Woman of Valor (13 page)

And there he drifted off into another thought, only to write again, even more pathetically, in March:

There followed a staggering twelve-page letter filled with suggestions for her writing, but it was too late. His next letter made clear that she had finally told him in “clear and unmistakable language” that on returning to New York she had renewed her love affair with Walter Roberts and demanded to be released “physically and spiritually,” from her wedding vows. Bill's tragic response admitted that he was “staggered” by the weight of the “struggle—the soul combat” that they had begun at Provincetown.

As her own commitment to the new relationship developed, Margaret tried to enlist Bill's understanding and encourage his own sexual experimentation in the belief that their marriage might actually survive, if their infidelities were mutual. She told him that their future together depended upon the shattering of old habits, but the more consumed she became with issues of her own autonomy and satisfaction, the more intensely he communicated a paramount sense of emotional obligation to their shared past and to their children's future. He literally begged her to consider the children. Refusing to believe that she was responsible for her own actions, he attacked the men who preyed upon her, and identifying Walter Roberts by the initial “R,” viciously accused him of trying to break up the Sanger family. Bill's letters deteriorated steadily as it became clear to him that Margaret felt empowered by her new relationships, while he was growing despondent and weak, unable to work, to love other women, or even to care for his children, behavior which she could not tolerate and only further diminished her respect for him. “I am essentially a monogamist, and that's why women don't understand me,” he acknowledged. “I cannot adapt to new personalities…. I live for you, I strive for you.” Without her, he admitted to losing conviction in himself and in his painting, for she had long provided his inspiration. Divorce was never mentioned, but the marriage was over.
*
¹¹

Though Margaret actually shared some of Bill's disdain for the radical chic, her commitment to the free-love ideal would endure long after others of the Village crowd had retreated in confusion and unhappiness to a monogamy that became more acceptable simply with the maturity of age or, in many instances, as the result of intensive psychoanalysis. She, by contrast, would find apparent satisfaction through intimacies with many other men who were eager to indulge her independence, as her bereaved husband could not. She came to believe that she had simply grown beyond Bill—that he had somehow failed her. For years he tried to salve his wounds by hurting her with accusations of selfish and licentious conduct, but the attacks seemed only to solidify her resolve, and she made a political platform out of her own experience, brazenly proclaiming a woman's right to rebel against established religious, moral, and legal codes.

Mabel Dodge recalled in her typically flamboyant prose that Margaret was “the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.” Margaret believed that traditional sexual attitudes were “infantile, archaic, and ignorant, and that mature manhood meant accepting the life in the cells, developing it, experiencing it, and enjoying it with a conscious attainment of its possibilities that would make previous relationships between men and women with their associations of smirking shame and secretive lubricities, seem ignoble in their limitations and stupid beyond words in their awkward ignorance.” An enthusiastic Dodge remembered a private encounter when Margaret “told us all about the possibilities in the body for ‘sex expression'; and as she sat there, serene and quiet, and unfolded the mysteries and mightiness of physical love it seemed to us we had never known it before as a sacred and at the same time a scientific reality.”
¹²

No better testimony to this new enthusiasm for an intense and passionate sexuality exists than in the vividly erotic poem written for Margaret by Walter Roberts sometime in the spring of 1914:

When Margaret later wrote her autobiographies, she wanted the world to believe that she had abandoned Europe and a marriage of twelve years with a confident eye on the issue and movement that would assure her future success and celebrity. Perhaps, she wanted to believe it herself. With emotional and sexual conflicts long buried, she looked back from the comfortable distance of two decades and said simply that personal feelings were a necessary sacrifice to “ideals that take possession of the mind.” Even in Bill's letters from the winter of 1914, clearly she had already invented a calling out of her work, which rationalized her disobedience as a wife and mother.

Yet the predominating turmoil of her personal life was readily apparent when she arrived back in New York during the unusually bleak and cold winter of 1914. Aboard the ship from France, she conceived the idea of a magazine to be called
The Woman Rebel
, dedicated to working women and intended to challenge Comstock's prohibition of information about sexuality and contraception. She gathered a group of radicals one evening in the cheap flat she had rented way uptown, and on that historic occasion a young friend by the name of Otto Bobsein coined the term “birth control” to identify the social and economic objectives of the campaign Margaret planned to launch. All agreed that it was a simple term, with greater public appeal than such awkward phrases as “family limitation” or “voluntary motherhood,” which remained in standard usage.
¹⁴

