Woman of Valor (24 page)

In February of 1919, she took Grant out of boarding school, and they traveled across country by train, observing with sadness the arrests and deportations of IWW activists along the way. She rented a cottage in Coronado, near San Diego, where she turned out a steady stream of chapters, which she then sent back to New York for editing. Her diary records her delight in the bright sun, the exquisite beach, the enchanting birds, the orange trees, and the graceful palms of the California coast. She traveled north to Los Angeles and San Francisco to visit her old IWW friends, Marie Equi and Caroline Nelson, but neither the natural beauty of the landscape, nor the progress of her work, nor old political enthusiasms—not even the Theosophists whose spiritual counsel she sought out en route—could cure her of a deepening despair. “It is a most awful anguish one suffers…” she confided in her journal, “a great aching void of loneliness takes hold in different places.” California reminded her of Spain, and the ghost of Lorenzo Portet, she wrote in her diary, loomed up beside that of her beloved little Peggy “like a nightmare.”

It seems certain that, had Portet lived, Margaret would have made an effort to reunite with him after the war. She had written Bill Sanger early in 1917, threatening to leave the country immediately if he refused to give her a legal divorce. “Won't you let go that straw of hope that you have clutched so long, and let me have freedom and a future happiness which I think is my right,” she pleaded. “There is nothing I have to give you in love, there is nothing to be repaired, there is no way we can go on together. The kindest and most human thing is for us to cut the bond at once.” Two years later, as she prepared to turn forty, the divorce was still not accomplished, Portet was dead, and she could not have been less pleased about her uncertain prospects.
⁴⁰

Although she often felt lonely and insecure, she seems nonetheless to have rarely been alone. In the bleak days that followed her return from Europe—then Peggy's death and later Portet's—she had resumed her affair with the ardent poet and journalist Walter Roberts. Through 1918, the two also worked together on the
Birth Control Review
, but despite Roberts's devotion to her personally and to her cause, she firmly resisted his desire for a permanent commitment. The relationship ended without any visible rancor, and years later, as with many of her old friends, she was still in touch and sometimes lent him money.
⁴¹

Billy Williams, who helped raise funds for the
Review
, soon replaced Roberts as lover and coworker, and it was to him that she sent the chapters of her book for editing. During the war Williams had drifted from one cause to another—the Socialist Party, the Rand School, the birth control movement—lending his talents as a publicist. He was revered in Greenwich Village coffeehouse circles as a gentle, introspective sort who could sit for hours through an evening discussing politics and philosophy. Neither handsome nor terribly adventuresome, he seemed an unlikely candidate for Margaret's affections, as though in the wake of Portet's death she turned to someone completely different. The common thread was that all were passionate in temperament. Williams, as had Bill Sanger and Walter Roberts before him, wrote her almost embarrassingly plaintive love letters, and like Portet, he also died suddenly and tragically—of kidney disease in 1920, while Margaret was away in London, his last hours apparently soothed by her frantic telegram promising that she would return and nurse him back to health. He and John Reed died on the same day, and the two were memorialized together on the front page of
The Call
.
⁴²

There were apparently other romantic attachments as well. Though no clear record of any intimacy exists, Margaret wrote in her diary of dinners, operas, and assorted social engagements with the lawyer Jonah Goldstein, whom Stuart Sanger also recalls fondly as a personal presence in their lives, but she also seemed genuinely relieved when Goldstein married someone else. Herbert Simonds, whom Margaret later solicited to manufacture diaphragms and other contraceptive pharmaceuticals, once recalled that his life had been changed when they met at a resort shortly before America entered the war and discovered a shared enthusiasm for dancing and for each other. Harold Hersey, another rejected suitor from these years, had still not unburdened himself of his infatuation with Margaret when he attempted to write her biography twenty years later.

She seems to have completely fulfilled these men, but she did not fall in love with any of them, and she contemplated her situation in the privacy of her diary. Describing Williams, she wrote of “a man so big and generous and devoted…who offers his all…strength—talents—love…and though it's appreciated and valued, these essential qualities in and of themselves do not bring out of us the love they should.” Goldstein was “fascinating” and “very keen of intellect” but “underdeveloped emotionally.” Of both men, she wondered what exactly determined the “chemical side” of love and why it “has a big part in life.” She later confided to Juliet Rublee that at least one problem with all these men was that as soon as they became involved in the birth control movement, they assumed their right to dictate policy. “The kind of man [we] have in mind has not been born dear,” she concluded.
⁴³

She could only have been emotionally perplexed, as well, by the faithful attentions she continued to receive during these years from Havelock Ellis. Following his wife's death, Ellis first became involved with the Frenchwoman Françoise Cyon, who remained the permanent companion of his later years. Even so, he encouraged Margaret's affections, writing her on the occasion of one lovely spring day, for example, that “I most want you here and recklessly want to wander about with you to Ireland and anywhere. There is no danger of the Irishwoman you speak of being driven out of my heart by any French woman…for I always love to think of her, and it always thrills one to think, as I often do, of her first kiss.”

