Woman of Valor (28 page)

If the political prerequisites for a birth control organization were in place, despite the continued reservations of some feminist leaders, so too were the economic conditions for a persuasive argument that women should be offered reliable and cost-effective contraception. Between 1870 and 1930 the number of employed American women increased by tenfold, bringing the total to over 10 million, or one fourth of the eligible female population. And increasingly higher percentages were older, married, and American born. As child labor laws prohibited the employment of young girls, and as immigration laws restricted the entry of foreigners, the numbers of single and foreign women in the work force diminished. By 1930, more than a quarter of the female work force were married, almost three fourths were native born, and studies showed that more than 90 percent of women workers contributed all or part of their incomes to the maintenance of families. No longer was it possible to sustain the traditional image of working women as immigrants gaining an economic foothold, as young girls biding time until they found husbands, or as spinsters who had never found them at all. And if married women were working in greater numbers than ever before, then rationalization and control of their fertility was paramount.

More important, perhaps, women's overall visibility as workers increased, even while the vast majority remained at home or were segregated in low-paying, entry-level jobs, such as personal and domestic services. As the nation's consumer and service economy developed, the numbers of women in clerical and service positions (store clerks, office workers, and telephone operators, for example) surpassed those in manufacturing. With more and more people living in cities, fewer women were left in inconspicuous, family-based agricultural pursuits. At the same time, though professional opportunities for women tended to be limited to teaching and nursing, the few intrepid pioneers who managed to enter the closed sanctums of business, law, medicine, and government achieved great notoriety. It was widely believed that their opportunities were increasing, even if aggregate statistics did not always bear out this impression.

Whatever the reality, the very perception of change itself provoked another round of vigorous public debate over the fertility of American women, and over the possibilities and practicalities of combining child rearing and career. In circles of progressive, educated women there was no issue more prominent. Even such an established feminist as Charlotte Perkins Gilman broadened her focus to embrace a concern about reconciling marriage and family with work. Margaret herself, though never shy on the subject, responded with special vehemence when queried by a reporter. Branding full-time domesticity “drab and monotonous,” she claimed that work often disciplines a woman to appreciate her home more. Acknowledging that children need their mothers a great deal, she nonetheless argued that “young children are by nature selfish, and they will let you indulge them as much as you please.” “It isn't good for them though,” she concluded on a harsh, if personally revealing note. “As a matter of fact, they should be taught by example that a mother is not here merely to be their attendant, but that she is a superior human being, a personage as well. They have much more respect for her then.”
⁹

Margaret's message was intended to be prowoman, not antifamily, with emphasis on the new style of feminism she espoused, which accommodated and indeed encouraged sex and marriage. Once again, she advertised birth control as bridging the discontinuities of a feminist agenda that offered women a public role at the expense of their private lives. Only with universal availability of contraception could women hope to realize their full potential.

However halting and partial it may have been, the economic and political empowerment of married women during the 1920s forced yet another redefinition of their role within the home. Behavioral psychologists suddenly scorned Freud's developmental imperatives as overly sentimental and instead echoed John Watson's recommendation that women avoid their children's excessive reliance on mother love. At the same time, purveyors of the consumer frenzy driving the nation's economy forward reshaped the housewife into a domestic professional, freed by technology from the responsibility and drudgery that had bound her mother to the hearth. A burgeoning industry in advertising and public relations for electrical gadgets, packaged foods, storebought clothes, and other new commodities of the era encouraged women to be efficient managers of household goods and services. In high schools, colleges, and universities, courses in home economics were consciously designed to offer a reconstituted vision of marriage and family life, one that promoted time and labor-saving devices and emphasized the importance to women of the quality of their relationships in the family, not just of their material obligations and responsibilities as wives and mothers.

This vision of modern womanhood implicitly assumed the voluntary control of childbearing. It also consciously encouraged a more active sexual role for women on the practical grounds that the liberated homemaker and wife had time available for more romance in her life. Once considered scandalous, the ideal of mutuality in the sexual relations of husbands and wives found a large public audience in the 1920s. The most popular and enduring symbol of freedom for women of the decade was explicitly sexual. The youthful, eroticized flapper, her hemline dramatically and provocatively shortened, was emblazoned in national magazines and on billboards. Her figure lean and angular, her hair short and shingled like a man's, or marcelled in the new and somewhat softer style of middecade, she symbolized the assertion by women of social and sexual parity. Gone was the buxom, matronly woman common to advertisements in the past, whose very appearance assumed her primary maternal responsibility. In her place, a slender, stylish woman suddenly turned up, shopping in a department store, riding in an open roadster, or even dancing the night away at a speakeasy. This kind of woman used contraception within marriage and perhaps even outside it.
¹⁰

With hindsight it becomes clear that not all of these developments were positive. Though present in the labor force in greater numbers than ever before, women in the 1920s did not necessarily consolidate and advance their economic power. And the decade's frenzied consumerism only escalated standards of domestic comportment, allowing housework along with affective relationships to continue to absorb female effort and time. What is more, the sexual revolution did not always leave women the equal partners of men, even as it fostered a new heterosexual intimacy. Yet as a gender consciousness and solidarity declined, the collective interests of women were left with no mobilizing agent or vehicle.