Disenchanted with the factionalism of the left, and still smarting over the discrimination she had experienced as a woman organizer, Margaret then presented her ideas before a feminist group called Heterodoxy, whose elite membership included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Crystal Eastman, and Henrietta Rodman. These women shared her disdain for the narrow focus of suffragists on political instruments and goals, and some of them were also Socialists. In the cause of birth control, she hoped to effect a united front of women across class lines on the model that had succeeded so well for women garment workers, but the women of Heterodoxy apparently turned her down, perhaps reluctant to associate with her avowed radicalism in politics and social behavior, perhaps skeptical of her lack of education and her erratic emotional behavior. Advertisements in radical journals instead produced the several hundred advance subscriptions that got her going and cemented an alliance with the politics of the extreme left. By March,
The Woman Rebel
had been launched from her dining room table, under the provocative Wobbly banner that first antagonized God-fearing workers at Lawrence and Paterson by proclaiming “No Gods, No Masters.”
¹⁵

Why
The Woman Rebel
? Margaret asked in the inaugural issue:

The manifesto went on to trumpet an anarchist faith in the potential of individual action. It celebrated a passion for freedom best represented by the nation's immigrant and working classes and ended with a revealing rhetorical flourish that summoned all women:

In an accompanying article Emma Goldman then raised the Malthusian banner:

But Margaret's intention was to look beyond economic and political arguments to an autonomy for women founded on wholesale change in attitudes and behavior. In a signed editorial she lamented the criminal sanctions then imposed on contraception, abortion, and illegitimacy and attacked the deeply rooted conventions of marriage and motherhood that governed the behavior of women and limited their opportunity. She called on working women to reject the standards and values of the upper classes and promised to provide them practical contraceptive advice in the columns of her papers as a first step toward their liberation. But before taking on a certain legal battle, she intended to raise the consciousness and belligerency of her readers and to assure herself widespread financial and moral support among women on the left. Mocking an absence of “vitality” among American bourgeois feminists, she praised the militancy of British suffragists instead and proclaimed:

She wrote in a breathless plea for moral autonomy, and it was this boast that made its way beyond her small audience into stories that appeared about her in the daily newspapers.
¹⁶

Filled with anger and bombast, and lacking intellectual depth or literary grace, the paper was not terribly well-received. Writing in
The Masses
Max Eastman regretted its extremism and absence of “poise” and with apparent condescension accused Margaret of falling into “that most unfeminine of errors—the tendency to cry out when a quiet and contained utterance is indispensable.” “
The Woman Rebel
seems to give a little more strength to the business of shocking the bourgeois than the bourgeois really are worth,” he wrote, chiding her especially for attacking the suffragists and other more moderate feminists, but still endorsing and promising to support her legal efforts to challenge the Comstock laws. Goldman herself wrote from Chicago that even the IWW women were “up in arms” over Margaret's brazen methods. “But, of course, they are women liberated only on paper and not in reality,” she added, and later said that the paper was, nonetheless, “the best seller we've got.”
¹⁷

According to Margaret, thousands of women also wrote encouraging her provocation and requesting the practical birth control advice. But long before she got down to the technicalities of contraception, she was indicted simply for sending “indecent” materials through the mail and on other unanticipated grounds. The Post Office confiscated her first issue with notice that she would be subject to criminal prosecution if she continued to publish. She continued nonetheless, and in syndicalist style, dropped discreet bundles of the paper into mailboxes throughout the city in an attempt to avoid detection. In August of 1914, the authorities finally arrested her and charged her on four criminal counts carrying a maximum sentence of forty-five years.
¹⁸

 

The Comstock laws proved an effective device for rounding up radicals, and the company Margaret kept, as much as anything she actually wrote, explains the severity of the indictments brought against her. The nation's economy had plummeted into depression in the early months of the year. With an estimated 300,000 unemployed in New York City alone, labor demonstrations and marches had grown larger and more militant, and even the city's more enlightened establishment feared the potential of widespread violence and disruption. Local newspapers in New York began calling for a crackdown on dissent, and the newly elected reform administration of Mayor George Purroy Mitchell complied.

The principal victim of this headline-driven hysteria was a young man named Frank Tannenbaum, who initiated an effort to dramatize the plight of New York's unemployed and homeless. Tannenbaum would later become a distinguished professor of history at Columbia University, but at this point of his life he looked to experienced IWW insurgents for support and for the kind of public relations gimmicks they had made their specialty. Early in February, Carlo Tresca, for example, discovered that the Childs' Restaurant chain was giving away special reduced-price meal tickets as a promotion. He had them reprinted in large numbers and persuaded Margaret to lead a delegation of stylishly attired ladies in fancy cars down to the Bowery, where they distributed them to the assembled hordes of street people.
¹⁹

The incident made the tabloids, but then Tresca and Tannenbaum came up with an even more controversial tactic. On a snowy winter night, they organized bands of homeless into roving street “armies” that demanded shelter in churches throughout the city. Tannenbaum was arrested for breaking and entering a church, and his subsequent imprisonment for a year made him a martyr for the left, the kind Margaret had no desire to be. His associate, Becky Edelsohn, was also jailed and began a well-publicized hunger strike, to which Margaret gave extensive publicity in
The Woman Rebel
. It seems only logical that their fate influenced her own subsequent legal strategy.
²⁰