Choices

 

Margaret Sanger opened a clinic in this building in 1930, and it operated in New York City for 43 years. It is now a National Historic Landmark

------------

 Her mother was pregnant eighteen times. Eleven children were born. Seven ended in loss. At fifty, her body gave out. Her daughter watched—and decided no woman should be forced to endure that again.

Margaret Sanger didn't grow up talking about politics or ideology. She grew up watching exhaustion hollow out the woman she loved most.

Watching pregnancy stack on pregnancy with no pause, no protection, no permission to stop. Her mother, Anne Purcell Higgins, was pregnant eighteen times. Eleven children survived. Seven pregnancies ended in miscarriage or stillbirth.

Anne died at just fifty years old, her health destroyed by decades of continuous childbirth.

Margaret never forgot what that looked like. A vibrant woman reduced to exhaustion. A body used up. A life that could have been longer, could have been easier, cut short by biology that was treated as destiny.

That was the lesson Margaret Sanger learned before she ever chose a cause.

At the turn of the 20th century, this wasn't unusual. Women were expected to endure pregnancy as fate. Pain was moralized. Exhaustion was normalized. Death in childbirth was mourned quietly and accepted publicly as God's will.

Choice was not part of the vocabulary.

Margaret became a nurse, working in New York City's poorest neighborhoods in the early 1900s. In tenement after tenement, she saw the same story repeat itself. Women worn down by endless pregnancies. Babies born into hunger. Mothers begging for help they were legally forbidden to receive.

Birth control information was illegal.

Under the Comstock Laws—federal legislation passed in 1873—even explaining how pregnancy occurred could land someone in jail. Contraception was labeled obscene material, the same legal category as pornography. Doctors risked prosecution for providing information. Nurses were silenced. Women paid the price.

Margaret watched one patient nearly die after a self-induced abortion. When the woman begged doctors for information to prevent another pregnancy, they turned her away with a shrug. "Just tell your husband to be more careful," one said.

A few months later, the woman attempted another self-induced abortion. She died of infection.

That death hardened something in Margaret Sanger. She didn't see birth control as political rebellion. She saw it as survival.

In 1914, she began publishing a newsletter called The Woman Rebel, openly defying federal law by discussing contraception. She coined a phrase that would define her life's work: birth control. Not to shock, but to clarify. Women needed control—over their bodies, over their futures, over their lives.

Authorities responded swiftly. Her husband was arrested and jailed for distributing her materials. Margaret was indicted under the Comstock Laws. She fled to Europe briefly to avoid prosecution, studying birth control methods used in other countries.

She returned to the United States in 1916, undeterred.

On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Women lined up around the block—immigrant women, poor women, exhausted women who'd been waiting for someone to finally offer help.

The clinic lasted nine days before police raided it. Margaret was arrested. Convicted. Sentenced to thirty days in jail.

She considered it proof she was doing something necessary.

Over the following decades, Margaret fought through courts, legislatures, and public opinion that treated her like a criminal for suggesting women deserved control over their own fertility. She allied with physicians, scientists, and wealthy funders who believed women deserved more than endless endurance.

Her advocacy helped chip away at laws treating contraception as contraband. She founded what would eventually become Planned Parenthood. She helped fund research that led to the development of the birth control pill.

But Margaret Sanger was not universally admired, even in her own time. She was confrontational, uncompromising, and willing to work with anyone who shared her goals—including people and movements whose other beliefs were deeply problematic.

Like many reformers of her era, her legacy includes views and alliances that remain controversial and debated today. She operated in a time when eugenics was disturbingly mainstream in American progressive circles, and some of her rhetoric reflected that era's failings.

These aspects of her history are important to acknowledge. They don't erase her achievements, but they complicate them in ways that matter.

Yet the core of her mission never changed: She wanted women to be able to say no.

No to another pregnancy that might kill them. No to bodies breaking down under the weight of endless childbirth. No to lives decided entirely by biology and laws written by men.

In 1936, a federal court ruling in United States v. One Package allowed doctors to receive contraceptive materials through the mail, effectively overturning major portions of the Comstock Laws. In 1960, the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive—the birth control pill. In 1965, the Supreme Court's Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalized contraception for married couples nationwide.

