Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility First Edition

This book connects some dots in history that our public education and college educations don't want connected namely Margaret Sanger's hand in helping to motivate the most sinister scientific idealogy in history EUGENICS! It examines Planned Parenthood's many leaders who were also eugenicists. Keep in mind that eugenics was anathema to woman's rights to reproduce being that at it's apex it led to the administration of mandatory sterilization of thousands of womenfrom disadvantaged backgrounds. This book led me to gems like this article featured in the NY Times in 1950 of Margaret Sanger calling for the government to forcebly sterilize women [...]The book's references are all listed in the extensive bibliography and all the author's research was done in the library of congress so most of the book is based on the key player's own quotes. She even gets into how eugenics is connected to the genetic engineering movement. The book is written in a very eloquent manner but is not difficult to read or bogged down with overly academic terminology also the author doesn't tow the line that most authors do when criticising the birth control movement and evagelizing through the entire book with religious passages.

I thought it was a factually written work of history. Having my degree in historical studies, I thought that she did a wonderful job delving into the facts, and citing the appropriate references for her arguments. I would encourage readers to read this book, and not to shy away from a work for fear of what facts it might bring forth. It is most definitely a historical, not political work.

This is a book that thoroughly supports its thesis, even to the point of being dry in some places. But that is necessary to support her arguments. To cover the bases of what she is claiming it requires evidence that she researched the material. She has. Margaret Sanger had a real and dark agenda and Franks is methodical about exposing it.

This book has literally changed my perspective. I knew that Sanger was considered a eugenist, however I did not know how she was exactly connected. This book gives a logical, historical and analytical objective prospective that basically blew my mind.

Fine analysis in lucid style.

Good book about Sanger, planned parenthood and eugenics.

TIME magazine called Margaret Sanger one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, saying that "her crusade to legalize birth control spurred the movement for women's liberation." While many remember her advocacy for birth control, few remember or give due consideration to the eugenic philosophy that drove Sanger and her allies in the birth control, and later population control or "family planning" movements. This book corrects that significant historical deficit.In this book, Franks shows that any concern Sanger had for women's rights was secondary to her larger agenda -- helping to create a better race by controlling the fertility of those she saw as society's least "fit" members -- the poor, the disabled, the "feebleminded," the sickly, the epileptic, the alcoholic, etc. Where persuasion worked, that was fine, but as Franks points out, Sanger and her allies were prepared to use coercion when they felt it was necessary to achieve their eugenic aims.Franks traces what she identifies as the "control movement" from its earliest days in the 1920s when sterilization programs began to spring up in Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, and later California to the 1990s when U.N. "family planning" money helped support forced sterilizations and abortions in China. Along the way, she identifies the key players, policies, and programs that helped to mainstream many of the ideas that the world once found so abhorrent in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.There are those in our modern PC culture that might be tempted to dismiss such charges, but this book is thorough and well documented, with over 1,200 footnotes and a bibliography featuring about a thousand books, articles, and interviews on Sanger, her associates, and the organizations they founded and led.The tone is academic, but the language is generally accessible, so that both scholars and activists alike will benefit from the reading of it.Despite Sanger's celebration as a liberator of women and the feminist hagiographies that have been written of Planned Parenthood's founder, Franks argues that Sanger's eugenic ideas are antithetical to freedom and to true feminism, aiming to suppress precisely what it is that makes women women.Sanger certainly had enormous influence, but before deciding whether that influence was good or bad, one would be well advised to read this book.