Woman and the New Race
Woman and the New Race
Margaret Sanger was a revolutionary, and this book is her manifesto. Written in 1920, in the aftermath of a war that had devastated a generation and in the same year American women gained the right to vote, Woman and the New Race makes a radical argument that still resonates: women will never be free until they control their own bodies. Sanger, who would later found what became Planned Parenthood and serve prison time for distributing birth control information, connects reproductive autonomy to every other struggle. Unwanted children, she argues, perpetuate cycles of poverty, illness, and despair. Mothers trapped by involuntary pregnancy cannot participate fully in society, in the economy, or in their own development. This is not a dry treatise but a passionate call to arms, drawing on the voices of women who wrote to Sanger in desperation, describing their suffering, their deaths from illegal abortions, their inability to care for the children they already had. Sanger believed birth control was not merely a private matter but the cornerstone of a just society, and she made her case with moral urgency and strategic brilliance. The book remains essential reading for understanding where reproductive rights came from and how fiercely they were fought for.
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“Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man’s attitude may be, that problem is hers”
— Margaret Sanger
“The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Margaret Sanger””
— Margaret Sanger
“She had chained herself to her place in society and the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only chains thus strong could have bound her lot as a brood animal for the masculine civilizations of the world.””
— Margaret Sanger
“Conditions, rather than theories, facts, rather than dreams, govern the problem. They place it squarely upon the shoulders of woman. She has learned that whatever the moral responsibility of the man in this direction may be, he does not discharge it. She has learned that lovable and considerate as the individual husband may be, she has nothing to expect from men in the mass, when they make laws and decree customs. She knows that regardless of what ought to be, the brutal, unavoidable fact is that she will never receive her freedom until she takes it for herself.””
— Margaret Sanger
