Woman of Valor (17 page)

Knowing of the reactionary and inhumane objectives that scientific theories of human improvement have since served, it is difficult to recapture this naive confidence in the possibilities of doing good through the rational application of medical and scientific advances to human life. The ugly and tragic link of eugenicism with the intolerance and prejudice that produced Naziism has undermined its earlier association with scientific progress meant to promote the welfare of the individual and the public. Also lost is the fact that eugenicists were largely responsible for having introduced explicitly sexual topics into the boundaries of acceptable scientific discourse.
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Ellis always considered himself both a eugenicist and a Socialist and convinced Margaret of the coherence of this viewpoint. A pioneering advocate for the socialization of medicine as a public responsibility, he never tackled difficult moral or practical considerations about the implementation of eugenic policy, instead assuming, as she also would, that its benefits would be universally understood, because all human beings desire self-improvement. Medical and scientific advances would be available to all and welcomed by all; they would never need to be imposed. As the naïveté of this viewpoint became apparent with the rise of Fascism, Ellis shied away from the subject altogether, claiming to be bewildered, and refusing to hold himself in any way responsible for what he believed was a total perversion of eugenic theory.
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Ellis made his most important contribution to eugenic doctrine, at least from the standpoint of Margaret's interest, when he assigned women to act as its chief enforcers. Women are critical agents of civilization's progress, he argued, because as individuals they alone have the power to produce and nurture fewer, fitter babies, while, collectively, they can exercise the will to reduce substantially the pressure of population on the environment and the competition of labor in the marketplace. Increased sex expression and wider use of birth control were thus significant tools in the eugenic program, and accordingly, he condemned eugenicists who refused to endorse birth control because they wanted more children for the better classes. Though he never saw birth control alone as a panacea for social ills, and often encouraged Margaret to diversify her interests, he assumed a necessary equation among women's emancipation, contraception, and human betterment.

This linkage evolved logically from his views about gender difference and women's instinctive mothering nature. With his professional roots in biology, Ellis saw no value in a feminist agenda that strictly imitates men. Despite his efforts to break down barriers between the sexes, he, in fact, never questioned conventional stereotypes of men as aggressors and women as nurturers. By perpetuating these distinctions, however, he did not intend to relegate women to an inferior status. To the contrary, he believed that the assertion of woman's biologically determined responsibility for fertility would automatically empower her in a larger scientifically minded culture. Moreover, he celebrated the ascendence of feminine values of community and cooperation in the public polity and deplored traditionally male-associated traits of self-assertion and dominance. He once wrote aphoristically: “Charm is a woman's strength, as strength is a man's charm…. Civilization involves the substitution of women's methods for man's.”

Ellis's ideas in this regard engaged not only Margaret but also such outspoken feminists of the era as Emma Goldman, Olive Schreiner, and Ellen Key, all of whom also treasured his friendship and quoted his writings extensively in their own work. They looked to him as inspiration for a philosophy that argued for the recognition of a different voice, and for the accommodation of woman's special needs and values, in the making of social and political policy. They brought his concerns to bear on the popular thinking of their generation by debating the relative merit of an agenda that emphasizes absolute equality of opportunity for men and women, over one that takes stock of fundamental differences in biology. With Schreiner, Ellis shared the view that a modern industrial and consumer society allows men productive economic roles and participation in marriage and family life, but forces women to choose between the two. He supported a feminist doctrine which encouraged meaningful work and economic independence for women. On the other hand, he also agreed with the Swedish-born Key that a collective family life, which frees women of domestic responsibilities and enables them to work—an idea then advocated by many radicals—fosters a fearsome social conformity and robs children of the psychological nourishment and individual enrichment of the independent home. Key's solution to the problem was to advocate state support of mothers with young children, so women would neither have to work or be financially dependent on a man during the period of their maternal responsibility, and it is her legacy that informs the program of compensatory maternal and child care benefits for which the Scandinavian countries today are duly praised. She offered no resolution, however, to the dilemma of woman's enforced absence from the labor market while she mothers or to the difficulties of reentry and retraining when she wishes to return.

