A Shout Out to Margaret Sanger
by maggiejean, SheKos guest contributor
Sometimes people just come into the world as average human beings, yet despite all the odds, change the world completely. Margaret Sanger was one of those people. She didn't set out to be a world-changer; this simply came to her. It began with her experiences as a nurse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Her story is quite remarkable, and I hope that you will follow me below the fold to learn about it.
Sanger was born Margaret Higgins on September 14, 1883, in Corning, New York. She was the sixth of eleven children. Hers was not too different from many families living in the late 19th century. Her mother would die at a young age from TB and her father, a stone maker and "free thinker" would influence the way she saw the world.
Margaret Sanger was educated at Claverack College, where she trained as a nurse. She married William Sanger, an architect, in 1902. After moving to Saranac, in the Adirondack Mountains, for health reasons (she contracted TB taking care of her mother), she gave birth to three children, two sons and a daughter. For the next twelve years, she devoted herself to being a housewife and mother.
When her children were old enough, she went to work as a nurse in the "slums" of New York -- the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to be precise. From her own writings, this is what she encountered.
In July of 1912, she was summoned to a Grand Street tenement. "My patient was a small, slight Russian Jewess, about twenty-eight years old, of the special cast of feature to which suffering lends a madonna-like expression. The cramped three-room apartment was in a sorry state of turmoil. Jake Sachs, a truck driver scarcely older than his wife, had come home to find the three children crying and her unconscious from the effects of a self-induced abortion." When Sadie Sachs died Margaret Sanger made a pledge to devote her life to making reliable contraceptive information available to women. She began her campaign by writing a column for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know."
In 1912, Sanger gave up nursing to dedicate herself to the distribution of birth control information. However, the Comstock Act of 1873, part of a campaign for legislating public morality in the United States, was used to forbid distribution of birth control devices (condoms) and information. After being indicted for violating obscenity laws, Margaret Sanger jumped bail to leave the United States and was jailed multiple times for creating a public nuisance. She later returned to face the charges, hoping her trial would focus public attention on her cause. The untimely death of Sanger's daughter resulted in the charges being dropped.
Sanger continued to be a pioneer in the area of educating and providing women with birth control options. In 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic, for which she was jailed after only nine days of operation. However, by 1923, she was able to legally establish the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. The clinic served both as a model for other clinics and as an important source of clinical data and research.
Tireless in her campaign to win broad support for the right of women to control their reproduction, Sanger associated herself with a variety of sympathetic interests. Perhaps her most unfortunate choice of allies were those in the eugenics movement.
She increasingly rationalized birth control as a means of reducing genetically transmitted mental or physical defects, and at times supported sterilization for the mentally incompetent. While she did not advocate efforts to limit population growth solely on the basis of class, ethnicity or race, and refused to encourage positive race-based eugenics, Sanger's reputation was permanently tainted by her association with the reactionary wing of the eugenics movement.
In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which would become Planned Parenthood in 1939. By then, what had been mostly one woman's radical campaign to help women take control of their lives had become a full-fledged - and fairly mainstream - social movement. For progressives, gains have been bitter weet. Reproductive health is better than it was in Margaret Sanger's day. However, for every two steps we move forward there seems always to be one step back. I am glad for the two steps forward, but I am sad that we have to deal with that one step back.
I ask that you honor the memory of the woman who started it all in the United States. The woman who refused to give in or give up despite all the odds. The woman who thought all pregnancies should be planned. The woman who helped to found The Planned Parenthood Federation. The woman whose name is Margaret Higgins Sanger.
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THIS WEEK IN WOMEN'S HISTORY: Ida Wells Crusades Against Lynching
by joedemocrat
- This week in 1931, Ida B. Wells passed away. She was a fearless crusader against the evils of lynching, a suffragist, and a talented journalist and speaker. Some call her the original Rosa Parks, as in 1884, she refused to give up her train seat to a white passenger. In 1889, she started The Free Speech newspaper. She began to work against lynching after 3 black male friends were lynched in 1892. Ida Wells responded to this act of violence by writing an editorial in the Free Speech urging blacks to leave Memphis. She organized boycotts of white-owned businesses. She also began a comprehensive study on the reasons for lynching and found that many blacks were hung, shot and burned to death for trivial things such as not paying a debt, disrespecting whites, testifying in court, stealing hogs, and public drunkenness. She found that a third of the charges against black men were for raping white women, but most of these relationships were actually consensual. Her study caused outrage in the white community, and a white mob stormed her office, destroyed her newspaper, and threatened to kill her. She relocated to Chicago. In 1909, she helped found the NAACP. [UPDATE: Correction: A source incorrectly gave the date of Ida Wells' death as March 9; several other sources list it as March 25, 1931.]
- This week in 1911 was the first celebration of International Women's Day. This is now an annual global celebration of the social, economic, and political achievements of women. It is even a national holiday in 30 countries. In many of these countries, it is customary for men to give the women in their lives -- mothers, wives, girlfriends, and daughters -- flowers and other gifts. In 1975, the U.N. started sponsoring International Women's Day. The U.N. has worked to increase awareness of tragic issues affecting women, such as the 100 to 140 million women who have undergone female genital mutilation.
- This week in 1947, Kim Campbell was born. She became the first woman prime minister in Canada.
