Woman of Valor (27 page)

Indeed, her idealism may help explain why she so blithely invited the support of powerful eugenicists, whose underlying assumptions were a good deal more offensive than her own. It is also important to remember that eugenicism remained, for the moment, still a well-established intellectual enterprise and actually gave birth control a patina of respectability. It also helped diffuse the widespread sensitivity among scientists to the more directly sexual dimension of Margaret's message. Beyond this expedience, she also seemed comfortable with the premise that the application of “intelligent guidance over reproduction” must be substituted for “the blind play of instinct,” as she herself wrote. The fierceness of her attachment to the superiority of a sexual ethic governed by science, rather than by ignorance and fear, blinded her to troubling questions about the rights of the individual to reject the behavior she prescribed.
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As always, she was driven by the conviction that women bear the unfair burden of social laws and customs, which enforced childbearing on moral grounds.
The Pivot of Civilization
concludes with an eloquent plea for a new morality expressing the powers and responsibilities of women, not only in refusing to bring unwanted children into the world but in refusing to remain “passive instruments of sensual self-gratification on the part of men…. In increasing and elevating her love demands, woman must elevate sex into another sphere, whereby it may subserve and enhance the possibility of individual and human expression,” Margaret wrote. “Man will gain in this no less than woman.”
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The Pivot of Civilization
embodies more a change of emphasis than of message, an effort to move birth control toward the political center with respect to both class and gender politics. Beyond Ellis and Wells, responsibility for its somewhat more even tone may have been due to Robert Parker, an editor and occasional critic at magazines like
The Literary Digest
and
Theatre Arts
, who became Ethel Higgins's live-in companion, and Margaret's longtime ghost writer. Beginning with
Pivot
, Margaret drafted ideas for books, articles, and some speeches, and Parker then polished them up for publication.

Ellis privately called the new book her “best and most mature work.” Wells was publicly enthusiastic but protected himself in his introduction with the caveat that if not fully justified in calling birth control “the pivot or cornerstone of progressive society,” Margaret correctly understood that it had become a test issue between two wholly distinct interpretations of the world—“of what is good in life and conduct.” Where a person stood on the birth control controversy, he said, could tell you more about that person's general intellectual bent than just about anything else.

Independent critics remained more skeptical. Some doubted Margaret's optimism about the motivation of even the educable population to use birth control and effectively improve their lives. They worried about how fitness for marriage and responsible parenthood would be decided. Others condemned her refusal to consider the likelihood of continued inequality of opportunity and of resource allocation, even in a more scientifically disciplined society where birthrates had been brought under control. But, in fact, most reviewers emphasized the moral implications of the birth control issue over its political or eugenic dimension.
The New Republic
paired its Sanger review with coverage of a new book of essays on birth control by a conservative physician who argued that contraception contravened the true nature of women and was, in fact, causing them decay of a serious consequence—from fibroid tumors and sterility to rampant immorality and neurosis! As Wells himself had written, the issue was weighted down by symbolism. Even if divorced from the stigma of economic radicalism, it remained locked in larger, postwar cultural conflicts that aligned traditionalism against modernism—social orthodoxy against freedom and experimentation—and, in some cases, men against women. No matter how broadly Margaret framed her arguments, birth control served as a symbol of the social consequences of allowing women greater sexual opportunity.

“Mrs. Sanger, like a true propagandist, claims too much for birth control,” wrote
The New Republic
's reviewer, the psychologist and feminist Leta Hollingworth. “Education for birth control will not cure every ill from which we suffer in the body politic.” Still, Hollingworth acknowledged that Sanger gave dignity to what had for too long been a private issue. “She proclaims aloud what women have been taught they must smother to whispers.” That on its own was a credible achievement, or, as another supporter put it, “yesterday's criminal” has become “today's heroine.”

