Woman of Valor (29 page)

The following year, writing expressly in response to the endorsement of birth control by the New York State Federation of Women's Clubs, Ryan confronted the problem with intensified zeal. He identified three “evil results” of contraception: First, the “degradation of the marital relation itself since the husband and wife who indulge in this practice…cannot help coming to regard each other to a great extent as mutual instruments of sensual gratification, rather than cooperation with the Creator in bringing children into the world”; second, the weakening of “self-control and the capacity for self-denial” and the increasing of “love of ease and luxury,” as evidenced by the fact that small families were most evident among the well-to-do; third, the inevitability of population decline. In his dire demographic prognosis, Ryan seized on eugenic arguments even while professing the church's love of all humanity.

Ryan's objective was to formulate a rational and defensible posture for the church, but he was not yet in a position to control the hysterical bombast from other official quarters. In 1922, the editors of the
Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement
baldly charged that women who use contraception accept “the conditions of a prostitute for those of married life.” They linked the “unnatural and immoral principles” of the birth control movement to such “grave physical and moral disorders” as cancer, neurasthenia, sterility, infidelity, and divorce. Several years later, Archbishop Hayes, who was soon to be named a Cardinal, addressed the subject in self-conscious prose in his 1925 Catholic Charities appeal. He wrote:

A pamphlet issued by another official of the National Catholic Welfare Conference then condemned birth control because it “isolates sex passion from the normal controls and correctives and counterchecks placed upon it by nature and the God of nature and leaves it shorn and naked in all its degraded grossness and unloveliness. It reaps the pleasure of sex while evading the normally consequent sacrifices and responsibilities.” The author cited authoritative testimony from such far-flung witnesses as Saint Augustine—whom he quoted as having said that contraception makes a “prostitute out of the wife and an adulterer out of the husband”—to Bernard Shaw, who called it “mutual masturbation.” To this vitriol,
The Catholic Light
, a weekly published by the diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, added a scurrilous, ad hominem attack on Margaret and her “pals” who were allegedly “profiting” from birth control business.
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Margaret responded in kind. In a 1920 letter challenging a representative of the National Catholic Welfare Conference to debate, she accused the church of aligning itself “on the side of ignorance against knowledge, of darkness against light.” Articles in the
Birth Control Review
took even cheaper shots. One piece berated “bachelor” priests for daring to pose as moral censors of marriage and also ridiculed the Church of Rome for associating Malthusian doctrine with a love of ease and luxury, “considering the state in which it is, itself, carried on.” A direct reprint of a
New Republic
editorial of December 28, 1921, labeled the apparent influence of Archbishop Hayes over New York's police as “the last resort of authoritarianism” and “socially insane.” In private, Margaret revealed an intensifying prejudice: “The R.C.'s are certainly taking their stand against this subject & me,” she wrote Juliet Rublee. “Their attacks against ‘the Sanger woman' are libels, but no time have me [sic] to bother about libels. Dearest I fear with you…but it may serve to awaken the Protestant element, in time to save the country later on.”
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By decade's end, the Vatican would deliberately codify its own teachings on birth control, in the hope of elevating this level of discourse. Church officials would reassemble the intricate, scholarly edifice of Augustinian doctrine on natural law that had bolstered arguments against the practice many years earlier, but since then, scarcely been mentioned. But coming as it did, after fifteen years of more or less scurrilous propaganda on both sides of the issue, this recourse to natural law doctrine enjoyed only partial credibility. Margaret, for her part, could never accept Rome's intransigence on contraception as anything more than a last line of defense against the steady erosion of ecclesiastical authority in matters of family life and social behavior. Viewing birth control as a threat to the power of the church and its prelates, and not to their deepest moral principles, she let herself believe too quickly that Catholic opposition to contraception would in time be subject to compromise.
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In the early days before World War I, only such exceptionally outspoken religious figures as the Episcopal minister John Haynes Holmes of New York, or the Reform Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise, had dared to support birth control. But the situation was changing. In 1920, Margaret heard from the principal spokesman of the Anglican Church in London, the Very Reverend William R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul's. Inge had read
Woman and the New Race
and wrote Margaret how much he admired her courage and her conviction. He could not yet speak out in public, he explained, because of the regrettable use of contraception by some unmarried persons. Within a year, however, he went one step further and supported Neo-Malthusianism, expressing his concern about the social dangers of unchecked population growth. Though he stopped short of expressly endorsing contraception, this was a historic first step toward what would become an official reform of Anglican doctrine later in the decade. Through the 1920s, Margaret anticipated—incorrectly—that Inge's transformation was reason to assume the inevitability of doctrinal change elsewhere as well.
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Meanwhile, Margaret self-consciously sought the support of a growing community of secular thinkers who were suddenly enjoying new stature. Yet, many of these professionals, scientists, and academics had scarcely more inherent sympathy for her cause than the most determinedly conservative of clerics. They rejected contraception on the grounds that its use only discouraged the reproduction of people like themselves, who comprised the country's productive, educated, and upwardly mobile classes, while not reaching those individuals most in need. Like their progressive forebears, they were also visibly anxious about the broadening of public roles for women, and they almost always identified themselves as eugenicists.

