Woman of Valor (15 page)

After Portet's death, Margaret struggled to extricate herself from haunting associations of the past. As her own politics moderated after World War I, moreover, she had ample cause to hide the depth of her feelings for the dynamic, radical Spaniard. In his place, she wove a myth around the relationship she had formed with another mentor from her year of exile in Europe—Henry Havelock Ellis, the British sex psychologist, whom she had heard so much about at Mabel Dodge's salon.

On her arrival in London in late November 1914, Margaret had contacted Dr. Charles Vickery Drysdale, an heir by family lineage to the mantle of British Malthusian doctrine. Drysdale's parents, Charles Robert and Alice Vickery, both physicians and feminists, together with his uncle, Dr. George Drysdale, a prominent pamphleteer for birth control in the 1860s, had been founders of London's Neo-Malthusian League (so-called because it added “prevention” to Malthus's original argument). The Drysdales defended Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh during their widely publicized trial in 1878 for distributing
Fruits of Philosophy
, the birth control tract by the American Charles Knowlton, an event to which Margaret's recent indictment in New York was being compared. Though reversed on appeal, the famous case had won Neo-Malthusianism the support of such prominent late nineteenth century British liberals as John Stuart Mill.
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By the century's close, however, British liberals, preoccupied on the one hand with the practical agenda of trade unionism and on the other with the growing popularity of millennial Socialist doctrine, were suspicious of Malthus's ideas as economic theory. Many were willing to support the idea of population control as an economic and personal benefit but not as a solution to poverty. In 1896, the Manchester Labour Press did publish Edward Carpenter's
Love's Coming of Age
, a historic and widely circulated series of papers on the relations between the sexes, which advocated greater freedom in love and bemoaned the absence of a foolproof system of birth prevention. As an official matter, however, the Labourites stayed clear of these issues well into the 1920s. The widowed Alice Vickery and her son were lonely voices for their cause and understandably, therefore, gave enthusiastic welcome to a beleaguered American convert. They helped Margaret find lodgings, arranged a lecture opportunity at London's Fabian Hall, and secured her an invitation to tea with Ellis, who was their most prominent advocate.
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When Henry Havelock Ellis opened the door of his Brixton flat to Margaret Sanger on December 22, 1914, she saw in the soft glow of the candlelit room a “tall, lovely simple man with the most wonderful head and face and smile,” whose shock of white hair and flowing white beard gave him the look of a seer. He was fifty-six years old and looked more than his years. She was just thirty-five but already claiming to be less, a fiction that easily deceived because, indeed, she appeared young and cultivated an earnest demeanor. She found Ellis open and easy in intimate conversation, which was a relief to her. They talked of their respective legal battles, for the volume of his
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
that dealt with sexual inversion, the then-standard label for homosexuality, had recently been censored. They also discussed the virtues of various birth control methods. Ellis extolled
Tokology
, a pamphlet written by the nineteenth century American spiritualist and sex radical, Alice Stockham, which encourages husbands to withhold orgasm until their wives have been sexually satisfied and then ejaculate outside the vagina, a practice labeled “karezza.”

