Margaret Higgins was born into a working-class family on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, the sixth of eleven children. Her father, a stonecutter, was an activist for woman suffrage and Socialism. Sanger was educated at St. Mary’s School in Corning, New York, and then attended Claverack College in Claverack and the Hudson River Institute in Hudson. She left school in 1899, owing to the financial constraints of her family. After caring for her mother in her final illness, Sanger enrolled at the White Plains Hospital Nursing School. In 1902 she married the architect William Sanger, with whom she had three children. In 1912, having settled in New York City, Sanger started work in the slums of the Lower East Side, where she saw the devastating effects of unplanned pregnancies on mothers and their children. That year she began writing a column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for the Socialist newspaper the New York Call, in which “Sexual Impulse” appeared in two parts.