Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger was born on September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York. While working as a practical nurse and midwife in the poorest neighborhoods of New York City in the years before World War I, she saw women deprived of their health, sexuality and ability to care for children already born. She saw the clear interrelationships between overpopulation, high infant and maternal mortality rates, and poverty. Contraceptive information was so suppressed by clergy-influenced, physician-accepted laws that it was a criminal offense to send it through the mail. Yet the educated had access to such information and could use subterfuge to buy "French" products, which were really condoms and other barrier methods, and "feminine hygiene" products, which were really spermicides.

It was this injustice that inspired Sanger to defy church and state. In a series of articles called "What Every Girl Should Know," published then in her own newspaper The Woman Rebel and finally through neighborhood clinics that dispensed woman-controlled forms of birth control (a phrase she coined), Sanger put information and power into the hands of women.

Sanger continued to push legal and social boundaries by initiating sex counseling, founding the American Birth Control League, which became, in 1942, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and organizing the first international population conference. Eventually her work would extend as far as Japan and India, where organizations she helped start still flourish.

Founder of the American birth control movement, her inspirational work paved the way for a movement that established the principle that a woman's right to control her body is the foundation of her human rights. She is a truly remarkable leader whose life work promoted understanding, tolerance and mutual respect among all people.

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