The Need For Birth Control Margaret Sanger Analysis

"The Need for Birth Control" (1922) written by Margaret Sanger a feminist and birth control activist. Sanger started out nursing before she released in 1912 an article in a newspaper called "What Every Girl Should Know" starting her campaign to educate women about sex, during this time she was nursing women on the lower east side and treated many women who had back-alley abortions or tried to terminate the pregnancy themselves. This motivated Sanger to begin fighting to make birth control information and contraceptives available to women. In 1914 Sanger had published "The Rebel Woman" a feminist magazine that promoted women's rights to birth control, By doing this she was going against the Comstock act of 1873 and faced a possible five- year jail sentence. Instead of facing jail time Sanger fled to England and worked in the women's movement and researched birth control. In 1915, Sanger returned to America and within a year opened the first birth control clinic in America. During 1921, Sanger established the American Birth Control League ( a precursor to today's Planned Parenthood Federation of America) and opened the

A lot of her argument is around how men have made women view these subjects (women, birth control and sex) she states " The brunt of this injustice falls on women, because the old traditional morality is the invention of men.... In the moral code developed by the Church, women have been so degraded that they have been habituated to look upon themselves through the eyes of men,". Singers work is greatly affected by her bias since that is one of the main points of it, that women are injusticed by men and to gain freedom they need to know themselves, express themselves and by realizing themselves "more completely than has ever before been possible". The critics of her argument is largely the Catholic Church that believe birth control and sexually activity other than for reproductive means to be