Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion by Jean H. Baker

Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion by Jean H. Baker

I knew little about Margaret Sanger when I started writing If Not the Whole Truth. I only knew that she had coined the term "birth control" and that she was connected to Planned Parenthood somehow.

I was unaware of her lifetime of truly revolutionary work, or that she ran with a bohemian, freethinking crowd in Greenwich Village that included Max Eastman, John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. Artists, intellectuals, musicians. It was the hippie movement, only in 1910. Her husband quit his job as an architectural draftsman to become a painter. Maggie got a job as a nurse in the slums. There she saw self-inflicted abortions, the birth of children who could not be supported, miscarriages and deaths from pregnancies that should never have been. It was there she became outraged at the suffering of the poor because of unwanted pregnancy.

I hadn't know about her interaction with congress, nor her work to make the birth control pill a reality.

But I had noticed that Sanger, known as Maggie, to her family and friends, seemed to have fallen into recent disrepute.

That was the trigger that pushed feminist historian Jean Baker (professor of history at Goucher College and author of many books on 19th-century American history) to correct the many misconceptions about Sanger with this very approachable and comprehensive biography, detailing Sanger's battle for reproductive rights and why she is so controversial.

"It is a mark of the still controversial nature of birth control that Margaret Sanger remains a controversial subject. Now, finally, she has the biography she deserves. Jean H. Baker has restored Margaret Sanger to history and history to Margaret Sanger." ―Ellen Dubois, Professor of History, UCLA

An excerpt:
Declaring that discrimination was a universal failing to be opposed everywhere, she found its solution in the education of white men. “We must change the white attitudes … When you have Negroes working with whites you have the break down of barriers, the beginning of progress. Negro participation in planned parenthood means democratic participation in a democratic idea. Like other democratic ideas, planned parenthood places greater value on human life and the dignity of each person.

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