Margaret's two books made effective propaganda and together sold 567,000 copies between 1920 and 1926. She earned respectable amounts of money for the first time in her life, but more than anything else, she accomplished her desire to reshape the objectives of the birth control movement for a mainstream American audience. Whatever their deficiencies, the intellectual foundations and political principles on which she built the modern birth control movement took shape in these books. She would organize women to advance themselves in the best interests of society. She would cast her lot against the backward forces of reaction in favor of the liberating potential of medicine and science. As she had redefined herself and the personal relationships in her life, so she would help shape a new woman for a new world.
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But first there were personal hurdles to overcome. Margaret had to confront the overwhelming obstacle of declining health and spirits. New X rays uncovered yet another spot of tuberculosis in her neck, and her doctors were again insisting that she rest. She was physically exhausted, temperamentally erratic, and suddenly fearing the worst possible outcomes, her despair intensified by personal loneliness in New York and by her recollection that her beloved Lorenzo Portet had finally succumbed to the disease when it spread to his throat.

During the summer of 1921, she reembarked for England with the ostensible goal of securing prominent supporters and speakers for a birth control conference scheduled for New York in the fall. She also welcomed the opportunity to recuperate in the comforting embrace of the Wantley circle, and to spend at least several weeks at a sanitarium in Switzerland, where she worked in seclusion on early drafts of
The Pivot of Civilization
. She then traveled on to Amsterdam to participate in a meeting being held there on birth control methods. Still quite sick when she made her way back to London in September, she consented to see a physician whom Havelock Ellis recommended.

By Margaret's account, this doctor discovered a pocket of tubercular contamination that had lodged beneath her tonsils. It was the slow but steady draining of this infection into her sinus passages that had weakened her for so many years. He immediately put her in a local hospital, and surgical excision of the infected tissue quite remarkably cured her after twenty-one years of suffering from the persistence of a dreaded disease. She returned to New York and the conference that would launch the American Birth Control League, inspired by restored energy and health to new heights of ambition and resolve.
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T
he First American Birth Control Conference convened at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in November of 1921, heralding Margaret's bid for bourgeois approbation. An assortment of prominent social scientists, physicians, and reformers participated beside the former suffragists and society women who had long rallied to her support. Even a handful of her old Socialist sympathizers attended, though none of their names was included on an official list of sponsors, which instead featured such international luminaries as the accomplished member of the British Parliament, Winston Churchill, and the distinguished American novelist, Theodore Dreiser. Margaret invited members of the American Public Health Association, which was meeting concurrently in New York. She also scoured the list of participants in the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference for potential supporters and sent an official communiqué to the international delegates assembled there, who, with the possible exception of Wells, were more specifically concerned with limiting the number of warships in the Pacific Ocean than with her abstract pronouncements on the relationship of population and peace. Prepared with the assistance of the staff still publishing the
Birth Control Review
, her promotional literature linked “reckless procreation” to nothing less than the problems of worldwide unemployment, poverty, criminality, disease, famine, overpopulation, emigration, competitive armament, and war. She condemned established remedies, such as charity and legislation, as “paternalistic and superficial” and called for new organizational approaches and scientific solutions to these problems.
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The conference reestablished Margaret as the country's preeminent spokeswoman for birth control. During the many months she had spent abroad, substantial organizational gains had been made by her rival, Mary Ware Dennett, who had changed the focus of her legislative initiatives from the states to the federal government. Dennett achieved an undeniable breakthrough when the New York State Federation of Women's Clubs endorsed birth control after a contentious floor fight at its convention in October of 1920. Nationally, the General Federation was the largest organization of American women to emerge in the aftermath of the suffrage effort. Until mid-decade, when dissension split its ranks and politics was shelved from its agenda, it served as a bellwether among women on significant public issues.

Other groups that grew out of suffrage, however, such as the National Women's Party or the League of Women Voters, had not yet consented to study or debate the birth control issue. Nor had Dennett met with any success on Capitol Hill. More than half the members of Congress at the time had two children or fewer, and few had more than three, yet they were still reluctant to confront birth control as a public policy or public health issue. Perhaps they needed no better deterrent than the political ordeal Pres. Warren Gamaliel Harding endured. As a member of the Senate's Public Health Committee in 1920, the Presidential aspirant had told Dennett in writing of his inclination to support a birth control bill, but when this commitment was made public in the campaign later that year, he was hounded by the Democrats and withdrew it. Harding, whose reputation as a ladies man was well known, may have been particularly sensitive to any association with a sexual subject, but even politicians of more pristine reputation remained timid.
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Skeptical of Dennett's strategy and riding the not inconsequential success of
Woman and the New Race
, Margaret immediately decided to reinvigorate the alternative organizational and lobbying strategy she had long espoused—to establish a network of birth control clinics on the medical model established in Holland. Six hundred people attended a 1920 luncheon in her honor, and they cheered her proposal to pursue state legislation. This legislation, in place of outright repeal, would codify the judicial ruling she had won through the appeal of her Brownsville clinic case, affirmatively license physicians to prescribe contraception, and ostensibly assure their willingness to serve in her proposed facilities.

