The Mother of Planned Parenthood : WOMAN OF VALOR: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, <i> By Ellen Chesler (Simon and Schuster: $27.50; 640 pp.)</i>

Eighteen, unmarried and in need of contraceptives in 1962, I had no idea about the struggle for birth control described in this book, or the existence of an early 20th-Century feminist movement, or what the forces were that determined that a middle-class young woman like myself had nowhere to go for reproductive advice in the largest city in the richest country on earth. All I knew was the name “Margaret Sanger,” whoever that might be. I looked it up in the New York phone book and went to 17 West 16th St. Sanger’s biographer, Ellen Chesler, describes the building hundreds of thousands of women remember: “an elegant five-story town house,” the home of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau.

A sympathetic staff of women demonstrated contraceptive devices on a 3D model of the female pelvis (wonderful models like these remained in use for years in scattered villages in India, where Margaret Sanger took them in 1935). The nurse explained the options, and asked no embarrassing questions about marital status.

What the clinic was doing was illegal in many states under the 19th-Century Comstock laws, which defined contraception as “obscene.” Not until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 did the Supreme Court guarantee a nation-wide right of the married to contraception; the unmarried had to wait until 1972 for the Eisenstadt v. Baird case, only a year before the nurturant and intimate clinic on 16th Street finally closed, ending what might well deserve to be called the Sanger Era, a narrow but tough thread of politics stretching for half a century between two great women’s movements.

Every modern woman has her own birth-control story, and in most of these Margaret Sanger plays some part, visibly or otherwise, whether in Japan or England, Tucson or New York. Reading Ellen Chesler’s definitive biography of this great fighter, the founder of Planned Parenthood, readers may discover pieces of their own histories. This is the story of how women’s lives have changed in a fundamental respect since Sanger was arrested for opening American’s first birth-control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916.

Like abortion today, birth control served as a symbol of larger social changes that made almost everyone nervous. Emerging from jail to thrilling fanfare and furious abuse, the vivid Sanger seized this powerful symbol of the new freedoms she wanted and, abandoning the broader revolutionary movements of her youth, spent the rest of her life trying to legitimize that simple information I learned at her clinic. She knew it was earth-shaking--the little formula for separating sexual pleasure from reproduction.

In the early days, it looked as if Sanger would carry all before her. She won an initial victory in 1918, when a New York court exempted doctors from the obscenity laws if they could claim that a patient needed birth control for her health. But this surprising success woke a sleeping giant, the American Catholic Church. From then on, for weary years, Sanger had to rely on the authority of doctors, her only bulwark against an increasingly organized religious lobby that fought her on every front. The galloping forces of modernity were with her--New Women, eugenicists, her mentors Emma Goldman and her sometime-lover, the English sex radical Havelock Ellis, along with businessmen like Charles Goodyear, ready and willing to risk fortunes in rubber--but the church fused a powerful opposition.

Born in Corning, N. Y., in 1879, Sanger was an Irish Catholic herself, though her father was ultimately buried outside the churchyard, an improvident renegade and social radical. Working-class and ambitious, she went into nursing, identifying with and serving the poor. In the heady days before World War I, she found her chance for self-expression and happiness, not in the image of her mother’s piety and patient bearing of 11 children but in the idea of a new kind of woman to be found in the Bohemian Greenwich Village to which she gravitated as a young wife and mother.

Initially a militant socialist and a cultural radical, she changed her friends and her tactics as her birth- control movement grew. To make “obscene” contraception legal and respectable, Sanger had to learn where the money was. She raised millions. Her radical desire for women’s freedom remained the bedrock of this work and made her seek birth control for women of every class, nationality and race. But the new monied friends who helped her often had their own more paternalistic agendas, and some were outright racists, eager to limit the numbers of blacks, immigrants or “the unfit.”

Former biographers have either lionized Sanger or, in a healthy reaction, have tended to blame her for this racism and for reformist compromises that may well have undercut a more revolutionary agenda for women and for social services in general. Chesler’s strategy is quite different. Her study is encyclopedic, a style that dissipates any such summations.

