So – was she really a Nazi?
Before we ask that, perhaps we should ask – who the heck are we talking about? My son just walked in, and he needed about 10 seconds to place her. I venture that most people today couldn’t place her in 10 hours, without using a reference. But in her day she was one of the best-known women in America, and one of the most fiercely hated.
Margaret Higgins and her sister Ethel were born in Corning, along with almost 20 brothers and sisters. They were baptized at St. Mary’s church, but that was about the limit of their connection. Their father Michael was an activist for atheism, constantly at odds with Father Colgan, and cut off from the Irish-American community that might have been a source of support and encouragement. The family faced a hard life, and they faced it alone.
Ethel (married name Byrne) and Margaret (married name Sanger) became nurses, and grew increasingly horrified at how many women faced the ravages of endless pregnancies, or of abortion. Birth control, they reckoned, was the answer, and they opened a women’s clinic in New York City, under the banner “Do Not Kill – Do Not Take Life – But Prevent!”
Such advice, however, was against the law in New York, and in most other states. Birth control information was considered obscene materials.
It didn’t take long (as they knew it wouldn’t) before a police woman turned up in plain clothes, asked for information, and came away carrying the evidence. The sisters were arrested and taken to court, and their clinic shut down. Ethel began a prison hunger strike, and was slipping into a coma when Margaret cut a deal with the governor, vowing that Ethel would end her campaign for birth control.
But that deal did NOT apply to Margaret, who embarked on a life of propaganda (her word). Throughout Europe and America she campaigned for the right to use birth control, and for woman’s rights in general. Her life now included such figures as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Clarence Darrow, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.
What it did NOT include was abortion, which she opposed – this was, of course, the days before antibiotics, when ANY surgery was dangerous.
The Nazi charge rests mostly on the fact that she once gave a birth-control lecture to Women of the Ku Klux Klan, and that she shared some ideas with the eugenics movement. (So did H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alexander Graham Bell.) Eugenics aimed at “scientifically” improving humanity through controlled breeding, and some, including the Nazis, did so by forced sterilization, or by killing those deemed unfit. Sanger basically hoped that the less fit would limit their own numbers through voluntary birth control, and she also supported immigration restriction. Her first husband (Mr. Sanger) was Jewish, and thus her children would have been rated half-Jewish (and marked for death) under Hitler. Sanger donated money to anti-Nazi causes.
She campaigned for birth control and women’s rights along with her sister Ethel and their Corning contemporary, Katherine Houghton Hepburn (relative of Amo, mother and grandmother of noted actresses). Sanger helped secure money to develop the birth control pill, and lived long enough to see the Supreme Court legalize birth control FOR MARRIED COUPLES ONLY – a right that the current court strongly suggests that it will soon repeal, scarcely a hundred years after women got the right to vote.
So, the charge that Margaret Sanger was a Nazi is (using her word again) propaganda. (So is the charge that she favored abortion.) She DID have some ideas that overlapped with some ideas of the Nazis… so did Reverend Billy Sunday, Rousas J. Rushdoony, and Dr. James Dobson. Love ‘er or hate ‘er, a Nazi she wasn’t.