1910's Medicine and Health | Sanger, Margaret 1879-1966

BIRTH CONTROL REFORMER

A Father's Injunction.

Margaret Sanger almost single-handedly founded the birth control movement in America and was the driving force in the development of modern contraceptives. Her efforts to make birth control universally available to American women saved the lives of countless women by ending the nightmare of constant pregnancy that often burdened families with more children than they could support. Sanger was born as Margaret Louisa Higgins in Corning, New York, on 14 September 1879, the middle child in an Irish American family of eleven children. She often quoted her father, a sculptor of graveyard art and an avowed socialist, that the only obligation he expected of his children was to "leave the world a better place."

Maternity Ward Nurse.

While she nursed her tubercular mother, Sanger borrowed several medical books that fired her own ambition to become a physician. But...