The Legacy of Margaret Sanger
On July 21, the Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced that they were removing the name of their organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, from their Manhattan location and encouraging the city to remove her name from a nearby street sign. “The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building,” said Karen Seltzer, Board Chair for Greater New York, “is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy . . .”
This was an unexpected decision. Although Sanger’s support of eugenics, a pseudoscience that strove to improve the human race through selective breeding, is well documented, up to now there has been little public acknowledgment of Sanger’s role in the movement.
This points to an old problem in feminist genealogy: how does one deal with the legacy of a problematic woman? Sanger is certainly an important figure in the genealogy of feminism. She is, in a sense, the mother of reproductive-rights rhetoric: she coined the term “birth control” and wrote as early as 1920 that “no woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.” It would make for a purer genealogy of feminism if the mother of reproductive-rights rhetoric had the same understanding of reproductive rights that we do. And Sanger is not the only woman who causes these problems for feminist genealogists. Eugenics was a fundamental part of the worldview of many (white) modernist women, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Mina Loy, futurist poet and writer, whose “Feminist Manifesto” exhorts women to produce children “in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex.” Eugenics is the elephant in the room for early twentieth-century feminism.
Aimee Armande Wilson, author of Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control, notes the “scholarly anxiety” that surrounds Sanger’s legacy. Wilson rightly suggests that this anxiety comes from a struggle to make sense of Sanger’s combination of the “paternalism” of the eugenics movement and her own rhetoric of liberation and autonomy. From a contemporary perspective, the alliance between early feminism and eugenics does seem odd. Eugenics, with its amalgam of utilitarianism, scientism, and blatant racism, seems to be standard patriarchal philosophy—not the kind of thing we would expect the mother of reproductive-rights rhetoric to defend. Wilson writes that we need a “more nuanced explanation than pragmatism, willful ignorance, or hypocrisy,” possibilities other scholars have offered as explanations for Sanger’s views. But in her attempt to provide a more nuanced explanation, Wilson falls into a similar trap.
Wilson makes sense of the contradictions in Sanger’s writing by arguing that it is a mistake to see them as contradictory. She examines “the intersection of modernist aesthetics and the politicized narratives of the birth control movement,” showing that modernist women writers portrayed women in a way that was “doubled,” almost paradoxical: the maternal body was autonomous in that it reproduced against the wishes of the woman, making the woman herself powerless. Wilson argues that Sanger’s empowering rhetoric and her eugenics rhetoric should also be seen as doubled aspects of Sanger’s work, so readers shouldn’t try to make the two make sense together or relieve the contradictions. In this way, what is unsavory does not necessarily influence what is appealing; they are distinct aspects of Sanger’s work. “[R]ather than seeing Margaret Sanger as either hypocritical or elitist,” she writes, “perhaps we are better off thinking of Sanger as a system builder who could not make the center hold, a person trying to control an ultimately uncontrollable narrative.” This doubling was not necessarily intentional; it was impossible for Sanger to keep her narrative in order. She couldn’t help that it spun out of control, leaving contradictions in its wake.
This does not just distance Sanger’s beliefs about eugenics from her feminism—this also distances Sanger as a person from her beliefs about eugenics. Wilson uses Sanger’s organization of the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference as an example of her narrative spinning out of her control. Although Sanger was the organizer, a group of eugenicists at the conference “voted for a resolution” that encouraged “persons whose progeny gives promise of being of decided value to the community” to have more children. Sanger was dismayed. This went against some of her deepest beliefs—she strongly contended that women had a right to decide for themselves how many children to have and that they should not be pressured to have more. Of this episode, Wilson writes: “Ultimately . . . the narrative got away from Sanger before she had a chance to realize what was happening . . . Sanger could not have anticipated the direction her early, tentative alignment with eugenics would ultimately take . . .”
