Margaret Sanger and Kathrine McCormick are two of the social activists I will be talking about in my presentations at the library during Women's History Month. Here is a large part of what I will say about them. I write my notes in my own "shorthand", I've tried to find all the words I've done that with and expand them into actual English words for you. If I missed any, I think you can figure out what I was saying........
"In People of the Century, Gloria Steinam states, “she taught us, first, to look at the world as if women mattered.” Born into an Irish working class family, Margaret witnessed her mother’s slow death, worn out after 18 pregnancies & 11 live births. While working as a nurse & midwife in t poorest neighborhoods of NYC in the yrs before WWI, she saw women deprived of their health, sexuality & ability to care for children already born. Contraceptive information was so suppressed by clergy-influenced, physician-accepted laws that it was a criminal offense to send it thru t mail. Yet the educated had access to such info and could buy “French” products, which were really condoms & other barrier methods & “feminine hygiene” products, which were really spermicides. The Comstock law of 1873, called for the “suppression of Trade in & Circulation of, obscene literature & articles of Immoral use.” The act made it a crime to use the USPS to send items of erotica, but also info about contraceptives, even descriptions of a woman’s reproductive system. Many woman did not have an iota of an idea of how they got pregnant, or that there was any way to not get pregnant other than abstinence, which was not always a choice for them. When as a nurse returning to the home of a woman who had suffered the end of her 9th pregnancy, the woman asked the doc that Margaret was working w/ “how do I stop getting pregnant?” the doc answered “tell your husband to sleep on the roof.” When M asked doctors the same question they told her that was info she did not need to know, even though she was a nurse & midwife.
In a series of articles called “what every girl should know”, then in her own newspaper, The Woman Rebel, & finally thru neighborhood clinics that dispensed woman-controlled forms of “birth control” (a phrase she coined), Sanger put info & power into the hands of woman. While in Europe for a year, partly to avoid severe criminal penalties, partly for violating postal obscenity laws, she learned more about reproduction, contraception & the commonality of women’s experience. Condoms and diaphragms, that most Eur’n women were using , were not allowed to be bought or sold in the US. Her case was dismissed after her return to the States.
Sanger cont’d to push legal & social boundaries by initiating sex counseling, & opening the 1st birth control clinic in the US in NYC, which led to her arrest for distributing info on contraception & condoms & diaphragms. S felt that in order for women to have a more equal footing in society & to lead healthier lives, they needed to be able to determine when to bear children. She also wanted to prevent unsafe abortions, which were common at the time because abortions were usually illegal. She believed that while abortion was sometimes justified it should generally be avoided & she considered contraception the only practical way to avoid the use of abortions. She had seen more than one woman who after begging for info from a doctor as to how to prevent pregnancy, ending up dying of a self-induced abortion.
In 1921, S founded the American B C League, which became in 1942, Planned Parenthood Fed’n of Am, and organized the 1st international population conference. In NYC, she organized the 1st birth control clinic staffed by all-female docs, as well as a clinic in Harlem w/ an entirely Af-Amn staff. She had found that Eur’n immigrant woman in particular would not go to a male doc for info, & that Af-Am women, at a time when they may be given incorrect info, or be in danger of sterilization, were more comfortable going to an Af-Am staffed clinic.
In 1929 she formed the Natl Comm on Fed’l Legislation for Birth Control, which served as the focal point of her lobbying efforts to legalize contraception in the US.
Many drug companies or college labs would not do any research on an oral contraceptive because of the power of the Catholic Church & their opposition to all forms of contraception. Sanger worked for years to encourage scientists to develop a hormonal birth control method.
Thruout the 1920s Kathrine McCormick, a 1905 grad of MIT, w/ a degree in biology, worked w/ Sanger on birth control & other women’s issues. McC smuggled diaphragms from Europe to NYC for S’s clinical Research Bureau. In 1937 K’s mother died leaving her an estate of more than $10 mill. Her husband died in 1947, leaving an estate of over $35 mill. In 1953 McC met w/ Gregory Pincus who had been working on developing a hormonal b c method for 2yrs. McC agreed to fund Pincus’ research. The FDA approved the sale of the Pill in 1957 for menstrual disorders & added contraception in 1960. McC had provided almost the entire $2 mill it took to develop & test the oral contraceptive pill. She cont’d to fund b c research thru the 1960s.
Sanger was past 80 yrs old when she saw t 1st marketing of a contraceptive pill, which she helped develop. But legal change was slow. It took until 1965, a yr before her death, for the Sup Crt to strike down a Conn law that prohibited the use of contraception, even by married couples. This right was extended to unmarried couples only in 1972. This constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy would became as important to woman’s equality as the vote.
