Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger

by David M. Kennedy

A history of the birth control movement in the United States must necessarily be in part a biography of the movement’s leader – Margaret Sanger.  In this volume Mr. Kennedy describes Mrs. Sanger’s great personal influence on the course of the birth control movement and examines those elements of her thought and character which shed light on the nature of twentieth-century feminism and reform.  He shows that Mrs. Sanger contributed as much to women’s continuing subordination as she did to their liberation.  Similarly, he describes how she took the birth control issue with her as she moved from a commitment to radical anarchism to middle-class respectability, thereby transforming what she had conceived as a proletarian weapon in the class struggle into a conservative instrument of social control. 

Mr. Kennedy also explores the heritage of nineteenth-century attitudes about the family, women, and sex which influenced the reception given to Mrs. Sanger’s proposed reform.  He discusses the impact of the birth control movement upon organized religion, the medical profession, and the law where, in each instance, initial antipathy slowly gave way to qualified acceptance.  Even the federal government, which had prosecuted Mrs. Sanger in 1914, was itself promoting birth control by the time of the Second World War. 

Margaret Sanger died a heroine in 1966.  Yet, as the author points out, however valuable her legacy to us today, her cause was often one of ambiguous implications whose complexities even she did not always understand. 

Genres: History, Feminism, Biography, Womens

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1970

About the author

David Michael Kennedy is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University[1] and the Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.

Kennedy is responsible for the recent editions of the popular history textbook The American Pageant. He is also the current editor of the Oxford History of United States series. This position was held previously by C. Vann Woodward. Earlier in his career, Kennedy won the Bancroft Prize for his Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for World War I, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980). He won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999).

Reviews

[Jamin W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kennedy, gives an amazing deep look into the life of Margaret Sanger. Her life on how it shaped "women's rights" and the struggles of that time.

[Vivian Witkind · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Kennedy provides an in-depth history of the birth control movement in the United States, anchored by the story of its champion, the redoubtable Margaret Sanger. He paints a portrait of Sanger as an indefatigable and sometimes grandstanding leader. The intellectual origins of the birth control movement and its moral, legal, medical and organizational challenges are presented in depth. This is the best book on Sanger and early 20th century family planning reform that I have found. Published in 1971, it of course stops short of the Roe v. Wade decision and the subsequent battles over abortion rights.