Woman of Valor (105 page)

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In fact, no formal tie between Smedley and the Comintern has ever been established, although strong circumstantial evidence links her to the Russians. During her years in Shanghai, she had a love affair with Richard Sorge, a German born in Russia, who was then ostensibly working as a correspondent for the German press and who by some accounts sponsored her for party membership. Sorge later made his reputation as a master spy for the Soviets working in Japan, where he was arrested and executed during World War II. She also became involved in the defense of left-leaning Chinese intellectuals being persecuted by the government and later helped open communication between Moscow and the Jiangxi Soviet outpost of the peasant Communists.

Of forty-three women responding to the survey, all but four admitted having used some form of artificial family limitation. Douching was most popular, followed by the safe period, withdrawal, the condom, pessary, and sponge. Methods were consciously distinguished by gender, with women identified as responsible for the douche and pessary, and men for the condom and withdrawal.

The Visiting Nurses of Henry Street Settlement employed single unmarried women on a full-time basis, and after May 6, 1912, also required that all staff be registered. Married nurses and nurses with practical training were only permitted to work on relief and at night. Not all part-timers were accounted for, however, and Sanger's name does not appear on available ledgers for 1910 and 1911.

In what emerged at this time as a highly competitive metropolitan newspaper environment in New York and other cities, abortion investigations drew readers by sensationalizing sex and crime, and, at the same time, by providing them practical consumer protection from fraud and, in the worst cases, from outright danger.

The act also set fines for such offenses of $5,000, or imprisonment of five years, or both. Its sweeping inclusivity, and the absence of sustained dissent, served as indications to subsequent advocates of reform that the full implications of the prohibition were not fully considered by the legislators—that their intent was never to inhibit the behavior of lawfully wed adults. Enforcement of the law was always selective and its impact on private marital practice tangential. Earlier drafts of the bill clearly excluded “physicians in good standing” from its prohibitions, but this exemption was deliberately struck from the final version by a particularly vigilant and God-fearing Senator from Connecticut.

A statistical survey of 1,000 married women, all of them college-educated and/or women's club members, published by the reformer Katherine B. Davis in 1920, would find that 75 percent reported effective use of contraception. Well into the 1920s, however, Robert and Helen Lynd in
Middletown
, their historic, sociological portrait of Muncie, Indiana, continued to find differentials in the contraceptive practices of the working and business classes. The demographer Raymond Pearl, who studied the contraceptive practices of more than 5,000 black and white women in eleven major cities in the early 1930s, would also find similar differentials by class and race and an overall contraceptive use rate of only 46 percent, but Pearl's sampling had an unusually high concentration of Catholic women, and his estimates were considered overly-conservative. By contrast, information then being gathered at Margaret Sanger's pioneering birth control clinic in New York established a nearly universal desire, if still limited success, in contraceptive practice among working-class women who had the motivation to seek out services. This data would later be corroborated by survey research on contraceptive practice conducted by Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana.
See Katherine B. Davis, “A Study of the Sex Life of the Normal Married Woman: The Use of Contraceptives,
journal of Social Hygiene
8 (1929), pp. 173-89; Robert and Helen Lynd,
Middletown
(New York: 1928); Raymond Pearl, “Contraception and Fertility in 4,945 Married Women,”
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly
, 12 (July 1934), pp. 355-401; Marie E. Kopp,
Birth Control in Practice: An Analysis of Ten Thousand Case Histories of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau
(New York: 1934), pp. 19-21.

