thumb| Margaret Sanger

'''Margaret Higgins Sanger''' (ur. stan Nowy Jork, zm. stan Arizona) – amerykańska feministka, aktywistka na rzecz planowania rodziny, założycielka American Birth Control League (Liga Kontroli Urodzin).

W USA była i jest nadal osobą kontrowersyjną, mającą zarówno zwolenników jak i przeciwników. Z jednej strony docenia się ją za walkę o prawo kobiet do antykoncepcji, z drugiej, za jej śmiałe wypowiedzi i poglądy zaczerpnięte z eugeniki, jest ostro krytykowana, wręcz przeklinana.

== Życie<ref> Na podstawie en Wikipedii [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger]</ref> ==
Przyszła na świat w ubogiej katolickiej rodzinie jako siódme z jedenaściorga dzieci. Jej matka, zagorzała katoliczka, była osiemnaście razy w ciąży, chorowała na gruźlicę i wczesne stadium raka macicy. Margaret uczęszczała przez dwa lata do Claverack College w Hudson, opłacanej przez dwie starsze siostry. W 1900 r. rozpoczęła praktykę pielęgniarską w szpitalu w White Plains na przedmieściach Nowego Jorku. 

W 1902 r. wyszła za mąż za młodego architekta Williama Sangera. Pomimo choroby (chorowała na gruźlicę) urodziła dwóch synów i córkę, która zmarła w dzieciństwie. Po pożarze domu w 1912 r. rodzina przeprowadziła się do Nowego Jorku, gdzie Margaret niosła pomoc ubogim mieszkańcom slamsów na Manhattanie, a jednocześnie prowadziła rubrykę w New York Call "Co każda dziewczyna powinna wiedzieć". Napisała i rozprowadzała wśród kobiet broszurę ''Ograniczenia kobiet'', czym narażała się w ówczesnych czasach na konflikt z wymiarem sprawiedliwości. W 1913 r. rozstała się z mężem z powodu swoich poglądów i działalności na rzecz wyzwolenia kobiet. 

{{Infobox Person
| name   = Margaret Higgins Sanger
| image     = MargaretSanger-Underwood.LOC.jpg
| image_size     = 200px
| caption  = Margaret Sanger
| birth_date  = 
| birth_place = Corning, New York
| death_date  = 
| death_place = Tucson, Arizona
| occupation     = 
| spouse         = 
}}
'''Margaret Higgins Sanger''' (American negative eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). Initially met with fierce opposition to her ideas, Sanger gradually won some support, both in the public as well as the courts, for a woman's choice to decide how and when, if ever, she will bear children. In her drive to open the way to universal access to birth control, Sanger was ahead of her time.  However, her racist ideology and advocacy for eugenics are positions which have tarnished her reputation.

==Early life==

Sanger was born in Corning, Roman Catholic who went through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births)<ref>Steinem.</ref> 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,"<ref name=father></ref> and was also an activist for women's suffrage, free public education, and socialism.  Sanger was the sixth of eleven children <ref> James L. Cooper and Sheila McIsaac Cooper, ''The Roots of American Feminist Thought'' (Alvin and Bacon, 1973), p219 </ref> and spent much of her youth assisting in household chores and care of her younger siblings.    
Sanger attended Claverack College, a boarding school in Hudson for two years. Her sisters paid her tuition, and when they were unable to continue to provide this assistance, Sanger returned home in 1899. Her mother died the same year, after which Sanger enrolled in 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 East Side slums of Comstock Law of 1873, which outlawed as obscene the dissemination of contraceptive information and devices.

Margaret separated from her husband William Sanger 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") and that each woman be "the absolute mistress of her own body." She was indicted for violating U.S. postal obscenity laws in August 1914, but jumped bail and fled to England under the alias "Bertha Watson".  Sanger returned to the U.S. in October 1915 and her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died November 6. 

==Family planning clinics==

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 a state appellate court in 1918 allowed doctors to prescribe contraception. 

In 1916, Sanger published ''What Every Girl Should Know,'' which was later widely distributed as one of the Socialist Party paper, ''The Call''.

Sanger founded the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 with Lothrop Stoddard and C. C. Little. 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 1914, three men attempted to assassinate John D. Rockefeller, the head of Standard Oil, but the bomb exploded during preparation and killed all three. In the July 1914 issue of ''The Woman Rebel'', Sanger commented on the incident, writing: 

<blockquote>Even if dynamite were to serve no other purpose than to call forth the spirit of revolutionary solidarity and loyalty, it would prove its greater value. (Flynn, Daniel J. Intellectual Morons, Crown Forum, New York, New York, 2004, p. 146-147)</blockquote>

In 1923, under the auspices of the ABCL, she established the Clinical Research Bureau. It was the first legal birth control clinic in the U.S. (renamed Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1940). It received crucial grants from 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.<small><ref>Crucial, anonymous Rockefeller grants to the Clinical Research Bureau and support for population control - see 
John Ensor Harr, and Peter J. Johnson. ''The Rockefeller Century: Three Generations of America's Greatest Family''. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988. (pp.191, 461-62)</ref></small> 

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."

