By 1925, Margaret Sanger was in the thick of her campaign to bring birth control to women everywhere. In 1921, she founded the American Birth Control League, the organization that would grow into Planned Parenthood. Two years before "The Children's Era," she opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, which is a long and intimidating name for the first legal birth control clinic in the United States.

The legality of her actions was a huge part of Sanger's work in the 1920s. Much of her previous advocacy had been illegal and had led to fun things like jail time and fleeing the country (which, hey, could be fun depending on where you're going), but in the 1920s she turned her attention to working with existing laws or finding ways to challenge them through the legal system.

"The Children's Era" was originally delivered to a bunch of people who chose to attend an international conference on birth control and population control, so in theory they were ready to pick up what Sanger was throwing down.

However, there's no evidence that this one speech turned on a light bulb in their brains and they suddenly started caring about women's and children's health. Instead, it appears that they kept following their agendas and Sanger kept following hers, continuing to face the kind of praise and criticism for her work that she still gets today.

Now, as we've discussed in greater detail in the Introduction section, there are some things in this speech, like eugenics and bashing on the poor, that we're not so eager to get our hands dirty with today. Plus, there are some terms we just don't use because, well, they're offensive.

When we read this speech today, we also need to read it in the context of how Margaret Sanger is viewed nowadays, which means we need to know a little something about the controversy over Planned Parenthood in the 2010s, because the memory of Margaret Sanger is all wrapped up in it. (Source)

Today, the anti-Planned Parenthood crowd totally uses the sketchy agendas and questionable racism Margaret Sanger was linked with to try to sully her reputation and suggest she couldn't have done anything good.

On the other hand, the pro-Planned Parenthood crowd, while often acknowledging her faults, would call her St. Margaret if she hadn't been so opposed to the Catholic Church.

So all that means there are a lot of emotional opinions and mudslinging to wade through when we look at Margaret Sanger. We need to understand both the positions for and positions against Sanger in order to try to get past them to look at what Sanger actually said and what she accomplished.