TERRIBLE VIRTUE
A Novel by Ellen Feldman
Harriet Hoffman at an informational picket protesting the privatization and undermining of public housing in NYC.
Margaret Sanger was not just a fighter for access to birth control and the founder of Planned Parenthood. She was a political maverick who defied all kinds of cultural norms at great personal cost and was attacked as much for her personal lifestyle decisions as for the courageous campaign she led to provide birth control information for poor women. As a political activist and mother of two children, I deeply felt the emotional pain and the social cost of her refusal to abide by the rules of the time, especially her decision to reject the expectations of traditional motherhood.
Actually universal access to birth control information took a very long time to be accepted in the U.S. Before the sexual revolution in the mid-1960s there was little talk about birth control. Those of us who were adolescents in the late fifties and early sixties can certainly remember what that was like. “Nice” girls didn’t have sex and certainly didn’t tell anyone if they did; abortions were illegal until 1973 when Roe vs. Wade was decided; and you usually had to either get married or put your child up for adoption if you got pregnant. In fact sex education in schools was practically nonexistent until about 20 years ago.
Sadly, this is a very timely book. It is one hundred years since Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, NY, and today Planned Parenthood is under serious attack. Sanger chose Brownsville for her clinic because it was home to poor women whose lives and health were being negatively impacted by their lack of knowledge and access to birth control. While the attacks on Planned Parenthood today are focused on abortion, most people are unaware that Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of low cost health care and birth control in the U.S. An estimated one in five women in the U.S. today has visited a Planned Parenthood health center at least once in her life. Without Planned Parenthood it is young and low income women and men who will likely be the ones to lose needed health services.
Harriet Hoffman is a consultant specializing in grant writing and helping people maximize their Medicare and social security benefits. She is the coordinator of the popular monthly independent volunteer gathering, Talkin’ Independence, a program of IndependentVoting.org and the New York City Independence Clubs.