By the time contraception became widely available, the idea that women could plan their families no longer seemed radical. It seemed overdue.

Millions of women made choices their grandmothers never had the chance to consider. They pursued education without fear of derailing it with unexpected pregnancy. They worked careers. They spaced their children for health and economic stability. They limited family size because they wanted to, not because biology forced them.

Margaret Sanger lived long enough to see contraception legalized nationwide. She died in 1966 at age 86, just months after the Griswold decision guaranteed Americans' right to birth control.

She did not live to see the debates end. But then again, she never expected them to.

Reproductive rights remain contested, politicized, fought over in legislatures and courts. Access to contraception—something she spent her life making legal—is still not universal. Some want to reverse the protections she helped establish.

But her story endures because it was never abstract. It began with one exhausted mother dying at fifty. One observant daughter watching and deciding that suffering should not be tradition.

Margaret Sanger did not believe motherhood was wrong. She believed forced motherhood was.

That distinction reshaped the lives of generations.

Her mother, Anne, was pregnant eighteen times. Today, a woman can choose whether to become pregnant at all. She can decide when, how many, and whether her body can handle it. She can say no without breaking the law or risking her life for information that should never have been criminal to share.

That's Margaret Sanger's legacy. Not perfect. Not uncontroversial. But undeniable.

Her mother's body gave out after eighteen pregnancies. Margaret spent her life ensuring other women wouldn't face the same fate—that biology wouldn't be destiny, that exhaustion wouldn't be inevitable, that choice would finally be possible.

She was arrested for opening a clinic. Jailed for publishing information. Prosecuted for believing women deserved control over their own bodies.

And she won. Not completely. Not permanently. But enough that millions of women have lived different lives than their grandmothers could have imagined.

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). Nurse. Activist. Founder of what became Planned Parenthood. The woman who made birth control legal in America.

Her mother died at fifty from too many pregnancies. Margaret made sure other mothers could choose differently.

That's not a perfect legacy. But it's a powerful one.

And it started with an eleven-year-old girl watching her mother's eighteenth pregnancy and thinking: This shouldn't be the only option.

Posted to "What an Amazing History" on FB

Doris Lessing - on Education

 In 1971, Doris Lessing wrote something that still makes people uncomfortable today.

She said that every child, throughout their entire education, should be told this:

"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do."

She continued: "What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be."

Then came the part that still resonates fifty years later:

"Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself—educating your own judgments. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."

This wasn't just abstract philosophy.

Doris Lessing knew exactly what she was talking about.

THE WOMAN WHO EDUCATED HERSELF

Born in 1919 in Persia (now Iran), Lessing moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at age five. Her father, a wounded World War I veteran, had come to Africa hoping to farm and find peace.

What young Doris found instead was the rigid world of colonial education—systems designed to maintain social hierarchies and produce compliant citizens of the British Empire.

She attended convent schools and girls' schools where the curriculum reflected the assumptions of the time: that the Empire was righteous, that certain ways of thinking were correct, that questioning authority was improper.

At fourteen, she left formal schooling behind.

But she never stopped learning.

Lessing became a voracious reader. She devoured books on politics, philosophy, sociology, and literature. She educated herself through public libraries and borrowed books, through conversations and fierce curiosity.

"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world," she later wrote. "People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."

A LIFE OF QUESTIONING

In her twenties, Lessing joined the Communist Party, drawn to its promise of equality and justice. Later, disillusioned by its failures and authoritarianism, she left.

She moved to London in 1949 with her young son and almost nothing else. Within a year, she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, about the brutal realities of colonialism and racial segregation in Africa.

The book was a success. But Southern Rhodesia and South Africa weren't impressed.

In 1956, because of her outspoken criticism of apartheid and racial injustice, both countries declared her a "prohibited immigrant." She was banned from the places where she grew up.

The irony wasn't lost on her: the systems she criticized proved her point by silencing her.

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

In 1962, Lessing published The Golden Notebook, a novel about a woman writer trying to make sense of her fractured life through four separate notebooks.

The book explored ideas that were radical for its time: women's inner lives, sexuality, political disillusionment, the gap between how we present ourselves and who we really are.