But Wilson’s argument, like the arguments of the scholars she disagrees with, focuses on finding an abstract way of dealing with Sanger’s unpleasant beliefs while actually failing to investigate Sanger as a historical figure. She, like many other scholars, turns a blind eye to the work of eugenics scholars, who have long held that Sanger’s views on eugenics were not negligible and have accordingly taken a more accurate view of her legacy.
Wilson shows a certain naivety about what exactly the eugenics movement was and where Sanger saw herself within it. The fact alone that Sanger was organizing a Neo-Malthusian conference should be a red flag for any feminist critic: Neo-Malthusianism was a movement to curb overpopulation by keeping the poor and “defective” from reproducing, and the fact that Sanger was organizing this conference shows just how involved she was in eugenic advocacy. In fact, before Sanger came up with the term “birth control,” she considered re-appropriating “Neo-Malthusianism” as the name of her movement.
Wilson also misleads her readers when she refers to Sanger’s “tentative alignment” with eugenics. As Edwin Black exhaustively covers in his War Against the Weak, Sanger actively sought out these partnerships with eugenicists who disagreed with her about whether or not “fit” women had a responsibility to have more children. She gave a position on the board of directors of the American Birth Control League (ABCL) to Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, and Stoddard served for years. Sanger invited many other prominent eugenicists to join her board, though she received plenty of rejections since many of them disagreed with her stance against pressuring women to have more children than they wanted. She invited these same eugenicists to the Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. Although she was dismayed that they redirected her conference, it is highly unlikely that she was particularly surprised. She was well aware of their disagreements, and she strove to work with them anyway. She understood the narrative, and she believed in much of it.
If it were true that Sanger had only a tentative alliance with the eugenics movement at the time of the conference, one would expect that this episode would change her approach. Rather, she later tried to merge the Birth Control Conference with the Eugenics Research Association, and when she was consistently turned down, she continued to work and advocate with those men. There was even talk of merging Sanger’s Birth Control Review with the American Eugenics Society’s publication—Sanger was enthusiastic about this possibility. And in the 1930s, after Sanger had left the ABCL, Sanger supported a merger between the American Eugenics Society and the League. Like all the other attempts at merging, this was prevented by Sanger’s opponents, and the ABCL went on to become Planned Parenthood.
It is hard to say of the woman who wrote the following quote that she was not in control of the narrative she was writing about eugenics: “The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives.” It would be more correct to say that she was held back from participating in the narrative as much as she would have hoped. Quite often her eugenic rhetoric was thoroughly mixed with her feminist rhetoric, especially in Woman and the New Race: “Motherhood, when free to choose . . . refuses to bring forth weaklings . . . It withholds the unfit, brings forth the fit.”
It is interesting to imagine an alternative history, one where Sanger had received the support she sought from these men, where Sanger got what she wanted. What would our feminist genealogies look like then? Would we still strive for genetic purity, or would we be quicker to reject problematic, racist, and ableist trends?
Sanger saw eugenics as a foundational part of the revolution she was leading, and attempts to see her eugenics as somehow existing in a vacuum are ahistorical. Assumptions that her beliefs about eugenics were separate from her beliefs about reproductive rights stem from an insistence on fashioning a spotless feminist genealogy. It is easier for contemporary readers to compartmentalize Sanger’s beliefs, keeping what is appealing and hiding the unsavory in the past. But in order to do so, we must either ignore large swaths of her life or, if we are forced to confront them, re-envision her as a passive person who ultimately had little control over the movements she built. Wilson writes that the birth-control movement attempted to bring women’s issues into the public eye after they had for so long been relegated to the private sphere, a sphere where women were “timeless, private, and pure beings” whose place was the “changeless private home,” rather than social and political agents engaging in public life. Wilson, though, does the same to Sanger: by compartmentalizing Sanger’s thought, Wilson effectively cuts her off from her historical context and fails to take seriously her engagement with the world around her.
Feminist genealogy that works in this way constructs an odd modern woman: her empowering work is seen as in conversation with today’s rhetoric, but what is problematic is seen as coming out of a vacuum. She is autonomous yet passive, a revolutionary leader and somehow set apart from the history she lived through.