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Birth control- a parents' problem or woman's by margaret sanger
Margaret Sanger fights for birth control
Margaret Sanger fights for birth control
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Margaret Sanger
"Women are too much inclined to follow in the footsteps of men, to try to think as men think, to try to solve the general problems of life as men solve them
The woman is not needed to do man's work. She is not needed to think man's thoughts
Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities." I am Margaret Sanger and this is how I feel. God put us on this world not to follow in the footsteps of someone else but to create our own. Before I go on and tell you all of my opinions, I must explain to all of you, how I came to be this way. I will explain to you my life story.
I was born September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York. My desire for women to have more freedom began way before the public had ever heard of me. It arose when I was just a little girl. My parents were a great influence on me and very supportive of any decision that I made. My father provided me with all the mental tools I needed for my life to be a success. My father was a radical. He taught me to question everything and stand up for whatever I believed. My mom was a great woman herself. Although she dealt with a lot of children and didn't have a lot of time for each of us, I loved her dearly. My mother had passed away at quite an early age from tuberculosis, which was due to the amount of kids she bore. There were no contraceptives in that day and age. Due to my mothers death it made me come to the conclusion that I wanted to work with pregnant women. I had a need to help women who were either in the position my mom was in, or were just in need of help. In 1896 I attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute. I then entered the nursing program at White Plains hospital at which time I met my husband, an architect, William Sanger. After finishing the nursing program I obtained a job as a nurse in the ghettos of New York. I dealt with a lot of horrible sights.
Dorothy Wardell’s article titled “Margaret Sanger: Birth Control’s Successful Revolutionary” explains what inspired Sanger ideas on contraception and what problems she faced while working to change the notions and laws on Birth Control. The central argument presented by Wardell is that Sanger’s efforts led to privileges for women’s bodies and health centers providing methods for women to act on these privileges (Wardell, 736). Although Wardell is effective in supporting her argument, it would be stronger if she included some historical context and evidence of Sanger’s opinion in her own words found in a speech of hers and in Family Limitation.
Everyone views the world with his or her own sense of gender, equality, and mind. Woman today view the world as a one-sided standard where equality does not exist for them. They believe that men have taken away their chances of happiness and opportunity because there are men and we are woman. Even though both men and women share equal hardships some women believe that men still have the final say in their lives. In Scott Russell Sanders essay “The Men We Carry in Our Minds” he believes that women have life made essay in his mind but woman must work just as hard as men for jobs, believe that everything should be given to them just because to who they know and what they do, and that men will always ruin the world and that women are the more dominate
On September 14, 1879, Margaret Sanger was born in Corning, New York. She was the sixth child of eleven children and realized early what being part of a large family meant; just making due. Although her family was Roman Catholic both her mother and father were of Irish descent. Her mother, Anne Purcell had a sense of beauty that was expressed through and with flowers. Her father was an Irish born stonemason whose real religion was social radicalism. Her father was a free thinker and strong believer in eugenics which meant Margaret possessed some of the same values. (Sanger, Margaret) Eugenics is the belief that one race is better than a different race just because they are not like them, kind of like Hitler and the holocaust. “He expected me to be grown up at the age of ten.” (Source 4.3 page 30) Coming from a family of eleven children she did have to grow up fast. Faster than most kids should have to. She left her house as a teenager and came back when she needed to study nursing. It was during this time that Margaret worked as a maternity nurse helping in the delivery of babies to immigrant women. She saw illegal abortions, women being overwhelmed by poverty, to many children, and women dying because they had no knowledge of how to prevent one pregnancy after another. This reminded her of the fact that her own mother had eighteen pregnancies, eleven children, and died at the age of forty-nine. Margaret dropped out of school and moved in with her sister. She ended up teaching first grade children and absolutely hated it. She hated children at that time. When Margaret was a child herself however, she would dream about living on the hill where all the wealthy people lived. She would dream of playing tennis and wearing beautiful c...
them to have an identity that separates from their spouses. Birth control helped shift slightly the balance of power from only being masculine to shared between the sexes. Margaret did so much to bring the issue of birth control and its benefits in to the for fount in her time. Her writings and actions better the lives of women in America then, and today more then ever. Margaret Sanger wrote the woman "...must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility..." of her own body and "...the first step is Birth Control. Through Birth Control [the woman] will attain voluntary motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, [the woman] will cease to enslave herself…[the woman] will not stop at patching up the world; she will remake it" (Sanger A 36).
Margaret Sanger was the founder of The American League of Birth Control which later became Planned Parenthood and her argument in those times was that it was not fair for women who were from a lower class could not have access to Birth Control.
