The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (8 page)

It wasn’t good enough for Sanger. Doctors would only prescribe birth control in the most dire of circumstances, and even then, what form of birth control would they prescribe? There were no reliable options, except perhaps the condom. But condoms depended on the cooperation of men, and Sanger’s experience in the tenements of New York City told her that men didn’t mind six or seven children so long as they were able to enjoy sex when the mood struck them. Women were the ones dealing most with the consequences of sex, not only because they were the ones getting pregnant but also because they were the ones raising the children.
Sanger wrote in 1919
:

While it is true that he suffers many evils . . . she suffers vastly more. It is she who has the long burden of carrying, bearing and rearing the unwanted child. It is she who must watch beside the beds of pain where lie babies who suffer because they have come into overcrowded homes. . . . It is her love life that dies first in the fear of undesired pregnancy. It is her opportunity for self expression that perishes first and most helplessly because of it.

Rubber condoms were sold in tins and had names like Sheik, Ramses, Peacock, and Golden Pheasant. Though they were cheap, effective, and widely available, they were never going to be good enough for Sanger, who cared more about birth control than disease prevention. But the judge’s ruling at least gave legitimacy to her cause. She began gaining supporters who once would not have dared to speak out for birth control.

“
The Church’s attitude on birth control
must change,” said the Reverend Dr. Karl Reiland, one of the liberal leaders of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York. “It must support this method of raising the level of existence. Objections on religious grounds are all irrelevant.” Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, founder of the American Jewish Congress, argued that “
the sacramental attitude
toward life does not dictate that there should be illimitable and unchecked generation of life, but that humans shall will to bear children only when they are fitted to give them such a background as will make life worth living.” Many doctors agreed as well, and they volunteered their services as Sanger opened more clinics. Even some courts endorsed the legality of contraception. Only Congress, various state legislatures, and the Roman Catholic Church held fast. Importantly, though, the resistance came mostly from entrenched, conservative institutions rather than from the general public. The public was getting Sanger’s message, and they were getting it from many different channels.

Sanger grew more sophisticated in her radicalism. Instead of challenging society’s conservative views on sex and challenging obscenity laws, she tried to recruit physicians, scientists, and corporate leaders to join her crusade, emphasizing the benefits to public health. She encouraged women to see their doctors to get fitted for diaphragms—not only because diaphragms were the most effective available choice of contraception but also because she knew that doctors would be valuable allies in her fight. A movement centered on sexual pleasure would never get the support it needed, but a movement focused on health might have a chance. It was a strategic accommodation, and a shrewd one.

One of her allies at the time was a wealthy widower named James Noah Henry Slee, who met Sanger and fell quickly in love with her. Slee was twenty years older than Sanger, and a conservative Republican to boot. He was president of the 3-in-One Oil Company, makers of a product that almost every American at the time kept on hand to grease typewriters, bicycle chains, and sewing machines. Sanger had been separated from her husband for seven years when she met Slee. In 1922, she finally divorced William Sanger and married the crusty, aristocratic Slee.
There were conditions
, though, and Sanger insisted that they be put in writing. They would keep separate apartments, and there would be no dropping by each other’s places unannounced. Soon after their wedding, Sanger persuaded Slee to establish the Holland-Rantos Company, the first firm in the nation to sell contraceptives exclusively to the medical community. It was part of her plan to make contraceptives more legitimate. At one point, Sanger asked Slee to spend ten thousand dollars in salary and expenses for a gynecologist to travel the country distributing information about contraceptives. “If I am able to accomplish this,” she pleaded with him, “I shall bless my adorable husband, JNH Slee, and
retire with him to the garden of love
.”

Slee went along with Sanger’s terms for the marriage. When a drunken friend of Sanger’s asked Slee how he could abide such an unusual relationship, Slee replied, “It’s obviously an impertinent question, young man, but I’ll tell you. She was, and always will be,
the greatest adventure in my life
.”

If it was an adventure he wanted, Sanger gave it to him. And Slee in turn gave Sanger all the money she wanted for her cause, including the money she requested to hire the traveling gynecologist, who went on to present more than seven hundred lectures across the country.

Sanger was making progress. She not only led an advocacy group that operated clinics, she and her husband now owned their own company to design and market birth-control devices. She was approaching the contraceptive market as an industrial magnate might, seizing control of her product from every possible angle. Holland-Rantos gained the loyalty of doctors and became the nation’s leading supplier of diaphragms. Doctors liked the arrangement because they were put in the position of supervising women’s reproductive health, and they were provided with a new and steady stream of patients. Scientific studies, many of them supported by funding from Sanger, endorsed the Holland-Rantos method of diaphragm and jelly as the safest and most reliable option for women. When the American Medical Association finally backed contraceptives, Holland-Ramos reminded doctors that their contraceptive—referred to as the Koromex method—was the industry standard already used by “over 50,000 physicians,
234 clinics and 140 hospitals
.”

By now Sanger had broadened her network beyond the original core of radicals, building alliances with powerful people in the mainstream including doctors, wealthy businessmen, and socially active society women. These alliances helped her raise money and helped offset the power leveraged against her by the Catholic Church.

