Woman of Valor (18 page)

There is no way to know whether Margaret commissioned or even condoned the sculpture, though her grief was nonetheless intense. Overcome with emotion, she retreated from friends and family for days, a time for which there is little documentation. Peggy's body was cremated, and her ashes were later interred at the beachfront cottage on Cape Cod that Margaret purchased with the first money she ever made as a lecturer. The gesture at least gave her the comfort that the child's remains would forever overlook the seashore she had so loved.

Margaret never fully stopped mourning Peggy or exorcised the guilt over having been absent during the final year of her brief life. For years after, she could not sit across from another mother and daughter on a train, or in any other public setting, without losing control. She wrote in her journal of recurrent sleeplessness, reporting that images of a child slipping away from her haunted her dreams, and left her to awaken in tears. On a trip to Chicago in 1923, she dreamed that she was standing in the rear yard of a New York building when suddenly she heard roofs crashing down around her. In the commotion she began to worry about her little girl, but realized that she had been neglecting her for years and did not know where she was. She found herself running through the streets cradling a sweet-faced infant, thinking of her lost child, weeping, crying aloud, and pulling her hair, and only then did she wake up. For years thereafter dreams of babies remained as a persistent anxiety pattern. She was often disturbed during sleep by these dreams, which she recorded in letters and journals in the honest belief that the images were portents of developments in the birth control movement, happy babies promising good news, and sad ones bad. But more likely they were haunting reminders of the more fundamental sense of vulnerability she carried with her after Peggy's death.

Even as she achieved public prominence, Margaret carefully maintained a private space for herself, an “imaginary landscape,” as she once described it, set apart from the rest of the world, where her daughter grew to maturity “untouched by harsh actuality and disillusion.” Every year on the anniversaries of Peggy's birth and death, she canceled her public appointments and mourned. Grant, who could barely remember the sister who had been the lone friend and reliable companion of his youth, regularly wrote or phoned his mother to share in this ritual.
⁹

By sustaining this private and intensely spiritual bond with her daughter, Margaret was able over time to shape her anguish into something she could bear. As she told the story many years later, this curious accommodation began when she awoke from a bedside vigil in the hospital on the eve of the child's death, convinced that she saw an astral figure of Peggy, bathed in light, rise from the actual body and disappear out the door in a trail of smoke. Margaret's anxiety heightened in the following months as she found herself overcome by the certainty that the dead child's pattering footsteps continued to follow her around. Seeking comfort, she embraced a set of mystical beliefs that provided spiritual solace and emotional relief without tying her to any of the conventional religious doctrines that she had since rejected. Though she had long considered herself an atheist, she never completely abandoned the quest for absolutism that Catholicism instilled in her as a child and that Socialism briefly supplanted. Peggy's death may have only intensified it.
¹⁰

Desperate to hold on to some dimension of the child, Margaret began to study Rosicrucianism, then a fashionable mystical cult among British intellectuals to which Havelock Ellis had first introduced her in London. The Rosicrucians advanced an oriental regimen of private meditation intended to connect the individual to powers within the self that derive from a supreme higher force, a “god within,” as she interpreted it, paraphrasing Nietzsche. Moreover, they counseled that successful practitioners of their faith would come away with healing powers of their own and become “a force for good among men.” This compelling practical rationale served Margaret's professional needs as well as her personal ones, and helped overcome the void left by her increasing disenchantment with radical politics. Never troubling herself with intricacies of theological speculation, she simply accepted uncritically the Rosicrucian notion that every individual possesses “a spark of divinity,” which determines the potential to express oneself in a constructive and meaningful way. This gave a spiritual dimension to the doctrine of self-reliance she absorbed from such icons of secular American culture as Ralph Waldo Emerson and her father's hero, Robert Ingersoll—the same credo, perhaps, that her older sister practiced as a Christian Scientist. The power to believe in individual renewal may have rescued her from the loss of a collective Socialist ideology.

With Havelock Ellis, moreover, Margaret believed that science and mysticism could coexist without conflict since they both served essential, if distinct, human needs for self-understanding. Quiet meditation offered a kind of emotional crutch that enhanced her self-esteem and provided communion with her lost daughter, even though she never really believed that talking to the dead was more than a useful fabrication. Margaret rejected much of the dogmatism of the Rosicrucians and never accepted anything as eccentric as their belief in reincarnation. From this point on, however, her dabbling in spiritualism helped strengthen private doubts and misgivings for which neither political ideology, nor the objective world of science and medicine, provided meaningful solutions. She sometimes “talked” to Peggy and encouraged close friends to do the same with deceased loved ones of their own.
¹¹

Much unlike her husband and sons, Margaret thus emerged from Peggy's death with the intent of achieving something concrete and important in her life. She seems to have shed some of the disabling confusion and self-doubt that had long been troubling her, not only about her marriage, but also perhaps about the mother she had long ago refused to mourn and the father she had summarily rejected. A distinctive maturity and personal coherence followed, yielding a new determination and practical orientation to her continuing efforts as a social reformer. Through her work for birth control, she would translate painful, personal circumstances into public achievements, and no one would stop her.

 

The tragedy of Peggy's death may have tied Margaret emotionally to her daughter, but it left her little more attentive to the practical care of her surviving sons than she had been before. To the contrary, she could now satisfy a sense of maternal obligation without deviating from her chosen path, since Peggy remained with her—in effect, if not in reality—as the justification for her own professional preoccupations.