It became a landmark of feminist literature, though Lessing herself bristled at the label.

"It's stupid. There's nothing feminist about The Golden Notebook," she once said. "The second line is: 'As far as I can see, everything is cracking up.' That is what The Golden Notebook is about!"

What she cared about wasn't labels. It was truth. The uncomfortable, complicated, contradictory truth of human experience.

And in 1971, when she wrote the introduction where her famous quote about education appeared, she was doing what she always did: refusing to let comfortable assumptions go unchallenged.

THE UNEXPECTED NOBEL

For decades, Lessing kept writing. She produced over fifty books—novels, memoirs, science fiction, plays. She explored everything from African politics to the psychology of aging to imagined futures where civilization had collapsed.

In 2007, at age 87, she was shopping for groceries when she came home to find reporters camped outside her London flat.

"You've won the Nobel Prize for Literature!" they told her.

Her response? "Oh Christ!"

She added, with characteristic directness: "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."

THE SPEECH ABOUT HUNGER FOR BOOKS

Because of health issues, Lessing couldn't travel to Stockholm for the ceremony. But she sent a lecture that captured everything she believed.

She titled it "On Not Winning the Nobel Prize."

In it, she didn't talk about herself or her achievements. Instead, she talked about Zimbabwe—the country of her childhood—and the desperate hunger for education she'd witnessed there.

She described villages where people hadn't eaten for three days but were still talking about books and how to get them.

She told of a friend, a Black writer from Zimbabwe, who taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopedias.

She contrasted this burning desire for knowledge with students in wealthy countries who took education for granted, who had access to everything but valued little of it.

"In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, with the Tradition," she said. "I have a friend from Zimbabwe, a Black writer. He taught himself to read from the labels on jam jars."

Her point wasn't that formal education was worthless.

It was that true education—the kind that changes how you see the world—requires something more than classrooms. It requires hunger. Questioning. The willingness to think for yourself.

THE LEGACY

Doris Lessing died on November 17, 2013, at age 94.

She had lived through colonial Africa, World War II, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the digital revolution. Through it all, she kept writing, kept questioning, kept refusing to accept easy answers.

Her quote about indoctrination continues to circulate today—shared by people across the political spectrum who see something true in it.

She wasn't saying education is bad. She wasn't attacking teachers.

She was saying something more nuanced: that all education carries the assumptions of its time and place. That what seems like eternal truth in one generation looks like prejudice to the next. That the best thing education can do is teach you to question—including to question the education itself.

"There is only one way to read," she wrote, "which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you... and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought."

Real learning, she believed, doesn't happen when you accept what you're told.

It happens when you learn to question who's doing the telling—and why.

And when you're hungry enough to find answers for yourself.

From FB page ~Unusual Tales

Where's the lead?

Dr. Clair Patterson, 

He discovered how old the Earth was. Then he discovered something that could destroy us all.

For thousands of years, humanity wondered about the age of our planet. Religious texts offered one answer. Philosophers debated another. Scientists made educated guesses based on fossils and rock layers. But nobody actually knew.

Until a quiet scientist named Clair Patterson figured it out in 1953.

He should have become instantly famous. His name should have appeared in every textbook. Instead, what he discovered next turned him into a target. He found himself standing alone against one of the most powerful industries on Earth, fighting a battle that would determine whether millions of children would grow up with damaged minds.

And for decades, almost nobody knew his name.

Patterson's journey began in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. He was a young geochemist with an impossible assignment: measure the precise amount of lead isotopes in a meteorite fragment called Canyon Diablo.

The theory was elegant—if he could measure these specific lead ratios accurately, he could calculate when the solar system formed, and therefore, when Earth was born.

But there was a problem that nearly broke him.

Every time he tried to measure the lead in his samples, the numbers were wildly inconsistent. One day high, the next day higher, never stable. His equipment seemed fine. His calculations were correct. Yet the data was chaos.

Most scientists would have given up or blamed the methodology. Patterson was different. He possessed an almost obsessive attention to detail and patience that bordered on stubborn madness.

One day, he realized something shocking: the problem wasn't his rock sample. The problem was everything else.