Alone and perplexed in December of 1919, Margaret took herself to an exhibition of Bill Sanger's paintings. She found them powerfully drawn but filled with sadness, and the experience occasioned the only known apology she ever made to her husband for the pain she had caused him. The letter, though admitting her remorse, is fraught with self-justification. She wrote:

Margaret never sent the letter but instead tucked it away in her personal papers, with a notation that it be given to Bill after her death. Thereafter, still feeling weary and ill, she consulted the physician and scientist Robert Morris, author of the best-selling
Microbes and Men
, and he diagnosed a lingering tuberculosis. She entered the hospital where her infected thyroid was partially removed, and then prepared to recuperate over the summer in England. The manuscript of her book was finally complete, and she left for London with the expectation of returning to the United States in the fall when it was scheduled for publication.

“More than ever [I have] decided that one must make and direct one's life,” she had written in the last entry of her diary for 1919. “Drifting cannot be the way.” To renew the focus of her life and work, she again sought inspiration abroad.
⁴⁴

M
argaret remained in London from May through October of 1920, first letting a room in the central city and then moving to the garden suburbs, where she hoped the sunshine and fresh air would help cure her persistent tubercular cough. No journal of her trip survives, only an appointment book and a handful of letters to her new friend, Juliet Rublee. She lectured frequently—thirty specific bookings are identified—but she preached principally to the already converted. For that reason she was most enthusiastic about arrangements made for her to speak through the Women's Cooperative Guild, a voluntary association of 75,000 working women, whom she described as representing “the best and most advanced women of the working class.” She looked to them to carry her message to even poorer and less educated women of their districts, and more important, to arrange opportunities for her to speak before men in Labour and Socialist circles who remained overtly hostile to birth control on the grounds that only income disparity, and not family size, was the cause of poverty. “The thought here is masculine and difficult to raise,” she wrote home somewhat dejectedly, but her spirits revived a month later after a tour of what she described as some of the country's most “godforsaken” districts. “Oh, Juliet,” she implored, “never was there such a cause. Poor, pale-faced, wretched wives. Men beat them. They cringe before their blows, but pick up the baby, dirty and unkempt, and return to serve him.” Margaret was again driven forward by the conflicting strains of compassion and contempt she felt for the misery of poor women who capitulated to autocratic male authority—by the unresolved anger of her own childhood that never failed to move her. She also believed that the rank and file in the working classes were entirely open to birth control, despite leadership's resistance, because the wives of younger workers tended to be better educated, more independent, and determined to better their own lives and those of their children.

The Cooperative Guild did arrange audiences for her as far away as Ireland and Scotland, and years later, she described to an interviewer the exultant sight of what she estimated as nearly 2,000 shipyard workers who turned out on Glasgow Green to hear her. As in the United States, however, British political lines had hardened during the war, forcing supporters of birth control to take sides. The Neo-Malthusians, led by the Drysdales and Marie Stopes, had become virulently antilabor. Margaret privately deplored their “materialism,” yet she knew that with the organized left unwilling to take a stand, she had nowhere else to go for support.
¹

Since coming to Margaret's assistance in 1915, Stopes had made herself something of a celebrity among England's middle and upper classes with the publication of a controversial and wildly successful book called
Married Love
. Stopes was a paleontologist by training but drew the inspiration for her new career from an unhappy experience with an impotent husband. After the marriage was annulled, she sat down at her writing desk to ensure that no women would again suffer as she had from sexual ignorance and inhibition. What she said about sex was hardly more advanced than Ellis's writings, and, indeed, her florid prose today seems more than a little quaint. She turned sexual orgasm into a marital sacrament, claiming: “The half swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit in that eternal moment at the apex of rapture sweeps into its flaming tides the whole essence of the man and woman.” Tucked in among such profusions of sentiment, however, were more prosaic descriptions of coital positions and technique that a decade later became the standard fare of marriage manuals but seemed terribly shocking in this first instance. The book caused a public outcry in 1918 and became a runaway sensation, selling out six editions in a year and ultimately more than 1 million copies in a dozen languages.

