Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Paperback)

~ (Author) "As the introduction indicated, many historians of Sanger and the birth-control movement assume that Sanger embraced eugenics only pragmatically on behalf of her feminism, and..." (more)
Key Phrases: elitist bigotry, eugenic commitment, eugenic hypothesis, Population Council, United States, Margaret Sanger (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Margaret Sanger, the American birth-control and population-control advocate who founded Planned Parenthood, stands like a giant among her contemporaries. With her dominating yet winning personality, she helped generate shifts of opinion on issues that were not even publicly discussed prior to her activism, while her leadership was arguably the single most important factor in achieving social and legislative victories that set the parameters for today’s political discussion of family-planning funding, population-control aid, and even sex education.

This work addresses Sanger’s ideas concerning birth control, eugenics, population control, and sterilization against the backdrop of the larger eugenic context.

About the Author

Angela Franks lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 359 pages
• Publisher: McFarland & Company (January 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786420111
• ISBN-13: 978-0786420117
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #80,066 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exposing the Agenda of Planned Parenthood's Founder, April 17, 2005

By	R. K. OBANNON (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

TIME magazine called Margaret Sanger one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, saying that "her crusade to legalize birth control spurred the movement for women's liberation." While many remember her advocacy for birth control, few remember or give due consideration to the eugenic philosophy that drove Sanger and her allies in the birth control, and later population control or "family planning" movements. This book corrects that significant historical deficit.

In this book, Franks shows that any concern Sanger had for women's rights was secondary to her larger agenda -- helping to create a better race by controlling the fertility of those she saw as society's least "fit" members -- the poor, the disabled, the "feebleminded," the sickly, the epileptic, the alcoholic, etc. Where persuasion worked, that was fine, but as Franks points out, Sanger and her allies were prepared to use coercion when they felt it was necessary to achieve their eugenic aims.

Franks traces what she identifies as the "control movement" from its earliest days in the 1920s when sterilization programs began to spring up in Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, and later California to the 1990s when U.N. "family planning" money helped support forced sterilizations and abortions in China. Along the way, she identifies the key players, policies, and programs that helped to mainstream many of the ideas that the world once found so abhorrent in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.

There are those in our modern PC culture that might be tempted to dismiss such charges, but this book is thorough and well documented, with over 1,200 footnotes and a bibliography featuring about a thousand books, articles, and interviews on Sanger, her associates, and the organizations they founded and led.

The tone is academic, but the language is generally accessible, so that both scholars and activists alike will benefit from the reading of it.

Despite Sanger's celebration as a liberator of women and the feminist hagiographies that have been written of Planned Parenthood's founder, Franks argues that Sanger's eugenic ideas are antithetical to freedom and to true feminism, aiming to suppress precisely what it is that makes women women.

Sanger certainly had enormous influence, but before deciding whether that influence was good or bad, one would be well advised to read this book.

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read Lady Eugenist too, November 15, 2005

By	Michael W. Perry "Michael W. Perry, author of... (Author of Untangling Tolkien, Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Those who're interested in this book might also want to check out a newly released book, Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull and a companion book that will soon be released, Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Writings of Victoria Woodhull.

In her 1938 autobiography, Margaret Sanger noted that "Eugenics, which started long before my time, had once been defined as including free love and the prevention of conception." Eugenics and free love was a reference to Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President (1872), for a time a fierce advocate of free love, and a life-long advocate of eugenics and state-controlled child rearing. In 1927, in what was perhaps Woodhull's last public statement, she praised Buck v. Bell, a US Supreme Court decision declaring forced sterilization constitutional and, according to the New York Times, told a reporter that she had "advocated that fifty years ago."

The two books mentioned above present detailed evidence that one of the nation's leading feminists was advocating eugenics, then called stirpiculture, in the 1870s, three decades before Francis Galton took up the cause in earnest and four decades before it acquired a significant following in Margaret Sanger and others. That demolishes the argument of those who claim that feminists such as Sanger only adopted eugenic rhetoric because the movement was too powerful to ignore. When Woodhull took up eugenics, she was virtually the only public figure in the U.S. speaking on the topic. She 'mainstreamed' an issue, controlled human breeding, that had previously only been discussed by strange utopian cults on the American frontier, such as the Oneida Community.

The historical reality is that, far from being united in defending 'reproductive freedom,' certain groups of well-connected and powerful women have been some of the strongest proponents of the government limiting the birth rates of women they consider "unfit" or inferior. (You see this in their sneers at 'stay-at-home' mothers.) Newspapers noted that Woodhull attracted those sorts of women in the 1870s-90s when she advocated eugenics. They continued to do so when Charlotte Perkins Gilman promoted negative eugenics in the 1910s, and when Sanger did so with her birth control movement from 1917 on.

Woodhull's speeches and pamphlets also demonstrate that there is a close connection between those who want to control who can have children and those who want to limit the rights of parents to rear their children after they are born, as illustrated by a recent Ninth Circuit decision denying the right of parents to protect their grade-school children from sexual questions. These are most emphatically not people who believe in protecting anyone's "privacy."

--Michael W. Perry, Seattle
Editor of The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective by Margaret Sanger
Editor of Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Feminists: Read this book!, August 10, 2006

By	Jennifer Morse "jennyromo" (Vista, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book exposes the fear that is at the heart of the modern reproductive rights movement: fear of female reproductive power. We need a women's movement that allows us to be ourselves, instead of a women's movement that demands that we chemically castrate ourselves. Angela Franks points the way to a new women's movement that is based on what is truly distinctive about women. We need to celebrate motherhood, not fear it. Angela Franks shows that Margaret Sanger and her movement were strongly eugenic, and feared too much reproduction by people they considered unfit. The women's movement has never recovered.