In March, we’re featuring an influential woman every day in honor of Women’s History Month.
Today we’re celebrating:
Today we’re celebrating:
Margaret Sanger
Birth control activist, nurse, sex educator, and writer (1883 – 1966)
Birth control activist, nurse, sex educator, and writer (1883 – 1966)
- Worked as a nurse in the early twentieth century on the lower East Side of Manhattan, where she treated women in a seemingly constant state of pregnancy, but left nursing to find practical methods of birth control after receiving many requests from her patients to control conception
- Worked for years to make birth control a fundamental human right (and coined the term “birth control”), despite immediate persecution from the government and organized religion
- Opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, where she was arrested after an undercover police officer bought a copy of her family planning pamphlet
- Founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In New York City, she organized the first birth control clinic staffed by all-female doctors, as well as a clinic in Harlem with an all African-American advisory council and later an African-American staff
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