Terrible Virtue: Evening with writer Ellen Feldman

Date: Tuesday, March 21
Wine Reception: 6:30PM
Presentation: 7:00PM
Cost: Free for members; $15 for guests

Ellen Feldman, author of Terrible Virtue, will present the life story of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. The provocative and compelling story of Margaret Sanger, one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the twentieth century, is of an indomitable woman who, more than any other and at great personal cost, shaped the sexual landscape we inhabit today. Trained as a nurse, she fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception. From opening the first illegal birth control clinic in America in 1916, through the founding of Planned Parenthood to the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s, Margaret Sanger sacrificed two husbands, three children, and scores of lovers in her fight for sexual equality and freedom. With cameos by such legendary figures as Emma Goldman, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, H. G. Wells, and the love of Sanger’s life, Havelock Ellis, this richly imagined portrait of a larger-than-life woman is at once sympathetic to her suffering and unsparing of her faults.

Ellen Feldman, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Scottsboro, The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, andLucy. Feldman writes both fiction and social history, and has published articles on the history of divorce, plastic surgery, Halloween, the Normandie, and many other topics, as well as numerous book reviews. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Modern History from Bryn Mawr College. After further graduate studies in History at Columbia University, she worked for a New York publishing house.