Woman of Valor (19 page)

A support dinner was held under the auspices of the National Birth Control League at the Hotel Brevoort in New York City on the eve of the scheduled trial, and newspaper coverage focused on the broad range of endorsements she had suddenly drawn from establishment women's rights advocates, writers, physicians, and other professionals. The presence that night of such notables as the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and
The New Republic
editor, Herbert Croly, was considered especially newsworthy, as was a request by suffrage leader, Harriet Stanton Blatch, the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that Margaret Sanger be guaranteed a trial by a jury composed of
equal
numbers of women and men.

Though still identified in the newspapers as a “Socialist leader,” Margaret was clearly courting an elite constituency, undoubtedly hoping to avoid prosecution. Conscious of the broadening of her support she said in her speech at the Brevoort:

But she quickly defended herself, proclaiming that, “there is nothing new, nothing radical in birth control. Aristotle advocated it; Plato advocated it; all our great modern thinkers have advocated it!”
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Margaret's prosecutors had never been any more confident than she about structuring a case around the elusive
Woman Rebel
charges, and the tremendous public exposure given the subject of birth control in the year since the initial indictments against her substantially strengthened the rationale of her defense on free speech grounds. Who would be willing to punish her for initiating a debate that had since been discussed with impunity in major newspapers and magazines throughout the country? Uncertain of just how to proceed, the prosecutor, Harold Content, foolishly arranged to have the trial date postponed twice, allowing each adjournment to enhance Sanger's public profile and add more suspense to the drama of her persecution. She became a celebrity, with newspapers interested not only in what she said but in what she wore. “The accused was dressed in modish attire, a close-fitting suit of black broadcloth, patent leather pumps, white spats and an English walking hat,” the
Evening Mail
in New York and the
Washington Post
both reported. Finally, having failed to structure a settlement, Content, on February 14, 1916, dropped all charges against her. Margaret Sanger, fugitive from the law for more than a year, was once again free.
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She received “a jubilee accorded a victor,” in the description of one New York reporter, who covered a birth control rally held several nights later in a Broadway theater. And in the course of the year that followed, she took the opportunity to capitalize on her sudden fame by booking speaking engagements throughout the country. One exhausting itinerary took her by train from Rochester to Buffalo and then on to Detroit, Chicago, and San Francisco in the course of ten days. She also visited Boston, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Denver, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and Spokane, delivering her inaugural birth control lecture 119 times, always before packed and enthusiastic crowds of either working class dissidents, bourgeois feminists, or sympathetic establishment figures—and sometimes an unlikely mix of all three. In St. Louis, an attempt by local authorities to deny her the right to speak inspired a young settlement house worker named Roger Baldwin to the first of what would become a lifetime of civil libertarian protests. In Chicago, she addressed an audience of 1,500 people, assembled by local free speech advocates in a hall in the poor districts near the stockyards, but professors from the nearby University of Chicago and other civic leaders from the city also attended.

Margaret's handwritten notations on the original typewritten text of her speech suggest that she may have modified her arguments to address concerns specific to each of these various constituencies. The speech blended elements of the standard soapbox provocation she had learned from the radicals with a quieter approach based on scientific and sentimental arguments—a mix that was to become her own oratorical trademark. To all she recounted in measured cadence her conviction that basic ignorance of sexuality and contraception bred large families, disease, and poverty. To all she repeated the history of the government's suppression of her efforts to stimulate popular awareness of these issues. Groups made up predominantly of radicals and labor activists, however, heard her condemn an oppressive class structure and deplore the disparity of access to reliable contraception between rich and poor, while middle-class women received a substantially toned-down version, which identified birth control as a guarantee of their freedoms and made villains not of capitalists, but of the repressive authorities of church and state who dared to keep them in bondage. Margaret's success put to rest any lingering self-doubt over her ability as a speaker, though it would be years before she fully overcame her anxieties about performing in public.
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Wherever she spoke, she left a trail of ad hoc advocacy organizations behind her, many of them supported by well-to-do and socially prominent women drawn to the birth control cause on feminist and free speech grounds. Yet at the same time, praise for her from important voices within the radical community continued to be warm and enthusiastic. The ever-devoted Alexander Berkman, writing from San Francisco, where he was publishing a national newspaper called
The Blast
and fomenting local anarchist activity, claimed that whenever a cynic bemoaned the forces of “economic determinism,” he would cite Margaret as a “striking example of what
one
individual of brains, energy and determination can accomplish.”

