Woman of Valor (26 page)

They apparently saw each other privately only on occasion thereafter, in London in 1922 and 1924, for example, when brief visits were commemorated by cards from Wells bearing such straightforward messages as “Wonderful! Unforgettable” or “Monday—Way out,” the latter decorated with squiggles of ink that were meant to convey electricity, a characteristic of the funny drawings that often accompanied his letters. Beyond these intimacies, they would sustain a warm friendship, which accommodated weekend visits with each other's spouses and, in Wells's case, with subsequent lovers, as well. They saw each other in New York and London many more times and also crossed paths in Russia in 1934, when Wells was there to interview Stalin and Sanger toured Soviet birth control and abortion facilities. One of Wells's biographers argues that a neurotic search for perfect passion motivated his long series of sexual infidelities. He had many affairs beyond West and Sanger, each of which ended in bitterness as he tired of the women he possessed. The relationship with Margaret, however, was intermittent, casual, and without visible discord. When their physical intimacy ended, they remained correspondents until Wells died, and they seemed to maintain affection for one another in their old age, as former lovers and longtime friends. Few of Margaret's letters to Wells survive, but her
Autobiography
recalls that there was “no aloofness or coldness in approaching him, no barriers to break down as with most Englishmen; his twinkling eyes were like those of a mischievous boy…. He could be amusing, witty sarcastic, brilliant, flirtatious, and yet profound all at once, all in his thin, small voice….”
¹³

Wells came along and enhanced Margaret's self-esteem at a point when it was flagging. She was especially proud of their friendship and of the fact that he identified her as a woman with “a scientific quality of mind,” a description she often repeated when she grew older, as though she needed to remind herself and others who thought less of her. Wells, like Ellis before him, also provided a secure intellectual rationale for changing her political posture from rebellion to reform. Indeed, he may even have been the more significant mentor in this regard because of his eminence as a Fabian thinker, despite Lenin's reasonably accurate description of him after their meeting in 1920 as an “unreconstructed bourgeois.”

As aspiring children of the working class, Margaret and H. G., as he was called, shared a common inability to romanticize poverty. And once they enjoyed material comforts and rewards, they seemed reluctant to condemn the maldistribution of wealth, goods, and services that gave rise to widespread discontent in the economies of the West. These blinders, along with their disdain of violence, especially as manifest in early Bolshevik, and subsequently in Stalinist, terrorism, may best explain why in the end they wholly capitulated to liberal arguments that scientific advances and industrial organization offered a surer and safer route to social and economic reform than changing the political system or the means of industrial and commercial ownership altogether.
¹⁴

 

Margaret returned from London to New York in the fall of 1920 to confront the glare of publicity that issued from publication of her first book,
Woman and the New Race
. Conceived during the postwar frenzy over dissent, and edited by the fervidly idealistic Billy Williams, it was written in the extreme, exhortatory style characteristic of the radicals. Probably because of this, the manuscript, first titled “The Modern Woman Movement” was rejected by the Macmillan publishing house and resold to Brentano's, which gave it the new title, an allusion not to distinctions of color but to “race” in its generic sense, as in “the human race.”

The book tells women to give up on the solutions that men had proposed to alleviate their misery—to believe in themselves, instead, and their own ability to effect change. “The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom,” Margaret wrote, her prose polished by the gifted Williams's pen:

Some years earlier Havelock Ellis had cautioned Margaret against the recklessness of the writing in
The Woman Rebel
. “It is no use…smashing your head against a brick wall, for not one rebel, or even many rebels, can crush law by force,” he told her. “It needs
skill
even more than strength.”
Woman and the New Race
was a self-conscious attempt to shape herself in her mentor's image—to take a more instrumental approach to social change. Essentially it wed Ellis's own formulations from
The Task of Social Hygiene
to feminist theory and to the practical goal of establishing a network of scientific birth control clinics, which would empower women in their own right.

Woman and the New Race
maintains that through all of recorded history women had exhibited an “elemental” claim to freedom through their defiant, clandestine use of contraception, abortion and infanticide. The universality of these practices demonstrated a recognition that uncontrolled fertility is not only a personal burden, but also the root of widespread social pathology. The intelligent judgments of women, however, were rarely reflected in the laws of church and state, institutions where men traditionally dominate and subordinate women, so as to increase the size of the population. By this reasoning, Margaret argued, men suppress the expression of an innate “feminine spirit.” Antagonisms of gender, as much as conflicts of class, were the root of social malaise.
¹⁶

Margaret acknowledged that women themselves often became victims of masculine thinking. “War, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap,” she wrote. “They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.” The availability of modern, scientific birth control, in her view, had suddenly presented women an unavoidable challenge to protect and promote their own freedom and to advance society's well-being by propagating individuals capable of meeting the rigorous demands of modern life.

Margaret attempted to reconcile her new vision of a society purified by the efforts of women with the social ideals that had fueled her energies as a radical. She did not intend birth control to replace “any of the idealistic movements and philosophies of the workers…. It is not a substitute—it precedes…. It can and it must be the foundation upon which any permanently successful improvement in condition is attained.” Yet she could not have it both ways. By identifying birth control as a panacea, she certainly undermined the objectives of the revolutionary labor struggle, and by housing her abstract arguments in a practical political framework focused wholly on one issue, she implicitly challenged the value of even a more moderate agenda of progressive social reform.

