Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger

Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. By David M. Kennedy. 320 pp. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1970. $30. David Kennedy is the McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Professor Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. Professor Kennedy teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of the twentieth-century United States, American political and social thought, American foreign policy, American literature, and the comparative development of democracy in Europe and America. He has had ten books published to date and written over twenty articles with two on Margaret Sanger. He has received numerous awards including the John Gilmary Shea Prize (for Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, 1970 and the Bancroft Prize (for Birth Control in America), 1971. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. It is a highly critical study of Sanger's pre-World War II career that can still be appreciated by readers in today's society. It is not a true autobiography of Margaret Sanger but a chronological listing and explanation of the events that occurred involving the American birth control movement which she was a crusader for. To fully understand Sanger's involvement in the birth control movement the author lets us know who Margaret Sanger was and the events that caused her to become a leading birth control advocate, feminist, and activist. Margaret Sanger was born in 1879 in Corning, New York, one of eleven children of Irish-American parents. Her mother was Catholic, her father a radical follower of the freethinker Robert Ingersoll and single-taxer Henry George. Sanger later attributed the family's lack of prosperity and her mother's death at forty-nine to her parents' having had so many children. The inequality she observed between them stimulated her lifelong social activism.Margaret, with help from her sisters, attended Claverack College, after which she went to nursing school. She did not immediately use her medical training because, she later wrote, William Sanger "pressured" her into marrying and leaving school in 1902. William Sanger, an artist and architect, moved the family (soon to include three children) to suburban Westchester. While he commuted to New York, Margaret grew restless as a result of her isolation and full-time housekeeping. In 1910 the Sanger's moved back to Manhattan, and Margaret began working as a visiting nurse on the Lower East Side. She became active in radical politics, joining the Socialist party and working with