Ellis wrote lavish introductions to the English translations of Key's books, condemning the dogmatism of a first generation of feminists in their fixation on work and their reticence about sexuality and family life, and arguing for a “new phase” of the woman's movement, which would begin to understand the rights of women “to be unlike men.” He never resolved the question of whether a social philosophy recognizing and protecting the reality of biological difference between men and women is logically and legally compatible with egalitarian principles that must also govern a society where opportunities for women are unbounded, but he did raise consciousness about it. Along with Ellis, Schreiner and Key were beginning to be read in America, and Margaret herself had already incorporated some of their ideas into
The Woman Rebel
.
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Havelock Ellis would thus provide Margaret an empowering philosophy in the years following World War I, as she steered the birth control movement away from radicalism. It is a mistake, however, to believe that his moderating influence immediately eroded her prior commitment to fundamental economic change, and it is important to emphasize again the competing influence of Portet, who as a follower of Ferrer may have preferred education to violence as a vehicle of social change, but nonetheless always carried a gun.

Indeed, when Margaret addressed London's Fabian Society on July 5, 1915, she faced an audience that was not sympathetic to the extremism of her own economic and social philosophies, but still she refused to accommodate. The speech she wrote out in longhand recounted the struggle of American labor against an industrial giant dependent on the sweat of women and children and explained her defiant advocacy of family limitation, not as a “panacea,” but as a first step in breaking the cycle of the “present economic enslavement.” A month later in a letter addressed from London to her American “Comrades and Friends,” she made no claim for herself as a pioneer for birth control: “The industrial and economic conditions had done all the pioneering which was done in America, and especially among the working people; but as soon as I was convinced that the information to prevent conception was a necessity of woman's as well as man's emancipation, I set to work at once to do my part in giving it.” For the time being, at least, birth control remained subordinate to the larger concerns of the working class.
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Throughout the summer she learned of a growing interest in her cause from her radical friends at home. Leonard Abbott first wrote that the Free Speech League had appealed for $500 to fight Bill's case and raised considerably more. He enclosed a $100 check but cautioned that despite the growing sentiment in her favor, she was likely to receive a long prison sentence if she returned. She would have to decide for herself whether she was willing to “face the music.” Only a month later, however, he advised that the situation was changing for the better and told her to come home. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also warmly urged her to overcome her distaste for public speaking and undertake a national lecture tour, with the support of IWW locals and other groups, as a means of generating interest in her trial. From Washington, D.C., and from as far away as Texas and California, letters came commending her courage and daring and asking for more copies of the revised editions of
Family Limitation
she was sending home from Europe with new information on the rubber spring diaphragm, the favored contraceptive method of the Dutch clinics she had visited. The only breach of solidarity she felt was from Goldman, who neglected to write anything at all about
The Woman Rebel
convictions in
Mother Earth
until after Margaret left the country, and then never even mentioned Bill's subsequent arrest. Ironically, given her more determined radicalism, Goldman was annoyed that Margaret's defense of assassination in
The Woman Rebel
had compromised the integrity of her legal challenge to the contraception statutes. There was a public apology after Margaret wrote a long letter to
Mother Earth
from London defending her actions, and the journal gave better coverage to William Sanger's trial that September, but again Goldman implied that Margaret lacked sufficient experience and judgment to operate independently. The rift between the two strong-willed women never really healed.
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Bill Sanger, meanwhile, stood alone before three judges of the Court of Special Sessions in New York City on September 10, 1915. After months of haggling over procedural technicalities without success, he gave up all hope of justice and dismissed his lawyer. In a statement reflecting the impassioned turmoil of his private life, he identified emotionally with his wife's work and called Anthony Comstock the victim of an “incurable sexphobia” who lacked “the intelligence to distinguish between pornography and scientific information.” He was offered the alternative of a $150 fine or a thirty-day prison sentence, and he chose jail without appeal.

