Bonus: Margaret Sanger and her unusual last name
Who doesn’t love last name origin stories!
According to HowManyofMe.com, “Sanger” is the 8,497th most popular last name in the United States. In total, there are fewer than 5,000 people in the U.S. with the last name Sanger out of 329.4 million people.
For comparison, my last name (Burton) is the 255th most popular and there are over 130,000 people in this country with it. We are the populous Welsh.
So what does Sanger mean? The Surname Database gives us two options with the same root. It is “is either an occupational name for a singer or chorister, or, a nickname for a person who was always singing. It is derived from the Old English pre 7th Century ‘sangere’ or ‘songere’ meaning ‘singer’.”
“Ohh” you’re probably saying to yourself. So someone back in the line of one of Margaret Sanger’s grandparents was either a professional singer, roaming the countryside and hopefully telling people of the beneficial uses of sheep intestine via song (NSFW), or annoying all who knew him with his incessant singing of bawdy ballads that no one found funny but him.
Sanger was definitely pro-eugenics but also very pro-birth control in a time when she could be and was jailed for talking about it. This complicated legacy makes her a figure whose mistakes and triumphs we can learn from.
If you’re interested in when you were legally allowed to teach other people about birth control, the answer is horrifying because the answer for married people is the 1960s and for unmarried people, the 1970s. Yes. The 1970s.
The 1965 Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut overturned a state law prohibiting dissemination of contraception information based on a constitutional right to privacy for marital relationships. In 1971, Eisenstadt v. Baird extended this right to privacy to single people.
Happy Friday!