100 years ago in Spokane: Margaret Sanger, birth control advocate, delivers fiery speech

From our archives, 100 years ago

Margaret Sanger, fiery advocate for birth control, told a Spokane audience that “woman has been made a child-bearing machine, with no time to think, develop and study.”

This “pleasant, good-looking” and, above all, “earnest” nurse spoke before a receptive crowd at the First Unitarian Church. She pulled no punches.

Here are some excerpts:

• “Knowledge of birth control does not lower the morality of the women who possess it.”
• “Overburdened maternity and the tyranny of the state are the shackles of her freedom.”
• “Woman has been forced to overdo her duty of populating the earth and man has allowed the new population to die by thousands in the social system he allows and maintains.”
• “Knowledge to control birth is the first step woman must take toward the goal of freedom and for the emancipation of the working classes.”
• “Ignorance about sex is responsible for 70 percent of the diseases of men and women.”
• “Last year, 600,000 babies died from poverty and neglect and 600,000 parents were permitted to continue in ignorance of methods to make such a thing impossible again this year.”
• “The future welfare of our race depends on family limitation.”