Anita Clair Fellman

Always the pragmatist

That two laudatory biographies of long-term female political activists, Ellen Cheslers of Margaret Sanger and Blanche Wiesen Cooks first volume on Eleanor Roosevelt, should appear at virtually the same time perhaps reflects how beleaguered feminists felt at that point. They, like liberals, needed heroes after twelve years of conservative administrations, and those tenacious reformers who kept battling even when the political and social climates were inhospitable seemed especially admirable. Given the ongoing backlash against womens reproductive autonomy, Sangers single-minded fifty-year campaign for widespread access to legal birth control becomes of particular interest. Ellen Chesler, a historian who interrupted her scholarship for eight years to serve as chief of staff to New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, acknowledges that her own practical experience as a woman in the political world informed the way she looked at her subject. While critical of Sanger for many things, her unwillingness to share the leadership of the birth control movement, her total cynicism about the Catholic Church, her willful naivete about the ambiguous lessons of science for fertility control, her neglect of her children, Chesler looks with understanding and approval on Sangers pragmatic willingness to make compromises and alliances she believed necessary to the success of her cause. In this richly detailed, important study, based on a much wider range of archival and oral history sources than any previous biography of Sanger, she seeks to identify the resources-financial, political, intellectual, and psychological-that allowed her notorious subject to fight for a cause that met so much organized resistance. Her carefully nuanced portrait is also a defense of Sanger from David Kennedys depiction of her in Birth Control in America: the Career of Margaret Sanger (1970) as an overly emotional reformer who ceded the birth control movement to the forces of social control and from Linda Gordons denial of her as a