There is, in fact, no evidence that Flynn, who remained a committed radical and later became America's most prominent female Communist, ever begrudged Margaret her subsequent defection from the left or her comfortable life-style. Margaret's name was included on the dinner committee that honored Flynn in 1926 on the occasion of her twentieth year in the labor movement. And there is surely no apparent sign of estrangement or bitterness in a letter that survives from the years Elizabeth spent in self-imposed exile in Oregon, which shares personal confidences and requests a loan of $2,500, a substantial sum of money at the time, for an investment in a Brooklyn movie house by her mercurial and alcoholic brother, Tom. Margaret's political moderation was apparently less distressing to her old radical friend than the simple fact that she had stayed so beautifully thin. Elizabeth gained seventy pounds during her years in Portland and what she wanted, along with the loan, was approval of a new and trendy “California diet,” on which she claimed to have already lost weight. During Flynn's occasional trips to New York, the two women dined together, reminisced and celebrated old times, and Margaret maintained the friendship and support even after Flynn returned East permanently, publicly avowed her Communism, and was ostracized by many old friends on the left. It was not until anti-Communist hysteria led to Flynn's imprisonment in the 1950s that contact between the two old friends appears to have come to an end. And even then Flynn was careful to credit Margaret's “long hard struggle” in her historical accounting of the legacy of women in American Socialism. See E. G. Flynn to M.S., Jan. 22, 1930, MS-LC. (She already owed her $1,700.) Sanger's description of the fathers is in
Autobiography
, p. 79; Flynn-Tresca relationship in Tresca, “Autobiography,” CT-NYPL, pp. 141-52, 112, 180, 208; he uses the phrase “silver-tongued” to describe her. The Flynn Dinner Committee announcement and reference to a July 2, 1942, telegram congratulating Flynn on a Communist Party rally at Madison Square Garden are in Margaret Sanger's file at the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, made available in response to a request by the author under the Freedom of Information Act on May 13, 1985. The quote from Flynn's
Women in American Socialist Struggles
(1960) is taken from Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall,
Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
(New Brunswick and London: 1987), p. 171. Also see Flynn,
Rebel Girl
, pp. 86-89, 109, 224-25.
Margaret also never got back the money she gave Tresca in the late twenties to support his Italian labor news weekly,
Il Martello
, and to open a radical bookstore, a project he abandoned when the Depression hit. The loan was her way of repaying an obligation she felt she had incurred in 1925, when Tresca was sentenced to a year in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for publishing a two-line advertisement in his paper for a book on birth control. His conviction under the obscenity statutes was widely viewed as a contrivance for silencing his political viewpoints. Margaret visited him in Atlanta and then used her influence with a large number of prominent Republican women, who prevailed on President Calvin Coolidge to commute his sentence. For years thereafter, whenever she traveled through the South to lecture on birth control, she sent him postcards in New York from what she mockingly called his “country farm.” Through the 1930s, as Tresca became an increasingly controversial Italian-American opponent of Mussolini, he wrote to her about the dangers of the Fascist promotion of childbirth and race building. After he was assassinated on a New York City street corner in 1943, allegedly by Fascist agents, she sent money to his widow and helped to establish a memorial fund, to which she contributed for at least another decade. Harold Hersey, “Margaret Sanger. The Biography of the Birth Control Pioneer,” New York (1938), p. 129, talks about a dinner arranged by Tresca, with Sanger, Flynn, Joe Ettor, the hero of Lawrence, and others. Tresca to Sanger, Feb. 6, 1932, MS-LC, says he wants to set up a dinner celebrating the publication of her latest book. Also see M.S. to J. Noah H. Slee, Dec. 10, 1924; E. G. Flynn to “Dear Friend,” Nov. 24, 1924; Mrs. Oakes Ames to Pres. Calvin Coolidge, Dec. 15, 1924; M.S. to Hon. Calvin Coolidge, Dec. 18, 1924; M.S. to Carlo Tresca, Jan. 7, 1925; Tresca to Sanger, “Dear Margherita,” n.d. (1925); Tresca to Sanger, March 17, 1925, from Atlanta; Tresca to Sanger, “Dear Margaret,” n.d. (late 1920s), “My Dear Margaret,” n.d. (1931), and Feb. 6, 1932; Sanger to Mrs. Carlo Tresca, Jan 15, 1943, all in MS-LC. The FBI kept files on Tresca's contact with Sanger, see reports for Jan. 9, Jan. 19, and Mar. 11, 1924, in the FBI file. Finally see additional Tresca-Sanger correspondence in MS-SS, and the letter about her contribution, Dec. 22, 1955, in the Carlo Tresca Memorial Committee Papers, Manuscript Division, NYPL.

These dislocations also explain the widespread spiritual malaise and reactive waves of religious revivalism that were characteristic of the early decades of the nineteenth century. For most Americans, however, the evangelical promise of redemption through a retreat to enforced values provided no more of an enduring solution to their problems then than it does today.