What We're Reading: The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger

What We’re Reading:

School takes the joy of reading out of me. I used to be a total bookworm, making weekly trips to the library during the summer, slowly but surely going through the entire young adults section at the library, and mis-pronouncing really long words that I had read but never heard spoken. Not a shock that I was considered kinda a geek. But it was all worth it – I LOVED to read. Then high school hit – and college – and suddenly I realized I hadn’t read a book for fun in AGES. So when a friend at work lent me her copy of Margaret Sanger’s (the lady who founded Planned Parenthood) autobiography, I expected to read the first few pages and then return it with a polite – “yeah, I really just don’t have enough time!” To my complete surprise, I’m totally into it! I’ve been staying up late, carting it around on busses and trains, even skipping my weekly dose of People and Us Weekly to get in a few pages during my lunch breaks.

Must have something to do with how much it means to me personally. Here’s a woman who was harassed, arrested, put in jail, and separated from her kids and husband, just for trying to get women information on birth control… which was just being invented back then! It was illegal to even talk about it – much less buy it or use it. She saw how unhappy and held back the women of her day were by constant pregnancies and terrible health from exhaustion, and she was determined that they should have access to a simple solution that could improve and even save their lives.

Today, we have condoms in every corner store, teen clinics in many towns, and morning after pills available without a prescription. It’s super easy to have a conversation with your doctor or nurse about birth control, and however badly, reproductive health IS taught in most schools. There are definitely still things wrong with how we address birth control, but it is refreshing to take a look back in time, and realize how far we’ve come. So if you need a little light reading this spring, dive into “The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger” – especially if you’re interested in the history behind your green FPACT card, your free birth control, and the teen clinic downtown.