The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective

Margaret Sanger was undoubtedly one of the most influential women of the twentieth century. Her name was once a household word. Even today, the organization she founded, Planned Parenthood, receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government and draws generously from the world's largest foundations. With close ties to similar organizations around the world, its influence is truly global. Yet few Americans know anything about Margaret Sanger or the ideals to which she dedicated her life.

Perhaps for the first time, this book takes Margaret Sanger seriously as a thinker and offers the definitive reference to what she believed. It places what she said in historical context with no less than thirty-one chapters of prologue that prepare readers for the concluding twelve chapters which constitute Sanger's own best-selling 1922 classic, The Pivot of Civilization, introduced by the noted writer H. G. Wells. This is the book to read to find out what she really believed.

To give but one example, Sanger violently clashed with a once-influential movement that constantly fretted about 'race suicide.' A typical biography of Sanger might have a few paragraphs in which the author gives an opinion about that movement. This book does not leave readers captive to anyone's biases. It has no less than eleven chapters quoting extensively from all sides of that once-heated debate. It takes you back to the first written mention of the term and shows how the concept expanded, year by year, until it became a weapon to alter what was being taught at elite women's colleges and to change what was expected of educated, professional women. These are not isolated quotes taken out of context.

Each writer is allowed to argue in great detail. Two of these preliminary chapters are long out-of-print and hard-to-get articles by Sanger herself and two are by her arch-foe, President Theodore Roosevelt. You could spend weeks searching through a large university library to find even part of what is in this challenging and provocative book. Why, you ask, is that long ago clash important? That's like asking why slavery, outlawed almost a century and a half ago, is important to race relations. When you hear a feminist warn of those who intend to "force motherhood" on unwilling women, knowingly or not, she is reacting to that once heated debate. And when she complains that men simply "don't get it" about reproductive issues, she is referring, yet again, to an era when who was having children was an all too public issue.

This book brings that once familar debate out of its dark closet and into the light of day. In short, this book is a must read for those who want to get to the heart of contemporary debate about some of our most pressing social issues. What happened then influences how each of us thinks and acts today.