Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion

Goucher College history professor Jean H. Baker, biographer of Mary Todd Lincoln, the Adlai Stevenson family, and American suffragists, among others, explicates the life and accomplishments of a controversial birth control advocate in Margaret Sanger. Baker claims that Sanger “has been written out of history” and that this biography presents “a more nuanced view of [Sanger's] perspectives” than we have at present (pp. 4, 5). This book clearly demonstrates the lifelong, unflagging, single-minded passion that Sanger held for her cause. That passion led directly to a major advance for women: oral contraception. In addition to mining the usual historical sources, Baker scours the copious other resources available on Sanger, including Margaret Sanger Papers Project publications edited by Esther Katz and Sanger's papers at Smith College and the Library of Congress. Baker's sole reliance on Sanger's own writing for many facts presents a problem, however. Early in the text, Baker notes that her subject stretched or fabricated many facts of her life (pp. 35, 114n37). She gives the example of Sanger re-creating her in-laws in Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1971). The Sangers were Jewish refugees who lived in New York's garment district, but their daughter-in-law turned them into an English sheep rancher and the daughter of a European mayor living in Australia. After acknowledging this predilection toward inventiveness, however, Baker often supports her own statements with Sanger's autobiographical writings. References to her autobiography or her My Fight for Birth Control (1931), or both, represent almost 30 percent of the notes for the first five chapters (almost half) of this book. Many of these references stand alone, with no supporting works listed. The researcher looking for in-depth documentation should turn to Ellen Chesler's Woman of Valor (1992).