Sorry if I overstated the case. I guess I confused Sanger's personal opinions with others in the movement that did hold those views pretty explicitly. I think Sanger, like most "well-meaning progressives" of her day, had a problem with paternalism.And Sanger very plainly dissociated herself from those people at the time in question, too.
The things that Sanger may have "favoured" that most of us would probably find objectionable are things that we very possibly would have favoured if we'd lived in her day.
Not necessarily -- not all do-gooders took the same line as Sanger; some were what we'd consider more progressive. But hell, there are some around here I'd consider less progressive than Sanger in the 20s, so it's all a matter of perspective.
I've seen anti-choice internet sites claiming Emma Goldman as one of their own, if you can imagine. Red Emma, the feminist icon -- who refused to perform abortions for the women who begged her to do it ... because she had no way of doing it safely and the risk of the women dying of infection was so high.
They claim that Sanger said some things they don't like for reasons that were never Sanger's reasons ... they claim that Goldman said some things they do like for reasons that were never Goldman's reasons. Amazing.
Anyhow, that's the other thing that let's not forget. The things that Sanger is so oft and so deceitfully quoted as saying, to the extent that she did say them, she said a good 40 years before she died, for the most part. Sanger really was not wandering around the country in 1960 recommending that druggies and hookers be interned on farms, she just wasn't. I wonder how many of us will think back, in 40 years, to some of the things we said at DU, and just cross our fingers that nobody saved a copy.
There was some talk here the other day about how some people who have it good might not quite understand the realities lived by people who don't have it so good.
The same applies to people divided from us by time, as to people divided from us by class. I first read this in Mother Jones a couple of years ago -- it's about the miserable, filthy, disease-ridden, hunger-wracked existence of the people who lived in an area of NYC called Mulberry Bend in the late 19th century. A little before Sanger's time, but there were still people living in those conditions then. (To be equal opportunity: there were people living in some pretty appalling conditions in Toronto at the time as well, just not nearly so many and not quite so horribly, and, in part thanks to the Toronto Star newspaper and its do-good campaigns, not quite so hopelessly.)
http://www.motherjones.com/magazine/JA01/otherhalf.htmlThe Bend was ultimately torn down and a park built on its
site in 1897 after unrelenting pressure from Jacob Riis, the
Danish-born journalist and social reformer. In How the Other
Half Lives, an early landmark in reforming literature whose
title became a catchphrase, Riis provides some numbers
for Mulberry Bend, which he obtained from the city's
Registrar of Vital Statistics. In 1888, he wrote, 5,650 people
lived on Baxter and Mulberry streets between Park and
Bayard. If Riis means strictly the buildings within the Bend,
as he almost certainly does, then the population density
there was 2,047 persons per acre, nearly all of them recent
immigrants.
By itself, that's an almost meaningless figure. But think of it
this way: In Manhattan today, 1,537,195 persons live on
14,720 acres, a density of slightly more than 104 per acre. ...
Now consider a final set of numbers: According to Riis and
the city statistician, the death rate of children under five in
Mulberry Bend was 140 per 1,000, roughly 1 out of 7. This
is likely to be an underestimate. (Citywide, the number was
just under 100 per 1,000 and falling fast.) Today, Mulberry
Bend would rank between Lesotho and Tanzania in
under-five mortality and worse than Haiti, Eritrea, Congo,
and Bangladesh. Last year, the under-five mortality rate for
the United States was 8 per 1,000, or 1 out of 125.
... In one of his many articles on tenement housing, Riis
printed a map of the Bend drawn from overhead, a
silhouette showing the proportion of open space to
buildings. Looking at that map is like looking at an
old-fashioned diagram of a cell, a hieroglyphic of dark and
light. It's hard to know what to call the spaces depicted by
the white areas on Riis's map. Yard is too pastoral and air
shaft too hygienic. Riis calls them "courts" and "alleys,"
but even those words are too generous. What the white
spaces really portray are outdoor places where only a
single layer of humans could live, many of them homeless
children who clustered in external stairwells and on
basement steps. In the tenements of the Bend—three, four,
and five stories each—families and solitary lodgers, who
paid five cents apiece for floor space, crowded together in
airless cubicles. "In a room not thirteen feet either way,"
Riis wrote of one midnight encounter, "slept twelve men and
women, two or three in bunks set in a sort of alcove, the
rest on the floor."
I think it's pretty easy to imagine why a "reformer" would want to offer those women whatever assistance she could to ensure that she didn't spend her life bearing children too often destined for to live for a brief while, and then die, in those conditions, or become one of the homeless ones in the "yards" when the women died young themselves.
And in point of fact, the people that article is about were pretty much all *not* African-American. The bulk of Sanger's work too, as I understand it, was with the urban, white poor; it was really out of a spirit of equal opportunity that she tried to expand, to bring her illegal family planning services, which she of course dispensed at risk to herself, to the black community!
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