As developed by David M. Kennedy, the biography of Margaret Sanger is less the narrative of a woman--even a politically active woman--than the history of an idea that, well articulated, served as the inspiration for generations of socially concerned persons to make available to women as well as men a host of life options rather than a host of lesser-evil decisions. In Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, Kennedy demonstrates how a culturally transitional figure could seize a public health issue, explicate the scientific and social principles informing it, and transform consciousness of the issue on a large scale.
The revolutionary and transformational nature of Sanger's work becomes all the more remarkable when one considers that little in Sanger's background of genteel poverty except her father's passion for social justice was likely to position her as a leader of an unpopular, sometimes dangerous, yet scientifically defensible cause. Beginning with an account of Sanger's life in a family of 11 children, her overhasty marriage to an aspiring artist, and their engagement with the bohemian world New York City in the first and second decades of the 20th century, Kennedy constructs the conditions under which Sanger became a self-educated and tireless activist in behalf of reproductive freedom. The details of Sanger's early biography are important because they show the evolution of her awareness and sophistication in the matter of public advocacy of controversial reforms.
In New York, Sanger worked as a public health nurse and witnessed many deaths of women in childbirth or attempting to self-abort unplanned pregnancies. One patient's death was said to touch her deeply enough to resign as a nurse and devote herself to the lay medical education of women, particularly in respect of birth control. In the background of her ambition were the friendships she cultivated among the radical set in New...