To summarize: Sanger was born in 1879 into a large Irish-American family in upstate New York. Growing up, she saw how her mother’s health had been ruined by her 18 pregnancies (11 children, 7 miscarriages). In one of the more chilling incidents in Woman Rebel, young Maggie’s father, an artist and political radical, takes her along to a graveyard in the middle of the night to dig up the body of her dead baby brother so he can make a death mask to comfort her mother. (It was not entirely misguided: she is, indeed, comforted, not freaked out.)
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“If you search her name on the internet, you get extremely varied descriptions of her,” says Bagge. “It’s like the story of the blind men describing an elephant. I got the sense that she had been quite deliberately maligned. Now people equate eugenics with Hitler. This was not the case in the 1920s. Her take was not much different from what the average American thinks now.”
Bagge hopes that Woman Rebel will be the first of a series of books about remarkable women from the first half of the 20th century. He’s currently working on a graphic biography of Zora Neale Hurston, the novelist and anthropologist. “She had an amazing and ultimately tragic life,” he says. You can ask him about both Sanger and Hurston tomorrow, 10/19, at 7 PM at Quimby’s, where he’ll be showing a slideshow about Sanger’s life and talking about the creation of Woman Rebel.
