The Mysterious Margaret Sanger

She didn’t smile much in her photographs

WIKI SAYS: 

“Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins; September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966), also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914. She feared the consequences of her writings, so she fled to Britain until public opinion had quieted. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States.[4] Due to her connection with Planned Parenthood, Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of abortion. 

However, Sanger drew a sharp distinction between birth control and abortion and was opposed to abortions throughout the bulk of her professional career, declining to participate in them as a nurse. Sanger remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement.She has been criticized for supporting eugenics.”

Perhaps needless to say, Wiki is not terribly interested in the eugenics issue,, which it seems impertinent to discuss in the context of a feminist pioneer who has been beatified by the rabid pro-Roe abortion lovers.

Besides, as everyone knows, all woman have multiple facets of their exceedingly complex and subtle personas. 

Perhaps the best way to consider this is through an imaginative approach. Even an imagistic approach. We could ask how she saw herself in and among her shifting moods. This first one is not hard to imagine. The desire for power, and specifically power over or against men, is a cardinal attribute of all the feminist pioneers,

The next is similar but importantly different. Elizabeth I was called “The Virgin Queen.”Sanger was clearly not interested in virginity, or she would have chosen a different obsession entirely. She herself married twice and fully understood the nature and ardor of male sexual desire.

The first two share the factor of power and control. Control has always been a paramount objective of feminism. And Sanger was a modern woman, in many ways ahead of her time. But she had no crown and spent much of her life fleeing from and dueling with the law. And sometimes you win by foul means as well as fair. You use what you got in the long long battle of the sexes,

Now to the inner sanctum of a woman’s soul. Why all Sanger’s obsession with birth control? (She invented the term.) which in feminist history has expanded to include not only birth control, but sex control, and men control. (If you doubt the last, consider that for 50 years, only one sex had the absolute, unassailable right license to kill; i.e., the superior sex.) In Sanger’s case, we don’t know what she was like behind closed doors, but a part of her must always have wanted to be able to cut loose and just enjoy her own pleasure without fear or guilt. Or unwanted babies. Who knows? She had three children, presumably all carefully planned.

Is there some way to tie all of this together? Perhaps the peak experience a woman can have is to be admired, lavishly, uncritically by both sexes, like an uncrowned monarch walking amongst the commonplace folk. That is power. That is control. That is the heart’s desire of the lipsticked sex, is it not?

Unless this is more like it in the heart of hearts of some…

I see a resemblance, don’t you?