Primary Source Review: The Rights to One’s Body, by Margaret Sanger An American nurse and women’s rights activist, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), became the leader of “birth control,” establishing the first birth control clinic in the United States. She established the Birth Control Movement, organizing the American Birth Control League in 1921, which is now known as Planned Parenthood. Working as a nurse in the tenements of poverty, she saw first-hand the consequences of unwanted pregnancies, miscarriages, and amateur abortions. This lead her to the idea of a “magic pill” to control the occurrence of pregnancy, which we now know as birth control. Sanger focused solely on the rights of women, specifically to their bodies. “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother,” Sanger said in her essay, The Rights to One’s Body (1920), just one of many works done by her. Others include What Every Girl Should Know (1910), Family Limitation (1914), and My Fight …show more content…
Sanger was a feminist who believed women would never be equal to men until women were able to decide when they would become a mother. Because of her feminist views, she put a lot of blame on men in her essay for unwanted and failing pregnancies, arguing that women are enslaved by men's desires because the women are left on their own once they are pregnant and have a child. With pregnancy, Sanger argues that the women suffer more greatly than the men. Sanger says that, “In an ideal society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the man as well as the woman.” Throughout her entire essay she constantly portrays women as the victims, because their feminine spirits are “bondaged” by men’s desires. Her arguments are based more on her opinion, than absolute facts. Some of her claims are unfair to say about the men that do care just as much as the women in a