Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)

She was born in Corning, New York, watching her Irish-Catholic mother endure eighteen pregnancies and seven childhood deaths during the sixteen years before her own premature death - a direct result of her frequent pregnancies. One of Margaret's earliest memories was helping her father make a death mask for a four-year old brother. Having observed sick babies die, the steady deterioration of her mother's body and her lack of control over it, all the while noticing how it was only the poorer, uneducated families that suffered in the same way, she dedicated her life to change. She said, "a free race cannot be born of slave mothers." Named as one of Time's Top 100 Leaders of the Century: "she taught us, first, to look at the world as if women mattered."