Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was an American birth control activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). Although she was initially met with opposition, Sanger gradually won some support for getting women access to contraception. In her drive to promote contraception and negative eugenics, Sanger remains a controversial figure. Sanger was born in Corning, New York. Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, was a devout Roman Catholic who went through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births)[1] before dying of tuberculosis and cervical cancer. Sanger's father, Michael Hennessy Higgins, earned his living "chiseling angels and saints out of huge blocks of white marble or gray granite for tombstones,"[2] and was also an activist for women's suffrage, free public education, and socialism. Sanger was the sixth of eleven children[3] and spent much of her youth assisting in household chores and care of her younger siblings. Sanger attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Claverack for two years. Her sisters paid her tuition. Sanger returned home in 1896 following her father's request to come home to nurse her mother. Her mother died March 31, 1896. Toward the end of the century the mother of one of her Claverack friends arranged for her to enroll at a nursing program at a hospital in White Plains, an affluent New York suburb. In 1902, Margaret Higgins married architect William Sanger and the couple settled in New York City. Sanger had developed tuberculosis as a result of the care of her ill mother and her own overwork, and the Sangers moved to Saranac, New York in the Adirondacks, for health reasons. In 1903, she gave birth to her first child, Stuart. In 1912, after a fire destroyed the home that her husband had designed, Sanger and her family moved to New York City, where she went to work in the East Side slums of Manhattan. That same year, she also started writing a column for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." Distributing a pamphlet, Family Limitation, to women, Sanger repeatedly caused scandal and risked imprisonment by acting in defiance of the Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices. Sanger felt that in order for women to have more “equal footing” in society and to have physically and mentally healthy lives, they needed to be able to decide when a pregnancy would be most convenient for themselves.[4] In addition, access to birth control would also fulfill a critical psychological need by allowing women to be able to fully enjoy sexual relations, without being burdened by the fear of pregnancy.[5] Sanger and her husband William moved to New York City in 1910. Now in the big city they became immersed in the radical bohemian culture that was then flourishing in Greenwich Village.[5] The Sangers became involved with local intellectuals, artists, and activists. Some of the better-known acquaintances they were affiliated with were John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman.[5] As Sanger worked in New York's Lower East Side with poor women who were repeatedly suffering due to frequent childbirth and self induced abortions, she began to speak out for the need of women to become knowledgeable about birth control. While she was working on duty as a nurse, Sanger met Sadie Sachs when she was called to her apartment to assist her after she had become extremely ill due to a self-induced abortion. Afterward, Sachs begged the attending doctor to tell her how she could prevent this from happening again, to which the doctor simply gave the advice to remain abstinent.[4] A few months later, Sanger was once again called back to Sach’s apartment, only this time, Sachs was found dead after yet another self-induced abortion.[4] This was a turning point in Sanger’s life. Sachs’ predicament was not at all uncommon during that time period. Because of this particular incident, Sanger was able to see firsthand that women were literally dying to learn how to prevent unwanted pregnancies. She knew then, more than ever, that she needed to do something to help these desperate women before they were driven to pursue dangerous and illegal abortions.[4] Margaret separated from her husband William in 1913. In 1914, Sanger launched The Woman Rebel, an eight page monthly newsletter promoting contraception, with the slogan "No Gods and No Masters" (and coining the term "birth control"[6][7]) and that each woman be "the absolute mistress of her own body." She was indicted for violating US postal obscenity laws in August 1914, but jumped bail and fled to England under the alias "Bertha Watson". Sanger returned to the US in October 1915 and her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died November 6.[8] In 1915, William Sanger distributed a copy of his wife’s publication, “Family Limitations,” to a postal worker who was actually working undercover. Because he was found to have been distributing “obscene” material, he was jailed for 30 days while his wife was still in Europe.[5] In 1915, Sanger visited a Dutch birth control clinic in which she became convinced that a diaphragm was actually a more effective means of contraception than the suppositories and douches that she had already been distributing back in the United States.[5] This realization began the slow introduction of the diaphragm to the United States due to Sanger later illegally smuggling them into the country.[5] In 1916, Sanger published What Every Girl Should Know, which was later widely distributed as one of the E. Haldeman-Julius "Little Blue Books." It provided information about such topics as menstruation and sexuality in adolescents. It was followed in 1917 by What Every Mother Should Know. She also launched the monthly periodical The Birth Control Review and Birth Control News and contributed articles on health to the Socialist Party paper, The Call. On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened a family planning and birth control clinic at 46 Amboy St. in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States. It was raided nine days later by the police. She served 30 days in prison. An initial appeal was rejected but in 1918 an opinion written by Judge Frederick E. Crane of the New York Court of Appeals allowed doctors to prescribe contraception. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921. In 1922, she traveled to Japan to work with Japanese feminist Kato Shidzue promoting birth control; over the next several years, she would return another six times for this purpose. In this year she married her second husband, the oil tycoon, James Noah H. Slee. In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established the Clinical Research Bureau (CRB). Sanger eventually found a loophole in the system when she had learned that physicians were exempt from the law that prohibited the distribution of contraceptive information to women when prescribed for medical reasons.[5] With the help of her wealthy supporters, Sanger was finally able to open the first legal birth control clinic that was staffed entirely by female doctors and social workers. It was the first legal birth control clinic in the US (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1940). It received crucial grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1924 onwards, which were made anonymously to avoid public exposure of the Rockefeller name to her agenda. The family also consistently supported her ongoing efforts in regard to population control.[9] Also in 1923, she formed the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control and served as its president until its dissolution in 1937 after birth control, under medical supervision, was legalized in many states. In 1927, Sanger helped organize the first World Population Conference in Geneva. Between 1921 and 1926, Sanger received over a million letters from mothers requesting information on birth control. From 1916 on, she lectured "in many places—halls, churches, women's clubs, homes, theaters" to "many types of audiences—cotton workers, churchmen, liberals, Socialists, scientists, clubmen, and fashionable, philanthropically minded women."[10] In 1926, Sanger even gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.[11] She described it as "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing," and added that she had to use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand."[11] Sanger's talk was well-received by the group and as a result "a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered."[11] In 1928, Sanger resigned as the president of the ABCL, severing all legal ties, and took full control of the CRB, renaming it the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.[12] Two years later, she became president of the Birth Control International Information Center. In January 1932, she addressed the New History Society, an organization founded by Mirza Ahmad Sohrab and Julie Chanler; this address would later become the basis for an article entitled A Plan for Peace.[13] In 1937, Sanger became chairperson of the Birth Control Council of America and launched two publications, The Birth Control Review and The Birth Control News. From 1939 to 1942, she was an honorary delegate of the Birth Control Federation of America, which included a supervisory role with the Negro Project, alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble.[14] From 1952 to 1959, she served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; at the time, the largest private international "family planning" organization. In the early 1960s, Sanger promoted the use of the newly available birth control pill. She toured Europe, Africa, and Asia, lecturing and helping to establish clinics. Sanger died in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, eight days shy of her 87th birthday and only a few months after the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the US, the apex of her 50-year agenda. Sanger's books include Woman and the New Race (1920), The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Happiness in Marriage (1926), My Fight For Birth Control (1931), and an autobiography (1938).