Woman of Valor (23 page)

There were two competing birth control organizations in New York City in 1917, the National Birth Control League and the New York Birth Control League, which Blossom had organized. Margaret officially belonged to neither but worked with both until her dispute with Blossom. Mary Ware Dennett asked her to serve on the executive committee of the NBCL in 1916, and then again in 1919, when the name of the organization was changed to the Voluntary Parenthood League, but she refused both times, though Dennett did agree to write for the
Birth Control Review
.
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Margaret instead tried to maintain her own leadership and autonomy by keeping the
Birth Control Review
afloat on income from its several thousand subscribers, newsstand sales, and generous individual benefactors. The latter included a still devoted Gertrude Pinchot, Dorothy Whitney Straight, the activist philanthropist who with her husband Willard published
The New Republic
, and, most significantly, Juliet Rublee, who anonymously paid Margaret's office rent on lower Fifth Avenue, frequently sent money for her personal needs, and established her legitimacy with a large network of powerful and wealthy individuals in New York, Washington, and Chicago.
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Margaret could not have sustained her celebrity status or consolidated her leadership during these years without this friend's assistance, and for the rest of her life her devotion to Rublee remained unshakable. Having inherited a Chicago industrial fortune, Rublee had substantial sums of money to use at Margaret's discretion. She also happened to be married to the Harvard-educated lawyer, George Rublee, who served as a Wilson appointee on the Federal Trade Commission and whose personality was as reserved and cautious as hers was extravagant and wild. The marriage apparently did not satisfy the full extent of Juliet's energies or passions, and there were no children, because she was infertile as the result of overzealous surgery for pelvic complaints when she was young. Through her association with Margaret, this eccentric, if well-intentioned, woman would experience political engagement and personal adventure for which she was more than happy to exchange her money and contacts. More than any other figure in the country's social establishment, she would be responsible for subsequent changes in the orientation of the birth control movement.
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A personal rapport was well-established by the time Rublee went off to France in 1918 to work as a Red Cross nurse. Margaret sent her to meet Havelock Ellis and wrote often to inform her of developments in the birth control movement taking place beneath the facade of official accounts. Margaret confessed that she was using her office as an informal clinic to instruct from twenty-five to forty women a week in the use of pessaries, implying that this had been the procedure at Brownsville as well. Juliet, in turn, delighted in flouting the law and enthusiastically endorsed this work. Juliet also supported further distribution of
Family Limitation
among women workers in factories, mills, and mines. A concerted educational outreach was being made in several small towns in Pennsylvania and upstate New York. During the summer, an Italian woman in Pittsburgh had been sentenced to nine months in jail for giving the pamphlet to a miner's wife, and Margaret was trying to secure her pardon, while also printing and distributing an additional 20,000 copies of the pamphlet translated into Lithuanian and Polish with funds donated by Gertrude Pinchot.
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Before leaving New York, Juliet had also set the
Birth Control Review
on solid financial footing, following Blossom's abrupt departure, by helping to incorporate the New York Women's Publishing Company as a parent venture for the magazine. She sold $10,000 worth of stock in shares of $10 each, though it was never likely to be a money-making proposition. Several of Rublee's friends became officers of the parent company, and directorships were also offered to Jessie Ashley, Ethel Byrne, and Mary Ware Dennett, even as editorial control mostly remained with people from the left. Margaret's old beau, Walter Roberts, took over as managing editor. And an impressive range of writers and thinkers joined the editorial board, including Eugene Debs, Crystal Eastman, the lawyer and social reformer, and Florence Guertin Tuttle, a prize-winning journalist who had recently published a much-acclaimed book on world peace and would soon become a lobbyist for the League of Nations. From Europe came Havelock Ellis, C. V. Drysdale, Johannes Rutgers, Marie Stopes, and Stella Browne, a spirited young Socialist in London.
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For the moment the belligerent tone of the publication under Blossom disappeared. Gone was the bombast linking birth control to social revolution, replaced by reasoned arguments, setting forth poverty, maternal and infant mortality, child labor, tuberculosis, birth defects, and other generally agreed-upon objectives of the liberal social welfare agenda as a sufficient rationale. By the early months of 1919, however, Margaret was under pressure to earn money and embarked on an extended lecture tour through the South. Not feeling well, she then extended her leave of absence to write her book,
Woman and the New Race
and placed another old friend in charge, the rebellious journalist and self-styled revolutionary, Agnes Smedley.

Smedley was newly released from jail, where she had been held until the war's end, charged under the Sedition Act with abetting the Germans as a result of her association with underground Indian Nationalists accused of working in New York and London to undermine America's British allies. She was still under indictment when Margaret brought her to work at the
Review
, and the prospect of renewed militancy under her stewardship must have irritated some directors because a formal statement of editorial policy was adopted on June 17, 1919, limiting the magazine's interests to “Birth Control pure and simple. No other propaganda work of any kind.”
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Margaret was not in town when the vote was taken, yet she was not herself immune from controversy. Only months later, Mary Ware Dennett resigned from the board to protest a front-page article urging women, regardless of their circumstances, to unite in a “birth-strike” for five years. The byline was not Smedley's, but Margaret's own. The country's attention was riveted on strikes in the steel industry in Pennsylvania, and she used the occasion to argue that at issue was not just worker exploitation, but the unchecked reproduction of a “future crop of wage slaves.” Dennett objected on the grounds that this constituted endorsement of “a militantly feministic policy” and, even worse, employed the “terminology of the labor struggle.” She had recently transferred her campaign for legislative reform from the statehouses to the Federal government and was concerned that Margaret's tactics would antagonize potential supporters of reform and discredit her efforts. Privately, she also condemned what she called Margaret's emphasis on “sex antagonisms,” believing that birth controllers should adopt a more conciliatory tone toward men.
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Dennett argued with some merit for more soothing messages, but despite her promise of moderation Margaret was never so disposed. She took the view that confrontation in and of itself can be valuable. At least it kept her in the news. During the war, for example, when birth control had been able to achieve little conventional press exposure, she sent advocates to the city streets to sell their magazine at busy intersections. Her most effective salesperson was Kitty Marion, who had learned to hawk papers as a militant British suffragist. Beginning in 1918, and for more than a decade thereafter, Marion stood almost every day during the afternoon and early evening at a familiar post on Times Square or outside Macy's Department Store at 34th Street, once claiming to have sold 90,000 copies of the
Birth Control Review
at 10 to 20 cents apiece. She called it a “liberty bond” for women's freedom and endured the frequent heckling of patriots who objected to what they perceived as her mockery of the war finance effort. She was repeatedly arrested by police officers who tried to interrupt her activities by enforcing local peddling restrictions.