“Such activity is distinctly antisocial; for it enables selfish people to escape their proper responsibilities, ultimately to their own detriment and certainly to the injury of the state,” the prominent statistician and New York social welfare activist, Louis Dublin, told an audience of birth control sympathizers in 1925. Calling himself a progressive, Dublin insisted that economic intervention, and not birth control, would alone help the poor. “You do not solve the worker's problems by encouraging him to lose his greatest and noblest possession, his children,” he added. This argument resonated with many Socialists and trade unionists in the audience, who at best saw birth control as a second or third line of defense in their struggle for the redistribution of economic opportunity, and who also shied away from it in fear of antagonizing Catholic workers they hoped to organize. Another speaker at the conference carried the point further by insisting that unfit children were being born to women who continued to work during their pregnancies.

Indeed, as overall birthrates continued to drop during the 1920s, qualitative theories of racial improvement again gained widespread public acceptance. As had happened briefly before World War I, eugenics became a popular craze in this country—promoted in newspapers and magazines as a kind of secular religion. A national advocacy organization, the American Eugenics Society, was founded in 1923 to foster broader public understanding of eugenic principles through such public relations gimmickry as sermon contests in churches and synagogues and “fitter family” contests at state fairs and other public gatherings. The great majority of American colleges and universities introduced formal courses in the subject, and sociologists who embraced it took on what one historian has called a “priestly role.” Even a man as far to the left as Norman Thomas, then just beginning his long public career, had no qualms about adding his voice to the chorus of concern over the “alarming high birthrate of definitely inferior stock.”
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Remarkably enough, this enthusiasm for eugenics endured, even as the putative science began to provide the intellectual rationale for socially conservative ends—for what became an unmitigated defense of property, privilege, and race baiting in its most conventional sense. By 1924, for example, an Immigration Act closed America's doors to new waves of foreigners from eastern and southern Europe and from Asia. The motivation behind the legislation was primarily economic. The country could no longer afford to assimilate hordes of unskilled workers, but the argument was framed in racial terms. In favoring white, northern Europeans, immigration restriction promoted a popular view that one nationality or stock can be distinguished from another on the basis of hereditary characteristics. Many supporters of eugenics, including Margaret, objected to this racial stereotyping, claiming that intelligence and other inherited traits vary by individual, not by group. But these distinctions grew more and more difficult to enforce.

What is more, nearly universal agreement was reached during the 1920s on the propriety of passing compulsory sterilization statutes to govern the behavior of individuals carrying deficiencies believed to be inherited, such as mental retardation, insanity, or uncontrollable epilepsy. This movement reached its zenith with the enactment of such laws in thirty states. Virginia's statute, authorizing the involuntary sterilization of inmates in state institutions, was, in fact, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1927, in the matter of
Buck v. Bell
. The majority opinion in this notorious case was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., with Louis Brandeis and all but one other member of the court, voting in favor. (The lone dissent was from a Catholic, ostensibly opposed on moral grounds, though he presented no written comment.) Holmes and Brandeis had built their judicial reputations as liberals and proponents of free speech, but both were willing in this instance to sacrifice the rights of individuals who “sap the strength of the state,” as Holmes put it. Arguing that collective social interests should take precedence in these circumstances, Holmes wrote without equivocation, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

By 1930, the state of California had sterilized 7,500 of its institutionalized dependents. Elsewhere enforcement was less zealous, if no less troubling, with 5,000 procedures accounted for throughout the rest of the country. The laws may also have acted, however, as an incentive for quiet coercion, and the extent to which individuals in populations at risk were pressured into agreeing to sterilization can never be fully determined.

Without any apparent concern for the potential of abuse, Margaret supported these initiatives and argued for the compatibility of this kind of eugenics and birth control. She deliberately courted the power of eugenically inclined academics and scientists to blunt the attacks of religious conservatives against her. Her principal intent remained, as it had been earlier, to redress economic and gender inequality and to promote healthier, happier families. Yet, there is no denying that she allowed herself to become caught up in the eugenic zeal of the day and occasionally used language open to far less laudable interpretations. At one point, for example, before an audience of eugenicists, she bemoaned the burden of the “unfit” on the productive members of the community and pledged to organize the “thinking population of this country” around the issue of birth control as a deterrent to poverty and human waste. She then committed birth control to the creation of “a race of thoroughbreds,” having taken the phrase from an article in the popular
Literary Digest
. It had actually been written by a progressive physician, arguing for state endowment of maternal and infant care clinics, but it also carried other implications. A second lapse from her usual distinction between individual and racial definitions of eugenic fitness occurred in 1925 when, as a deliberate taunt to the Catholic Church, she suggested that the United States liberalize its immigration policies for Italian citizens, only if their government agreed to promote birth control.
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Yet even as Margaret strained to make an argument for contraception on biological grounds, the most prominent leaders of the eugenics movement—men such as Charles Davenport, head of the richly funded and highly profiled eugenic research laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, New York—remained vocal opponents of birth control and actually feared that their own scientific credibility would be compromised by association with it. The California eugenicist and physician Paul Popenoe disparaged birth control in a private letter, referring to Margaret and her supporters as “a lot of sob sisters, grandstand players and anarchists.” However extreme some of her pronouncements may seem by contemporary standards, Margaret continued to be identified popularly as a proponent of women and of a deep sympathy and compassion toward the overburdened poor. Only a handful of avowed eugenicists, such as the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, the Harvard sociologist E. M. East, and the president of the University of Michigan, Clarence C. Little, were ever willing to associate with her publicly.