Margaret Sanger...

[iverglas]

16. exactly!

Check out that Feminists for Life place for all the anti-abortion quotes from early US feminists. Of course they were anti-abortion -- abortion was a threat to women's lives, for starters! And it was seen by them, as the anti-choice "feminists" allege it is today, as a social failure, since all women would want all pregnancies if only they had the resources to feed, clothe and house all the babies.

On social conditions in the US when Margaret Sanger was coming of age, this is a good short introduction:
The Conscience of Place: Where the Other Half Lived

Since abortion was generally reviled, arguing that access to contraception, and empowerment of women generally, would reduce abortion was (and still is) a popular tactic. And unfortunately, that did and does leave individual women as the casualties sometimes. Emma Goldman did it too (although again, the dangers of abortion at the time were reason enough not to agree to perform them):

http://en.muvs.org/topic/emma-goldman-1869-1940-en/print/

In 1916 her campaigning for contraception resulted in Goldman’s conviction for violation of the Comstock law. The US politician Anthony Comstock (1844 – 1915) was a fervent stickler for Victorian morals and sniffed out offences everywhere; all information about birth control was therefore deemed illegal, obscene, prurient and lascivious. The law that bore his name was not taken off the statute books until 1936.

From her own experience as midwife and nurse, the feminist Goldman saw for herself the dubious methods women were using to prevent the birth of further children, whom they couldn’t afford to feed (either). Goldman was asked to perform abortions but refused because she saw that it would do nothing to tackle the social problem. She therefore fought for birth control as a positive alternative.

Emma Goldman disseminated her opinions in a plethora of presentations and a series of articles and books. From 1906 to 1916 she published the newspaper 'Mother Earth', which she filled with anarchic-feminist content. She went to prison three times for her campaigns. She died in 1940, in Toronto, Canada.

It's interesting that Goldman, whose goals and efforts were similar to Sanger's when it came to contraception, has received so much less attention. I would think that's because she was in fact overtly political and openly challenged the political order from a left/anarchist position, which Sanger didn't do as consistently.

Sanger did write under the anarchist banner in her early life though -- "No gods, no masters":

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=420018.xml

The main cause of the social misery endured by the working women to-day lies not so much in the value of wages received as in the way they have to be earned. It is not alone the work done, but the bullying, the hustling and the submission which the wage system entails, that blights the life of the worker and creates a just hatred of the master class. And there can be no hope for the woman worker until she realizes the degradation of "work" and the injustice of a system which forces her, in order to obtain the barest necessities of life, to be snubbed and insulted and driven by a master.

... No one doubts that the ordinary working woman can get on with the capitalist system as it is--at a price. The demand of the class-conscious worker, however, is not strength enough to get along with it, but to destroy it. Can woman hate enough to do this and yet love her class enough to think it worth emancipating? Can she look upon the colossal good, the hardihood and the endurance of the wage slaves without feeling sympathy? Can she look upon the colossal evil of wage slavery without once feeling despair? Can she be a rebel woman? Can she be a fanatic? Is she prepared to sacrifice the whole race for the sake of itself?

The masters argue that because we cannot have equality in a silk factory we cannot have it anywhere. Because we cannot have good-fellowship in business we cannot have it at all. They argue that society cannot do without "labor", meaning servitude -- without the bossing and the firing and the too old at forty and all the rest of their filth. If society cannot do without masters and wage slaves, so much the worse for society. For we are prepared to sacrifice our machines, our wheels and tunnels and wires and systems and slave lives for one hour of happiness.

Do not be led astray by the towering materialism which dominates the mind of the wage earners to-day which rests upon the false assumption that because a few generations go on doing the same thing over and over again, we all live in a system of clockwork evolution. Do not let fear prevent you from leading a free life. Live up to your own ideal and to the standard inscribed on the banner of the WOMAN REBEL--No Gods, No Masters.

Now there's some intersectionality: feminism and class consciousness.

The anti-choice right wing hates her for her libertinism. We should probably celebrate her more for it.

Unfortunately, she does seem to have largely abandoned that path in favour of the "scientific" social reformism of the day.