The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger

by Margaret Sanger

Book Overview

"A moving story of action -- direct, forceful, and plain-spoken....It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of this autobiography." -- Saturday Review of Literature.
While working as a nurse amid the squalor of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger witnessed the devastating effects of unwanted pregnancies. Women already overwhelmed by the burdens of poverty had no recourse; their doctors...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0486434923
• ISBN13: 9780486434926
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 504 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Sanger as Activist & Thinker

Margaret Sanger is not only one of the most influential women in 20th century America, she's the rare sort of individual whose autobiographies are better than the biographies that others have written about her. The Sanger described by others is typically little more than an icon, a stilted "Woman of Valor." The real Sanger you'll discover here is far more interesting and in many ways far more apt to reveal flaws and shortcomings.This is a reprint of her 1938 autobiography, written by a mature Sanger as she was retiring from public life to become the birth control movement's senior representative. Her 1931 My Fight for Birth Control has more fire to it, but at that time she was much more ill-tempered. She'd been pushed out of the American Birth Control League that she had founded and was having little success in her attempts to get federal birth control legislation passed. If you read one of her autobiographies, this should be the one.Just remember that you will not get a full picture of Sanger from this book. Here you get the events of her life told from the inside. To understand what motivated her you need to read the book she termed her 'head' book, her 1922 The Pivot of Civilization (recently republished with additional material). It's her most intellectual book and contains an introduction by her friend H. G. Wells.It is demeaning of Sanger's legacy that so few of those who claim to take her seriously as an activist take the time to examine her ideas. It was Sanger the thinker who inspired Sanger the activist. We must understand both to understand the movement she founded.