In 1926, in what she called "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing," Sanger even gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, a group she found so ignorant she had to use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand."<ref name=wkkk></ref> Sanger's talk was well-received by the group and as a result "a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered."<ref name=wkkk></ref> In September 1930, she received at home the Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer.<ref>François-Marie Algoud, ''La Peste et le choléra: Marx, Hitler, et leurs héritiers'', Chiré, 2000, p.68</ref><ref>Désiré Dutonnerre, ''La Marée noire de la pornographie'', Chiré, 1992, pp.213-214</ref>

Additionally, Sanger also had offending words for Catholics when she stated that she believed that they were “black moles…invading our buildings of democracy.” She voted against Al Smith for President in 1928 and John F. Kennedy in 1960, both of whom were Catholics. (Flynn p.156-157).

In 1928, Sanger resigned as the president of the ABCL. Two years later, she became president of the Birth Control International Information Center. In January 1932, she addressed the Julie Chanler; this address would later become the basis for an article entitled ''A Plan for Peace''.<ref name=pouzzner>Pouzzner.</ref> 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. From 1952 to 1959, she served as president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation; at the time, the largest private international "family planning" organization.

During the 1960 presidential elections, Sanger was dismayed by candidate John F. Kennedy's position on birth control (Kennedy did not believe birth control should be a matter of government policy). She threatened to leave the country if Kennedy were elected, but evidently reconsidered after Kennedy won the election.

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 from her 87th birthday and only a few months after the ''Griswold v. Connecticut'' decision, which legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S., the apex of her 50-year agenda.

Sanger's books include ''Woman and the New Race'' (1920), ''Happiness in Marriage'' (1926), ''My Fight For Birth Control'' (1931), and an autobiography (1938).

==Philosophy==
Although Sanger was greatly influenced by her father, her mother's death left her with a deep sense of dissatisfaction concerning her own and society's understanding of women's health and childbirth. She also criticized the censorship of her message about sexuality and contraceptives by the civil and religious authorities as an effort by men to keep women in submission. An atheist, Sanger attacked Christian leaders opposed to her message, accusing them of Obscurantism and insensitivity to women's concerns. Sanger was particularly critical of the lack of awareness of the dangers of and the scarcity of treatment opportunities for venereal disease among women. She claimed that these social ills were the result of the male establishment's intentionally keeping women in ignorance. Sanger also deplored the contemporary absence of regulations requiring registration of people diagnosed with venereal diseases (which she contrasted with mandatory registration of those with infectious diseases such as measles).

Sanger was also an avowed socialist, blaming the evils of contemporary capitalism for the unsatisfactory conditions of the young white working-class women. Her very personal views on this issue are evident in the last pages of ''What Every Girl Should Know''.

===Psychology of sexuality===
While Sanger's understanding of and practical approach to human physiology were progressive for her times, her thoughts on the psychology of human sexuality place her squarely in the pre-Freudian 19th century. Birth control, it would appear, was for her more a means to limit the undesirable side-effects of sex than a way of liberating men and women to enjoy it. In ''What Every Girl Should Know'', she wrote: "Every normal man and woman has the power to control and direct his sexual impulse. Men and woman who have it in control and constantly use their brain cells thinking deeply, are never sensual." Sexuality, for her, was a kind of weakness, and surmounting it indicated strength:

<blockquote>Though sex cells are placed in a part of the anatomy for the essential purpose of easily expelling them into the female for the purpose of reproduction, there are other elements in the sexual fluid which are the essence of blood, nerve, brain, and muscle. When redirected in to the building and strengthening of these, we find men or women of the greatest endurance greatest magnetic power. A girl can waste her creative powers by brooding over a love affair to the extent of exhausting her system, with the results not unlike the effects of masturbation and debauchery.<ref>Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 46 [http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/whateverygirl1920.pdf (PDF available here)]</ref></blockquote>

Her thoughts on human development were also laden with racism:

<blockquote>It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.<ref>Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 47</ref></blockquote>

Sanger, like most of the population of her time, also considered masturbation dangerous:
<blockquote>In my experience as a trained nurse while attending persons afflicted with various and often revolting diseases, no matter what their ailments, I have never found any one so repulsive as the chronic masturbator. It would be difficult not to fill page upon page of heartrending confessions made by young girls, whose lives were blighted by this pernicious habit, always begun so innocently, for even after they have ceased the habit, they find themselves incapable of any relief in the natural act. [...] Perhaps the greatest physical danger to the chronic masturbator is the inability to perform the sexual act naturally.<ref>Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, pp. 39-40</ref></blockquote>

For her, masturbation was not just a physical act, it was a mental state:
<blockquote>In the boy or girl past puberty, we find one of the most dangerous forms of masturbation, i.e., mental masturbation, which consists of forming mental pictures, or thinking obscene or voluptuous pictures. This form is considered especially harmful to the brain, for the habit becomes so fixed that it is almost impossible to free the thoughts from lustful pictures.<ref>Sanger, "What Every Girl Should Know", 1920, p. 39</ref></blockquote>