Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility [Paperback]

Angela Franks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 28, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0786420111 | ISBN-13: 978-0786420117

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Angela Franks lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: McFarland (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 Best Sellers Rank: #402,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

83 of 92 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)   

This review is from: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Paperback)

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.

40 of 47 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 review is from: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Paperback)

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.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Planned Parenthood doesn't want you to know, November 21, 2008

By 

RuskinTL (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (Paperback)

I can't say enough good things about this book. Angela Franks does a wonderful job exposing with thorough research how Margaret Sanger tainted the women's movement with an insidious agenda. Feminism should work to protect the vulnerable; instead feminists have joined forces with the population controllers to oppress low-income women in the U.S. and third world countries, all in the name of "reproductive health." It's hard to see how women can have a "choice" when they are subjected to forced abortions and sterilization. Shame on feminism for allowing Margaret Sanger and her cronies in the eugenics movement to advance their agenda under the guise of freedom and justice. Unfortunately the agenda of Planned Parenthood is engrained in our contraceptive culture.
This book is a must-read for anyone in the pro-life movement, whether your concern is eugenics, embryonic stem-cell research, contraception, abortion, euthenasia or the death penalty.