Woman of Valor (2 page)

Margaret Sanger went to jail in 1917 for distributing contraceptives to immigrant women from a makeshift clinic in a tenement storefront in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. When she died fifty years later, the cause for which she defiantly broke the law had achieved international stature. Though still a magnet for controversy, she was widely eulogized as one of the great emancipators of her time.

For more than half a century, Sanger dedicated herself to the deceptively simple proposition that access to a safe and reliable means of preventing pregnancy is a necessary condition of women's liberation and, in turn, of human progress. Her most exquisite triumphs were her last. She was past seventy when the world finally began to heed her concern for unchecked population growth, past eighty when the team of doctors and scientists she had long encouraged first marketed the oral, anovulant birth control pill. She lived to see the realization of her repeated efforts as a litigant and a lobbyist through the landmark 1965 ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in
Griswold v. Connecticut
, which guaranteed constitutional protection to the private use of contraceptives. She died just as Lyndon Johnson incorporated family planning into America's public health and social welfare programs and committed at least a fraction of the nation's foreign policy resources to it, fulfilling her singular vision of how best to achieve peace and prosperity at home and abroad.

Since her death the rebirth of a vigorous feminist movement has given new resonance to her original claim that women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies. Her direct legacy endures in the far-reaching international family planning movement that descends from her pioneering organizational efforts. She has become an occasional scapegoat of extremists opposed to abortion or of black militants, who insist that family planning is genocidal in intent. But by and large, she shares the ignoble fate of so many iconoclasts like her who have lived to see the routine acceptance of ideas once considered disturbing. She has been forgotten.

Every woman in the world today who takes her sexual and reproductive autonomy for granted should venerate Margaret Sanger. With the full promise of scientific contraception still unfulfilled—with the right to legal abortion now compromised for those who cannot pay, and again at risk for all American women regardless of means—her courageous and determined career merits renewed consideration.

This new biography aims to recapture Sanger's vitality and the intensity of her long struggle to establish the legitimacy of her concerns. It examines both the personal and public dimensions of her life much as she experienced them, layering complicated private struggles and intimate relationships upon larger intellectual and political pursuits. Though she encountered enormous resistance in her own lifetime and still invites criticism, Sanger popularized ideas and built institutions that have widespread influence today. Her leadership, while often quixotic, helped create enduring changes in the beliefs and behavior of men and women who perceive themselves as modern, not only in America but throughout the world. Birth control has fundamentally altered private life and public policy in the twentieth century. No other issue has for so long captivated our attention or so dramatically polarized our thinking. As the psychologist Erik Erik-son once provocatively suggested, no idea of modern times, save perhaps for arms control, more directly challenges human destiny, which may account for the profound psychic dissonance and social conflict it tends to inspire. This study necessarily incorporates some of the history of these sweeping developments. It veers away at points in the narrative from the woman herself, and the reader is appropriately cautioned.

Yet the force of Sanger's personality asserts itself, even when she is not at center stage, and the life she uniquely defined for herself as an independent woman develops on its own as a subject worthy of interest, quite apart from the content of her work. Many aspects of her character were admirable. Some were not. Under close scrutiny, she does not always occasion sympathy or seem worthy of praise, but her weaknesses as well as her strengths ought to be more clearly understood. Knowing her better can only help to illumine the history of her times and yield insights into the tensions of our own, when so many of us struggle to complete her still unfinished journey as feminist and reformer.

 

The middle child of a large and poor Victorian family, Margaret Higgins Sanger learned to dream at an early age from a magnetic Irish father who squandered away his talents and his humane social vision on too much talk and drink. From an overburdened but resourceful mother, however, she was lucky to absorb a powerful motivation to improve her own lot and the essential habits of self-discipline that made it possible to do so. One parent taught her to defy, the other to comport. She always warred between the two but took away from both a distinctive resolve to invent a better life for herself and for others.

She emerged on the American scene in those halcyon days at the turn of this century, when it was easy to believe in the potential of individual and social renewal—in the inevitability of human progress. The country seemed wide open with possibility. Frustrated by her work as a visiting nurse in New York City's bleak immigrant slums—her young marriage turned sour—she first teamed up with labor radicals and bohemians to organize strikes and pickets and pageants in the hope of achieving wholesale economic and social justice. “No Gods, No Masters,” the rallying cry of the International Workers of the World, became her personal and political manifesto. But like so many of the callow youth of her generation, this joyous faith in revolution served only as a way station to a more sober confidence in the ability of science and education to shape human conduct. She soon jettisoned Socialism in favor of an alliance with progressives, confident that capitalism might reform itself voluntarily and that bold public initiatives could be planned for human betterment.

At the heart of this political conversion was the maturing of her consciousness as a feminist. Sanger lost confidence in the power of working people to unite for change but decided to invest in the collective potential of women. Chided at one point for taking herself too seriously, she responded deadpan: “I am the partisan of women who have nothing to laugh at.” She openly rebelled against conventional gender arrangements that confined men and women to separate spheres but also insisted that the price women pay for achieving equality should not be their sexuality or personal fulfillment. Following in the footsteps of a generation of suffragists and female reformers who had proudly forgone marriage and sacrificed themselves at the altar of professional advancement and political gain, she became the standardbearer of a far less ascetic breed, intent on a broader range of satisfactions. Far from subverting the political or economic advancement of women, she saw nothing wrong in wanting them to have it all, or in establishing birth control as the necessary condition to the resolution of their often conflicting needs. And just as she took issue with traditional images of respectability for women, so she also rejected the equally confining determinism of Sigmund Freud. A disciple of the social theorist Havelock Ellis, she believed optimistically in the power to liberate human sexuality, even from the yoke of the unconscious.

