The daughter of a hard-drinking, smooth-tongued freethinker and a mother worn down by thirteen children, Margaret Sanger vowed her life would be different. Trained as a nurse, she fought for social justice, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception.

This complex, enigmatic revolutionary was at once vain and charismatic, generous and ruthless, sexually impulsive and coolly calculating?a competitive, self-centered woman who championed all women, a conflicted mother who suffered the worst tragedy a parent can experience. 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.

Deeply insightful, Terrible Virtue is Margaret Sanger's story as she herself might have told it.