Ironically, the judge's opinion actually intensified interest in the case. It defined the issue unequivocally as a dispute not about obscenity, but about women's role, and therein set the terms for a public debate on birth control that continues to this day: “Your crime is not only a violation of the laws of man, but of the law of God as well, in your scheme to prevent motherhood,” it read. “Too many persons have the ideas that it is wrong to have children. Some women are so selfish that they do not want to be bothered with them. If some persons would go around and urge Christian women to bear children, instead of wasting their time on woman suffrage, this city and society would be better off.” One hundred supporters who had crowded into the courtroom, and an equal number waiting restively outside, broke into a raucous protest. Two weeks after the trial, however, there was cause for renewed celebration, because Anthony Comstock caught a cold and died of pneumonia at the age of seventy-one.
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When Margaret learned of these events, she immediately decided to return and stand trial herself. She either felt she owed Bill a sacrifice comparable to his own, found herself jealous of his sudden notoriety, or thought that with Comstock gone, she would receive a fairer trial. Perhaps she also took her loneliness for the children as a guide. She was desperate to see them, and for weeks, in fact, had been plagued by dreams about Peggy, a pattern that betrayed anxiety and perhaps some guilt as well, about her long and in part self-indulgent absence, though she explained it away simply as a premonition of trouble at home, a premonition bound, inexplicably, to the number six.
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M
argaret left her ship in lower Manhattan in October of 1915 and stopped immediately at a newsstand. There, by her own account, the words “birth control” stared back at her from the headlines of the popular weekly,
Pictorial Review
. Ever the gifted storyteller, she may well have invented this incident too, or encapsulated several experiences into one for dramatic effect, but a substantial shift in public consciousness on the issue had, indeed, occurred during her absence. Newspapers and magazines had quite suddenly turned their attention to the birth control controversy. As Bill Sanger languished in a New York City jail, the prosecutors who had hoped to check birth control propaganda with his conviction achieved exactly the opposite effect. They unleashed the most widespread, outspoken, and sympathetic public discussion since the Bradlaugh-Besant trial in London years before.
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Margaret had fled indictment in order to buy herself time and sympathy, and the strategy born in panic actually began to show results during her ten month exile. None of New York's mainstream papers or periodicals at first carried news of her situation. The only coverage had come from such predictable supporters on the left as
The Call
and
The Masses
. Early in 1915, however, the infant
New Republic
also took up her cause. In March, that new but suddenly fashionable journal featured an emphatic defense of contraceptive advocacy. Its brash young editors wrote with zest and confidence:

The endorsement constituted a striking dissent from the emphatic pronatalist sentiments of the Teddy Roosevelt brand of Progressivism with which the magazine was politically allied.
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Between April and November of 1915,
Harper's Weekly
, then the country's foremost popular intellectual forum, carried an exhaustive series on what it still decorously labeled as the question of “family limitation.” These soberly reported articles differed immeasurably in tone from Margaret's polemics, only mentioned her by indirection, and surely did not embrace her radical politics. Yet they marshaled similar medical, social, and economic arguments to those she had employed. They defined contraception for the first time as a scientific, rather than a moral issue, and in its defense assembled data on maternal and infant welfare, income, education, and fertility patterns. They thoughtfully summarized current arguments identifying smaller families with racial betterment and women's rights, and most important, perhaps, gave currency to birth control as a subject fit for responsible public debate.

The emerging legitimacy of the issue can also be traced in
The New York Times
's coverage of the Sanger story during 1915. Margaret's arrest and exile had apparently not been considered newsworthy, but within months the situation changed. Bill's confrontation with Comstock did get a small story on the inside pages, followed by several subsequent articles during the summer on efforts to organize for his defense. His trial in September received still more sustained attention from the
Times
and other dailies, and by November even the popular national news digest,
Current Opinion
, featured “The Debate over Birth Control.” Reticent editors at the
Times
, however, covered the story without ever using the words “prevention of conception,” which forced John Reed to intervene with friends on the paper's editorial page in the hope of placing a more candid piece of writing there.