Margaret was overwhelmed to have conversed with “the one man who has done more than anyone in this century toward giving women and men a clear and sane understanding of their sex lives and of all life.” Ellis, for his part, though he found her “quicker, more daring and impulsive” than was his temper and strongly disapproved of her radical politics, had rarely known a more charming companion and never found one so quickly.
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It is virtually impossible to overestimate the impact Ellis would have on Margaret. She met him when he was at the height of his influence, having established an international professional reputation with the completion in 1910 of his path-breaking
Studies
, an iconoclastic, multivolume taxonomy of the range and diversity of human sexual expression. The son of a wandering sea captain, he was raised by a deeply pious and moralistic mother and four sisters, none of whom married. His earliest remembered sexual encounter came aboard his father's ship when he traveled around the world as a handsome youth of eight and witnessed the autoerotic—and probably the homosexual—behavior of sailors. Nevertheless, he long associated his first consciousness of sexual excitement with memories of watching his mother stand and urinate in a park, claiming that this urolagnia “never developed into a real perversion” but “became in some degree attached to my feelings of tenderness toward women.” An extremely shy adolescent, he was troubled by the experience of “wet dreams,” and since masturbation was then rigidly circumscribed, he resolved out of his own confusion to train as a doctor and study sexuality.
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In America before World War I, while Freud still remained relatively obscure, Ellis enjoyed enormous intellectual and even popular prestige as a scientist who wrote about sexual psychology with rare literary accessibility and grace. His reformulated theories of hygienic conduct gave immense stature to the emerging revolt against what was perceived as a pervasive Victorian fear and discipline of unlicensed sexual behavior. His sheer enthusiasm for sexuality and his inherent disdain of reticence and duplicity made him the undisputed prophet of a modernist tradition that has been confident and optimistic in its conviction that a freer sexual life is essential to individual and social well-being, a tradition that has since been given further credibility by the empirical sex research of men like Alfred Kinsey. Ellis's capacity to write sympathetically and without moral sanction about an endless variety of sexual predilections as they were reported to him by patients—including homosexuality and autoeroticism, the subjects of his first two volumes—stood in sharp contrast to dominant standards of propriety. Even Margaret was for a time disturbed by his frankness, claiming that an initial reading of his case studies gave her “psychic indigestion.”
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At first, Ellis's stature in America increased along with Freud's. He was one of the earliest writers in English to appreciate the significance of the psychoanalytic argument for the fundamental relationship between sexuality and neurosis. But as Freud veered away from the relative optimism of his early writings and began to emphasize the inherent conflict between sexual drives and internalized restraints and moral sanctions, Ellis countered with a more liberal and humane approach to the subject. He eschewed the rigidity of orthodox psychoanalytic imperatives, which in his view were problematically concerned with the danger of an unchanneled sexual instinct. In a rather sweeping indictment, he challenged Freud's dogmatic views about the necessary course of childhood development and sublimation, of adult social behavior and coital performance. He especially despaired of a therapeutic model that sought to enforce strict norms, and at one point called Freud's published views on the interpretation of dreams and other symbols nothing more than “didacticism and divine revelation.” He once identified Freud as “an extravagant genius—the greatest figure in psychology who was almost always wrong.” But since Ellis himself failed to produce an alternative theory of personality and behavior, or a therapeutic model anywhere near the scope or complexity of Freud's, his reputation did not survive the psychoanalytic revolution unscathed.
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Ellis viewed sexuality as an inborn drive that could only become repressed or distorted by culture. He argued that more liberal social attitudes would necessarily breed contentment by setting men and women free from inherited taboos and letting them do whatever seemed natural and right. This optimism was born of his faith, at least before World War I, in the educability and malleability of the human personality—a viewpoint that rejected both traditional, Christian doctrines of man's fall from grace and Freud's secular reformulations on the subject. Ellis endorsed any number of reforms, including universal coeducation and a program of sex education for children, so as to permit boys and girls from the start to feel comfortable with themselves and with each other. He was supportive as well of organized feminism, because the woman's movement promised to shatter the traditional formality and distance between men and women that fostered the inhibition and misunderstanding on which he believed most heterosexual dissatisfaction rested. Though he found Freud's linkages between disturbances of the unconscious and hysteria quite fascinating, he insisted that individual mechanisms for repression and denial could be easily penetrated in the kind of patient therapy he practiced, where simply talking about anxiety and bringing it to the surface often acted as its own cure.
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Unlike Freud, Ellis did not demand that his patients change their habits, whatever they might be, only that they accept them. His standards for what ought to fit within a reasonable spectrum of normal sexual activity accommodated not only conventional practices, but many that were then commonly labeled perverse, and often still are. Ellis, in fact, celebrated deviation from conventional coital sexuality as a laudable, inventive and distinctively human phenomenon.
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His sexual theory was premised on a willingness to understand and tolerate sexual diversity as a dimension of what he simply called “nature's balance.” He believed in complete sexual freedom, apart from society's interest in protecting innocent individuals from behavior to which they do not consent, though he never spelled out exactly how this enforcement should work. He also believed women should be left alone to do as they please until they become pregnant, at which point society might reasonably assert its legitimate interest in the welfare of the child. In almost all these respects, Margaret deferred to his erudition and endorsed his scholarship wholeheartedly, accepting his theories as validation of her own experience, and making them the intellectual foundation for her subsequent work.
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Margaret found Ellis's formulations on female sexuality especially congenial. His writings celebrated the emancipation of an independent, self-defined woman whom she liked to think she resembled. He defended passion in both sexes as one of life's great driving forces but made a special plea for female eroticism, claiming in contradiction to established Victorian views on female sexual weakness and to Freudian confusion on the subject, that what women want is the fulfillment of their strong sensual nature. Ellis linked sexual desire to instinctual reproductive requirements and understood the sexual encounter as an intense courtship ritual—an extension of the primitive mating game. Yet, he argued that emphasis on reproduction at the expense of gratification had brought an unnatural and repressive influence to bear on human sexuality, especially for women. He instead legitimized the stimulation of desire through complicated patterns of arousal that for some might countenance sexual excess, for others, long periods of abstinence—all depending on levels of sexual energy, which he maintained were highly individualized. He advanced a view of orgasm emphasizing the similarity of male and female response and directly challenged Freud's dicta on the subject, claiming instead that orgasmic deficiency in most women is simply the result of male ineptitude. At the same time, he argued—somewhat contradictorily, in the view of some of his critics—that the process of sexual arousal and gratification in women (“tumescence and detumescence,” as he called them) is generally more complicated and time-consuming than in men. He meant no criticism by this—indeed, virtually all of his writings condemn male, phallic-centered notions of gratification and endorse a more imaginative and creative sexual regimen on the grounds that response patterns in both sexes are better when made more diffuse. Nonetheless, this preoccupation limited the revolutionary implications of his thinking. He encouraged men to play upon women as they would upon delicate and finely tuned instruments and left himself open to misrepresentation and misunderstanding as an apologist for traditional gender arrangements. His views must have substantiated Margaret's own quite clearly, however, for she too never saw any hazard for women in greater male solicitude of their sexual desires and needs.

Though his sexual theory was grounded in biology and anthropology, Ellis was at the same time an aesthete and romantic by temperament. He believed that the sex drive is instinctual but also argued that the emergence of self-conscious human beings allows for the integration of sex and love—for a union of physical and spiritual impulses.
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This peculiar blend of a modernist temperament with respect to rights of sexual expression and a conventional, romantic outlook about relationships (however many he might countenance at a single time) made him an ideal mentor for Margaret. His writings on love and on freedom in marriage, even more than his explicit thinking about sexual practices, confirmed her own viewpoints and quickly formed a new catechism for her own unorthodox behavior and beliefs.
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The historian Paul Robinson, in a thoughtful essay, points out that in praising both naturalism and romanticism, Ellis raised to the level of debate, but did not resolve, the most vexing problem of human sexual psychology—“the paradoxical need for both companionship and variety in erotic life.”
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Ellis might have agreed with this assessment, but he would have us believe that he accommodated the dilemma in his own life by remaining intensely devoted to his wife, whom he doted on emotionally and intellectually, while both had sexual relations with other women. The arrangement seemed satisfactory to all parties concerned until Margaret Sanger became the other woman in his life.
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