Margaret Sanger

Born Margaret Higgins on September 14, 1879, she worked as a nurse in New York City's slums in the early 1900s, treating mothers desperate to avoid more children - many of whom had turned to back-alley abortions. Believing women should decide if and when to have children, she began campaigning to legalize contraceptives, deliberately breaking laws that banned even discussing them. Her activism, shaped by first-wave feminism and also by eugenics and Malthusian population concerns, led to court rulings that opened access: one allowed physicians to dispense contraceptives, another - Griswold v. Connecticut - legalized them nationwide for couples. She built a network of dozens of clinics offering reproductive health services (though never abortion), founded the organizations that became Planned Parenthood, and in the early 1950s persuaded philanthropists to fund Gregory Pincus in developing the first birth control pill. She died in Arizona on September 6, 1966.