She then put Juliet Rublee to work on her impeccable personal contacts among clubwomen and other potential supporters of a birth control organization Margaret might unilaterally control. For more than a year, Rublee reached out to a large personal network, including many of the prominent officials of women's organizations and also physicians, academics, journalists, and reformers, such as the settlement house leader Lillian Wald. On the legislative front, Rublee established contact with Belle Moskowitz, the Albany political operative who was a principal adviser to New York State Governor Al Smith, though no evidence survives of what transpired at their meeting. Efforts to find a sponsor for a New York bill failed, as did subsequent attempts in neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut. The Connecticut effort, however, produced an important alliance with local birth control activist Katharine Houghton Hepburn, mother of the soon-to-be-famous actress.

In 1921, Margaret also sent out a mailing to 31,000 individuals, most of them women, whose names she had put together over the years. She included a contribution card and a questionnaire on birth control practices. The reply rate was a respectable 18 percent, with more than 5,000 individuals writing back. Many simply requested further information, but some made small contributions, and 1,250 women took the time to describe their own birth control practices in detail. The majority said they were motivated to use birth control by considerations of economics, personal preference, health, or a combination of all three, and that they relied either on condoms or pessaries. The sample obviously had no statistical validity, but Margaret pointed to the sober and intelligent responses as evidence that women wanted the aura of mystery and immorality lifted from public discussion of birth control—that they wanted it out in the open.
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When all of these efforts culminated in an actual agenda and program, a new harmony of purpose and spirit prevailed. Only the participation of several conservative eugenicists provoked controversy and augured future problems. Antoinette Konikow, a Boston physician and Socialist who had years earlier broken with Margaret over the Blossom incident, objected testily to their presence and reminded the audience that she represented working class mothers—“people that are often considered to be not fit.” Even stronger resistance was raised when an equivocally phrased resolution was adopted advocating “a decrease in the world birth rate in general, but, at the same time, a recognition of the necessity of reproduction by those of unusual racial value.” Margaret, who had elsewhere opposed “cradle-competition,” remained silent in this forum, and the motion carried.
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The conference had been scheduled to conclude with a mass public meeting at New York City's Town Hall on Sunday, November 13, 1921. Margaret had arranged for Harold Cox, a former member of the British Parliament, editor of the erudite
Edinburgh Review
, and an accomplished speaker, to address this convocation. Cox was to follow the inspirational Mary Shaw, a popular Broadway actress and prominent supporter of women's causes, but before he even got to speak, he was forcibly removed from the stage by a band of New York City policemen, who claimed to be acting at the behest of the redoubtable Archbishop Patrick Hayes of nearby St. Patrick's Cathedral. Margaret, remaining serene and composed, and carrying a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses, was hauled away along with him, as the assembled crowd jostled the police, shouted in protest, and then broke into a mock patriotic rendition of “My Country 'Tis of Thee.” A considerable fracas ensued, and she was booked on disorderly conduct charges and then released on her own recognizance. Police reserves were called in to control the crowds of protesters and onlookers who had followed her from Town Hall to the local precinct house. The confrontation received front-page newspaper coverage.

An official inquiry was undertaken by the mayor's office in response to protests brought on her behalf by a coalition of representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and such pillars of New York's legal and financial establishment as Paul D. Cravath, Lewis Delafield, Paul M. Warburg, and Henry Morgenthau. Procedural disputes between municipal authorities and the birth controllers sustained the headlines for days on end. The investigators finally issued a report that placed sole responsibility for the raid on a local police precinct captain, who had impulsively sent in his troops. The Catholic Church was never formally linked to the event, but in the interim reporters were able to quote a spokesman for the archbishop as saying that “decent and clean-minded people would not discuss a subject such as birth control in public,” and Hayes himself issued a ponderous statement in opposition to birth control, as the press kept hounding him to admit that he had, indeed, provoked the police action.
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According to the newspapers, when the suppressed forum was rescheduled on November 18, 1,500 people crammed into the Park Theater, and another 3,000 were turned away. This time the police provided protection and sent official stenographers to keep a record of any illicit activities. Young women from Barnard College, with fresh faces and bobbed heads, volunteered as ushers and kept order in the audience. From the podium, Harold Cox soberly challenged the prevailing religious conviction that sexuality without procreation was unnatural, immoral, and biblically enjoined. He formulated an alternative set of ethical principles for family life which, he argued, would condone family limitation, advance human health, welfare, and happiness, and also promote peace. He even cited biblical chapter and verse, quoting from
Ecclesiasticus
: “Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children, neither delight in ungodly sons. Though they multiply, rejoice not in them for one that is just is better than a thousand.”