...eenth century's most important woman's rights advocates, antislavery leaders, and feminist thinkers (Lerner). "Whatever is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights - I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female" (Grimke, Angelina). "Here then I plant myself. God created us equal;- he created us free agents; - he is our Lawgiver, our King, and our Judge, and to him alone is woman bound to be in subjection, and to him alone is she accountable for the use of those talents with which Her Heavenly Father has entrusted her. One is her Master even Christ" (Grimke, Sarah). As women who spoke publicly against slavery and for women's rights, they continued to inspire female activists to not give up and keep fighting for all human beings to be equal.
One of the most important roles that a nurse fulfills as a responsibility of the profession is the advocate. Nurses are responsible to provide the information needed for a patient to make a decision and consequently support that decision. Margaret Sanger was one of the most influential advocates for women’s health and sexual health in general. Margaret Sanger was a public health nurse in New York who noticed that there was a significant problem in the way that women were treated within the healthcare system. Through her efforts she started what is today known as Planned Parenthood, defeated laws preventing the distribution of contraceptives and information regarding contraceptives,
“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body”. Margaret Sanger stated this quote for the purpose of letting all women know that they should have the choice to make decisions about their own body whenever plausible. She seemed to feel as though, if women can’t obtain control over what they want to do with their body, then they can never truly be free in other manners as well. Sanger is an amazingly determined woman who was able to give all women the chance to gain control and power over their body. Margaret Sanger is an important figure in the 1920s American History because not only did she create and establish the first birth control clinics, but she also gave women the chance to take control over their body.
I have always found the role of women in religion to be a fascinating and diverse subject, varying from community to community. Sometimes, the role of a woman in society is so closely linked to her religious role, that the two are indistinguishable. For example, why is it that some women are expected to upkeep the home and children without question? How are such gender roles assigned? Are these gender roles created by religion and upheld by culture or created by culture and upheld by religion? Where do such social expectations stem from? What does the daily life of a woman in religious groups that hold such expectations look like? And given these questions, is it possible for such roles to evolve? Has social change within gender roles occurred in the context of religion? In order to find the answers to these questions and questions like them, one must seek further insight of religion itself and the social context within which it exists.
Judith Lorder writes in Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender, "talking about gender for most people is equivalent of fish talking about water" because gender is so routine that its "assumptions and presuppositions" are taken for granted and left unquestioned and unchallenged. Institutions such as religion has remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years and has teachings that are outright sexist, which limits lives of women because it creates the idea that there are just two extremes and no in-between : the virgin or the whore. Men do not have to face persecution or tyranny in instutions and social systems have a patriarchal foundation. Gender inequity operates within instutions because the institutions are in the control of men who are privileged from the gender inequity. Institutions limit women 's lives by excluding women who do not conform to their expectations or follow their "rules." The rules or norms within these instutitions were determined by men which explains why women 's problems or limitations are not a concern for
In the early 1960’s, inspired by the antiwar and civil rights movements, women began to fight earnestly for their rights. They took on the taboo subject of abortion, began to tell personal stories to other women about their experiences, rallied, and marched for pro-choice. With the help from civil liberty groups, reform came gradually. A few states legalized abortion but the cost was still high, and with very few allowances, little to no women benefited. The struggle continued.
The roles of women have altered our lives substantially from the beginning of time. Take the example of Eve in the Garden of Eden. If the theory is true that our existence relies completely on a God who created us, then had Eve not eaten the forbidden fruit, humanity would not have been born apart from the only two people on Earth.
The Roaring Twenties were known as a time of economic boom, pop culture and social developments. This was a time when women began to break norms, they acted rebelliously such as wearing releveling clothing, smoking, and drinking. These women were known as “flappers” who wanted to change their roles in the 1920’s. Birth control activist, Margaret Sanger sought to change the world where women had access to a low cost, effective contraception pill. In “The Morality of Birth Control” Sanger battled opponents who claimed that contraception would cause women to become immoral. The author uses rhetorical devices such as ethos, pathos, and fallacies to back up her claim while touching on issues in the church, advancements of women, and the source of disease in the world.
"Women were denied knowledge of their history, and thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written. Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, generation after generation. ... thinking women of each generation had to waste their time, energy and talent on constructing their argument anew. Generation after generation, in the face of recurrent discontinuities, women thought their way around and out from under patriarchal thought." (Lerner qtd in Merrim Modern Women xxiii)
Women have always been essential to society. Fifty to seventy years ago, a woman was no more than a house wife, caregiver, and at their husbands beck and call. Women had no personal opinion, no voice, and no freedom. They were suppressed by the sociable beliefs of man. A woman’s respectable place was always behind the masculine frame of a man. In the past a woman’s inferiority was not voluntary but instilled by elder women, and/or force. Many, would like to know why? Why was a woman such a threat to a man? Was it just about man’s ability to control, and overpower a woman, or was there a serious threat? Well, everyone has there own opinion about the cause of the past oppression of woman, it is currently still a popular argument today.