Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), the founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, has been hailed as a great feminist foremother, a pioneer in the work of female liberation. Yet her feminism might not be recognizable to women today. Intimately linked with her belief in the goodness and necessity of birth control was a eugenic desire to control the reproduction of the “unfit.” Birth control was for “fit” women like herself, who wished to be freed from the difficulties of childbirth and child rearing in order to pursue a bourgeois, romantic vision of sexual freedom. But it was also for those women who were “unfit,” who “recklessly” perpetuated their damaged genetic stock by irresponsibly breeding more children in an already overpopulated world. If the latter did not voluntarily embrace birth control, according to Sanger, it should be forced upon them.
Quality not Quantity
Population control was a natural extension of Sanger’s eugenic desire for population “quality, not quantity.” She insisted, “A qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity.” She was one of the first activists to extend the influence of eugenics by concentrating on population control (that is, facilitating “quality” by focusing on the “not quantity” side of the eugenic equation as applied to the fecund poor), and her organizations made sure she would not be the last. Demography’s attitude toward people was also determined by the “quantity vs. quality” dichotomy. Thus, the concern for reducing the number of people born was interwoven with the eugenic desire to reduce the number of “unfit” people born.
How could such eugenic sentiments be advanced by a feminist? And how could organizations such as Planned Parenthood, whose ostensible purpose is the promotion of women’s rights, support such activities? As surprising as it might be to those unaware of the seriousness of Sanger’s commitment to eugenic ideology, many forms of feminism have not been immune to oppressive tendencies and to androcentric cooptations of the feminist ideal. In order to point out the warning signs of such cooptation, I will summarize the elements of the ideology that we have seen in Sanger’s thought.
Promotion of Birth Control
We see in Sanger’s 1920 book Woman and the New Race that underlying Sanger’s promotion of birth control was her understanding of what she called the “sex servitude” of women. The inferior place of woman was caused by her acceptance of the “chains” forged by “the maternal functions of her nature,” When “unenlightened” women participated in what she called the “wickedness of large families,” they foisted upon the world hordes of “cheap” human beings. Note that human beings (and, therefore, women) do not have an innate dignity. They are like a commodity that loses its value when the market is flooded. These worthless people in tum became the ignorant, idle, impoverished class. Thus, “woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth.”
If the cause of “war, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers” is to be found in the woman’s womb, then she cannot evade her responsibility: “The task is hers. It cannot be avoided by excuses, nor can it be delegated. It is not enough for woman to point to the self- evident domination of man. Nor does it avail to plead the guilt of rulers and the exploiters of labor…In her submission lies her error and guilt.” As a result, “she incurred a debt to society. Regardless of her own wrongs, regardless of her lack of opportunity and regardless of all other considerations, she must pay that debt.” Nor can the payment of this debt be mere palliative action, such as pro- grams of social and political amelioration. No, the fault lies in her womb, and there the price must be paid.
Sanger’s Gnostically dualist view of women leads her to this conclusion. In opposition to “the chains of [woman’s] own reproductivity,” there exists “the feminine spirit.” “Woman’s desire for freedom is born of the feminine spirit, which is the absolute, elemental, inner urge of womanhood.” This spirit can be understood as a vitalist, quasi-Hegelian spirit of the race expressing itself within woman. It has as its proximate goal the freedom of individual women but its ultimate goal is “the birth of a new race.” Thus, the feminine spirit can express itself in a specific kind of motherhood that is not slavery, when motherhood is voluntary and produces “fit” children, while the “chief obstacles” to its expression are “the burden of unwanted children”
“Enforced Maternity”
Sanger maintains that a motherhood freed from the burden of “enforced maternity” “works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth weaklings…It withholds the unfit, brings forth the fit; brings few children into homes where there is not sufficient to provide for them. instinctively it avoids all those things which multiply racial handicaps.” The feminine spirit, Sanger contends, when freed from fear of unwanted children, will naturally channel itself into an appropriately eugenic maternity. This is due to Sanger’s hyper-romantic idea of sexual love in which the free development of the personalities of the lovers always takes precedence over the responsibilities of parenting. Given this narcissism, few children can be accommodated, but after all, eugenic reproduction is by definition a matter of quality, not quantity: “In sharp contrast with these women who ignorantly bring forth large families and who thereby enslave themselves, we find a few women who have one, two or three children or no children at all. These women, with the exception of the childless ones, live full-rounded lives.” What does such a life look like’? “Theirs is the opportunity to keep abreast of the times, to make and cultivate a varied circle of friends, to seek amusements as suits their taste and means, to know the meaning of real recreation. All these things remain unrealized desires to the prolific mother.” They are, in other words, “fit mothers of the race…the courted comrades of the men they choose, rather than the ‘slaves of slaves.”’