There was lead everywhere. On the lab benches. In the air. Tracking in on people's shoes. Floating as invisible dust particles. The entire world was contaminated, and it was sabotaging his measurements.

So Patterson did something unprecedented. He built the world's first ultra-clean laboratory.

He scrubbed every surface until his hands bled. He sealed cracks in walls with tape. He installed specialized air filters. He made his assistants wear protective suits and wash repeatedly before entering. For years, he cleaned and refined and eliminated every possible source of contamination.

Finally, in 1953, he achieved it. He got a clean reading. He ran the numbers through a mass spectrometer, performed the calculations, and suddenly held an answer that no human in history had ever known:

4.55 billion years.

The Earth was 4.55 billion years old.

It's said that in his excitement, he drove straight to his mother's house in Iowa and told her he'd solved one of humanity's oldest mysteries. The weight of not knowing had finally lifted.

But while building his clean room, Patterson had stumbled onto something far more disturbing.

Where was all this lead coming from?

Lead is naturally rare on Earth's surface. It stays locked deep underground in mineral deposits. It doesn't float freely in the air. It doesn't coat laboratory tables. Yet it was everywhere—in quantities that made no sense.

Patterson began testing the world outside his lab. Ocean water. Mountain snow. Everywhere he looked, lead levels were hundreds of times higher than natural background levels.

And then he understood.

Since the 1920s, oil companies had been adding a compound called tetraethyl lead to gasoline. It prevented engine knock and made cars run smoother. But every car on every road was functioning as a poison dispersal system, spraying microscopic lead particles into the air with every mile driven.

Lead is a neurotoxin. It damages developing brains. It lowers IQ. It causes behavioral problems, aggression, and cognitive impairment. And an entire generation of children was breathing it every single day.

Patterson had to make a choice.

He was a geochemist. His job was studying rocks and isotopes, not fighting corporations or advocating for public health. He had stable funding and a promising academic career. He could have simply published his Earth-age discovery and moved on to the next project.

But he couldn't unsee what he'd found.

In the mid-1960s, he published papers warning that industrial lead contamination was poisoning the environment and harming human health.

The response was swift and brutal.

The lead industry was massive, wealthy, and had no intention of losing billions in revenue. Their chief scientific defender was Dr. Robert Kehoe, who had spent decades assuring the public that environmental lead was natural and harmless. Kehoe was polished, well-funded, and had the backing of powerful corporations.

When Patterson challenged this narrative, the industry attempted to buy his silence. Representatives visited him offering generous research grants and institutional support. All he had to do was redirect his focus elsewhere.

Patterson refused.

So they tried to destroy him professionally.

His funding from petroleum-connected sources was immediately cut. The industry pressured his university to dismiss him. They used their influence to block his papers from peer-reviewed journals. They publicly dismissed him as an overzealous geologist stepping outside his expertise.

For years, it worked. Patterson was marginalized, labeled an alarmist, and isolated from mainstream scientific discussions.

But Patterson had something the industry couldn't counter: evidence from before the contamination began.

He realized he needed a time machine—a way to prove what Earth's atmosphere was like before automobiles. So he traveled to one of the most remote places on the planet: Greenland.

In brutal, freezing conditions, Patterson and his team drilled deep into ancient glaciers, extracting long cylinders of ice. These ice cores were frozen time capsules. Snow that fell in 1700 was preserved deep in the ice. Snow from 1900 was higher up. Snow from the 1950s was near the surface.

Back in his clean lab, Patterson carefully melted layers of ice from different time periods and measured their lead content.

The results were devastating to the industry's claims.

For thousands of years, atmospheric lead levels were essentially zero. Then, starting precisely in the 1920s—exactly when leaded gasoline was introduced—the levels shot upward like a rocket. The graph was unmistakable. The contamination wasn't natural. It was recent, man-made, and accelerating.

Armed with this irrefutable proof, Patterson returned to the fight.

He testified before congressional committees, sitting across from industry lawyers who tried to confuse the science. He wasn't comfortable with public speaking.

He was nervous, awkward, and preferred the quiet predictability of his laboratory. But he refused to back down.

He told legislators they were poisoning their own children. He showed them the ice core data. He made the invisible visible.

Slowly, reluctantly, the truth broke through.

