Thanks for Birth Control, Auntie Em!

For a research paper I am crunching today, I was looking up the 1957 interview Mike Wallace did with Margaret Sanger, the famous and controversial birth control advocate. Once you get past Wallace's lengthy, prattling plug for the Phillip Morris cigarettes (he might as well be smudging a lit smoke in your ear, it's that obvious) the actual interview is extremely interesting and Sanger comes off as very sincere and articulate, as much an advocate for personal responsibility as for . (She also had recanted her past views on eugenics at this point, and that doesn't excuse them, but it shows she wasn't above changing her mind when broader life experience proved her wrong.)

The entire time I was watching the interview, I was struck by how much Sanger resembled that actress everyone doesn't know they know, Clara Blandick. A classic character actress, Blandick is better known as Auntie Em to Judy Garland's Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (1939). I kept picturing that scene where Elmira Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) gets told off by Auntie Em, but with different dialogue.

Ms Gulch: What do you say to opponents that birth control violates, not only a Catholic law, but a 'higher law.' What would you say to that?
Auntie Em: Well, you'd have to ask a Catholic. I can't speak for them.



Watch the interview here:
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/sanger_margaret.html