Margaret Higgins Sanger, born September 14, 1883, was the founder of the birth control movement in the United States. Wife of an affluent architect and mother of three, Sanger worked as a visiting nurse on New York’s Lower East Side, where she witnessed the misery and poverty caused by uncontrolled fertility. Believing that every woman should have the right to plan the size of her family, Sanger published a magazine in 1914 with information about birth control methods. Sanger was charged under the Comstock Law of 1873 with mailing obscene literature, but the charges were dropped. Two years later, Sanger spent 30 days in jail when she opened America’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. In 1936 a federal court made it legal for physicians to prescribe contraceptives. Margaret Sanger, the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, died in 1966.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to