There is reason to speculate, though no proof, that Berkman was also a lover of Margaret's in these years, because he wrote passionately on this occasion and others of how taken he was by her “beauty and simplicity.” The fact of an intimacy between them might provide another explanation for the rivalry with Emma Goldman. Still, the support Margaret received from radicals at this time extended well beyond personal relationships. When Margaret was subsequently jailed in Portland, Oregon, for distributing copies of
Family Limitation
, and then released by a judge who emphatically condemned prudery and supported her work, Anita Block changed her earlier view and lauded her progress in
The Call
, encouraging all Socialists to support her. Marie Equi, a well-known radical physician and lesbian-feminist in Portland, affectionately called her “a little bunch of hellfire.” Later, she wrote intimately: “My Sweet, sweet girl. I love you with an ecstasy and understanding of Spirit that you alone have imparted to me thru the very brightness & flow of your intellect…. My arms are around you. I kiss your sweet mouth in absolute surrender.”
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Back in New York, however, Emma Goldman was clearly unhappy about her disciple's sudden prominence. Charges brought for the first time against Goldman for giving birth control information in a lecture in New York were still pending, yet the reporter from the
New York Herald
who covered the first Sanger victory rally in January took the trouble to note in his story that all the enthusiasm left the normally voluble Goldman standing in the wings of the theater with no opportunity to speak. Even before this public slight, Goldman was snidely complaining that birth control was getting “
too
respectable for decent folk,” and soon Ben Reitman was reminding the readers of
Mother Earth
that Margaret Sanger owed a debt to Emma's pioneering lectures on sexual subjects. The festering rivalry between the two women exploded again in April when Goldman defiantly went to jail for fifteen days. She never mentioned Sanger in the extensive coverage she devoted to her martyrdom in
Mother Earth
, and Margaret, in turn, was notably absent as a sponsor of the dinner called in protest, though she did send a telegram of support. Nor did she turn up at a Carnegie Hall rally held on Goldman's release, though again she prepared a message claiming illness as her excuse and affirming her strong concern. The rally made headlines when Rose Pastor Stokes defiantly promised to distribute slips of paper containing a birth control formula, but then reneged after she was pushed from the stage by a throng of rowdy women eager to have the information.
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The competition abated only as Goldman became consumed by the question of American involvement in World War I and lost interest in other causes. Though also a pacifist, Margaret made a strategic decision at this juncture to commit herself to birth control as a single issue. She was appalled when a young friend responded to the draft and showed up at her apartment in uniform but told him that others had made the mistake of diluting their effectiveness by embracing every worthy cause—that she would not risk the same fate.
²²

 

As American radicals turned their attentions abroad, Margaret had no choice but to broaden her constituency. Yet she did not abandon her dedication to civil disobedience as a means of direct action for social change, nor lose her disdain for progressive do-gooders and “pink-tea ladies,” as she often privately described the new audiences she began to court. Her sense of distance derived, in part, from the intimidation she felt as a result of the money, social sophistication, and superior education—not to speak of the aristocratic bearing—of many of the women who became her followers. In her
Autobiography
she wrote of how much she admired these “robust, vital” daughters of the country's establishment and regretted that she did not give the same impression. “If I were in a room with ten people and somebody came in who expected me to be present, she invariably approached the
biggest
woman and addressed her,” she said, admitting that for a time she tried to effect a more imposing appearance by wearing severe, mannish suits, until she recognized the futility and foolish expense of this contrivance.
²³

At the same time she had a distinct sense of superiority over women whose social position, stature, and self-confidence she may sometimes have coveted. In this respect, she never lost the ambivalence toward wealth and privilege she first experienced as a child. As an adult she led what was incontrovertibly an unconventional and independent personal life, and her experiences only bred more contempt in her for individuals, and especially for women, who had indulged and sheltered backgrounds.

She harbored a special grudge against Mary Ware Dennett and the National Birth Control League, resenting the fact that Dennett, like Emma Goldman, did not initially show confidence in her own potential for leadership. She thought Dennett looked down on her. In their brief competition for control of the nascent birth control movement, each woman would filter her response to the other through the lens of her own insecurity.

Dennett did come from an elite Boston family, but her professional fortitude masked the enormous upset she had experienced when left with two children by a disaffected husband who ran off with one of his architectural clients. Dennett would later claim that the conflicts in her marriage had been ideological—that her commitment to suffrage had destroyed it—but this was apparently only part of the story. In private correspondence she would also acknowledge that while grieving the death of an infant daughter, she had stopped having sexual relations with her husband and felt in part responsibile for losing him. Much like Margaret, she was toughened by personal tragedy.
²⁴

Still, a more fundamental disagreement kept the two women permanently at odds. The National Birth Control League was not terribly effective in 1916 and 1917, in part because Margaret's continued militancy divided the membership. Dennett believed firmly in organizing to change the law, not in acting to break it, and she openly rejected blatant propagandistic tactics. Seasoned by her experience in the suffrage movement, she was certain that the time was coming when legislators would recognize the absurdity of maintaining an anachronistic prohibition of birth control.

In 1916, she had bills drafted to amend both the federal and the New York State obscenity statutes, and for the following two years she carried her campaign a step further by lobbying in Albany to repeal the words “preventing conception” wherever they appeared in the law and to add a new clause affirming that contraception was not per se obscene or indecent. Only two legislators, one a Socialist, the other a liberal New York City Democrat, would agree to submit her bill, however, and under those circumstances it surely had no chance of success with a Republican majority desperately frightened of radicals, or with a Democratic minority that remained wholly subservient to the social conservatism and religious orthodoxy of Tammany Hall bosses.
²⁵

Margaret remained skeptical of these legislative initiatives and refused to endorse Dennett's efforts, out of resentment, in part, but also because she continued to view elected politicians as conformists who at best reflected established shifts in “expressed public sentiment,” as she put it, but rarely themselves initiated change. To explain her preferred mode of action, she paraphrased the familiar cry of labor activists of the day, “agitate, educate, organize, and legislate,” and when she finally came around to supporting reform of the Comstock statutes, she did so only for publicity, not because she had any real expectation of winning.
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