- This week in 1947, Carrie Chapman Catt passed away. She was a leader in the women's suffrage movement, and was founder of the League of Women Voters. She was a close colleague of Susan B. Anthony.
- This week in 1976, West Point Military Academy accepted its first female cadet.
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WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE: Medieval Days
by pat of butter in a sea of grits
I'm reading The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger (1999). It's a fascinating social history of England one 1,000 years ago. Included in this book is information about what life was like for women in medieval times. The women who post on sites like Ravelry, Craftster and Knitty descend from a long tradition of women's handiwork that was critical to women's roles in medieval times. The word wife is derived from the Old English word for weaving. Men were called waepnedmenn or "weaponed persons," while women were wifmenn - "weaving persons." Prior to about 1000, men were buried with swords, spears, and shields, while women were buried with spindles, weaving tools, and sewing boxes with needles, thread, and cloth.
Brewing was a common job for women in medieval times, as was sex work, as described in Ruth Karras's book on prostitutes in medieval England. The world's oldest profession was regulated but tolerated until the 16th century. Sex workers were restricted to particular neighborhoods and in other ways kept in check, but allowed on the belief that if men did not have access to prostitutes they would rape other women.
Unfortunately, women earning less than a man for the same job is nothing new. In medieval England, men earned 8 pence a day for reaping, while women earned 5 pence for the same job. For haymaking, the disparity was 6 to 4.
At the top of the social structure, women were often involved in running the kingdom. There were queens, such as Aethelflaed, who reigned following their husbands' deaths. Aethelflaed ran an aggressive campaign against the Danes and Welsh around 910 A.D. and built a series of fortresses. Early medieval religious orders usually included both men and women and were run by an abbess, rather than an abbott. The most famous is Hilda, who oversaw the Synod of Whitby in 664 at which the date of Easter was determined. By the year 1000, however, women were demoted in the church hierarchy, as were married priests. And as the church traditions of male celibacy and primacy were being instituted, these concepts would supplant any previous notions of equality in the church.
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GLBT NEWS THE KAT DRAGGED IN: Unshakable Courage In Uganda
by KentuckyKat
In a country where life in prison or the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality" may become law, it would be reasonable to assume that lesbians would be unwilling to live out of the closet. But at least one Ugandan lesbian is living out, though cautiously. Pepe Julian Onziema is one of a handful of out gays and lesbians in Uganda. She acknowledges that dressing to her taste, in a pant suit, can be seen as a death wish in her home country. Her partner elaborates on what life is like in Uganda following the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality Law:
When you're just walking, someone will turn and look, and have a second look, and a third, and a fourth.
link
One of the things that struck me about the discussion of their relationship is the statement that "One year in a kuchu relationship — the Luganda word for gay is one that people in the community use to describe themselves — is like 10 years in a heterosexual relationship, kuchus say." One can hardly doubt that that is the case given the obstacles that Pepe Onziema and her partner have faced during their relationship.
In 2008, when Onziema and other kuchus handed out flyers at an HIV conference in Kampala, they were charged with trespassing. The trial dragged on for months and months. Though the charges were ultimately dropped, the experience in prison was traumatic for Onziema. Several officers taunted her — discussing whether she was to be put with the male inmates or the female ones. Her clothes were forcibly removed, and an officer touched her genitals "for confirmation."
Onziema was even attacked by her partner's father. She kept the bloody jeans that she was wearing the night of the attack.
But these women have a hope that is so moving to me. They want to be married. And they want that same father who attacked Onziema to give his daughter away on her wedding day. I find myself so amazed and humbled by these women who risk their lives every day and yet still maintain a greater hope than so many of us in this country. I hope for them that the bill is defeated, that they will be able to marry, and that their lives will be valued in the same way as others.
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
by Oke
- A wonderful diary by Devilstower on Science Fiction You Should Be Reading inspired hepshiba to respond with The Other Science Fiction: A Response to Devilstower, in which she lists some wonderful non-white and feminist sci-fi authors and characters, and shares anecdotes about early years as a budding feminist sci-fi enthusiast.
- In Why Won't Women Be Doormats on the Healthcare Bill? uberblonde explores how the traditional role of women as saintly volunteer doormats clashes with the need to have a serious discussion about access to abortion under HCR.
- Gender-based expectations of behavior start even before birth with the "Is it a he or a she?" question asked of all soon-to-be-parents.
countdown to a pronoun
by malangali wrestles with the issue of why people care more about a fetus's reproductive organs than its overall health -- and in a very personal way.
- Has feminism made women more unhappy? If so, is such unhappiness a necessary condition of the equality that comes from feminism? cabaretic explores this question and provides an interesting answer in Examining Happiness Beyond a Gendered Lens.
March 8th wasInternational Women's Day. Here are some of the diaries that provided perspectives on events and meaning of the day.
And from outside the Orange:
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RECOMMENDED READING
by dirkster42
The book Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History, edited by Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, surveys a range of topics in U.S. History, from Seneca agriculture to women's opposition to Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. It's a bit weak on the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods, but has lots of insights on 19th and 20th century history. It's a very thick book, but the essay format means you can work through it at whatever pace you like without losing a sense of where it's going.
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VIDEO OF THE WEEK
(h/t rb137)
<div style="text-align:left;font-size:x-small;margin-top:0;width:384px;">Forehead Tittaes w/ Marion Cotillard from Marion Cotillard</div>