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Margaret Sanger's What Every Mother Should Know

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Margaret Sanger knew first-hand what it was like to experience the effects of a life without birth control, being the sister of ten siblings. Her activism for birth control was strongly influenced by her personal experience. At the young age of nineteen, she tragically watched her own mother die from tuberculosis. She personally blamed her father for causing this, saying her mother died from “having too many children and working herself to death” (Amory, 2011). As a result of this tragedy, Sanger’s passion for birth control and women everywhere exploded. After her mother’s death, she moved to New York to attend nursing school. She began to work as a nurse on the Lower East Side of New York City. She was inundated with several women who …show more content…

Of course this led to an even stronger desire for Sanger to legalize contraceptives and provide women with accurate information about them. She stated that “women should have knowledge of contraception. They have every right to know about their own bodies” (Amory, 2011). While in New York, Sanger became actively involved in the Socialist Party and the International Workers of the World, which was a radical labor organization. She gave many speeches on the subject of health, and her talks became quite popular, especially among the female population. In 1911, she began to publish a collection of articles for The New York Call entitled “What Every Mother Should Know.” A year later, these articles were expurgated by the Post Office Department, due to their defilement of the Comstock Law, “which forbade the mailing of ‘lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene’ material” (McPherson, 1984). In 1914, she invented the term “birth control” and began to provide women with more information. Sanger started her own newspaper and called it Woman Rebel. She stated that the main goal of this paper was “to stimulate working women to think for themselves and to build up a conscious fighting character” (McPherson, 1984). But most of the articles contained content regarding Sanger’s thoughts

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