Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger returned to a troubled country. By 1915, social, economic, and ideological forces were visibly transforming the most sacrosanct aspects of nineteenth-century life: the condition of the family, the status of women, and the nature of sexuality.

When Mrs. Sanger called contraception birth control and made it a public issue, she was not inventing a new social practice. But she did inject a new term and a new degree of frankness into the debate on what was coming to be called the sexual revolution. The place of birth control in that ( revolution, and the context within which it was debated, depended directly on its relation to the transformations affecting the family, woman, and sex.

The nineteenth-century American considered the family, as Henry James put it, "the original germ-cell which lies at the base of all that we call society." That view drew support from the findings of American social scientists, who, in their Germanic search for the origins of all institutions, repeatedly demonstrated the initial formation of society in the microcosm of the family. And the sacredness of the idea of the family had more than an evolutionary derivation. In a country plagued by the divisive effects of civil war, territorial expansion, and the birth of modern industrialism, men put a high premium on the forces working for order and cohesion. The family, they thought, was such a force. Its significance, therefore, was less personal than social.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the very forces against which the home had been deemed the most effective defense appeared to many to be undermining the home itself. Critics blamed especially the recrudescence of primitive individualism, as evidenced by growing divorce rates, for the destruction of the traditional family. Several observers saw that ruinous spirit best typified in the dramas of Henrik Ibsen, whose philosophy was described as "bold and uncompromising selfishness." Many Americans agreed with the literary critic Chauncey Hawkins that in the face of such egotism, "the family, that institution which we have long regarded as the unit of civilization, the foundation of the state," could not long survive.

The alarm had little substance. The nineteenth-century family, which the Victorians regarded as a contemporary embodiment of the primeval social unit, was in fact a relatively modern institution. As the French historian Phillipe Aries has convincingly shown, the concept of the family did not emerge until the late Renaissance, and then only among the upper classes. The apparent disintegration of the family which the late Victorians decried in fact represented its adjustment to new living conditions brought about by urbanization and industrialization. But those processes by no means spelled the death of the family.