Margaret had gone to some length to secure Stopes's book an American publisher. Turned down by the large commercial firms, she finally arranged for it to be printed by
The Critic and Guide
, the popular medical magazine run by her friend and mentor Dr. William Robinson, but the book was then censored in the United States. While Margaret expected the favor of her efforts to be returned in England, she was not quite prepared for the degree of enthusiasm with which Stopes embraced the birth control cause there in her own name, rather than Margaret's. By 1920, Stopes had married again, this time to a wealthy manufacturer who fathered her only child and was prepared to back her efforts to open a birth control clinic and marital advice center in England, where no laws existed to prohibit her effort. She also had a second book ready for press called
Wise Parenthood
, which promoted the individual and eugenic benefits of scientific contraception and small families, a book Margaret reviewed favorably in the
Birth Control Review
. In the opinion of Ellis and several of Margaret's other English correspondents, however, Stopes was a blustering and egotistical woman—class bound, politically conservative, blatantly anti-Semitic—and intent on dominating the new field she had staked out. No shrinking violet herself, Margaret refused to accommodate to someone she thought vulgar, and whose competitive instincts, though not wholly unlike her own, she found distasteful. She spent a weekend at Stopes's country home early in the summer of 1920 but thereafter always found some excuse for not seeing her when she was in London.

Within two years Stopes had, indeed, preempted Margaret by opening up the first birth control clinic in London, where instruction was given by midwives to women who could prove they already had at least one child, a regulation Margaret openly deplored. At about the same time, she accused Stopes of having breached an obligation and a trust by telling Mary Ware Dennett of Margaret's disregard for her, an opinion that had been shared in confidence. Stopes then allied herself with Dennett in opposition to Margaret's leadership in the United States, forcing a permanent estrangement. This was, to be sure, a contest of strong and fiercely ambitious personalities, but as with Dennett, substantive issues also bred antagonisms. Both women disparaged any action or pronouncement by Margaret that they could possibly interpret as evidence of a lingering political and sexual radicalism. By taking her to task for her confrontational postures in public, they effectively pushed her toward their own more accommodating political and organizational strategies. Yet personal relations among them were permanently damaged. Margaret, for her part, did her very best to pit such significant potential supporters as Havelock Ellis against Stopes, which was not difficult since he seemed little inclined toward her anyway. The Drysdales and others of the Neo-Malthusian group also split off and established a competing clinic in London, the Walworth Center, staffed by doctors and placing no restrictions on its clientele. Still, the name of Marie Stopes in England, like that of Margaret Sanger in America, became synonymous with birth control. London schoolchildren in the 1920s skipped rope to the chant:

 

The principal purpose of Margaret's 1920 trip to England was to visit Ellis, and, in fact, the two spent much of their free time in London that summer together. Absorbed in a new relationship with Françoise Cyon, Ellis nonetheless seemed to make time for Margaret whenever she wanted. They reserved Sundays to be together at leisure, and her diary records lunches, teas, and long walks in the park. One such encounter is characterized with a simple but emphatic inscription: “glorious.”

In July, she finally scheduled their long-anticipated outing to the Irish countryside, but with this opportunity for a sustained intimacy, things did not work out satisfactorily. The two of them rode about County Cork in an open carriage, searching through parish registers for confirmation of the exalted Purcell lineage Margaret heard so much about as a child, but their genealogical expeditions produced nothing. She must have apologized at some point for being “nervous, impatient and horrid” during the trip, for Ellis wrote later to excuse her from such behavior and to assure her in his typically salacious language that he still savored his “delicious memories” of their time together. She, by contrast, was absorbed wholly by material concerns, having borrowed a week's rent from Ellis, which she was anxious to repay. She seemed in no hurry to see him again and managed to find time for only “a brief glimpse” before she left England shortly thereafter to tour maternal health clinics on the Continent, and to inquire about recent developments in contraceptive technology. She traveled once again with his professional introductions and on this trip learned from physicians in Germany of the formula for the chemical jelly which, with some subsequent modification, became the substance she would recommend for use with the rubber spring diaphragm she had discovered in Holland.
³