In November of 1918, Marion landed in the Tombs on a thirty-day charge, until Jonah Goldstein could secure her acquittal on First Amendment grounds. She found herself in jail with Agnes Smedley, who was there because of her underground political work, and by Smedley's account in a letter to Margaret, they also shared their accommodations with cockroaches, bedbugs, and all kinds of other “very active human and animal life.” Smedley complained of their mistreatment by a police detective, who told her he wished he had arrested her down South, where “she would be strung up to the first lamppost.” She then reported that Kitty had turned the prison into a forum for birth control agitation. “Kitty came clattering down the stone corridors every morning with her scrub pail in her hand. ‘Three cheers for birth control,' she greeted the prisoners and matrons. And ‘three cheers for birth control,' the prisoners answered back.” Years later Marion would sentimentally recall the incident: “If I have helped to diminish unnecessary suffering, I have received a very liberal education in return,” she acknowledged, as she prepared to return to England, having outlived her usefulness to a professionalized birth control organization which by then wanted nothing more to do with sidewalk agitators.
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Margaret nurtured these activists, and they returned an enduring devotion and loyalty, because of a shared resentment over their subordination as women living in a world governed by men. The bonds among them transcended conventional boundaries of politics and class and unsettled women who were less disaffected, such as Mary Ware Dennett. Yet, at the same time, Margaret could also move comfortably in conventional circles and was remarkably successful at observing social amenities when the situation demanded. Unlike her sister Ethel, she bore the stamp of her bourgeois education in etiquette. She alternated between propriety and seething resentment—between the comportment she had learned at her mother's knee and the iconoclasm she both relished and resented in her father.

Margaret's unusual inspirational skills before a broad audience of men and women in these years may have been as important to her success as any specific message she communicated. Blanche Ames, the formidable, talented, and wealthy daughter of another Boston Brahmin family, who had left women's suffrage to embrace the birth control cause in her state, first heard Sanger in a 1916 speech before a frenzied meeting in Boston called to protest the arrest of a young college student by the name of Van Kleek Allison for distributing birth control pamphlets to unmarried factory girls. Ames later remembered:

Viewed as impetuous and somewhat neurotic even by his supporters, the young Allison made an unlikely martyr, but when he was tried and convicted, a conservative Boston judge handed him an outrageous three-year prison sentence, which was only later reduced on appeal to several months. These events provided birth control in Massachusetts with an effective organizing tool and pitted local Catholics against the Protestant elite. Blanche Ames was vilified for her activities, with one newspaper reporting that she was denounced in local Catholic churches as a menace to society—as a “woman of the idle rich, who prefers poodles to babies!”

In other states a similar pattern of conservative overreaction to birth control agitation also helped build a following for the movement. In 1918, in Pennsylvania, birth control advocates mobilized to defeat legislative prohibitions, which were passed where there had previously been none at all. So too, a citizens' coalition organized by several University of Chicago professors and Hull House physicians, Alice Hamilton and Rachelle Yarros, in response to Margaret's 1916 appearance, was able to kill a similar measure in the Illinois legislature. This, despite the fact the more prominent, but increasingly cautious, Jane Addams refused to lend her name to the still controversial cause.

Where there were no such confrontations, birth control activism simply foundered. Coalitions of radicals and reformers became untenable, and much of the nation turned its attention away from domestic political and social causes altogether. Many of the endorsements Margaret had won through her perspicacity as a publicist and by the sheer force of her personality proved ephemeral, as was the limited progress of Mary Ware Dennett's plodding legislative efforts. Neither woman, for the time being, was able to create a strong institutional legacy behind her. The tide turned against them. By 1920, most of the state and local committees that had organized to defend Margaret and carry forward her agenda were either quiescent or had ceased to exist altogether, though many would regroup in middecade around the concrete objective of organizing birth control clinics.
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Margaret found herself overcome by despondency and depression, unable to impose direction on her professional commitments. In 1919, she had begun writing again in a diary, and often inserted a line or two of philosophical reflection into her record of the day's correspondence, work obligations, and evening engagements. At the heart of her malaise was despair over the red scare and the deteriorating political climate, but she was confused and uncertain as well about her health and about her personal life. She was also ill with the familiar symptoms of fever, weight loss, and a persistent lump in her neck that she believed were signs of recurring tuberculosis. Assured by her physician that she was suffering only from “nervous fatigue,” she went off to rest at Truro with her sons. When the conditions persisted, however, she seized the opportunity presented by the advance she received to write a book and decided to work in the restorative climate of Southern California.
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