Dreamers of a New Day (18 page)

The shift in public attitudes to birth control in Britain had been greatly influenced by the popular impact of the writings of Marie Stopes. Among Stopes’s seventy works were
Married Love
(1916),
Wise Parenthood
(1918),
Radiant Motherhood
(1920) and
Contraception: Its Theory, History and Practice
(1923), along with a polemical play,
Our Ostriches
(1923). The versatile Stopes even produced a film,
Maisie’s Marriage
, in which a chubby, enquiring, wanted baby emerges from an unfolding rose. The censor cut the baby and the birth control message. Resolving to go beyond propaganda, Stopes set out to test whether there was a demand for birth control advice among working-class women. In 1921 she opened the first birth control clinic in Britain, in Holloway, North London, and the following year took out a writ for libel against the Catholic Dr Halliday Sutherland, who had said contraception was a plot to reduce the numbers of working-class voters. She lost the case but the publicity increased the sales of her books, making Stopes a national figure. Her celebrity, along with her popular style, enabled her to reach a mass audience.
⁴¹

Stopes sympathetically addressed working-class women’s fears about sexuality: ‘You begin to dread what used to be your chief joy.’ Explaining that ‘men who are husbands need what is wrongly called the “husband’s right”’, she assured them that contraception would mean they did not
have to be anxious ‘that some bad girl will get him’.
⁴²
She urged her women readers to ask for guidance at their maternity welfare centres:

You
may
find that they refuse. But never mind; be brave, and think that even by asking for this information you are making it easier for other women in the end to get it, because until all the women in the country ask for this knowledge, until they insist on getting this knowledge, women and unwanted babies will go on suffering as they have suffered in the past, and are suffering now.
⁴³

Stopes was careful not to upset too many taboos at once. Unlike left-wing socialist campaigners she was not trying to transform society; her propaganda addressed existing attitudes. She always preferred to act as an individual, leaving the background organizing to others. In 1931, when the National Birth Control Association was formed, Stopes was on the executive along with experienced feminist campaigners and social investigators Dr Helena Wright, Eva Hubbock and Margery Spring Rice. But Stopes chafed under committee-style politics, declaring ‘I’m not the Cabin Boy in this movement. I’m the Admiral.’
⁴⁴
The other women listened politely and carried on regardless.

Eugenic ideas still permeated birth control propaganda. In
Radiant Motherhood
Stopes stated that fertility should be encouraged among those likely to ‘give rise to healthy, well-endowed future citizens’; it should be discouraged among those likely to produce ‘weakened, diseased or debased future citizens’. It was the ‘duty of the community to make parenthood impossible for those whose mental and physical conditions are such that there is well-nigh certainty that their offspring must be physically and mentally tainted if not utterly permeated by disease’.
⁴⁵
In 1919 Margaret Sanger also appealed to the eugenic lobby, by endorsing the ‘elimination of the unfit’.
⁴⁶
She accepted restrictions on the reproduction of the poor and the sterilization of the mentally ill, while resisting any measures to ensure a higher birth-rate among the ‘fit’. Though she called for immigration control, Sanger did not, however, equate immigrants with the eugenically ‘unfit’.
⁴⁷
In
Woman and the New Race
(1920), which contained a preface by Havelock Ellis, Sanger stressed the environmental factors which had forced people to migrate and insisted that free motherhood was vital for the ‘foreign and submerged mother . . . to enable her to prevent bringing to birth children she does not want’. She maintained that free motherhood ‘withholds the unfit, brings forth
the fit; brings few children into homes where there is not sufficient to provide for them’. Sanger envisaged an ‘American race containing the best of all racial elements’, which she thought ‘could give to the world a vision and leadership beyond our present imagination.’
⁴⁸
In Britain, Stella Browne gave the eugenic case for birth control an unusual twist by declaring birth control would ‘produce a new race fitted to carry out Communist and Feminist ideals.’
⁴⁹
Browne saw the individual making the choice, not the state. In bolstering their case with eugenic theories, birth controllers assumed that controlling reproduction would result in progress and a better society.

However, the repressive implications of eugenics were also challenged within the birth control movement. The Workers’ Birth Control Group, formed in 1924 by socialists including Dora Russell, was anti-eugenics. Russell commented in 1974, ‘You usually found that the so-called worst stocks were the poorer people and for that reason we completely dissociated ourselves from eugenics groups.’
⁵⁰
By 1926 the British Communist Party paper the
Woman Worker
had come around to supporting birth control, as a way of helping working-class families out of poverty and freeing women for engagement in political activity. But eugenics was ridiculed: ‘Some say we breed too many lower class humans – the unfits who go on the rates – that’s you and me Flo! Not a word about the unfit conditions which produce the “unfits”.’
⁵¹

In the United States, progressive African Americans were faced with a dilemma, because eugenic arguments were used to restrict the black birth-rate. The black nationalist Marcus Garvey rejected birth control, which he believed would lead to the extinction of African Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois opposed ‘eugenic sterilization’, but argued in 1921: ‘the future woman must have a life, work and future independence. . . . She must have knowledge . . . and she must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.’
⁵²
Birth control information was carried in the black press, and discussed at meetings. In 1918 the Women’s Political Association of Harlem called upon black women to ‘assume the reins of leadership in the political, social and economic life of their people’, and announced that birth control was to be one of the issues debated.
⁵³
Birth control was also treated sympathetically by black women novelists Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset, who protested against the assumption that a woman’s place was at home producing a large family.