Large Families=Unfit Women
Those who do not care for such a bourgeois life, who rather pursue true cultivation in the rhythms of — and not despite — a life of raising children, are by implication unfit. Sanger’s vision of the life of mothers in large working-class families makes quite clear that she thought that large families make a woman unfit:
Instead, such a mother is tired, nervous, irritated and ill-tempered; a determent, often, instead of a help to her children. Motherhood becomes a disaster and childhood a tragedy…She is a breeding machine and a drudge — she is not an asset but a liability to her neighborhood, to her class, to society. She can be nothing as long as she is denied means of limiting her family.
And such unfit women breed unfit children: “The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children .… Social workers, physicians and reformers cry out to stop the breeding of these, who must exist in want until they become permanent members of the ranks of the unfit.” As a result, birth control must be aimed at the unfit: “Birth control itself…is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those: who will become defectives.”
“Duty” of Women
Over and over again, Sanger comes back to the ‘*responsibility” or the “duty” that this situation places upon woman. “Within her is wrapped up the future of the race — it is hers to make or mar.” As a result, birth control is strictly the woman’s burden: “It is woman’s duty as well as her privilege to lay hold of the means of freedom. Whatever men may do, she cannot escape the responsibility.” As she said in the first chapter of the book, woman’s unfreedom is fundamentally caused by her maternal life, and only birth control can bring liberty; all other attempts at restructuring society or male behavior are merely superficial in comparison, including the struggle for suffrage and equal property rights (which she basically dismisses as epiphenomenal window dressing). Woman must control her fertility for the sake of the race. In compensation, Sanger closely binds the eugenic task to the self-actualization of women: “If we are to make racial progress, the development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.” If she suffers want or injustice, she has no one to blame but herself for not freeing her “feminine spirit” by controlling her body.
The dangerous results of this philosophy have been traced throughout this book, most clearly in the account of the population control movement’s scape-goating of the female body. And this philosophy has seeped into popular consciousness and even into feminism itself. The eagerness to blame women’s problems on their reproducing is omnipresent, an attitude clearly on display during the debates on welfare reform and single motherhood. Concretely, it leads to the very situation Sanger agitated for: attempts to reduce poverty and to reform sexist attitudes are buried under the all-consuming obsession to contracept women.
Eliminating Babies not a Fix
Many women do indeed experience great difficulties when it comes to raising children due, say, to poverty or to the evasion of paternal responsibility, but rarely do we attempt to solve those problems directly; rather, we attempt to eliminate her ability to have children. But a poor and exploited woman who is sterilized is still poor and exploited. But with our ideological blinkers, all we see as the source of such a woman’ s problems is her fertility. It is but a short step, even in the name of compassion, to the coerced or forced administration of birth control. If a woman’s problems are caused by her fertility, and if she refuses to acknowledge this reality, it is for her own good, so the reasoning goes, to persuade or demand or force her to stop having children.
It could be argued, of course, that Sanger could not have foreseen the perpetuation of imbalances of sexual power when she agitated for change in the laws and attitudes concerning contraception. It is certainly true that she believed that she was fighting for the means of female empowerment; she wanted a female contraceptive pill precisely because she believed that it would place the reproductive control in the hands of women alone. Yet this fact itself shows that she considered contraception to be all about the control of the woman’s body, whether by the woman herself or by those who know better than the woman. If a woman is not willing to internalize her slavery, plenty of others, including many women, are willing to force her to do it. As a result, we have the kind of situation Germaine Greer described recently: “More and more it seems that women themselves are coming to regard their wombs as a burden they have been lumbered with on behalf of the race .… If men flee the female, we will survive, but if women themselves treat femaleness as a disease we are lost indeed.”
This book has argued for Margaret Sanger’s world-historical importance as the great institutionalizer of eugenic ideology. Her vision was realized through the control of female fertility as carried out by the organizations she founded. This book ends with a proposal for a feminism freed from her eugenic and control-saturated view of women. The specifics of how feminism should shake off Sanger’s legacy are debatable, but the historical truth of that legacy’s destructive effects on women is not. Only by knowing this history can women recognize their unfreedom and reject the eugenic model of progress forced onto them by the control movement. The great tragedies of our failed and ongoing experiments with eugenic control — the maimed and dead women, men, and children — cannot be erased, but perhaps from the memory of these victims will arise a new feminism.
Copyright 2005, Angela Franks
This article was excerpted from Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility by Angela Franks. To order a copy, go to PRI’s website at www.pop.org or call Mary Veronica at (540) 622-5240 ext. 205. The list price is $39.95, and our price is $36.95 plus $5.00 S&H.
Reprinted by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson, N.C. 28640, www.mcfarlandpub.com
