Throughout the years, many women have made contributions to the field of nursing. Only of a few of these women have made significant contributions that have revolutionized the way nursing was viewed and performed.
Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee was one of these women. She was born on September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York.
Anne Purcell Higgins, her mother, was Roman Catholic who gave birth to eleven children. Michael Hennessy Higgins, her father, was an activist for women's suffrage and free education while working as a stone carver.
Sanger was born as the sixth child to her parents. Due to the number of children in the home, Sanger spent much of her time tending younger siblings and helping with household chores.
Later, Sanger's sisters paid for her to attend Claverack College for two years. In 1896, Sanger followed her father's plea to return home and to nurse her dying mother.
Her mother died later that year of tuberculosis and cervical cancer. By 1900, one of her friends from college's mother set her up to continue nursing at White Plains in New York.
Two years later she married William Sanger. While they were living in New York, Sanger developed tuberculosis because she had cared for her mother and she consistently overworked herself.
Due to these health concerns, she and her husband moved to Saranac, New York where she gave birth to her first son in 1903. Her husband was an architect and so he designed their home.
However, in 1912 the home burned down and the family moved back to East Side slums of Manhattan. While living her, Sanger became an activist for birth control and published several pamphlets.
She risked prison because her actions violated the Comstock Law of 1873, which prohibited such pamphlets from being printed. In 1910, Sanger and her husband moved to New York City.
While in the city, they both became involved with radical bohemian cultures located in Greenwich Village. They were also known to spend their time with local intellectuals, artists, and activists.
Some of these people include John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Mabel Dodge, and Emma Goldman. In 1913, Sanger separated from her husband William.
By the following year, she had already published her eight page monthly newsletter promoting contraception. It was entitled The Woman Rebel and is the first publication that defined the term 'birth control.'
When she was accused of US postal obscenity law violations in 1914 she fled to England with the name "Bertha Watson." When she returned to the United States in October 1915, her five-year-old daughter Peggy died a month later.
In 1915, William Sanger gave a copy of his wife's publication, Family Limitations, to a postal worker. To William Sanger's surprise the postal worker had been working undercover and turned him in for distributing obscene material.
He was subsequently thrown in jail for thirty days while Margaret was in Europe. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened a clinic in Brooklyn based on family planning and birth control.
The police raided it a mere nine days later, whereupon she was thrust into prison for thirty days. Her initial appeal was rejected, but two years later Judge Frederick E. Crane wrote and appeal to allow doctors to prescribe contraception.
Sanger also founded the American Birth Control League in 1921. The following year she traveled to Japan to spread her ideas there.
She also married her second husband James Noah H. Slee, who was an oil tycoon. Upon discovery that physicians were exempt of prescribing birth control and with support from a few wealthy friends, Sanger opened the first legal birth control clinic that only employed female doctors and social workers.
Sanger continued to give lectures all over the nation until her death in 1966 in Tucson, Arizona. She died a few months after the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which allowed married couples to purchase birth control.
Author Resource:-
Tom Selwick has worked as a traveling nurse for the last 16 years. He has worked in many local clinics and the ER and recommends looking into becoming a travel nurse.
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