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| [from l-r, author Pearl Buck, Margaret Sanger, and Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn] |
Recently, Planned Parenthood took steps to publicly disavow their founder, Margaret Sanger. The organization announced it was removing her name from a clinic in Manhattan, citing her support for eugenics. This decision seems to have garnered support from anti-abortionists, who have always rejected Sanger, as well as pro-choice, anti-racist activists, who argue Sanger has become a hindrance to outreach to women of color.
The disavowal comes in the wake of a movement to take down the statues and memorials to US Civil War Confederates and their pro-slavery supporters. This movement seems to have extended even to John Muir, an early founder of the environmental movement, but not to the FBI headquarters bearing J. Edgar Hoover's name.
In Sanger's case, while allegations about her white racism and support for eugenics have existed for some time, this disavowal by her own organization is a gross error on several counts: its ignores Sanger's labor and anti-racist record, it fails to appreciate the other anti-establishment eugenics of the early 20th century that emerged out of the left, and lures the modern-day left into a familiar trap.
It is first an error because the things attributed to Sanger are not honest portrayals of her life.
At a time today when the working class is deeper in disarray, suffering successive, regressive setbacks since the post-WWII anti-communist years, Reagan/Thatcher attacks against labor union in the 80's, the destruction of the USSR in 1991, and now calamities as the COVID-19 pandemic upturns the fragile workforce we had, the radical left shouldn't be throwing its most capable, most effective, most visionary labor leaders and feminists overboard.
Sanger's many years of work qualify her as an effective labor leader and feminist. And while she did have some ideas we'd find intolerable today, racism was not one. We should be carrying her example.
Sanger's early successes as a labor leader set into motion the present disavowal by the organization she founded, and it's a history worth repeating.
For almost 25 years before she founded Planned Parenthood with her sister, Ethel Byrne and a small group of radicals, Sanger was an early Socialist Party USA member and one of the Industrial Workers of the World's [IWW] best labor organizers. Along with future chair of the CPUSA, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sanger was also one of the most prominent women labor organizers with the IWW and herself led two successful labor strikes.
It was the witnessing effect the labor struggle had on the wives and children that caught Sanger's attention over time. As she details in her memoir, Pivot of Civilization (Brentano's NY), "We saw that in the final analysis the real burden of industrial warfare was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children ... " She writes her concerns were rebuffed by a mostly male labor leadership. She wanted to encourage these families to limit the numbers of hungry children they were producing. The labor leaders argued that the more poor we had, the sooner the proletarian revolution would come.
Sanger writes "The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers could no longer, at least for me, ring with conviction."
Equally, the male leadership didn't like Sanger's challenge to patriarchy, effectively counseling women to not listen to their husbands.
Interestingly, as her disaffection grew, her interest in writers who had similarly fallen out of favor with the socialist left attracted her. She cites writers like Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Rocker, Lorenzo Portet, Francisco Ferrer, Enrico Malatesta. Sanger writes in her memoir how these thinkers "encouraged and strengthened" her. Of these, she cites, Rocker, the anarcho-syndicalist, most of all.
But if there were any racist eugenicists among her influences, they are not named. In fact, Nazi Germany was so opposed to her writings, they burned them.
But the eugenics movement handed down to us describes only one of those movements - the racist, white supremacist, Nazi variety. The one championed by Adolf Hitler.
Another movement is not familiar, and it grew mostly out of a turn-of-the-century class struggle and the catastrophe of World War I where organizers, writers, and thinkers on the left made what might be called the final break with feudalism, rejected church and state as static beings, and imagined a progressive state producing, in turn, progressive citizens. A few historical incidents mark this shift around the turn-of-the-century. In the US, the so-called Progressive Era witnessed mobilization against the affects of industrialization and urbanization. In the UK workers' struggles pressured to end forever the powers of the British House of Lords with the Parliament Act of 1911. The final nail in the coffin had to be the Great War - World War I - and the devastation it left in its wake.
Intensely angered at a bloody European war sanctioned and blessed by the Church, George Bernard Shaw, author of such works as "Man and Superman" (1905) and "Back to Methuselah," (1921) venomously counter attacked, emblematic of this shift. In "Methuselah," implicit in Shaw's warning is not only a call for humans to do better or be cast aside but this is cast in almost Darwinian terms:
"The power that produced man when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than man if man does not come up to the mark. We must beware; for man is not yet an ideal creature. At his present best, many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If man will not serve, nature will try another experiment."
This "social eugenics" sentiment is the context we have to place Sanger, not the Nazi one attributed to her. It's a sentiment that is even seen in Ernesto "Che" Guevara's famous letter, "Man and Socialism in Cuba" [1965].
The rift between the IWW and Sanger widened when she and her sister started smuggling contraceptive devices from the UK. This brought the Planned Parenthood founder not only on a collision with the labor leadership of her day but also against many state laws that prohibited possessing, teaching, or disseminating contraceptives. Connecticut was just one of these states.
