Terrible Virtue audiobook

While I knew of Margaret Sanger, I didn't know many of the details of her life. This book brings Sanger to life, showing her drive and her passion. It covers her entire life, yet I never felt like it skirted much. It was an insightful look at what life was like for women, what the freethinking community was like, and the challenges Sanger encountered as she paved the way for women.

Margaret Sanger has influenced the lives of millions of women. Most of us know the name, but possibly little else. Ellen Feldman recreates Sanger's life and times in a fictionalized biography that shows Sanger in a sympathetic light, but introduces voices that offer competing interpretations of Sanger's personality and behavior. What seems unquestionable is Sanger's courage and determination. A very timely subject and engagingly written.

Margaret Sanger had a rough childhood; born in 1879, as one of eleven children. Her miserable mother and drunk father had little to share amongst their many children. The older girls escaped as quickly as possible and Margaret tended to many of the younger ones. With a sharp eye and quick wit Margaret found herself wanting more than the average woman and she refused to believe this was not possible. As she grew both in age and maturity, Margaret married and became a mother to her own three children. She had a lifelong love of learning and thirst for freedom and equality that often could not be quenched. While rebels and socialists fought for rights and the vote, Margaret’s part time nursing position brought her to the tenements along New York’s lower east side. While her political friends held dinners where they discussed world views and downed champagne, Margaret climbed the stairwells of decrepit buildings where dreams were crushed and women were dying. These women asked – no, they begged - Margaret for a way to stop having more babies. There were no alternatives for these women and no restraints for these men they were married to. Margaret spent her entire adult life fighting to establish birth control and planned parenthood. She was an outspoken character that was said to embellish the facts but much of what she fought for changed the lives of innumerable women. We are still fighting for these rights. These legal rights that are made by men. Do I have to tell you this is a must read? Author Ellen Feldman narrates this easy to follow story, the life of a woman that to this day continues to reach out to us. Read it and decide for yourself, but please read it.

There has been a recent trend of historical novels featuring women many of us don't know much about. Paula McLain's The Paris Wife about Hadley Hemingway, Ernest's first wife, began the trend a few years ago, and some more recent ones include McLain's Circling the Sun (about aviatrix Beryl Markham) and a book I recently loved and reviewed The First Daughter, about Thomas' Jefferson's daughter Patsy. (My review here)Ellen Feldman's Terrible Virtue tells the story of Margaret Sanger, widely regarded as the woman who helped bring about birth control education for women and the founder of Planned Parenthood. I didn't know much about Sanger, so I was curious to read more about her.Sanger's mother had thirteen children and her father was an alcoholic who fancied himself a socialist atheist philosopher. Sanger watched her mother give birth year after year and become a shell of a woman, worn out by caring for so many children without any help from her husband.Margaret was intelligent and thanks to her older sisters who raised enough money, she was able to attend nursing school. She also became passionate about social justice, as well as men. She had relationships with many men and believed in free love.Yet she married Bill Sanger and they had three children- two sons and daughter named Peggy. Peggy was diagnosed with polio, a diagnosis Margaret disagreed with, and she refused to let her daughter wear a leg brace.One day Margaret was asked to speak to some women about health issues, and she began to talk about contraception, which was a forbidden topic at the time. Women were hungry for more information and soon Margaret's talks drew more and more women.She also drew attention from authorities and Margaret was arrested. Margaret fled the country for Europe, leaving behind her family. When she eventually returned, she devoted so much of her time and energy to the issue of contraception and women's health that her relationship with her husband and children suffered.The story is told from Margaret's point of view, with some characters- her husband, her son, her sister, her lawyer and others in her life- telling their story in small doses. I think the novel may have been stronger if we heard more of their voices.It was difficult for me to completely empathize with Margaret. She is, to say the least, a very complicated character. She was a pioneer in women's health, and her determination to help women understand and have access to contraception changed the world for women. So many poor women were trapped, forced year after year to have babies because contraception was not available to them.But she wasn't a good mother or wife. It's one thing to say that her husband knew what he was getting into with Margaret and her extramarital affairs, but her children didn't deserve to have an absentee mother. They were sent a boarding school that was horrible, and at the end of her life, I wonder how much she regretted not having a better relationship with them.I recommend Terrible Virtue as it brings to light how difficult life was for women because they didn't have any control over basic health care regarding contraception. The world changed dramatically for women once this happened, and Margaret Sanger was the one who changed it.

