Sleeping Beauty Awakes

Margaret Sanger is best known to demographers as an early advocate of birth control; indeed she is said to have invented the term. But she was also a utopian feminist who believed that sexually liberated women could lead mankind to a happier world.

Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an early paradise.... If I am criticized for the seeming ‘selfishness’ of this concep­tion it will be through a misunderstanding. The individual is fulfilling his duty to society not by self-sacrifice but by self-development............................................................................................................................................. This

is fundamentally the greatest truth to be discovered by womankind at large. And until women are awakened to their pivotal function in the creation of a new civilization, that new era will remain an impossible and fantastic dream.⁵¹

Until women are awakened... Sleeping Beauty needed more than just a kiss. She needed a diaphragm.

Sanger was arrested in 1914 for violations of the Comstock Act, but the charges were soon dropped, and she boldly published a pamphlet entitled Family Limitation that represented the first widely-distributed update on contraceptive methods since the Comstock Act had gone into effect. In 1917, she spent thirty days in jail after being convicted of actually dispensing contraceptive devices. As soon as she was released she resumed her activities, hampered more by social disapproval than by legal persecution.⁵²

Sanger was not particularly successful in her efforts to garner support from either socialist feminists or more liberal mainstream groups such as the League of Women Voters.

Sanger was heavily influenced by proponents of a new sexual psychology, such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, reframing their arguments to develop a philosophy of feminine self-interest. In Woman and the New Race, she pronounced that women were inexorably driven to greater self­development. If given free play, they would assert themselves in beneficent ways; if repressed, they could become destructive.⁵⁴ In Pivot of Civilization, published in 1922 and graced with an introduction by H. G. Wells, she explained that birth control was key to reconciling the conflict between altruistic commitment and individual autonomy.⁵⁵ Women would freely choose motherhood, but if they were coerced by lack of reproductive choice, the consequences would be dire not only for themselves but also for their children. Forced maternity was, for Sanger, a metaphor for forced submis­sion to the welfare of others.

Sanger initially denounced eugenic prescriptions, pointing out that their discussion of who was ‘‘fit’’ and who was not betrayed a distinctly middle­class bias. She lampooned talk of a ‘‘cradle competition’’ in which educated women should sacrifice their own interests in order to advance the race. If contraception was a selfish act, she asked, why wasn’t the state more unselfish in offering to help unwed mothers to support their children? Sanger seemed to believe that feminine self-interest held redemptive poten­tial because women’s natural bond with children would ensure their devo­tion to the future of the race. In the 1920s, she became far more conservative, responding to and aligning herself with growing backlash against immi­grant families in the U.S.

As the leader of an increasingly respectable movement to advance repro­ductive rights, she found it necessary or at least expedient to relinquish other progressive ideals. At the Sixth International Birth Control conference in New York in 1925, she criticized the French system of awarding allowances to families for raising children and proposed that the United States do just the opposite: award bonuses to undesirable families who limited fertility.⁵⁶ No longer concerned about middle-class bias, she was apparently confident that she could determine which families were undesirable and which were not.