March is Women's History Month. Over the centuries, nothing has been more important to women than reproductive freedom, yet such freedom was long in coming and hard won. Well into the 20th century, the mailing or distribution of basic information about contraception was a criminal offense. Margaret Sanger, a New York nurse concerned about the adverse effects of frequent childbirths, miscarriages and abortions, became the self-appointed crusader on behalf of reproductive rights in the United States.
In 1912 Sanger began to distribute birth control information to working-class women. Through her steadfast efforts over the next decade, women for the first time began to gain easy access to contraception. "The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time," predicted the British futurist and historian H.G. Wells in 1931.

Sanger embraced the cause of reproductive freedom because of her personal experiences. Born Margaret Higgins in upstate New York in 1879, the child of Irish immigrants, she blamed her mother's premature death on her frequent pregnancies and the taxing demands of caring for a large family. Mrs. Higgins, a devout Catholic, conceived 18 times and gave birth to 11 children.

Margaret married architect William Sanger and soon thereafter they moved to New York City and immersed themselves in the bohemian culture and radical idealism of Greenwich Village. Sanger worked as a nurse and midwife in Manhattan tenements. There she saw many struggling young mothers who did not have enough money to provide basic support for their growing families. She also witnessed the consequences of unwanted pregnancies.

While sitting at the bedside of a young woman dying of a self-induced abortion, Sanger resolved to spend her life helping women gain control of their own bodies. "No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother," she asserted.

In 1914 Sanger defied the law by publishing The Woman Rebel, a monthly journal that advocated the right to practice "birth control," a term she coined. Six months later, the police arrested Sanger for violating postal obscenity laws. Unwilling to risk a lengthy imprisonment, she fled to England.

The flamboyant crusader returned to New York a year later, eager to garner media attention through a sensational trial. The case, however, never made it to court. When Sanger's only daughter died suddenly of pneumonia, sympathetic publicity convinced the attorney general to drop the prosecution.

In 1916 Sanger opened the nation's first family planning clinic in Brooklyn. To promote its opening, she distributed fliers in English, Yiddish and Italian, asking: "MOTHERS! Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them? DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT!"

Hundreds of women flocked to the new clinic, arousing intense opposition from the Catholic Church. Police raided the clinic and arrested Sanger and her staff. The judge offered clemency if she would stop circulating information about contraception. She refused and spent 30 days in jail.

Sanger's trial produced an important legal victory. The New York State Court of Appeals ruled that contraceptives were legal if prescribed by physicians. Between 1914 and 1918 birth-control leagues developed in every major city of the United States. An excited Sanger reported that "millions of women are asserting their right to voluntary motherhood."

In 1921 Sanger organized the American Birth Control League, which in 1942 changed its name to Planned Parenthood. The organization distributed birth control information to doctors, social workers, women's clubs and the scientific community, as well as to thousands of individual women.

During the 1920s Sanger continued to champion a woman's right to "own and control her own body," but her tactics and style grew more conservative. She abandoned socialism and became a Republican. Divorced from her bohemian first husband, she remarried a wealthy industrialist in part because he promised to bankroll the cause of birth control. Now intent upon attracting support from middle-class Americans, Sanger downplayed the earlier association of reproductive control with women's rights and sought instead a compromise whereby contraceptives could be acquired through a physician.

During the 1920s Margaret Sanger alienated supporters, then and since, by endorsing sterilization for the mentally incompetent and those with hereditary deficiencies. Birth control, she stressed, was "the most constructive and necessary means to racial health." In 1928 Sanger resigned as president of the American Birth Control League.

Margaret Sanger was a free spirit. Charismatic and egotistical, charming and demanding, she loved the limelight and brooked no opposition. Yet for all of her faults, eccentricities and reversals, she never lost focus on women's freedom and its wider implications for social justice. She insisted that women should direct their own lives. In 1936 a federal court ruled that physicians could prescribe contraceptives — a vital step in Sanger's efforts to realize her slogan, "Every child a wanted child."