Activist Margaret Sanger is responsible for one of the most significant medical and social changes of the 20th Century – giving women the means to control the size of their families.

The former nurse, who’d witnessed the aftermath of backstreet abortions and her own mother’s premature death after 18 pregnancies, founded the birth control movement in the United States and helped to spread it internationally. She was also instrumental in developing the pill, now one of the world’s most popular contraceptives.

Her campaign was enormously controversial – she faced fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and was arrested several times for breaking strict anti-contraception laws. And her legacy is contested today – her association with the then powerful eugenics movement has thrown doubt on her motives and drawn allegations of racism by some. Even Planned Parenthood, the organisation she helped create, has distanced itself from her.

Bridget Kendall discusses her inspiration and battle against the powerful status quo with Ellen Chesler, a biographer of Margaret Sanger from New York; Elaine Tyler May, professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota and author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation; Sanjam Ahluwalia, professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Northern Arizona University and author of Reproductive Restraints: Birth Control in India, 1877-1947; and Dr Caroline Rusterholz, a historian of populations, medicine and sexuality at the University of Cambridge.

Producer: Simon Tulett

(Photo: Margaret Sanger circa 1915. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)