Ellis and Margaret were never lovers after that summer. She, in fact, rejoiced in the increasing satisfaction he derived from his relationship with Françoise, whom she sometimes disparaged, but with whom she quickly forged an intimate friendship. Effusive letters during the 1920s and '30s repeatedly conveyed appreciation for the sexual gratification and domestic tranquillity Françoise was able to provide Ellis—in Margaret's own words, for giving him renewed “youth and life.” Yet these letters never seem totally candid. At one point, for example, Margaret wrote that she wished she was the one “cleaning his [Ellis's] flat,” but given her antipathy to housework, this would seem a backhanded compliment. However grateful she was on Ellis's behalf, she probably viewed Françoise's situation somewhat dimly.
⁴

As in the past, Margaret also found in London a far more conventionally satisfying physical relationship than she was able to enjoy with Ellis, who was himself responsible for the liaison, having introduced her to Hugh de Selincourt, a handsome patrician and novelist and a devotee of Ellis's philosophies. De Selincourt seduced the women of the Ellis circle by invoking a common reverence for their mentor's teachings and then performing for them with the technique and competence that Ellis himself could not achieve. This virility only called attention to Ellis's limitations and may have accounted for his subsequent disdain of men he identified as mere “sexual athletes.” In fact, Ellis came to loathe de Selincourt, not so much because of Margaret, but because he also carried on an extended affair with Françoise Cyon, until Ellis objected and, setting his theoretical objections to sexual jealousy aside, insisted that she choose between them. Margaret, who seemed confident of her own relationship with de Selincourt, never minded sharing him, but Ellis, obviously hurt, rationalized that de Selincourt's intense hunger for personal conquests was compensation for intellectual deficiencies and professional failures.
⁵

Within days of their first meeting, de Selincourt was wooing Margaret for a weekend at Wantley, his sublime countryside estate, “the loveliest spot in England,” as he described it. “Here you could rest two, three or four days—a pianist would play to you; a novelist would laugh with you; a child would dance to you; and all the gods in the garden would welcome you—and you would return to lectures and public life so strong that no one could possibly resist you.” The pianist was de Selincourt's aristocratic wife, Janet, with whom he no longer had any sexual relations, the child, their sprightly and talented daughter, Bridgette. The arcadian retreat, a sixteenth century house of stone surrounded by orchards and gardens, had once belonged to the father of Britain's celebrated romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The liberated de Selincourts were committed to re-creating in its midst the morally unconstrained universe that Shelley and his soul-mate Lord Byron had pursued in exile in Italy some 100 years earlier, when fear of sexual scandal drove them from England. Like the free lovers of the Byron-Shelley circle, they were devoted to sensuous living—to music, poetry, and nature, and in this setting far removed from the surviving sanctions of Edwardian society, to an unfettered expression of physical love as a dimension of friendships formed within their group. They shared the house on a permanent basis with Harold Child, a well-known editorial writer and critic at
The Times
of London, who was for a time Janet's lover and later also became a lover of Margaret's. Other participants apparently came and went more or less casually, though Ellis himself, on whose theories it rested, never visited until late in the 1920s. Years later Margaret still remembered it as an atmosphere that would always “radiate beauty, stimulate mental and spiritual growth, utter kindness, unselfishness, and entirely do away with the pettinesses of jealousy, which so often occurs in the regular marriage.”
⁶

Margaret spent a weekend there in June of 1920. She returned for a full week in September, and tried to visit again at least once, whenever she returned to England. It was a place where she could unburden herself of worldly concerns, a “house of childhood”—as she once described its hold on her—where she always felt “young and happy.” Yet the lure of the place and of the estate called Sand Pit, to which the de Selincourts subsequently moved, was hardly innocent.

Ellis was probably correct that sports and women were ways for the debonair de Selincourt to compensate for his failure as a serious writer. He vented his frustrations as an unsuccessful commercial novelist by playing a good deal of cricket, and he even earned a modest living by writing about his passion for the game. Margaret liked to think of him as someone removed from material drives and ambitions altogether—as a pure poet and aesthete. She was not entirely unaware of his questionable talent, and in an introduction to a 1924 novel he wrote about adolescent sexual awakening called
One Little Boy
, she praised his perceptiveness and candor about human nature but implicitly questioned the book's merit as a work of fiction. Yet, for a brief time she was clearly infatuated by him. De Selincourt, in the effete and hapless essentials of his personality, was not unlike other men she had loved, including her father and her husband, but this relationship never offered any threat of responsibility. Uncompromised by any option of really serious involvement, it stayed light-hearted for its duration. Seeming to recognize the juvenile quality of her feelings for Hugh, Margaret once wrote that he was one of her “adolescent dreams—the man I looked for in books, on the stage—but never found.”