able to get pregnant. Desperate ones turned to the local abortionists, and were lucky if they lived through that. Frank Sinatra's mother was one in her neighborhood. They were, actually, much more prevalent than they are today, as women helped women.
Then came our savior in the form of Margaret Sanger. Her purpose was to free women from the necessity of enduring one pregnancy after another after another after another. She brought us Birth Control.
Eugenics were a BIG THING at the same time. Yes, read a history of it and discover the truth. There were a lot of prominent people who were sold on it, and a lot of well credentialed American doctors who promoted it big time, especially for the mentally ill, feeble-minded, and races other than the white. Yes, there were. I am NOT making this up.
So the upshot was actually that it was difficult for anyone with any sort of public life whatsoever not to know some of these people. Newspapers, magazines, books, letters and conversations were full of the subject. Thus it was that Margaret Sanger became tainted with it: it was a matter of her joining in the discussion. She was never in and of herself a promoter of eugenics. That was never her passion. Making it possible for women to control the size of their families for not only their own lives and health, but for the health and well being of their children WAS her passion, and I, for one, will thank her with all of my heart to my dying day.
The lying is despicable. But WHY oh WHY aren't ALL women protesting strenuously? I just don't get it!
Oh, and one last, but very important tidbit. Margaret Sanger was opposed to abortion. She was never, ever, an advocate for abortion and did not want her clinics to have any part in it. So why is she The Great Villain? To this very day, why is she so dreadful that murderers and rapists and tyrants can be in the Smithsonian, but she cannot? She brought us Birth Control and some freedom from the physical toll of constant pregnancy. That's it. That's ALL.
Think about it. She brought womankind a sense of control over her own body. A sense of freedom and well being. Whoops!
Males possessed of a strong domineering streak did not and STILL DO NOT approve of THAT! Analytic, intelligent, thinking men such as my husband approved strongly, and could see the benefits to themselves, as well. But men who are afraid of the potential that threatens their domination rights due just to their gender quite simply cannot bear women to have any control whatsover over their reproductive histories.
