The middle child of a large and poor Victorian family in Corning, New York, Sanger learned to dream at an early age from a magnetic Irish father who squandered away his artisan talents and his humane social vision on far too much talk and drink. From an overburdened but resourceful mother and several older sisters, however, she was lucky to absorb a powerful motivation to improve her own lot and the essential habits of self-discipline that made it possible to do so. One parent taught her to defy, the other to comport. She always warred between the two but took away from both a distinctive resolve to invest in a better life for herself and for others.

Never one to romanticize the poverty of her youth, she took refuge as a young teenager in Catholicism, then quickly converted to a socialist catechism, jettisoning both after World War I in favor of a more reasoned confidence in the ability of science and education to shape human conduct and in the possibility of reform through bold and progressive public initiatives. Her mentor through this passage was no less than H.G. Wells, the renowned British man of letters and influence, who foresaw the development of states that would mix free markets with centralized planning for social welfare. Both became tribunes for the rational, scientific control of the world's population and its resources, with Wells giving Sanger entree to the League of Nations and enhancing her international stature.

The two shared reputations for thinking expansively about the future, but also for living brazenly in the present. Sanger left her first marriage to William Sanger, a fledgling architect and painter, and committed herself to free love. Wells was one among many liaisons during and after her second marriage of convenience to J. Noah Slee, the wealthy inventor of 3-IN-ONE household oil, who used his facilities to help her smuggle in contraceptive products from Europe before they were legal here and helped bankroll her efforts, all the while letting her work, travel and have her freedom.

Critical to Sanger's political transformation at this juncture was the maturing of her consciousness as a feminist. She lost confidence in the potential of class cohesion, but decided to invest in the collective potential of women, many of whom were oriented to activism by the suffrage movement and eager for a new cause after women finally won the vote in 1920.

Openly rebelling against conventional gender arrangements, Sanger insisted nonetheless that the price women pay for equality should not be their sexuality or personal fulfillment. Following in the footsteps of a generation of suffragists and social do-gooders who had proudly forgone marriage, she became the standard-bearer of a less ascetic breed, intent on a broader range of satisfactions. She wanted women to have it all, and saw birth control as the necessary condition for the resolution of their often conflicting needs.

Sanger's determined optimism about the possibilities of freeing sex from a culturally and religiously enforced shroud of mystery and myth made her a pioneer of modern sexology and one of the first to take advantage of the popular market for lovemaking textbooks that emerged in the 1920s and '30s. An intimate disciple of Havelock Ellis, and a fervent opponent of the confining determinism of Sigmund Freud, she believed that improved communication and instruction in technique has the power to liberate human sexuality even from the yoke of the unconscious.

In no small measure, her success in this regard owed not just to the weight of her ideas but also to her considerable personal beauty and charm. She was an immensely attractive woman, small, lithe and trim. Her green eyes were flecked with amber, her smile always warm, her hands perpetually in motion, beckoning even to strangers. By Wells's own testimony, she had a quick Irish wit, high spirits and radiant common sense. And she was, in his words, "genuinely pagan."

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