[Mavdog]

Originally Posted by alexamenos

I suspect if I could find an affidavit which Ms. Sanger signed in her own blood swearing that she was a eugenicist, you'd find some reason to pretend that it doesn't really say what it obviously says.

you seem to have a reading comphrehension issue. should I rewrite my post in simpler terms for you?

Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist -- she may have been at the forefront of the women's rights movement, but she was a eugenicist at the forefront of the women's right movement. She was a eugencist pitching a eugenicists' means to a eugencist end.

Sure, eugenicists such as Ms. Sanger and her ilk had other arguments for birth control, but reducing fertility rates of the 'feeble−minded, the mentally defective, the poverty− stricken' was always at the front and center of the plan.

I'm afraid you're the one spreading the misinformation here by denying the centrality of eugencism in Sanger's world.

you are not a very well versed person in the history of women's rights, nor of sanger.

let's see...her first writing was a column for a nyc rag titled "what every girl should know". uh, it wasn't titled "what every strong, intelligent, wealthy girl should know". it was directed to all girls, rich and poor, smart or not smart.

no eugenic philosophy there.

then there was the "the woman rebel", from wikipedia: "with the slogan "No Gods and No Masters" (and coining the term "birth control"[6][7]) and that each woman be "the absolute mistress of her own body."

let's see, if a woman is in total control "of her own body", how can there be any support for someone other than that woman deciding if she would reproduce or not? and if there is no person other than the woman making these decisions- a role critical to the philosophy of eugenics, where another person decides for the woman if she can reproduce or not- how can there be any link to a eugenic ideal in the writing? answer is there can't.

then there was the writing "what every mother should know". again, it's "every mother", not "what every genetically acceptable mother", not "what every well endowed mentally mother"....it's every mother. no eugenic thought there either.

sanger's embracing of eugenic occurred late in her career, and it was not the basis for her campaign for women's reproductive rights which began decades prior to her advocating the eugenic ideal.

nor was it the basis of the many men and women who worked in the late 1800s and early 1900s to provide women the right to sex education and access to contraceptives.