Margaret Sanger: “Birth Control and Racial Betterment”

Margaret Sanger was a New York City nurse in 1912, when she wrote “Sexual Impulse—Part II,” but by the time she wrote “Birth Control and Racial Betterment” in 1919, she had launched a new movement for birth control and women’s empowerment. Her rhetoric changed as she grew more experienced and was exposed to different kinds of activism. She sought to expand the birth control movement beyond its radical base and draw support from broader and broader segments of the population, first speaking to working-class women, then to middle-class and society women, and finally to an audience that included physicians, legislators, and eugenicists (scientists who dealt with control of hereditary characteristics). Until the end of her active and long life Sanger continued to refine her arguments and address new and different audiences on behalf of birth control, but she always maintained that birth control was fundamentally both the right and the responsibility of each woman.