Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in America, spearheaded the birth control movement, and founded both organizations that later merged to form the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

"Maggie" Higgins was born in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children of a freethinking Irish immigrant stonecutter, Michael Hennessy Higgins, and his wife, Anne Purcell Higgins, a sickly, passive, woman. Margaret never accepted the patriarchal family structure, and mourned her mother's early death, hastened by repeated pregnancies. Although she considered men in the style of her father to be sexual tyrants, Margaret admired her father's his leftist iconoclastic ideas, and shared many political and ideological heroes with him.

The family fortunes declined after 1894 when Michael Hennessy alienated the local Roman Catholic constituency by engaging the atheist socialist Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) to speak at a public meeting in Corning. Margaret always longed to escape from Corning's...