As a result the book is abundant in contradiction. At one point it dogmatically attributes virtually all distinctions between native-born and immigrant Americans to their differential fertility rates and seems to implicate the victims of poverty and despair in their own oppression. Only pages later, however, it celebrates the ethnic and racial diversity of America and roundly condemns the intolerable conditions under which immigrants were made to live and work in this country, blaming their deficiencies on such environmental factors as slum housing, low wages, and inadequate health insurance, rather than simply on fertility. In Margaret's defense, however, this kind of intellectual tension was emblematic of the times. Her failure to resolve the relative importance of individual initiative and social renewal at once reflected, and also helped advance, a growing postwar disenchantment with collectivist solutions to social problems.
¹⁷

Yet the book's political framework probably had little to do with its popular success. More important than Margaret's bold claims for birth control as a social tonic was her romantic paean to a new sexual morality. The book closes with a peroration in behalf of woman's freedom from the bonds of pregnancy and the release of her long dormant “physical and psychic nature.” It celebrates the right of women to make love, as well as to do good, and this dimension of its argument, far more than its politics, underlay its commercial and critical appeal. Sales may also have been helped by a deceptive advertising campaign implying that the book contained technical birth control advice. The hardcover edition sold out immediately, and after several new printings, it was reissued by Truth Publishing, a soft-cover trade house that was also marketing Margaret's
Family Limitation
pamphlet.

The book did not entirely please Ellis, who wrote a rather tepid introduction, applauding Margaret's attempt to link the goals of the contemporary movements for women and for labor, but expressing some wariness about the boldness of her larger vision. In private, he urged her to adopt a still more cautious tone in the future, one that reflected the disillusion of a generation of European intellectuals whose confidence in the human condition, and in the possibility of any measure of reform, had been shattered by the chaos and devastation of World War I. He accused her of identifying birth control as “the sole guardian of civilisation,” when he had meant it at most as “a condition of progress.”
¹⁸

This criticism may have prompted her decision to embark almost immediately on a second book.
The Pivot of Civilization
makes a more concerted effort to abandon dogmatism in favor of a dispassionate approach to the birth control question. In so doing, it reflects not only Ellis's critique, but the clear influence of Wells, whom Margaret had met in the interim, and who lent her a great deal of both intellectual and commercial credibility by writing a flattering introduction.

Able books had been written justifying birth control from the woman's point of view, Wells suggested, but this one offered the larger perspective of what birth control meant to “the public good.” Indeed,
Pivot
presents a Wellsian world where a better life can be had for all without the necessity of violence and class warfare, because the great proletarian masses achieve self-direction and self-control by limiting their fertility voluntarily. On the grounds that labor servitude springs from numbers, Margaret characterized her ideas as an extension of the principles of trade unionists, who were seeking to limit the number of workers in any given industry. Marxism is too “flattering” a doctrine, she wrote, because “it teaches the laborer that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and his children's misery.”

Still searching for a catechism, whatever her disillusion with Marxist orthodoxy—whatever her lip service to a new intellectual rigor—she argued once more for the fundamental relationship of sex and reproduction to the economic organization of society. Birth control would not simply promise fewer children and the potential of a higher standard of living. It was, in her newest phrase, an “entering wedge” for educating humanity in matters of long-term health and hygiene, which would totally transform their lives.
¹⁹

Most important, Margaret attempted to further refine her argument for the essential compatibility of a progressive vision embracing both social reform and eugenics. Again paraphrasing Ellis, she took issue with conventional opposition to contraception on the part of conservatives worried about the reproduction of the “fitter” classes. There would be no “cradle-competition” between the haves and the have-nots, she insisted, because all women, rich and poor alike, would voluntarily limit their childbearing when presented with the option to do so. The one exception—the one population for whom enforced contraception might be necessary—were the physically or mentally incompetent, who could not themselves understand the benefits of smaller families. She declared her support for “negative” eugenics, or the weeding out of this “unfit” population, though she disdained the idea of promoting fertility, or “positive” eugenics.

The woman whose own autobiography so tellingly advertises the births of her ten siblings “without a blotch or a blemish” thus refused to consider that the handicapped may also be worthy, that the rights of the individual, in any event, must reign supreme in a truly democratic society. Nor did she question the reliability and objectivity of standardized methods of determining mental capacity, which were then just becoming much the rage. She was, of course, not alone in these oversights, nor in her willingness to sacrifice the individual rights of the most defenseless to what was being widely touted as the greater social good. Eugenics, for the moment, remained popular with a wide range of progressive thinkers who simply failed to anticipate that the enforcement of hereditarian reforms was likely to foster the very discrimination by ethnicity, race, and class that they denounced and worked elsewhere to combat. Like Ellis, Margaret was intent that biology be incorporated into social reform as a theoretical matter, but never really came to terms with how to do so in practice.

In
The Pivot of Civilization
she condemned the class bias of many eugenic writings and claimed that beyond “gross” examples of mental deficiency, there is no way of deciding the question of fitness in a democratic society. She maintained instead that birth control is where a true eugenic approach to social change must begin—that only controlled fertility can bring about the education and economic opportunity for women through which responsible motherhood is achieved. The initiative for individual and racial regeneration must “come from within….” she wrote; “it must be autonomous, self-directive, and not imposed from without.” She argued that the great majority of women, once given the opportunity to control their fertility, would willingly accept the responsibility to do so—that the fecundity of the uneducated and impoverished most often resulted from a lack of access to reliable contraception, not from poor motivation or self-control. And she maintained this conviction throughout her life.