While refusing to judge Sanger harshly, Chesler also resists Sanger’s notorious charm, rarely quoting her glowing, rallying prose. A careful historian, Chesler keeps her skirts down in the rhetorical high wind blowing around both Sanger and birth control, and gradually establishes the embattled context of Sanger’s development. She argues persuasively that Sanger’s real political conversion was not to the class-bound policies of her benefactors but to “political pragmatism” in a world of backlash. Even President Theodore Roosevelt had too much to lose politically to endorse birth control.

The great strength of this biography is Chesler’s gift for understanding the daily life of politics, the maneuvers, the assignations with strange bedfellows. We come to see the importance of Sanger’s great will to prevail, and to trust Chesler’s account. Children, friends, husbands and lovers sweep in and out, ideologies of race and class and population control come and go, while Sanger’s single-minded drive to win birth control by any means takes center stage--an emphasis probably true to Sanger’s own priorities.

The weakness in Chesler’s method is that it sacrifices an overview by succumbing to the pragmatics that drove Sanger herself. Chesler seems to share Sanger’s suspicion of large, framing ideas; at times in this narrative, Sanger’s early radicalism comes off as something healthfully outgrown, while her compromises become wise capitulations to market forces.

But this plot--the move from leftism to good sense--leaves out the long-term consequences of Sanger’s practical politics, deals, accommodations. For example, racism is a part of birth control’s history, a fact that requires more solemn recognition than it gets here. Of course Sanger’s choices are not to blame for the amazing shortfall of U.S. health care, but we could have used more maps to organize our thoughts about such relevant and momentous matters as the medicalization of birth control, the checkered history of eugenics, and the varied meanings of population-control movements. Large subjects like these keep flickering through Chesler’s pages, but they never acquire the weight of themes that deepen as we read.

All the same, “Woman of Valor” is a treasure. Chesler’s serious attention to the evidence creates a rich resource. Sanger was both loved and reviled, and readers will excavate their own Margaret, whose passionate work gave rise to the 900 clinics now delivering reproductive services of all kinds under the umbrella of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Though I may still have my criticisms of Sanger, I am left with an image that makes me revere her anyway, and reminds me of the service she once rendered me: A 19-year-old from Alabama writes Sanger describing her brief love affair with Tom, who had made her pregnant, got her an illegal abortion, then abandoned her. Now she wants to marry but feels ashamed. Should she tell her new lover about this sordid past? Sanger answers this cry from the heart:

“You must not think of yourself or your relations with Tom, whom you have loved, in the wrong light. If you loved him and he loved you, any relations between you were just as holy and as pure in the sight of God as if a marriage certificate had been given you. You must not look upon this relationship as if you were a bad girl.”

God and romance and the family are still in their conventional places in these words, but the year was 1924, and a response like this represents not only a coming change in values but also the compassion and respect Sanger always felt in the face of the daily, grinding need of the millions she helped. Her romanticism arose in part from her exciting new hopes for the lives of women, and she herself lived a wild, free, self-fulfilling life, taking sex and power as she could find them, enjoying her adventures, and never feeling like a bad girl because of them.

“Woman of Valor” gives Sanger the stature she deserves, and this tale of exhausting, patient effort enters the world when U.S. reproductive history takes its next lurch forward or back, as the Supreme Court decides, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, whether or not it will end almost 20 years of judicial protection for a basic right to abortion.

What Sanger once went through has happened again. Women’s gains in the early 1970s have awakened an enormous, effective resistance. Politicians like George Bush--who was once, as Chesler reminds us, a staunch defender of the right to abortion--have cynically turned tail before anti-abortion lobbies. But with Chesler’s hefty book in hand, we gain perspective: Abortion was a right Sanger never even dared mention. In the long view, women’s self-determination has already increased markedly.

But are there decades more to go? A few more long lifetimes of struggle? Or will voters give women more power over their reproductive lives by the choices they make this very November, by electing supporters of the Freedom of Choice Act?

If there’s a nondenominational heaven, Margaret Sanger is watching, mentally tallying votes.