Bas-relief of Margaret Sanger

FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor thanks world-renowned sculptor Zenos Frudakis for the exquisite and meaningful gift of a bas-relief sculpture of birth control pioneer and freethinker Margaret Sanger. The bas-relief sculpture embodies Sanger’s determination to free women.

In the first issue of her 1914 periodical, The Woman Rebel, whose motto was “No  Gods — No Masters,” Sanger counseled women: “To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an ideal; to speak and to act in defiance of convention.” This sculpture, says Gaylor, beautifully captures that sentiment, as well as the commitment to reproductive rights by FFRF principal founder Anne Nicol Gaylor.

The artwork bears a quote by Sanger: “No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”

The sculpture newly graces a prominent wall in the administrative wing of Freethought Hall, FFRF’s office building in downtown Madison, Wis.

Frudakis, a member of FFRF, created the FFRF sculpture of Clarence Darrow now found in front of the courthouse where the Scopes trial took place in Dayton, Tenn. His best-known piece, “Freedom,” has been listed in “The Top Ten: Public Art” by The Independent.

(For more on Sanger’s freethought views, check out Gaylor’s anthology of women freethinkers, Women Without Superstition, at ffrf.org/shop.)