American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Sanger discovered in Nietzsche’s thought both a critical philosophy and an aspirational idea for achieving a woman’s right to bodily self-sovereignty. In her speeches and writings, she employed the Übermensch to critique the bankrupt Western morality that undergirded the repression of women by church and state as well as an image of a self worthy of idolatry once all idols were smashed. Feminine chastity, she argued, was an artifact of a desiccated “Christian … ascetic ideal,” which taught women to hide in shame from their earthly desires. The Übermensch, by contrast, offered an image of “life in its fullness and all that is high, beautiful, and daring.”19 In a 1914 speech on Nietzsche, Sanger argued that he had taught her that “the individual is the original source & constituent of all value.”