Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America

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Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (Reprint) Pub. Date: 10/16/2007 Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (1st Anchor Books ed) Pub. Date: 5/1/1993 Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
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Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America Pub. Date: 6/15/1992 Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Overview

Ellen Chesler's 1992 biography of Margaret Sanger is acclaimed as definitive and is widely used and cited by scholars and activists alike in the fields of women's health and reproductive rights.

Chesler's substantive new Afterword considers how Sanger's life and work hold up in light of subsequent developments, such as U.S. Supreme Court cases challenging the constitutional doctrine of privacy and international definitions of reproductive health as an essential human right.

Chesler illuminates Sanger's turbulent personal story, as well as the history of the birth control movement, in an intimate biography of a visionary rebel. Indispensable reading for the generations of women who take their reproductive and sexual freedoms for granted. Photos. National publicty and advertsing.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Former Columbia University Faculty Fellow Chesler succeeds admirably in bringing the extraordinary career and controversial personality of Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) to life in this skillfully researched and objective biography. Sanger, a political radical, devoted herself to ensuring women's access to contraception after observing the plight of the poor as a public health nurse. An astute organizer, she fought against the opposition of a conservative political and religious male establishment, building a national and international birth control movement. Chesler explores the negative as well as the positive aspects of Sanger's character, noting that she was known to manipulate people and sometimes modified her views to achieve her ends. A strong believer in her own right to a fulfilled sex life, Sanger married twice and took many lovers, including Havelock Ellis and H. G. Wells. This is an outstanding biography of a feminist reformer whose achievements changed the lives of women forever. Photos not seen by PW. (June)

Library Journal

The contemporary social debate over women's reproductive rights provides a timely backdrop for this major new biography of Margaret Sanger and her struggle for birth control. Sanger spent 50 years organizing a movement and advocating for birth control rights that are taken for granted in today's Western world. Chesler believes that Sanger's impact on women's lives has not been adequately appreciated or documented. This biography succeeds admirably in filling the gap with a new look at Sanger's private and public life. Interwoven in this account are discussions of the sweeping social and political developments of the 20th century. Chesler presents a Margaret who rejected the conventional restrictive female role and, while living a hidden and unconventional private life, worked publicly to push society into accepting new rights for women. This work is carefully documented and, while not as breezy a read as some biographies, is a major contribution to women's history. Recommended for academic and public libraries.-- Judy Solberg, Univ. of Maryland Libs., College Park

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Kirkus Reviews

A splendid biography of the woman who fought for more than half a century to bring birth control to America. Planned Parenthood clinics are once again in the thick of political turmoil over a woman's right to choose abortion. It would probably all seem dishearteningly familiar to Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Higgins Sanger, who devoted her life to securing for women the legal right to prevent pregnancy by choosing contraception. In this lively volume, scholar Chesler (formerly of Barnard and CUNY) gives us a portrait of a complex personality who took on a strait-laced society in which the public mention of sex, even in marriage, was against the law. Sanger, born in 1879, battled not only to save the lives of the millions of women who died from illegal abortions and streams of uncontrolled pregnancies, but to give women the freedom to enjoy their own sexuality. She certainly enjoyed hers. No thin-lipped crusader, Sanger was attractive, witty, and bright, with two husbands and a parade of lovers that included Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells. Her politics and rhetoric were honed in turn-of-the-century leftist movements—Emma Goldman, John Reed, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were early allies—but she quickly narrowed her focus, urging that when women gained control of their bodies and hence their lives, social and economic change would follow. She made mistakes and she made enemies, the Roman Catholic Church not the least of them, but her tenacity saw the obscenity laws fall, the Pill introduced, and family planning become an international movement. A riveting warts-and-all portrait of a courageous and determined woman who, in a time of foment, wrought fundamental changes inthe human social condition. (Photos—not seen.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781416540762
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 10/16/2007
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 668
Sales rank: 704,993
Product dimensions: 6.12 (w) x 9.25 (h) x 1.56 (d)

Meet the Author

ELLEN CHESLER is distinguished lecturer and director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Life at Roosevelt House, the new public policy center of Hunter College of the City University of New York. Woman of Valor was a finalist for PEN's 1993 Martha Albrand prize for the year's best first work of nonfiction.

Introduction     11
The Woman Rebel     19
Ghosts     21
Love and Work     44
Seeds of Rebellion     56
The Personal Is Political     74
Bohemia and Beyond     89
A European Education     105
The Frenzy of Renown     128
The Company She Kept     150
The Lady Reformer     177
New Woman, New World     179
The Conditions of Reform     200
Organizing for Birth Control     223
Happiness in Marriage     243
Doctors and Birth Control     269
A Community of Women     287
Grande Dame, Grandmere     311
Lobbying for Birth Control     313
Same Old Deal     336
Foreign Diplomacy     355
From Birth Control to Family Planning     371
Intermezzo     396
Last Act     414
Woman of the Century     443
Afterword     469
Notes     493
Selected Bibliography     617
Acknowledgments     637
Index     641

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AngelicBlonde

Posted February 12, 2009

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A great book on an amazing woman

This was a great biography of an amazing woman whose life saw and shaped the evolution of the birth control movement. The book was well researched, and the addition of so many pictures brought the book to life.

The book is fairly long so it took me awhile to read but it was worth it. The whole life of Margaret Sanger was covered. Both her personal and public life was explained and shown. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the birth control movement or Margaret Sanger. The book offers a great deal of information about both.
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Posted June 13, 2011

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