In Britain and the US, the birth control clinics and the propaganda of birth controllers revealed a widespread desire among women to
control their fertility. Amidst all the uncertainty about sexuality and identity in the 1920s, one thing was clear – many women wanted birth control. When Leonora Eyles got a job on
Woman’s Own
, one of the new mass-market women’s magazines appearing between the wars, her secretary Jessie Stephen remembered how any article on birth control would be followed by floods of mail.
⁵⁴
Stephen was a veteran of the pre-war Glasgow suffrage and socialist movements; she had worked with Sylvia Pankhurst as a birth control campaigner immediately after World War One, and had then joined the Workers’ Birth Control Group. She belonged to a network of working-class women active in the local campaigns for birth control and in the new clinics springing up around the country. They linked class with gender, rejecting any lingering suspicions of Malthusianism, and presented birth control as part of a wider labour movement struggle. Mrs Lawther from Blaydon, Co. Durham, urged miners to support the Labour Party women’s campaign for birth control advice in maternity centres, reminding them of the help women had given to them when they were on strike in 1926.
⁵⁵
Attending a conference of labour women in Britain in 1925, the American socialist feminist Crystal Eastman was delighted to note that when ‘two firm young socialists . . . rose to explain that birth control was an economic issue that would not survive the social revolution, an earnest woman responded with adamant conviction, “Even in the cooperative commonwealth I think a woman will want to choose her time and say how many.”’
⁵⁶

Birth control’s new visibility between the wars revealed the hidden suffering caused by abortions performed under dangerous conditions. Mrs E. Williams wrote in
Lansbury’s Labour Weekly
in 1925: ‘It is almost heartbreaking to listen to the women who come to me day by day seeking my advice. They tell me of the terrible amount of drugs which they have taken, enough to rot the inside of the strongest, to try to prevent a child being born.’
⁵⁷

Alice Hamilton had noted before the war how American working women did not regard abortion as a crime.
⁵⁸
Similarly, in 1929 in
Mother England
Marie Stopes reported: ‘In three months I have had as many as twenty thousand requests for criminal abortion from women who did not apparently even
know
that it was criminal.’
⁵⁹
Marie Stopes used this as an argument for birth control; but Stella Browne had been an advocate of abortion as early as 1915, putting the case for its legalization in a paper to the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. She
continued to argue for abortion as a necessary complement to contraception through the 1920s, and was a founder member of the Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936.

Dora Russell reflected retrospectively on the ‘intense anger and frustration’ she had felt ‘at the attitude of the opponents of our modest requests on birth control’ within the Labour Party hierarchy.
⁶⁰
However, the case for birth control was not quite as ‘modest’ as she implied. Though it would find broad support as ‘family planning’ during the 1930s, its roots were in a decidedly unrespectable libertarian sexual radicalism and in the transformatory schemes of early nineteenth-century utopian socialism. Links to theoretical heterodoxy were evident in 1923 when Stella Browne went to lecture to workers in South Wales, telling her audiences that birth control was part of a new sexual ethics. She connected these new values to better housing, education and employment, and summoned Nietzsche, Ellis and Marx to support her case.
⁶¹

Browne struggled to extend the syndicalist belief in willed action into the circumstances of human reproduction. She saw women’s control over procreation as part of a wider process of creative, liberatory revolution. In 1922 in a letter to the
Communist
, she declared that ‘Birth control for women is no less essential than workshop control and determination of the conditions of labour for men . . . Birth control is woman’s crucial effort at self-determination and at control of her own person and her own environment.’
⁶²
The slogans ‘workers’ control’ and ‘birth control’ foregrounded active individual agency in the wider struggle to transform society. This new sexual politics of women’s right to self-determination was surfacing in France and Germany among anarcho-syndicalist and left Communist women, who linked it to demands for workers’ control over production. It was endorsed by the Soviet advocate of women’s emancipation, Alexandra Kollontai, and influenced Sanger, Konikow and Eastman in the US, as well as Browne in Britain.

Birth control was also seen as a means of altering mores. In 1924 Elsie Clews Parsons suggested that changes in reproduction might effect the kind of changes in values and culture which Marxists assumed would arise from transforming production. She declared:

Birth control makes possible such clear-cut distinctions between mating and parenthood that it might be expected to produce radical changes in theories of sex attitude or relationship, forcing the discard of many an argument for personal suppression for the good of children
or the honor of the family, and forcing redefinition of concepts of honor and sincerity between the sexes.
⁶³

Parsons was unusual in defining sexuality as an autonomous structure; however, other campaigners were alert to the significance of detaching sex from biological procreation. In
The Right to Be Happy
(1927), Dora Russell asserted that the confusion about sexual relationships could be greatly reduced by recognizing that the widespread demand for contraception required a change in how sex was regarded: ‘Most of the trouble flows from our absolute refusal to separate the instincts of sex and parenthood in our social and economic structure’.
⁶⁴
This separation would have far-reaching implications in the second half of the twentieth century for rethinking same-sex relationships as well as heterosexuality.

Several layers of heresy were thus wrapped up in the birth control bundle, and so was a fundamental contradiction. The idea of a woman’s right to determine her own fertility was rooted in the individualist belief in the inviolability of the person. As the socialist feminist Teresa Billington-Greig put it in 1915, an undesired baby was ‘a terrible infringement of the personal rights of the mother’.
⁶⁵
This radical tradition was reinforced by the individualism which asserted the will and would have no truck with collectivities; nation, state, society, race or class. Rejecting eugenic arguments about reproduction contributing to the national stock, the editor of the
Freewoman
, Dora Marsden, remarked: ‘It is surely a fallacy to hold that sex is primarily experienced with the motive of continuing the race. From the first protozoa up through the scale of life, it has been experienced for its own satisfaction.’
⁶⁶
Against calls for women to reproduce for the good of society, Helen Winter stated ‘As a Freewoman . . . I care nothing for the continuance of the race nor the reproduction of any man; my desire is to continue
myself
.’
⁶⁷