P.G. Smith Author

I can think of no better way to kick off Women’s History Month than to celebrate the life of Margaret Sanger, the revolutionary champion of birth control for all women, and founder of Planned Parenthood, who opened the first birth control and women’s health clinic in America in 1916. This, of course, was illegal, as was distributing any information about women’s reproductive health or birth control. For this she was arrested multiple times.

A great way to learn about her extraordinary life is by reading the excellent historical novel, Terrible Virtue, by Ellen Feldman. My challenge to you is this: just read one chapter–then see if you can put it down after that.

As the novel makes so vividly clear, Sanger grew up in a poor family with thirteen children, eleven of whom survived. She watched her mother give birth to thirteen babies and suffer through seven miscarriages, made old before her time by poverty, drudgery, and pregnancy. Like her two older sisters, she vowed that this would not happen to her.

She is saved from this fate twice by her sisters, Nan and Mary, who renounced the miserable life of their mother by the only means they had: get a job, never marry, never have sex. Since there was no birth control, that was the only choice women had in those days–unless they were rich.

That is the discovery Sanger makes when she is still in a private school paid for by her sisters. The rich always had birth control. That’s how the women up on the hill kept their tidy little families limited to two or three children, while the women down in the slums had twelve or fifteen, or died in the process. This enraged her.

So, this book, as is Sanger’s life itself, is as much about class prejudice as it is about sexism. Sanger was a true revolutionary: a socialist, a free thinker, a proponent of free love, and most of all a crusader for birth control for all women regardless of class or money. She was decades ahead of her time.

This is a no holds barred book, which extolls her accomplishments and her bravery, but also lays out her faults. Like many great crusaders, nothing is as important to her as her cause–not her husband, not her children, and not any of her lovers, of which there were many. Yet it is clear that no one has changed the lives of women in America and around the world as much as Margaret Sanger.

Terrible Virtue is a well-researched and beautifully written novel about the absolutely astonishing life of an incredibly courageous woman, who changed the world. It is amazing how how little most people know about her.

In these days of clear backsliding for women’s rights, when states like Indiana (just as one example) are declaring abortion murder, and allowing women to die rather than allow an emergency abortion, everyone needs to read this book.

Margaret Sanger believed and declared to the world that no woman could be free unless she controlled her own reproductive destiny. This book illustrates how right she was.