The popular journalist Dorothy Dunbar Bromley best expressed this shift in sentiment when she identified “new-style feminists” in 1928 as “intensely self-conscious” and professing “no loyalty to women
en masse
.” Bored with the stridency of suffrage and the narrowly defined objectives of organized efforts on behalf of women's rights, a new generation of women who were coming of age took the struggles of their predecessors for granted. They listened to authorities like John Watson, who also claimed that militancy on women's issues betrayed poor social and psychological adjustment. Indeed, the birth control movement provided one of the few women's causes that thrived in the 1920s, because it wed new personal and sexual interests to the larger set of public concerns that had motivated women in the past. Margaret Sanger wrote to much acclaim in
The Pivot of Civilization
:

 

To many Americans, of course, this message was deeply disturbing. The advances of women and the new presumption that they might voluntarily control fertility became increasingly visible symbols of the rising stature of modern secular authority in matters of social and family life.
The Pivot of Civilization
also quoted Michael Higgins's old hero, the freethinking Victorian, Robert Ingersoll:

The specter of a pious Anne Higgins, marching compliantly to her early grave, was never far from the surface of Margaret's emotional life and professional motivation. By completing Ingersoll's mission, she would vindicate both her mother's death and her father's apostasy. As these private conflicts found constructive resolution, however, her public confrontations with the Catholic Church only grew more intense. She may no longer have had Anthony Comstock as a nemesis, and she might be trying hard to shed the taint of her prewar radicalism, but the Town Hall raid demonstrated that she now faced a still more contentious adversary. America's Catholic leaders were finally determined to discard their mantle of reticence. Birth control would become a vehicle for the church's institutional organization and political empowerment in this country.
¹²

From prison in 1917, Margaret had written her sister Ethel and blamed the Catholic Diocese in Brooklyn for seeing that they were both punished. The letter quoted a local church newspaper with evident sarcasm. The judges, Margaret claimed, had been directed by the priests to give those “lovely intellectual women a serious dose of jail.” This view would harden subsequently in response to more open and rigorous Catholic opposition. The dispute over birth control, in Margaret's mind, was first and foremost a battle for the allegiance of women. She came to believe that orthodox Catholic doctrine could only hope to survive on the blind faith of its parishioners—so many of them women in the home. The secular education and political enfranchisement of women, not to speak of their sexual emancipation, threatened to dilute the absolute authority over family life that the church tried to impose primarily through women.

During the war and immediately thereafter, intervention by politically powerful dioceses had forced the cancellation of public birth control activities on several occasions, or their removal to private homes or facilities. These local skirmishes then gave way to a national organizing strategy. American Catholics, seizing the offensive with respect to official church participation in the war effort, had established the National Catholic War Council at a convention of delegates from sixty-eight local dioceses in Washington in 1917. The agenda of the new organization was divided among teams of priests and laymen operating at the direction of an administrative committee of bishops, and the procedure worked so well that it was institutionalized after the war through the founding of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. This national body emerged over the combined protest of several bishops in this country, who resented the invasion of the autonomous jurisdiction they were accustomed to exercising in their own dioceses, and of some officials in Rome, who were wary of ceding authority to what they feared might be the precursor of a “national” church in the United States, where an apparent indulgence of modernist thinking in ecclesiastical theory and practice was already considered a problem. By the early 1920s, however, most of this internal dissent had been overcome with the assurance that the new body would assume a purely “advisory” role in matters of social and canonical dispute, and with the recognition of its immense public relations value. At the same time, local Catholic officials were empowered by the formation of a Catholic Charities appeal run by the bishops. In New York, the formidable Archbishop Hayes would raise nearly $1 million a year between 1920 and 1925, and spend at least some of this income to fight birth control in his own archdiocese.
¹³

By 1920, the National Catholic Welfare Conference had also organized a social action department in Washington under the direction of an enterprising theologian by the name of Father John A. Ryan, whose mission was to articulate church doctrine on questions of social life and public policy in order to bring influence to bear, not only among Catholics, but outside the church as well. To this end, Ryan formulated an official Catholic position in opposition to women's suffrage, but he would become even more outspoken and better organized on the birth control issue.

Father Ryan had been building arguments against contraception for a long time. Echoing sentiments then being expressed in Europe, he had first warned against church complacency on the issue in the 1907 edition of the
Catholic Encyclopedia
. In that essay, Ryan identified Neo-Malthusianism as “intrinsically immoral” in its “perversion of natural faculties and functions,” but he reserved his harshest words for the social and economic consequences of small families, claiming that they “foster a degree of egotism and enervating self-indulgence, which in turn diminishes the incentive to labor and reduces industrial production.” The rising standard of living contemplated by Malthusians, Ryan wrote, leads not to “more genuine culture or lofty morals, but [to] more abundant physical enjoyments and a more refined materialism.” Curiously enough, Ryan mentioned “natural faculties,” but he cited no canonical precedent. His were essentially social, not moral, points of attack, no different from those of Teddy Roosevelt on the one hand or of orthodox Marxists on the other.

Ryan next wrote on the subject in 1916, in the
Ecclesiastical Review
, published by the Catholic University of America, where he encouraged more vocal opposition to birth control using the rationale that, only if reminded of the “mortal sin” of the practice, could good Catholics be expected to desist. He covered the same social arguments, again never explaining the precise doctrinal grounds of his opposition. It took three more years for the church to respond officially. In 1919, for the first time ever in this country, a joint pastoral letter was issued in the name of all American bishops expressly prohibiting artificial means of family limitation. Echoing Ryan, the bishops linked the practice to selfish individualism and demanded acceptance of the responsibility of bringing children into the world, “who may prove either a blessing or a curse to society at large.” Children, the bishops reminded the faithful, are “the Lord's inheritance.”