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)
3 comments:
I am so proud to be a member of Colorado Right to Life.
We are called to do right and risk the consequenses.
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?
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