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| A fictional memoir of Margaret Sanger |
Most of us recognize Margaret Sanger as the mother of birth
control in this country. Turns out, that’s all we know about her, and there’s a
whole lot more to her story.
Sanger was not only a force for change she was a force of
nature. Born in 1879, by adolescence she relished challenging norms. A
charismatic beauty, and a nurse by trade, she was a naturally inquisitive and sensual
young woman who morphed into a political activist and writer who spent a
lifetime fighting for sexual freedom and family planning.
She learned at the feet of her elders. She watched her impoverished
mother whither away raising eleven children and burying others who died in
infancy. She nursed desperate women who risked their lives in attempts to
eliminate their own pregnancies rather than bring another hungry child into the
world.
You might say Sanger promulgated what in later years became
known as free love. She opened the first birth control clinic in America in
1916 and founded Planned Parenthood. Keep in mind that until 1960, when birth
control pills were approved, birth control was in the hands of men alone, and
illegal for women to undertake in any way. Sanger died just a few years later,
in 1966, having realized her dream.
In the early years of the fight, under indictment for
publishing a magazine promoting family planning, she fled to Canada and on to
Britain for many years before returning to the states to continue her battle. She
left behind three children and their father, whose voices, among others like
social reformer Havelock Ellis, are included in this page-turner about Sanger’s
remarkable life and many loves.
Telling a true tale in fiction often reveals greater truths
through the literary license of dialogue and reflection. Feldman does an
excellent job taking the reader on the ride that was Sanger’s life, including
love affairs and friendships with some of the greatest thinkers of the age, and
the heartache of children and husbands left behind as she pursued the greater
good.
Ellen Feldman has crafted a well-told story of a well-meaning woman who made the
hard choices women of that time were not permitted to make, and women and
families today are all the better for it.
