Margaret Sanger Slee first appeared in Tucson in 1934. She was already well known for her sponsorship of birth control, particularly among poor, underprivileged women.
Many believed she was ahead of her time in her crusade to encourage open discussions about sex, procreation and contraception, but in all probability she was the right person for a very tough job.
The years she spent in Tucson became very important to her during times when she faced vilification from the public and press. The town was her haven from those who sought to silence her rhetoric. Yet even in the middle of the desert, she worked tirelessly on women’s health issues.
Margaret Louisa Higgins was born to Irish parents on Sept. 14, 1879, in Corning, New York.
Her mother suffered from tuberculosis, and after giving birth to 11 children, Anne Higgins died at the age of 50. Margaret bore her mother’s proclivity for tuberculosis and endured several bouts of the disease throughout her life.
She wanted to become a doctor, but after her mother’s death, she left school to work as a nurse. In 1902, at the age of 23, she married architect William Sanger.
Shortly after her third child was born in 1910, Margaret took a position at Lillian Wald’s Visiting Nurses Association on the Lower East Side of New York City where immigrants arrived daily with little money, language barriers and limited knowledge of health care.
She was soon speaking out for indigent women through the Socialist Party and wrote for the Socialist newspaper The Call, producing a column entitled “What Every Girl Should Know.”
The Federal Comstock Law, passed in 1873, condemned all contraceptive information and devices as “obscene,” outlawing the use, sale or mailing of anything having to do with contraception. When Margaret’s column was ruled obscene according to the law, The Call ran the title, “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.”
In 1914, she started her own publication, The Woman Rebel, but the Post Office again claimed she was mailing indecent material and confiscated the first issue. Margaret continued to publish the magazine until she was arrested that August.
To avoid prosecution, she fled to Europe, but when her 5-year-old daughter, Peggy, was diagnosed with pneumonia, Margaret returned to the United States.
Peggy Sanger died in November 1915, and public sympathy for Margaret may have played a role in the dismissal of the charges against her.
In 1916, she set out on tour the country espousing her views on birth control. Her appearance started a riot in St. Louis, and officials in Portland, Oregon, threatened to arrest her. Officials in several cities refused to allow her to speak.
She opened the first birth control clinic in New York City in October 1916. A week later, she was arrested, tried and found guilty of dispensing birth control products. She served 30 days in prison.
Margaret formed the American Birth Control League in 1921. Two years later, New York City opened the first physician-run birth-control clinic, providing legal contraceptive counseling to married women.
Margaret and William Sanger divorced in 1921, and she married 3-in-One Oil inventor Noah Slee in 1922. Slee’s affluence afforded Margaret the opportunity to travel extensively, advocating her views on birth control.
In 1934, Margaret and her son, Stuart, headed for Arizona, hoping to cure Stuart’s severe allergies.
Arriving in Tucson, she was not at all impressed with the heat that greeted her. In a letter to a friend, she wailed, “It’s sizzling hot — I drip. Sleep under the stars at night but with bats flying overhead & rattle snakes underneath & spiders watching for their midnight meal.”
She spoke to Tucson organizations advocating her views on birth control and recruited women of wealth and political connections to open a birth-control clinic.
Renting a small house in the barrio district, she and her followers started Clinica para Madres, the Mother’s Clinic. Charging $1 or less per visit, the nurse on duty had little to occupy her for the first three weeks as no one dared venture through the clinic’s doors.
When the Comstock Law was struck down in 1936, the little clinic began to flourish.
Margaret fell in love with Tucson, despite its heat, and whenever she left she missed “... the indescribable Catalinas, on which light and clouds played in never-ending changes of pattern.”
At the beginning of World War II, an emerging movement encouraged women to have more children for the betterment of the country. Margaret was condemned as a communist and anarchist for her views on birth control.
During the war, she and her husband spent much of their time in Tucson. Noah Slee died here in 1943. That same year, her two sons, Stuart and Grant, were sent to war.
When the war ended and her boys safely home, she took off for Europe in a quest to bring birth control out of the dark ages.
But Tucson was where she wanted to be.
She built a red brick home shaped like a fan so she could see the mountains from every window.
One of her granddaughters recalled her grandmother “Mimi” as a woman who “loved champagne, daiquiris, flambéed desserts, and great big salads that she made at the table. ... Her parties in Tucson were fabulous.”
Margaret was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, and served as the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation from 1952 until 1959. In 1960, the FDA approved use of the birth-control pill.
At age 83, Margaret moved into a convalescent home in Tucson.
The University of Arizona awarded her an honorary doctor of humanities degree in 1965.
That same year, Japan presented her with one of its highest honors, the Third Order of the Sacred Crown, for her diligence in bringing birth control to its country.
President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom shortly before her death on Sept. 6, 1966.
Time Magazine named Margaret Sanger Slee one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
