Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. "Our living-room," she wrote in her autobiography, "became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.'s could meet."42 A member of the Women's Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed "What Every Girl Should Know." The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.
A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation's first "birth control martyr" when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of "liberal fascism." Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn't right for family life, admitting she was not a "fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration."43
Under the banner of "reproductive freedom," Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the "positive" eugenicists, deriding it as mere "cradle competition" between the fit and the unfit. "More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control," she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, "We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us." Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world "swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.")44
A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger's books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.45 As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, the Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled "Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need," by Ernst Rudin, Hitler's director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.
One of Sanger's closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: "Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat."46 When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.
Sanger's genius was to advance Ross's campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her "Code to Stop Overproduction of Children," published in 1934, she decreed that "no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit...no permit shall be valid for more than one child."47 But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that "liberated" women wouldn't mind such measures because they don't really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.
Sanger believed — prophetically enough — that if women conceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a necessary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren't going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact "speaking truth to power," as it were.48 This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish "individualism" among rebellious conformists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger's analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread feminist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect "bought off" women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.
In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned "Negro Project," which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project's racist intent is beyond doubt. "The mass of significant Negroes," read the project's report, "still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes...is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit." Sanger's intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. "We do not want word to go out," she wrote to a colleague, "that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."49
It is possible that Sanger didn't really want to "exterminate" the Negro population so much as merely limit its growth. Still, many in the black community saw it that way and remained rightly suspicious of the progressives' motives. It wasn't difficult to see that middle-class whites who consistently spoke of "race suicide" at the hands of dark, subhuman savages might not have the best interests of blacks in mind. This skepticism persisted within the black community for decades. Someone who saw the relationship between, for example, abortion and race from a less trusting perspective telegrammed Congress in 1977 to tell them that abortion amounted to "genocide against the black race." And he added, in block letters, "AS A MATTER OF CONSCIENCE I MUST OPPOSE THE USE OF FEDERAL FUNDS FOR A POLICY OF KILLING INFANTS."50 This was Jesse Jackson, who changed his position when he decided to seek the Democratic nomination.