By 1920, the "pivot" from full-time labor organizer to birth-control advocate was complete. Sanger had always been a feminist and suffragette, and these impulses equally drove her labor organizing as much as it did in organizing Planned Parenthood. Sanger the IWW labor organizer did formally break with the union and was solidifying the concept of Planned Parenthood "clinics," but it was part of the same cause of women's liberation. The clinics would provide women contraception, teach techniques to avoid pregnancy, and nurture the idea that women as autonomous beings needn't listen to their husbands.
At Sanger's direction, drawing from her years as a labor organizer, the clinics were integrated with Black and white staff - nurses and doctors.
In establishing these clinics, she had not only the support of many white women, like Flynn of the CPUSA, who counted among her financial and activist supporters, but also NAACP co-founder WEB DuBois, the Communist Party's Paul Robeson, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Mary McCloud Bethune, and some pro-labor activist Black ministers who would eventually invite Sanger to come and speak to their congregations. DuBois sat on the board of Planned Parenthood. In later years, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., praised her work - and became the recipient of the organization's first award.
DuBois and those Black ministers' support is important to this false narrative. It was in a 1939 correspondence with one of her friends that a passage has been taken out of context to haunt Sanger for some time.
Her "... We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the [Black] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members" which discussed her visits with these Black congregations.
This has become manipulated into "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" as proof of her racist beliefs.
The other racist quotes attributed to Sanger have been dispelled by scholars like Marxist historian Silvia Federici and Charles Valenza.
Valenza's research found that the racist quotes attributed to Sanger were not hers but did appear in a magazine she founded and was later under other editorial control. Nevertheless, Valenza argues these disparate authors appeared in her birth-control journal due to their name recognition at the time, and Sanger was interested in raising money for her cause [see, "Was Margaret Sanger a racist?" Family Planning Perspectives, Vol 17 No. 1, 1985], not because she endorsed their ideas.
Challenged once to explain her stance on eugenics, Sanger was clear "If by 'unfit' is meant the physical or mental defects of a human being, that is an admirable gesture, but if 'unfit' refers to races or religions, then that is another matter, which I frankly deplore," she said in 1934.
Admittedly, even Sanger's qualification for "physical and mental defects" is abhorrent today, but our evolved social attitudes toward the disabled or physically challenged are barely 30 years old, dating back to the 1990's American with Disabilities Act and slightly earlier struggles in public education to educate all children. Further, I argue her use of the term "racial betterment" in her memoir, writings, and speeches - even to Black congregations - bears the broader connotation of the human race, not a narrow ethnic one.
Federici's effort to rehabilitate Sanger extends to such works as Caliban and the Witch: Woman, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation [AK Press, 2004] to the overarching problem Sanger and women like her face.
"As we learned in the feminist movement," Federici says, "often the first obstacle a woman encounters when she wants to make a fight is not directly the state but the man in the family." (interview, Race, Poverty & the Environment, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2012).
Lastly, I mentioned Connecticut, the locale of Sanger's first clinic. New York and Maryland would follow. Sanger's friend and Planned Parenthood co-founder, Katharine "Kit" Hepburn (mother of the actress), a communist, helped organize the Connecticut clinics. Kit Hepburn's sister, Edith Hooker, organized the first clinic in Baltimore.
The Connecticut clinic was chosen early on by Sanger as the site to test the anti-contraception laws, test cases which culminated in the US Supreme Court's 1965 Griswold v Connecticut, which not only established a "right to privacy" but also became the foundations to the Roe v Wade decision, the overturning of anti-gay sodomy statutes, and lately the right of lesbian and gay marriage.
Sanger died after Griswold in 1966.
The sum of Sanger's lifetime of struggle and the allies and friends she attracted do not add up to a white racist or a eugenicist. It is a disservice to her work to say so. It is also a disservice to women of color to rob them of a militant feminist warrior. Instead, we might inquire the hypocrisy of present-day, right-wing, anti-immigrant and racist movements who are hijacking a moment of racial "wokeness" to destroy not so much Sanger but rather the movement she founded. Sanger is not the real target: it is women's sovereignty over their bodies that the right wing and patriarchy find objectionable.
In fact, this right wing scarcely knows her: it's news to anti-abortionists who despise Sanger that Planned Parenthood did not begin performing abortions until 1973, several years after her death.
This right wing seeks to capitalize on an anti-racist narrative in which they have no street credentials whatsoever to take down a hundred-year organization which has not only served its main constituency of working-class women but is also unrecognized as providing health services to gay men during the AIDS pandemic.
The left must be smarter than be lured into this trap. Who thinks the right will be satisfied now that Sanger's name has been publicly disavowed? Who thinks the mission of Planned Parenthood will now be freed to do its work? The right is chipping away at the foundations of our radical history, and we must not cede ideological ground to them.
It is deeply troubling at this critical juncture for the working class struggling to find its way and acknowledge its power to disavow a militant feminist, socialist, and trades-unionist who even braved the conservative thinking of the labor movement of her day. Sanger should not be disavowed anything; she should be emulated.