Other scientists began supporting his findings. Public health advocates took notice. Parents started demanding action. The tide turned.

In the 1970s, the United States passed the Clean Air Act and began the slow process of removing lead from gasoline. It took years of regulatory battles, but eventually, unleaded gasoline became the standard.

The results were nothing short of miraculous.

Within years, blood lead levels in American children dropped by nearly 80%. An entire generation was saved from cognitive impairment, behavioral disorders, and reduced intelligence. Millions of lives were protected from lead-related health problems.

Clair Patterson had won.

Yet when he died in 1995, few outside the scientific community knew his name. He never received a Nobel Prize. He never became wealthy. He simply returned to his laboratory and continued studying the chemistry of the oceans and the history of the Earth.

Patterson's story is a reminder of what integrity looks like when nobody's watching.

It's easy to do the right thing when the crowd is cheering. It's infinitely harder when powerful interests are trying to ruin you, when your career is threatened, when taking the money would be so much easier.

He could have stayed silent. He could have enjoyed a comfortable, well-funded career studying rocks while children's minds were damaged. He could have said, "Not my problem."

But he looked at the data, looked at the world, and decided truth mattered more than comfort.

He gave us the age of the Earth—a number that changed our understanding of time itself.

And then he gave us a future—a world where children could grow up without poison in their lungs.

We often imagine heroes as soldiers, activists, or celebrities. But sometimes a hero is just a stubborn man in a white lab coat, scrubbing a floor over and over, refusing to accept a convenient lie.

He cleaned the room.

And then he cleaned the world.

Source: A Solo Traveler FB page

See also: Wikipedia Clean Air Act

I admit I thought Ralph Nader was behind the Clean Air movement. This is good, to find a scientist who worked for it.

Honoring a founding father

 Today is the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1706). He was a printer, a scientist, an inventor, a writer, the founder of America’s first lending library, and one of the Founding Fathers of America itself. He recalled in his Autobiography (1794) that writing well became “of great Use to me in the Course of my Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement.”

There is a lot more information available about Franklin on line. I leave it to you to pursue.

Silent Sentinels

From "A Mighty Girl" January 18, 2017 

For two and a half years, the "Silent Sentinels" picketed in front of the White House for women's suffrage. This group of determined suffragists was organized by the National Woman's Party, led by suffrage leaders Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. Their vigil began on January 10, 1917 and continued every day and night, except Sunday, until June 1919 when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed both the House and the Senate.

Many of the more than one thousand different women who participated in the vigil were arrested at various times, including 16 suffragists who were arrested on July 14, 1917 and sentenced to 60 days in jail at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia for “obstructing traffic." Although President Woodrow Wilson pardoned this group after three days, Alice Paul and others were famously arrested in October of that year. Paul was sentenced to seven months in prison. To protest the poor conditions of the women held at the Workhouse, Paul led a hunger strike which resulted in her being force-fed.

Press coverage of these abuses, along with on-going protests, strongly influenced the Wilson Administration who declared, in January 1918, that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure" and asked Congress to act. Together with Burns and others in the National Women’s Party, Paul’s dramatic efforts brought the attention of the world to the struggle for women’s rights in America, and led to the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. Its passage marked the victorious end of a 72-year long struggle to achieve equal voting rights for women which had begun at the first women's right conference organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

The story of these courageous women is told in the award-winning book, "With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman's Right to Vote," for readers 10 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/with-courage-and-cloth

For an excellent youth-friendly introduction to the fight for women's suffrage in the US, we highly recommend "Rightfully Ours: How Women Won The Vote" for ages 9 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/rightfully-ours

To learn more about Alice Paul and Lucy Burns' fascinating story and their important legacy in securing women's right to vote, the film "Iron Jawed Angels" is highly recommended for viewers 13 and up at http://www.amightygirl.com/iron-jawed-angels

To introduce children and teens to more amazing women of the Suffrage Movement, check out the reading recommendations in our post, “How Women Won the Vote: Teaching Kids About the U.S. Suffrage Movement, ” at http://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11827

And, for more true stories of inspiring girls and women who worked to change the world for the better, visit our “Activist” section in Biographies at http://amgrl.co/1R6cGAu