Margaret Sanger...

[iverglas]

13. we really need to stop this

Okay, hold on, I see what that is. But it absolutely is not clear from the way it's presented.

The first set of little snippets are the FALSE representations of what Sanger wrote and said. Disconnected words, taken out of context, falsely described (e.g. there isn't even any reference to "blacks" in the first mishmash of cuttings). And aha, you have found that blurb that the moron at that long ago anti-choice forum misread so badly as

Founder of Planned Parenthood, <Margaret Sanger was> the largest abortion provider in the world.

Snork.


The authors of the second set of excerpts still haven't got it right, though. I'm not quite sure what they're saying about that line about not wanting "the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" -- the plain and simple fact is that she didn't want that word to get out because it was FALSE -- and this statement is pretty problematic:

Eugenicists were hoping to improve the human race by preventing people with genetic defects from reproducing, and limiting birth control and abortion for women who were considered “fit” or healthy.

Sanger herself had always REJECTED the notion that the "fit" should breed more (while the "unfit" bred less), i.e. she rejected "positive" eugenics and favoured "negative".

Grappling with Margaret Sanger’s views on race is important for feminists today

How is grappling with straw ever more than a waste of time, let alone important? What are these "views on race"? The notion that African-American women should have access to contraception?

In 1919, she wrote:

Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state. We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother.

In fact, some early US woman suffragists like Anthony did buy into some racist policies. Racism is also alleged against Emily Murphy, one of Canada's Famous Five (as I've meant to add to my thread on that case):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Murphy#Drugs_and_race

Sanger, on the other hand, simply does not suffer that historical disability as unequivocally. Sanger opposed immigration policies based on stereotyping early on. Murphy had it in for Chinese immigration to Canada -- her failure actually lying in her blindness to all the complex mechanisms of disadvantage and exploitation that were the real problems. Few social reformers of the day were raging lefties, politically; they didn't have a class analysis (and of course were generally privileged themselves). Hardly anybody actually was, or did.


As far as feminism including or not including everyone, once again, why are we bashing feminists from a century ago, and why should feminists today have to answer for them? Why not bash the Black Panthers for excluding women's rights and interests in the 1960s, and hold equality-seeking African-Americans accountable for them today? Why not bash gay men from a little later even, because they did not join forces with feminists and reject male privilege, and hold the whole LGBT community accountable for them today? Why not bash the Taliban for the abuses committed against women right up to this day, and hold all Muslims everywhere accountable for them? Does anyone actually bash slavery abolitionists in the US for not including votes for women in their agenda? Hell, not many even bash those founders and framers who not only didn't give African-Americans and women the vote, they owned and sexually exploited slaves. Oops, I see I'm not even being original here. In its page on Sanger, PP says the same thing about those founders and framers.

In Canada, women fought in the Persons Case and won a victory that has benefited every disadvantaged, stereotyped, hated minority in Canada in the near-century since. There can be no doubt that if Emily Murphy were living today, she would be overjoyed with the society that has grown up out of equality-seeking actions like hers. She would be a woman of our times. She wasn't. She was a woman of her times, with all the disabilities that status carried.

And for fuck's sake, Margaret Sanger was writing about eugenics IN 1920. She lived nearly another half-century after that. She was getting close to 90 when she died: she was born in 1879. I wonder what most of us would have been up to if we'd been born in 1879.