The Crusader : A Novel on the Life of Margaret Sanger - Noel B. Gerson (used)

Hardcover. Little, Brown & Company. 1970. ok condition.

Mrs. Margaret Higgins Sanger was physically a tiny woman, with dark red hair and a piquant face and a brisk bearing. She could be gentle, charming and persuasive. She could also be willful and aggressive; some people found her hellishly difficult to deal with. She was possessed with the singleminded zeal of the true visionary, and she dedicated her inexhaustible energy, her whole being, her whole life to a cause: birth control.

This novel tells Margaret Sanger's story; it makes a tale as dramatic as any pure fiction though it is firmly based in fact. Margaret Sanger's crusade took its first impetus from her experiences in the seething tenements of New York in the early 1900's. A trained nurse, the young Margaret visited countless families — and unmarried women too - who were too poor to cope with even one child but who produced six or eight or ten children simply because they didn't know how to stop. Over and over, mothers implored Margaret for advice, thinking she must have a secret that would help them stop the children coming. But Margaret, to her despair and mounting fury, had nothing to tell them.

What was worse, she knew nowhere she could send these women for help. The medical profession, along with the rest of society in the United States in the first years of this century, was still shackled by Victorian prudery combined with ignorance and wild misinformation. Most doctors could recommend only that women stay away from their husbands. Margaret Sanger grew increasingly appalled — and increasingly determined to change the picture.