Margaret Sanger trained as a nurse, worked as a visiting nurse in the New York tenements, and built the American birth control movement out of what she saw there. She also spent decades attached to the eugenics movement, and both things are true.
Training and the tenements
She was born Margaret Higgins on September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children. Her mother had eighteen pregnancies and died at fifty; Sanger held her responsible for it in a way she never let go of.
She trained at White Plains Hospital from 1900 to 1902 but did not complete the full course. She married, moved to New York City in 1911, and took up visiting nursing on the Lower East Side, in the same tenements where Lillian Wald had started twenty years earlier.
The obstetric work is what changed her. Contraception was illegal to discuss under the federal Comstock Act, so women had no legal access to information and turned to self-induced abortion. Sanger nursed the results repeatedly.
The case she wrote about for the rest of her life was a woman called Sadie Sachs, who nearly died of a self-induced abortion, asked the doctor how to prevent another pregnancy, was told to make her husband sleep on the roof, and died of a second attempt a few months later. Sanger said she walked the streets until dawn and gave up nursing individual patients that night.
What she did
She was clear that this was a nursing problem — a preventable cause of death in her own caseload that she was legally barred from addressing.
- In 1914 she published The Woman Rebel and coined the term birth control. She was indicted under the Comstock Act and fled to England.
- On October 16, 1916 she opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with her sister Ethel Byrne, a nurse. About 460 women came in nine days. She was arrested and the clinic was shut within the month.
- Her appeal produced a 1918 ruling permitting doctors to prescribe contraception for medical reasons, which is the legal opening everything after it went through.
- She founded the American Birth Control League in 1921; after mergers it became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, a name she disliked as evasive.
- She raised the funding, in her eighties, for the research that produced the oral contraceptive pill.
She died on September 6, 1966 in Tucson, Arizona, at 86, months after Griswold v. Connecticut made contraception legal for married couples nationwide.
The eugenics record
Sanger published on eugenics from 1917, devoted her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization to it, and argued through the 1920s and 1930s for reducing the reproduction of people she classed as unfit, including support for the sterilization of people with mental disabilities. She addressed a women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey in 1926, which she described in her own autobiography.
Historians disagree about how much of this was conviction and how much was alliance-building with a movement that was mainstream among American progressives at the time. That argument does not dispose of it. She held and published those views, and the movement she founded has since repudiated them by name.
She is on this list because she is one of the most consequential nurses in American history, and because a page about her that left out the second half would not be worth reading.
Related
Sources
- Margaret Sanger, for the chronology, the Brownsville clinic and the eugenics record. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- The Margaret Sanger Papers Project. New York University. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- An Autobiography, Margaret Sanger, 1938. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- The Pivot of Civilization, Margaret Sanger, 1922. Accessed September 9, 2026.