Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America

Ellen Chesler

Simon and Schuster, Oct 16, 2007 - Social Science - 672 pages

This illuminating biography of Margaret Sanger—the woman who fought for birth control in America—describes her childhood, her private life, her relationships with Emma Goldman and John Reed, her public role, and more.

Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women in a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She died a half-century later, just after the Supreme Court guaranteed constitutional protection for the use of contraceptives. Now, Ellen Chesler provides an authoritative and widely acclaimed biography of this great emancipator, whose lifelong struggle helped women gain control over their own bodies.

An idealist who mastered practical politics, Sanger seized on contraception as the key to redistributing power to women in the bedroom, the home, and the community. For fifty years, she battled formidable opponents ranging from the US Government to the Catholic Church. Her crusade was both passionate and paradoxical. She was an advocate of female solidarity who often preferred the company of men; an adoring mother who abandoned her children; a socialist who became a registered Republican; a sexual adventurer who remained an incurable romantic. Her comrades-in-arms included Emma Goldman and John Reed; her lovers, Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells.

Drawing on new information from archives and interviews, Chesler illuminates Sanger’s turbulent personal story as well as the history of the birth control movement. An intimate biography of a visionary rebel, Woman of Valor is also an epic story that extends from the radical movements of pre-World War I to the family planning initiatives of the Great Society. At a time when women’s reproductive and sexual autonomy is once again under attack, this landmark biography is indispensable reading for the generations in debt to Sanger for the freedoms they take for granted.

What people are saying

WOMAN OF VALOR: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America

User Review  - Kirkus

A splendid biography of the woman who fought for more than half a century to bring birth control to America. Planned Parenthood clinics are once again in the thick of political turmoil over a woman's ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Angelic55blonde - LibraryThing

This was a great biography of an amazing woman whose life saw and shaped the evolution of the birth control movement. The book was well researched, and the addition of so many pictures brought the ...

Contents

• INTRODUCTION: 11
• Ghosts: 21
• Love and Work: 44
• Seeds of Rebellion: 56
• The Personal Is Political: 74
• Bohemia and Beyond: 89
• A European Education: 105
• The Frenzy of Renown: 128
• The Company She Kept: 150
• THE LADY REFORMER: 177
• The Conditions of Reform: 200
• Organizing for Birth Control: 223
• Happiness in Marriage: 243
• Doctors and Birth Control: 269
• A Community of Women: 287
• GRANDE DAME GRANDMERE: 311
• 15: 411
• Woman of the Century: 443

Popular passages

Page 67 - Every obscene, lewd or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion...‎

Page 626 - Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?‎

Page 320 - For in matrimony as well as in the use of the matrimonial rights there are also secondary ends, such as mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence, which husband and wife are not forbidden to consider, so long as they are subordinated to the primary end, and so long as the intrinsic nature of the act is preserved.‎

Page 191 - No woman can call ^herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a...‎

Page 472 - The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence.‎

Page 508 - Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Mary P.‎

Page 208 - To accomplish this there is but one way. Science must make woman the owner, the mistress of herself. Science, the only possible savior of mankind, must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother.‎

Page 631 - Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York...‎

About the author

Ellen Chesler is a distinguished lecturer and director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Life at Roosevelt House, the public policy center of Hunter College of the City University of New York. Woman of Valor was a finalist for PEN’s 1993 Martha Albrand Prize for the year’s best first work of nonfiction.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America
• Author: Ellen Chesler
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2007
• ISBN: 141655369X, 9781416553694
• Length: 672 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory; Social Science / General; Social Science / Popular Culture; Social Science / Women's Studies