"A woman's duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in her eyes, to have an ideal, to speak and act in defiance of convention."And that is what Margaret Sanger did. She looked everyone in the face with a go-to-hell look in her eyes, and she spoken and acted in defiance of convention. Having watched her mother die older before her time, having raised 13 children, lost about 5, Margaret both loved and hated her mother. She loved her mother yet was disgusted with what her mother was, with what she let herself be: a broodmare...a baby incubator.This novel is told in the first person, as though Margaret is looking back on her years and her life, her goals, trials, losses, loves. Personally, I loved it. First-person writing can make or break a book. In this case, it worked. The writing was engrossing; the memories were vivid. I never felt as though they were being narrated to me, but that I was living them myself.I went with her from being called a devil's child and falling over her feet in the woods to her first marriage and the birth of her three children and the battles she fought inside herself between what she should want (what society told her she should want...a loving husband, a nice house, three adorable children) and what she really wanted (free love with whomever she pleased, a basic place in the middle of artists and socialists, and her main child: the birth control movement.Full review is on my blog. You didn't think I was done yet, did you? http://wwwbookbabe.blogspot.com/2017/...

Terrible Virtue, by Ellen Feldman, is one of the most directly relevant pieces of historical fiction I’ve read in a long time. I can usually find connections between the news and what I’ve been reading; it’s how my brain works. But I genuinely hope that Terrible Virtue gets a lot of attention when it comes out next month. Feldman’s book is a fictional account of the life and work of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger...Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review.

Excellent read!!!!!

4.5

For me, reading Terrible Virtue was like watching a fine one-woman play. With the skill of an accomplished actor, Ellen Feldman first inhabits her subjects, then tells their story from the inside out. Terrible Virtue exposes Margaret Sanger's personal and very public struggles to free women from their endless cycles of childbearing and poverty. In the early 1900s Sanger advocated birth control at a time when the subject was forbidden by law. She and the women of her movement were ridiculed, abused and even jailed for suggesting that women had the right to choose. Remarkably, their struggles continue to this day. This is an excellent and timely book.

This was an interesting take on the background of Margaret Sanger. It seemed like the author did through research on the history the time and Sanger's background. I enjoyed the insight blurbs from the other members involved in the story; they revealed Sanger's assumptions and arrogance in some areas, giving the character more depth and making her much closer to the actual person that she represented.

Excellent historical novel about Margaret Sanger and the fight for contraception rights. Sanger was a fascinating woman who pushed beyond all social norms. She had a sad life and at times it's hard to read, particularly her relationship with her children, but Margaret Sanger never gave up and was a champion of women's health. Hard to believe we are still in danger of losing hard-won ground for abortion and contraception rights.

Timely- very timely. Extremely well written and a good example of the genre of novelizations of an important historical figure's life. I liked it and reocmmned. THanks Edelweiss and Harper for the ARC!

Having read and loved the author’s other two books — Loving Frank and The Paris Wife— I was looking forward to enjoying this one on Margaret Sanger as well. And Ellen Feldman didn’t disappoint. Within the context of the current political movement to again chain women to their biology, this is an absolutely essential read! Like the early suffragettes who sacrificed their health, their family life, their social status, their physical bodies, Margaret Sanger did for women’s control over their bodies and health what Susan B Anthony and others did for women’s right to vote. That Sanger was so disparaged toward the end of her life as Hitler rose to power and she was inextricably (and grossly unfairly) linked to the eugenics movement is truly a disgrace, and Feldman’s attempts here to set the record straight are admirable—and a crucially important reminder of the context in which the later years of Sanger’s work flourished. As a student of feminist studies I personally loved the insight into other major players of the socialist, communist, and women’s movements early in the 1900…. Emma Goldman, John Reed, Alice Paul, Big Bill Haywood. A wonderful history lesson of what it has taken to win the freedoms we now have and why it’s so important to keep fighting for those we recently lost and are still in danger of losing!