Sanger envisioned a united front of women who would claim the legalization of contraception, along with greater public candor about sexuality, as a fundamental right. The nation's birthrate was already declining as the result of largely private contraceptive arrangements, but birth control remained illegal and underground, and it was she who first recognized the far-reaching consequences of bringing the issue of reproductive freedom out into the open. Birth control, she argued, would enhance the opportunities of women beyond the promises of economic reformers, on the one hand, and of suffragists on the other. It would be a tool for redistributing power fundamentally, in the bedroom, the home, and the larger community. Women would achieve personal freedom by experiencing their sexuality free of consequence, just as men have always done, but in taking control of the forces of reproduction they would also lower birthrates, alter the balance of supply and demand for labor, and therein accomplish the revolutionary goals of workers without the social upheaval of class warfare. Bonds of gender would transcend divisions of ethnicity, race, or class. Not the dictates of Karl Marx, but the refusal of women to bear children indiscriminately, would alter the course of history.

Through the 1920s and '30s, Sanger divorced herself from her radical past, bested her competitors for leadership, and made her name virtually synonymous with the birth control cause. With an uncanny feel for the power of a well-communicated idea in a democracy, she wrote best-selling books, published a widely read journal, held conferences, gave lectures, and built a thriving voluntary social organization. Her intent was nothing less than to construct an international network of clinics where women would receive a full range of preventive health care services. To this end, she had no choice but to mobilize men of influence in business, government, labor, the emerging professions and academic sciences, but her most active recruits always remained women, many of them veterans of the American and British suffrage movements, or daughters of former volunteers, who had learned to do political battle. Her pioneering facilities provided contraception, preventive gynecology, sex education, marriage counseling, and infertility services to poor women and to many who could afford private doctors but simply preferred a sympathetic female environment. Under the best circumstances they became laboratories for her idealism, but, as often as not, the experiment failed, and even Sanger herself grew disillusioned.

The birth control movement stalled during the long years of Depression and World War II, stymied by the cost and complexity of the task of reaching women most in need, engulfed by internal dissension and overwhelmed by the barrage of opposition it provoked. Timid politicians shied away from sexual controversy and refused to reform anachronistic obscenity laws. Many women feared compromising hard-won political gains, especially as birthrates plummeted in the face of economic crisis, precipitating a backlash against their increasing independence. In the social sciences, biological explanations for human behavior lost favor. Eugenic ideas about manipulating heredity, at first the province of progressive proponents of social reform, quickly deteriorated into an excuse for the control of undesirables on the straightforward basis of race and class. Margaret Sanger was never herself a racist, but she lived in a profoundly bigoted society, and her failure to repudiate prejudice unequivocally—especially when it was manifest among proponents of her cause—has haunted her ever since. Intent in her view of contraception as a tool of liberation, she always carefully distinguished between voluntary and coercive applications of her ideas, but this task proved no less daunting for her than it has been for advocates and policymakers since, who have struggled to balance the rights of individuals against a larger vision of the collective social good.

Above all, Sanger more than met her match in the powerful political opposition that was mounted against her by the American Catholic Church. For the first time in its history in this country, the church created a national mechanism for lobbying and for mobilizing its core constituency of faithful women. Sanger was identified as a dangerous subversive, intent on destroying the family and limiting the fertility of the very people she was trying to help. The alliance she forged with the country's establishment came to haunt her as the votes of urban Catholics and rural Southerners became critical to the Presidential ambitions of Franklin Roosevelt. And birth control was denied a place in the social welfare and public health agenda of the triumphant New Deal, tragically distinguishing the American experience from those of Western European nations.

Embittered by her failure to win support at home, Sanger grew personally irritable, politically conservative, and rabidly anti-Catholic as she grew older. Disenchanted with the increasing pronatalism of postwar Americans after years of deferred fertility, she turned her attention abroad and struggled valiantly, though never with complete success, to secure her stature among a new generation of international population policymakers, and to imbue population programs in the developing nations of the world with her never-wavering concern for the precarious status of women.

 

Margaret Sanger was an immensely attractive woman, small but lithe and trim. Her green eyes were flecked with amber, her hair a shiny auburn hue, her smile always warm and charming, her hands perpetually in motion, beckoning even to strangers. As H. G. Wells once described her, she also had a quick Irish wit, high spirits, and radiant common sense. Men adored her. She married twice and enjoyed the affection and esteem of men and women alike, who provided her a lifelong network of emotional, financial, and organizational support. At the same time, she could be impossibly difficult and was known to make enemies. She was not easily scorned, and those who dared to disagree with her quickly discovered her explosive temper.

Yet it was probably less temperament than sheer tenacity and doggedness of purpose that made her so controversial. She may simply have claimed too much for birth control, antagonizing supporters on the left for whom the dialectic of class remained a central determinant of economic and social change, confounding more bourgeois followers with her disdain for incremental politics, and yet, at the same time, provoking conservatives whom she sometimes courted despite an underlying contempt for convention and conformity. Always a pragmatist, perhaps at times even an opportunist, she deliberately shifted her tactics and strategies to accommodate changing political or economic currents and left herself open to the accusation that she was trying to be all things to all people.

These traits have made her especially controversial with biographers. An image problem actually developed with the two autobiographies she wrote during the 1930s, both self-aggrandizing books filled with petty deceits and outright duplicity. Neither attempts to explain her intriguing personal and political odyssey, for the risk of doing so while she was still alive might have been to ignite even more controversy. With the help of ghostwriters, she wrote entertaining, superficial books of the sort that inspire disbelief, and readers have been appropriately skeptical.