Book Description
Unlike any previous book, this new study of Margaret Sanger (based on original sources) takes her seriously as a thinker and provides the definitive reference to what she believed. It places what she said in its proper historical context with thirty-one chapters of prologue to prepare readers to understand the concluding twelve chapters, which are the full text of Sanger's own best-selling 1922 classic, The Pivot of Civilization, introduced by noted science fiction writer, H. G. Wells.
To give one example, Sanger constantly clashed with a once influential movement that fretted about something called 'race suicide.' A typical biography of Sanger might have a few paragraphs in which the author gives an opinion about that movement that's likely to be only partially accurate. This book does not leave you captive to the scholarly fashions of today. It takes you back to the time when race suicide was hotly debated, and lets you listen in on what was being said. It has no less than eleven chapters quoting extensively from all sides of that once-fierce battle. It takes you to the first written mention of the term and shows how the concept expanded, year by year, until it became a weapon to alter what was being taught at elite women's colleges and to change what was expected of educated, professional women (the essence: more babies, less careers). And those century-old issues still affect how present-day feminism views the world.
These are not isolated quotes that might be taken out of context. Each writer is allowed to argue his or her point of view in great detail, only irrelevant distractions have been removed. Two of these preliminary chapters are long out-of-print articles by Sanger herself and two are by her arch-foe in the race suicide debate, President Theodore Roosevelt. You would have to spend weeks searching through a large university library to find even part of what's in this provocative book. That makes this book an excellent resource for students with research papers to write.
Why, you ask, is that long ago clash important? That's like asking why slavery, outlawed almost a century and a half ago, matters to race relations. When you hear a feminist warn of those who intend to "force motherhood" on unwilling women, knowingly or not, she is reacting to the race suicide. And when she complains that men simply "don't get it" about reproductive issues, she is referring, yet again, to an era when who was having children was an all too public issue.
Even more important, it puts our current debate about reproductive issues in its proper context, not as a debate between men and women about "choice," but between women themselves about differing birthrates. Early twentieth-century women from elite universities, as smug in their sense of superiority as any modern feminist, did not want to be forced into what Sanger blasted as a "cradle race" with women they regarded as inferior - chiefly immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. As Sanger put it in a 1917 magazine article (quoted in its entirety): "The best thing that the modern American college does for young men or young women is to make them highly sensitized individuals, keenly aware of their responsibility to society. They quickly perceive that they have other duties toward the State than procreation of the kind blindly practiced by the immigrant from Europe. They cannot be deluded into thinking quantity superior to quality."
This book brings that once familar debate out of the shadows and into the cleansing light of day. Most important of all, it helps you to understand contemporary debates over issues such as abortion and sex. Sanger’s goal for the poor women she loathed and feared was to give them plenty of sex, but make sure they had as few of their "unfit" children as birth control technology permitted. Today, many liberals, who’ve long praised Sanger and what she was doing, have a similarly motivated zeal to bring abortion to racial minorities. As one liberal college professor put it, pointing to a young black man nearby, "That’s why we need legalized abortion." The only difference between him and Sanger was that she would point at an Italian immigrant woman with a large family and say, "That’s why we need birth control."