Margaret blamed the unruly Ferrerist colony for letting Peggy get sick, and many of her associates there believed that her growing disaffection from the left also derived from an irrational association of the radical life-style with her child's death. There was also the precedent of Stuart's unsatisfactory academic progress, and with both in mind, she immediately yanked Grant out of Stelton and placed him with his brother on Long Island, where she could count on more careful monitoring of his activities and thus be assured of continued freedom from routine domestic responsibilities. Thereafter she spurned progressive environments in favor of order and discipline in her sons' education. Later, the boys transferred to the Peddie School in New Jersey, where their young uncle, Bob Higgins, had been a scholarship student. By way of compensation for her usual absence, she hovered over them on holidays, occasionally took them with her on trips, or joined them at seashore.
¹²

Yet often, she didn't even manage to meet these meager obligations. Letters from ten-year-old Grant in 1918 cried out for her attention. “It is getting near Spring. The birds are coming from the South. I know you are very busy or you would come see me,” he wrote in February, and, then, several weeks later, “Am I coming home Easter? Write and tell me so, please.” Just before Thanksgiving, he implored her: “Mother will you come down…. Now you put down in your engagement book, Nov. 28, Go down to see Grant!” Many years later Stuart Sanger recounted to his own children the story of how he had once walked twenty miles along the Cape Cod beach on a hot day to greet his mother at the station, only to find that she wasn't on the train and hadn't bothered to wire ahead with an explanation.

When they did reunite, however, Margaret was a spirited, energetic, and thoroughly modern mother by the standards of her day, eager to join her sons in ocean bathing, horseback riding, and other active sports, which gained their respect and admiration. The family's humble cottage on the sublime beach at Truro, Massachusetts, had special sentiment for her, because of Peggy, and because she bought it for $500 in 1917 from John Reed, who needed the money to help pay for his legendary expedition to cover the Russian Revolution. It was there that she most often retreated with her boys, and primitive home movies from the 1920s show them relaxed and cavorting in the rough Atlantic surf.

Occasional family letters also survive and are generally chatty and affectionate. Yet the emotional duress she imposed upon Stuart and Grant when they were young seems to have erected a permanent barrier to meaningful, sustained intimacy. To cope with their apparent unhappiness, the boys in turn learned to hide their true feelings, bury resentments, and never question their mother's motivations. They became good students, competent athletes, and eventually reasonably successful professionals with families of their own. But this resilience never disguised an unappeased hunger for the love and approval of a mother at once appealing and seductive, yet fundamentally elusive—a mother who lavished her exuberance on other people and causes but never found enough time for them.
¹³

What may be most essential about Margaret's wholesale neglect of her boys at this time, however, is that she did not consciously hold herself accountable for it. She rationalized the situation by arguing that she was driven to work in order to support and educate them, since their father had abdicated all financial responsibility, an argument that was certainly true. Her first priority was to shelter them from the economic deprivation she had experienced as a child and equated foremost with emotional stress. Once she achieved stature as a reformer, however, her work became its own justification and reward. Yet, she relished telling friends of the joy she found in those hours she was able to spend in her “maternal corner,” as she called it, and she became something of a heroine to women colleagues who had consciously forfeited children for a career. A typically envious response came from the British suffragist and birth control advocate Edith How-Martyn, who wrote: “You make me wonder if I have made a mistake in not having any babies, but if I had I could not have done the little bits of public work I do, and we cannot have it all ways of life.”
¹⁴

 

Early in 1916, Margaret's friend and personal doctor, Morris Kahn, certified in a letter that she had suffered a disabling emotional breakdown after Peggy's death and could not possibly stand trial on
The Woman Rebel
charges. Just who requested the document is unclear, but she refused to use it and went ahead with preparations for a courtroom defense on January 18, the date set for disposition of her case. She consulted the New York law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer, & Marshall, then prominent for its handling of First Amendment cases, but refused to heed the advice that she plead guilty to reduced charges, promise never to break the law again, and pay a small fine. This obstinacy provoked derogatory comments about her mental state from some supporters, while others defended her determination to plead innocent and, if necessary, go to jail in protest. The young Socialist Bolton Hall pointed out that a fight would command more attention, and Emma Goldman, on a national speaking tour, wrote that she was suddenly finding substantially greater interest in birth control than in any of her other lectures. She even pledged to help raise money.
¹⁵

As the appointed day of trial approached, Margaret, together with supporters among radicals and feminists alike, orchestrated a forceful lobbying and publicity campaign. Hundreds of sympathetic letters deluged judges, legislators, and other prominent political figures, none more newsworthy perhaps than Pres. Woodrow Wilson, who heard from a distinguished list of British intellectuals, including the internationally acclaimed H. G. Wells. Before leaving London, Margaret had arranged with Marie Stopes that a petition be sent to Washington. Stopes was a biologist whose emotional excesses would soon lead her away from the laboratory to a career as Britain's foremost sex reformer, and her cover letter to the quiet and reflective American President got a bit carried away in its visceral imagery:

Probably with good fortune, this letter was never made public, and instead, more genuinely felt stories of Margaret's personal tragedy served to enhance public interest. At the urging of John Reed, Margaret wore a delicate lace-collared dress and posed with her young and winsome sons in a publicity photograph brilliantly calculated to undermine the notion that the support of birth control was a radical or immoral act. She had planned to dress in the costume of white shirt, black skirt, and tie that was then commonly worn as an emblem of suffragists, but the softer approach met with great success in newspapers throughout the country. The response produced the anomalous situation of a “prosecutor loath to prosecute and a defendant anxious to be tried,” as she herself later described it.
¹⁶