In 1914 there had been only three articles in the
Times
on birth control, and only fourteen in 1915, but in the following two years, there were a total of ninety. An identical pattern existed for national news magazines, though popular women's periodicals, such as
Ladies' Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
, remained timid about the subject well into the 1930s. Small-town newspapers also gave little coverage.
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The media breakthrough Margaret observed not only helped stimulate, but probably also reflected, the public support of birth control by a coalition of women far broader in its economic and political viewpoints than the radical labor community. The birth control controversy erupted at a critical juncture in the larger debate on women that still engaged the country. The woman's suffrage campaign suffered its last major defeat in the New York State referendum of November 1915, just as Margaret returned home. A national coalition of support then developed for a constitutional amendment in Congress, where victory was finally achieved in 1920. By martyring herself and creating a dramatic new public controversy, Margaret compelled women who were already politically mobilized to deal frankly and openly with the issues of sexuality and contraception for the first time. She gave them a new cause.

In Margaret's absence several of the feminists who had originally heard her at Heterodoxy had organized a committee called the National Birth Control League. She returned to the United States to find that a new audience had rallied against the accusation by Bill's angry judge that all women were to blame for daring to assert selfish personal considerations over their obligations as wives and mothers. Contraception had become a public controversy, not as an instrument for the redress of class grievance, but as a dimension of the much larger and more elusive debate on the “woman question.”

The National Birth Control League established itself as a coalition of activists dedicated to reforming the federal and state Comstock statutes. Its moving force was Mary Ware Dennett, a Boston Brahmin who was divorced, coincidentally, from an architect and had left behind her own career in interior design to hone political skills in the suffrage movement. Having served as an officer of the American Women's Suffrage Association for four years, Dennett believed in the efficacy of persistent legislative reform and rejected the direct action tactics Margaret advocated. Other prominent founding members of the group included Helen Marot, the labor activist who had cared for Peggy and Grant, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, the progressive educator, Rose Pastor Stokes, the Socialist benefactor, and Lincoln Steffens, the journalist.

If more conservative than Margaret by temperament, the committee's membership nonetheless rallied around her. The full import of this support was illustrated at a dinner in her honor in January of 1916, when the anthropologist Elsie Clew Parsons stood up and asked fifty married women in the audience to sign a manifesto demanding that information about birth control be made public and admitting that they used it themselves. Only six agreed to sign the first part of the statement; only three signed the second. For some, birth control advocacy remained tainted by Margaret's political radicalism, but many others, as Parsons herself observed, were simply reluctant to acknowledge a social problem by laying bare their own lives. By shrinking from public identification with birth control, they also objected to what Parsons had once condemned as “the domination of personality by sex.”
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Margaret's first challenge then was to teach this audience to speak out in public. To broaden her constituency, she had to extend the ongoing debate about the relations between men and women beyond issues of work and suffrage, just as she had first tried to do among radicals. To this end, she ingeniously courted the attention of the popular media, displaying her sophisticated understanding of the value of public relations over conventional political organization. Between 1916 and 1918, she produced an extraordinary volume of newspaper and periodical coverage, which helped destroy old taboos.

