Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography

1938, 1971 Dover edition
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography
Original and purchase price unknown
Worn paperback
B

This is an autobiography that has few personal dates, missing those of Margaret's birth, her children's, and her first marriage.  She was born in 1879, so she was almost sixty when this book was published, and at that point she had been a crusader for birth control for a quarter century.  She would live until 1966.  This book mostly focuses on the first decade of her campaign.  As such, it's an interesting insider's view of a cause that is now both taken for granted and controversial.  The most remarkable thing to a contemporary feminist, and perhaps to one at the time of this Dover edition, is that she was very much anti-abortion, considering it little better than infanticide.  She does highlight the hypocrisy of, for instance, the Germans and Russians, who were more comfortable with abortion than contraception, because they felt that it would be wrong to put birth control in the hands of women rather than men.

Sanger, whose mother's health was ruined by eighteen pregnancies, was a remarkable woman but definitely not flawless.  She was sympathetic to the poor but she was racist, as shown in her reference to a "darky" and in some of her remarks about India.  Also, she seems to have equated homosexuality with transvestism, and disapproved of both.  I do like seeing her observations from her travels around the world, including the changes in Japan from the early 1920s to the early '30s.

She also held some grudges, and although she tries to be fair to her colleagues, she does point out times when they disagreed and/or disappointed her.  I was amused to see she chose Sinclair Lewis as her favorite American writer but she considered his hero Mencken to be unadventurous.  She presents a very different view than Lewis did of the socialist etc. New York intellectuals of the period just before and during World War I.

She's insightful in pointing out how dictators and other leaders eager for war wanted more cannon fodder.  She also shows the objections that some Catholics and other conservatives had/have to birth control.  And there's a poem she quotes:

"Professor East, though you may try,
You fail to rouse my fears,
For I don't dream that even I
Will live a hundred years;
But do not think I view with mirth
Five billion folk (assorted)
Five billion tightly packed on earth
Who cannot be supported."

The current population, less than 75 years later, is at seven billion.  So, yes, this book is still worth reading.