But her most powerful new ally was also her most controversial. Leaders of the eugenics movement were not especially concerned with sexual freedom or women’s rights, but they were eager to see certain groups of women produce fewer children, and so they recognized overlap with Sanger’s mission. They considered birth control a useful weapon to reduce poverty, crime, and what they referred to as “feeblemindedness.” Women most likely to produce poor, feebleminded, or criminally inclined children should be prescribed birth control—or sterilized—to keep them from reproducing, these eugenicists said. Some of the candidates for sterilization, of course, were the same poverty-stricken women Sanger had set out to rescue when she was a young nurse working on the Lower East Side. Now, however, she found herself acceding to the eugenicists, who enjoyed greater respectability in the United States at the time than birth-control advocates. Eugenics was faddish. In the 1920s, the Harvard psychology professor William McDougall announced that illiteracy could be ended by forbidding people who could read from marrying people who couldn’t. Sanger said she saw nothing wrong with using birth control for the
weeding out of the “unfit.”
She agreed that certain people with untreatable, hereditary conditions should be encouraged to undergo sterilization. She also joined calls for criminals, illiterates, prostitutes, and drug addicts to be separated from the rest of society. That these views were widely embraced in the 1920s and 1930s doesn’t make them easier to fathom.

Sanger’s views on race were complicated. She was a socialist, which irked even some of her strongest supporters, and she was often reckless in pursuit of her goals. But she was not necessarily a racist. In 1930, she opened a family planning clinic in Harlem. The clinic was staffed by a black doctor and had the support of community leaders including W. E .B. Du Bois. Du Bois would later serve on the advisory board for Sanger’s so-called Negro Project, which was designed to bring birth control and social services to African Americans in the rural South.

In many ways, Sanger was consistent in her core beliefs. She held that women had the right to self-determination, that every child should be loved and cared for, and that women were entitled to enjoy sex as much as men. In fighting for those principles, she knew and did not mind that things might get messy, as they did in her personal life. Years later, the philosopher Michel Foucault would observe that sex by its very nature was both a private and a social act, something Sanger discovered early on.

Sanger’s pragmatism and elitism may have damaged her reputation as a crusader for the poor, but, as she expected, it broadened her base of support. By 1925, more than one thousand doctors from around the world sought admission to Sanger’s annual birth-control conference, this one held at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. British economist John Maynard Keynes attended, as did writer Lytton Strachey and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas. Messages of support arrived from W. E .B. Du Bois, Upton Sinclair, and Bertrand Russell. The most influential eugenicists in the country were on hand, too.

The birth-control movement was gaining visibility in the United States and spreading quickly around the world. It helped that sex in America was more widely discussed than ever. The single woman of the Jazz Age smoked, drank, danced, flirted, and (to use the term that was beginning to come into vogue) screwed. In conservative Muncie, Indiana, home of the classic sociological case study that produced the book
Middletown
, only fifteen of seventy-seven women interviewed in 1924 and 1925 said they disapproved of birth control. And the proof was in the declining birth rates: In the Midwest, the average family size shrunk from 5.4 to 3.3 in one generation. Overall, the birth rate in the United States fell 30 percent between 1895 and 1925, even though women had begun to marry at younger ages.

By 1930, the Birth Control League, the organization Sanger founded, was overseeing fifty-five clinics in twenty-three cities. When critics attacked her for promoting promiscuity, Sanger said she was no more to blame than Henry Ford, whose automobiles made it easier for men and women to slip away to towns where they wouldn’t be recognized and commit adultery, often
in the backseats of their cars
.

Officials in the Catholic Church protested Sanger’s assemblies and used their political connections to order police raids. New York’s archbishop, Patrick Hayes, said in his Christmas pastoral one year that only God had the right to decide whether children should be born, and that birth control was a more serious sin than abortion. “
To take life after its inception
is a horrible crime,” he said, “but to prevent human life that the Creator is about to bring into being is Satanic. . . . in the latter not only a body but an immortal soul is denied existence in time and in eternity.” In some ways, the intervention of the Church was a blessing for Sanger because it nudged her away from issues of sexuality and pleasure and kept her focused on the most powerful argument in her arsenal: human rights. “
What he believes
concerning the soul after life is based upon theory, and he has a perfect right to that belief,” Sanger said in response to Hayes. “But we, who are trying to better humanity fundamentally, believe that a healthy happy human race is more in keeping with the laws of God than disease, misery and poverty perpetuating itself generation after generation.”

Sanger was claiming the right for women “to experience their sexuality free of consequence just as men have always done,”
as Chesler wrote
. In her day, that was radical. For the women of Sanger’s age, reproduction was the sole purpose for living. Motherhood was the only job that counted. Rare was the woman whose identity extended beyond that of her husband. Even a woman as independent and assertive as Eleanor Roosevelt would be introduced and addressed as “Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt.” In attempting to give women the power to rule their own bodies, Sanger was in fact launching a human rights campaign that would have world-changing impact, reshaping everything, including family, politics, and the economy. Once they gained control of their reproductive systems, they would go the next step: They would declare their own identities. Womanhood would no longer mean the same thing as motherhood. Women would delay pregnancy to attend college, travel the world, start jobs, launch magazines, write books, record albums, make movies, or anything else they could imagine. Sanger knew what birth control might do—some of it, anyway. Neither she nor anyone else could have imagined how birth control would also contribute to the spread of divorce, infidelity, single parenthood, abortion, and pornography. Like any revolutionary, she was willing to tolerate a certain degree of chaos.

But she was no longer driven entirely by sex. Now it was sex and money and politics—and soon it would be science, too. Diaphragms and jellies would get her only so far. Even some of Sanger’s allies complained that the diaphragm was too expensive and too complicated, especially for poor women. “
There is no need to summarize
how little we have provided for the people that have the greatest need,” wrote Robert Dickinson, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist and consultant to the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, in a 1931 medical book called
Control of Conception
. “Consider the two and one-half million fertile couples that were on relief. How well can clinics, how well can doctors meet that particular need of the backwoods and the bayou, the requirements of the slum dweller or the distant mountaineer?” He went on to say the only hope was a better form of contraception, concluding: “I propose three ways out. The first is research; the second is research; the third is research.” The diaphragm-and-jelly approach would never work in the long run. There were neither enough diaphragms nor doctors to go around.