Returning to the United States under the influence of the rationalism and optimism of Ferrerists and Fabians alike—and empowered by Havelock Ellis's formulation of the elements of a new social hygiene—she created a constituency for the view that only women in control of their fertility hold the key to personal fulfillment through marriage, motherhood, and independent self-realization. Abandoning the class antagonisms of
The Woman Rebel
, she argued for solidarity of gender. Women would make themselves the instruments of a social regeneration of far greater consequence than what might be achieved simply by winning the vote or getting a job. They would reconstitute the family, that fundamental unit of collective life, in a manner consistent with the rigor and discipline the modern world demanded in all dimensions of human activity. Only with the individual thus remade might a more complete social agenda move forward.
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Margaret also had a compelling practical motivation for suddenly courting support from women of more comfortable circumstances. She returned from Europe with no income apart from occasional revenues from the sale of her pamphlets,
What Every Girl Should Know
and
Family Limitation
, along with small direct contributions from the national radical network. She needed to reach into deeper pockets to support herself and her children. During her year in Europe, Bill and Leonard Abbott, the free-speech advocate, had collected money from Mabel Dodge and other radical patrons, but these contributions were not sufficient to meet mounting obligations. “It's so funny how many people have told me what they either
would like
to do or will
do
,” Bill wrote her dejectedly from jail. “When it came to a show down nobody takes a chance for fear of arrest! Can you
beat that
—somehow it all ends in swindle. You stand alone dear heart in doing the yeoman work.”

This disillusion could only have intensified after an editorial in
The Call
, signed by Anita Block, expressed admiration for Bill but challenged his tactics, saying collective action was needed more than individual martyrdom. To save his family from indebtedness to the radicals he had come to distrust, he accepted checks from the philanthropist Gertrude Pinchot, of the family of Amos and Gifford Pinchot, both prominent progressive Republicans, and her sister Grace Sargeant. This money covered the costs of tuition and board at the Stelton School for Grant and Peggy. Stuart, who had never been able to learn to read in Stelton's chaotic atmosphere, was attending a small boarding school on Long Island selected and paid for by Nan Higgins, because it was run by Christian Scientists whose unequivocal faith in self-reliance she admired and had herself embraced.
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Margaret worried constantly about money and conveyed a deep resentment of her dependence on charity, while Bill began to deflect his grievances toward her. Had she not been indicted, he might have remained in Paris, happily painting and suffering no adverse political exposure, or so he insisted in a letter to Mabel Dodge. During the dreary month of his jail sentence, however, he tried to overcome these regrets by reveling in memories of happier times when he had frolicked on Westchester hillsides with his adored young family. He filled his prison letters to Margaret with a sentimental longing for this past, and even wrote her a poem entitled “My Beloved.” Weak in its imagery and difficult to follow, the poem communicates a tragic and alarming deterioration in his mental and emotional state. He began:

The remaining stanzas wander on almost incoherently. Even before the ordeal of his trial and conviction, he had repeatedly written Margaret of his despair, claiming that he could not live without her. “I live, or exist now, because I was too cowardly to die,” he told her after receiving her first request for a divorce, and this may again have been his intended meaning in his sweet but rather enfeebled verse.

Margaret never bothered to visit the Tombs, the squalid jail where Bill was imprisoned, and he only learned of her return to New York from Leonard Abbott. When they were finally reunited, and he faced the reality of a callous and indifferent woman whose affections so evidently lay elsewhere, his enormous disappointment spilled over into the vindictive and insulting behavior that characterized their relations for years thereafter. Both behaved so poorly that Margaret later wrote to say she wished she could return his name to him, but did not see how that might be accomplished.
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What finally made this bitter estrangement irreparable was young Peggy Sanger's sudden death on November 6, 1915, the date that had inexplicably haunted Margaret in Paris and would continue to cast its shadow over the rest of her life. The engaging child took ill at Stelton and within a week died of pneumonia at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, cradled in the arms of her mother and her devoted Aunt Ethel, then a nurse on the staff. The death left a long legacy of resentment and remorse in the Sanger family. Young Grant revealed his essential feelings by repeating over and over again that, if their mother had only been there, Peggy would have never become so sick and died, and this drove Stuart to even deeper despair. Bill was totally distraught and, in an eerie recapitulation of Michael Higgins's behavior, sculpted a plaster cast of his daughter, which he kept in broken pieces for years, until his second wife insisted that he finally rid himself of his ties to the past in preparation for the birth of their own child.
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