Another good compilation of Margaret Sanger quotes:
Quotes from Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood
The Truth About Margaret Sanger
"I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan...I saw through the door dim figures parading with banners and illuminated crosses...I was escorted to the platform, was introduced, and began to speak...In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered." (Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography, P.366)
5 comments:
Jeez--that Ku Klux Klan photo is the worst fake I've ever seen. Have you people no shame?
Actually, Margaret Sanger's books were among the first the Nazis burned. So apparently she wasn't that tight with Hitler.
Speaking of abortion...
Did you know that, under President Bill Clinton, the teen birthrate reached its lowest level in 60 years?
That means the Clinton Administration prevented more abortions than the entire Right to Life Movement.
And they didn't have to murder any doctors to do it!
It is indeed a fakeroonie. Sanger's image is from a picture taken in 1916 with a group of women and children. In the original, she was facing the other way.
As a historian, I find it incredibly disingenuous the way the far- and Christian right choose to characterize historical figures in such ignorant and ham-handed way. You can try to demonize Margaret Sanger--or reclaim Susan B. Anthony or Thomas Jefferson as right-wing ideologues or what have you--but history does not stand with you.
If Sanger spoke with the KKK women's auxiliary because it was one of the largest social organizations of the time, she obviously did so with some trepidation (as is obvious in the tone of the small sound-bite you and others use) and for an audience who did not really agree with her message of women's liberation through control of their own bodies. In fact, though occasional moderately eugenicist ideas proffer minor superficial likenesses, the viewpoints of such women's groups and of the Nazis and other fascists were in most cases in direct contradiction with Sanger and other sexual liberals of the time.
The conservative 1920s KKK and the later German National Socialists, whether politely listening to Sanger or not, thought that contraception by women was a danger to the moral identity of the state/nation/race. Not unlike you and your comrades, they would rather burn Sanger's books (as the Nazis did later) or ban their mailing in US postal areas (which Sanger successfully fought) than actually admit that it's good for women to control their bodies. So... who's side are YOU really on?
Sanger did speak to the Klan and other similar organizations, but it's not fair to haphazardly and uncategorically lump Sanger in with such groups.
However, both Sanger and members of the Klan were most certainly blatant racists with a very clear agenda of segregation and culling of the minority populace.
Was Sanger's life work really about women's rights, as some of these posters propose?
Margaret Sanger was primarily concerned with creating a superior race via birth control, coercion of various minority populations, and even sterilization and/or segregation of millions of "unfit" people! (1)(2)
Sure sounds like a true civil rights hero to me!
Secondarily, she was concerned about the health and wellbeing of women - only those women who happen to fall outside of the millions upon millions of "degenerates" Sanger deemed "dead human waste". (3)
Margaret Sanger said it best: "The campaign for birth control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical with the final aims of eugenics." (4)
It was never about women's rights.
1. A Plan for Peace by M. Sanger
2. Sanger's December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts
3. The Pivot of Civilization by M. Sanger
4. The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda. Birth Control Review, October 1921, page 5
The writer is totally right, and there is no skepticism.
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