Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America

National Review, August 17, 1992 by Michael Flaherty

Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, by Ellen chesler (Simon & Schuster, 639 pp., $27.50)

DESPERATE for a galvanizing force to rally their troops, feminists have undertaken to revive Margaret Sanget, the founder of Planned Parenthood. All but forgotten since her death in 1966, Mrs. Sanget has enjoyed a renewed celebrity in the last two years. She was honored by Life magazine as one of the hundred most influential people of the twentieth century, and was also inducted into the Arizona Hall of Fame. More recently, her spirit was invoked by NOW President Patricia Ireland, who claimed, in protesting a Supreme Court decision, that she was acting "in the tradition of Margaret Sanget."

Ellen Chesler's new biography, Woman of Valor, is the latest step in this process of rediscovery. Miss Chesler is a feminist of impeccable credentials, and Woman of Valor the result of over a decade of research. This mammoth work cannot, however, justify its own bulk-or the life of its subject.

Miss Chesler has placed everything she wants the reader to know about Mrs. Sanger in chronological order, from her birth in Corning, New York, to her death in Tucson, Arizona, and she tells the story in relentless detail. The figure we see marching from cradle to grave is less a human being than a walking bag of names, dates, places, and quotations.

Yet it's easy to see what anyone might find compelling in this daughter of a socialist stonecutter, sixth of eleven children, who had her conversion experience--to the gospel of birth control--in 1912, and helped to revolutionize sexual habits worldwide. At 33, she was the wife of another socialist, William Sanger. A nurse by training, she was working among the poor of New York City's Lower East Side. There she met women who had attempted to perform abortions on themselves, and was so appalled by this dangerous practice that, in 1916, she opened America's first birth-control clinic, out of a storefront in Brooklyn. She was promptly arrested and jailed for a month, convicted of violating obscenity laws. On her release, she found herself a star of the rising feminist movement.

This is all sufficiently straightforward. What the book leaves out is Margaret Sanger's interest in eugenics. Miss Chesler fails to mention many of the most haunting phrases in Mrs. Sanger's landmark book, The Pivot of Civilization. Perhaps her most popular work, it addressed what she saw as troubling demographic trends, notably the growing number of "nonAryan people" in the United States, who constituted "a great biological menace to the future of civilization."A mix of racism and class snobbery, the book admonishes readers to beware of "inferior races," whose members "deserve to be treated like criminals," and urges the "segregat[ion of] morons who are increasing and multiplying." Miss Chesler ignores most of this, though she quotes some of Mrs. Sanger's more sanitized utterances, such as "More from the fit, less from the unfit--that is the chief aim of birth control."

Not that Miss Chesler approves of such sentiments: "In Margaret's defense, however, this kind of intellectual tension was emblematic of the times." Lest the reader finish Woman of Valor with any lingering doubts, she writes: "Margaret Sanger was never herself a racist." Unfortunately, Miss Chesler's method of contextualizing historical figures is far from consistent. While excusing Mrs. Sanger's racism as a product of her time, she can, for example, decry Teddy Roosevelt as an alarmist who "gave credibility to supremacist social theory and to anti-immigrant prejudice."

Miss Chesler portrays the relationship between Margaret Sanget and the eugenicists as an alliance born strictly of political necessity, "to blunt the attacks of religious conservatives against her." According to Miss Chesler, Mrs. Sanger's fascination was simply a passing fancy. She makes no mention of the eugenicists on the lunatic fringe to whom Mrs. Sanger frequently gave a platform in her newspaper, The Birth Control Review. One such contributor to the April 1933 issue was Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. Such oversights are odd in a book as heavy with scholarship (119 pages of notes, 26 of index) as this one.

Clearly Miss Chesler is not familiar with thinkers who are not of the Left. If she were, we might have noticed the parallel between Mrs. Sanger and Ayn Rand. Like the Nietzschean supermen that inhabit Miss Rand's novels, Margaret Sanger despised, as she put it, "government welfare programs for their failure to weed out the feeble-minded and unfit." She held religion in contempt and proudly adopted the Wobbly motto, "No Gods, No Masters," as her own. While married, first to Mr. Sanger and then to a successful capitalist named Noah Slee, she delighted in sharing herself with interested members of the intellectual elite --including, though not limited to, H.G. Wells and Havelock Ellis. She even enjoyed a close friendship with Frank Lloyd Wright, who inspired Miss Rand's The Fountainhead. These personal traits, combined with a selfish individualism and a myopic focus on a single goal, make Margaret Sanger the quintessential Randian protagonist.