Margaret was a model of restraint, though she staked out her position in response to the appearance of an escalation of Catholic opposition to her activities. Noting that the hierarchy resolutely opposed women's suffrage, as well as birth control, she argued that church doctrine, though intended to sanctify the home, succeeded only by keeping women in ignorance and fear. She demanded a higher and truer moral code grounded in scientific knowledge and guaranteeing a motherhood of “dignity and choice, not ignorance and chance.” She called on physicians to support women, announced her intention to raise funds for a birth control clinic under medical supervision, and lined herself up with the forces of enlightenment in what she saw as the decade's emblematic battle between reason and faith. What she said may have troubled some of the police department agents in the audience, but no one could reasonably call her conduct either disorderly or obscene.
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The extensive national press attention taught her a valuable lesson. By remaining calm and poised in the face of what was undeniably an abrogation of her rights, she regained the offensive against her opponents. Virtually every major newspaper in New York and several national magazines condemned the Town Hall raid. By surrounding herself with the socially powerful, she was also able to deflect attempts to tar her with her past radical affiliations. During hearings in December,
The New York Times
headlined an investigator's inquiry into “Leader's Birth Control Past,” but the subsequent arrest of Juliet Rublee, when she tried to protest on Margaret's behalf during the proceedings, shifted the emphasis of the coverage and aroused another sustained round of public indignation. Once again efforts to muzzle the birth control propagandists produced exactly the opposite effect. This time, however, the papers promoted a movement that enjoyed the respect, not only of radicals or feminists, but of many of the most prominent men in New York's intellectual, professional, and business communities. Continued political and religious persecution only served to push Margaret more firmly into their orbit.
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Margaret's success as an activist and organizer in the 1920s would rest on her capacity to alternatively inspire and provoke the three constituencies that accounted for all the attention given to the First American Birth Control Conference—feminists, eugenicists and Catholics. She motivated a new generation of feminists, cajoled eugenicists, and then relied on the support of both groups, first, to escape her own past and, second, to neutralize increasingly virulent attacks mounted against her by religious opponents.

First, and most important to her, was the large population of women oriented to activism and looking for new challenges in the wake of the women's suffrage victory. Suffrage leaders had put forth an instrumental rationale for allowing women to vote, and success presented both leadership and rank and file with the complicated task of choosing a political strategy that would maximize the effect of their participation as franchised members of the body politic. By 1921, dissension surfaced within the National Woman's party over the question of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women equal rights. With this as its focus, the party removed itself altogether from the birth control debate, causing Margaret considerable consternation when she spoke before its national convention. The vast majority of former suffrage activists and more broadly focused feminists, however, opposed an equal rights strategy on the grounds that it would undermine long-term gains for women and children, which had been achieved through the promulgation of protective labor legislation and other progressive, social welfare initiatives. This fragmentation of interests and efforts meant that women did not exert a collective influence on the politics of the new decade, but instead tended to express and to vote their differences, just like men.

Yet, the novelty of their presence as voters and the effectiveness of their voluntarism did assure that issues of particular interest to women achieved prominence. Largely through their efforts, for example, the historic Sheppard-Towner Act was adopted by Congress that year, for the first time providing federal funding for state-administered maternal and infant care clinics. Although she made no attempt to discredit this legislation, Margaret did express misgivings about the wisdom of a welfare program designed to underwrite childbirth, but not to discourage it. The Sheppard-Towner clinics offered no contraceptive service but did provide a successful example of the kind of health network for women she wanted to build. They were a product of the new social feminist tradition in which she now hoped to locate birth control.
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