Woman of Valor (3 page)

In 1955, the journalist Lawrence Lader tried to present a more balanced and candid portrait in
The Margaret Sanger Story
, but Sanger herself edited the final manuscript, and it tends to recapitulate the many myths she created about her life. In 1970, Emily Taft Douglas in
Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future
wrote a posthumous celebration of her accomplishments that makes almost no attempt to analyze motivation or explain conflict, while the historian David Kennedy, in
Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger
, presented an interpretive study that is marred by his unexplained animus and patronizing attitude toward his subject. Kennedy belittles Sanger's importance, berates her intelligence, and argues that a persistent emotionalism compromised her effectiveness. Yet, contradictorily, he gives her credit for having undermined the accomplishments of the suffragists by offering women a more palatable personal life that provided them a false sense of liberation. Finally, Madeline Gray, in
Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control
(1978), offers little more than a voyeuristic examination of her private life, reducing a remarkable journey of self-discovery to the level of soap opera and riddling it with factual errors. All of these books are now out of print. Only two current monographs address Sanger's career. Linda Gordon, in
Woman's Body, Woman's Right
(1976), condemns her retreat from the left and portrays her unfairly as an unredeemed conservative who became the pawn of the social and professional elites with whom she tried to work. James Reed in
The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue
(1983) refutes this reading of Sanger's relationships with the physicians, social scientists, and philanthropists who joined her cause, but his emphasis is really more on those individuals than on her.

None of these works utilized the full range of archival materials Margaret Sanger carefully assembled and left behind. Though increasingly cautious and personally discreet during her lifetime, she preserved a personal and professional record of both rare intimacy and enormous scope. Her own life was in many respects a monument to the vision of freedom for women she embraced, and she wanted it known after her death that she had lived more or less contentedly by rules of her own devising. Hundreds of boxes of papers available in the archives of the Library of Congress and Smith College form the basis of the research for this project, along with many more examples of her spirited correspondence that have been uncovered in the papers of friends and colleagues throughout the world. Family and friends have also been generous with their reminiscences.

Out of this inquiry an arresting figure emerges. She incorporates emotional and intellectual tensions that make her intensely human and familiar, yet curiously difficult to assess. She was an idealist who devoted herself to achieving concrete reform. A reformer who believed in the determining influence of both biology and culture. A bohemian who loved money and things material. A confirmed sexual materialist who remained an incurable romantic. An adoring mother who abandoned her children. A Socialist who became a registered Republican. An internationalist who was always wary of cultural and political imperialism.

She was sometimes practical, sometimes impetuous, alternately irreverent and amusing, or pompous and boring. She could be strategic and savvy, or obdurate and implacable. She was occasionally a cynic, but more often an optimist. Laughter was always her best defense against despair.

She often surprises, and yet there is a poignant, painful pattern to her life. So much of what Margaret Sanger became seems to have been there right from the start.

S
he remembered herself first as a child of three who was crying. The house, ominously silent. A somber neighbor hovering over her mother. She was sent outside, kicking and screaming, but managed to drag a crate beneath the window of the room from which she was forbidden. She hoisted herself up and peered under the drawn shade at her mother lying in bed, white and still, braided hair falling gently at her shoulders—the neighbor now bent in prayer. She stood there until her father entered, and she was reassured that her mother would not die.

Nearly half a century had passed when she committed this memory to writing, and there is of course no way of knowing how much of it was true, how much of it pure invention. Autobiography was for Margaret Sanger a wholly self-conscious gesture. By nature, she was not deeply introspective, always in far too great a hurry to engage in anything more than the most elementary analytic exercise. From her father she had learned to externalize her demons, to subordinate personal malaise to political doctrine and find comfort in the championing of a good cause. From her mother, perhaps, came a rare facility for turning her back on remorse completely, an extraordinary capacity for denial. Yes, she shared the enthusiasm of her generation for the new psychology of Sigmund Freud, but she was never one to get bogged down by the details. She had patience for the particulars of her own past only to the extent that they formed a pattern and offered a compelling explanation for her life's work. To this end, the stories she told about herself may be more reliable as myth than as fact—facts were there for embellishment.

Beyond published autobiography, however, she also left traces of herself in journals, letters, conversations, and photographs where, in Virginia Woolf's memorable phrase, submerged truths invariably do rise to the top. A child emerges needing the love and attention of her mother. The mother is ill and unavailable, presumably from the complications of multiple pregnancies. The child invests her father with the power to resolve this predicament but learns instead of his complicity in the matter. She grows up to proclaim that women must own and control their own bodies, if ever they are to call themselves truly free. The symbolism is palpable, whether or not she ever really stood there at the window.
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She was born Margaret Louisa Higgins in Corning, New York, on September 14, 1879, the sixth child and third daughter of Michael Higgins, an Irish stonecutter by trade, and his wife, Anne Purcell. For years she lied about her age and claimed the birth date of a favored younger sister as her own. She even hastily wrote over her mother's inscription in the family Bible, which she deposited with her papers at Smith College, but the ink of the original record is clear, and a handwritten Steuben County census for 1880 confirms the date.
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Anne Higgins recovered from the crisis that determined her daughter's most enduring sensibility, and though she remained frail, there were, incredibly enough, five more babies after Margaret, each “without a blotch or blemish,” a point of considerable, and often remarked-upon, family pride. As the middle child, Margaret felt the full measure of this large family's difficult circumstances and knew each of her siblings as rivals for parental affections and resources that were never adequate. Yet, they also provided much of the joy she experienced in childhood, and she remained devoted to them throughout her life. She took special pride in the physical prowess and exuberance of the ruddy boys and was particularly fond of the youngest, Bob, later an All-American football hero and a celebrated college coach, whose gratitude to his four older sisters knew no bounds. The Higgins girls, by contrast, were red-headed, delicate, and fair, with a distinctive, wholesome Celtic beauty celebrated by Yeats, the favored poet of their ancestral homeland. They were not, however, blessed with the quiet nature Yeats also willed for his women, and Margaret saw in this predicament the seeds of her own mature discontent.
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Their father, Michael Hennessy Higgins, was a first generation Irish-American uprooted by the great famine that ravaged his homeland and sent him across the sea in search of opportunity. Born in 1846, he found his way to Canada as a boy with a widowed mother and a younger brother but left home in his teens and never saw his family again. Margaret's autobiographies say her father answered Lincoln's call for volunteers in the fight against slavery, but too young for active duty, then joined the Union Army as a drummer boy, claiming an adolescent adventure that forever after inspired the awe of his children. Margaret, though she became a committed pacifist and recoiled from human death and suffering, named her second son Grant after her father's revered Yankee general.

Official military records confirm only part of this story. They reveal that Michael enlisted as a private in the New York Cavalry in December of 1863, claiming to be a twenty-year-old laborer in New York City. For reasons that remain obscure, but may have been intended to conceal his age or something else in his past, he called himself by the name of “Michael Hennessy.” Margaret goes on to say that Michael marched with General Sherman's troops across Georgia and was cited for bravery. But, in truth, he seems to have escaped the glory and the carnage of that campaign. Assigned to New York's 12th Regiment in January of 1864, he was recorded as absent and sick with tonsillitis on the company's first muster roll. For the remainder of the year, he served daily duty uneventfully at Bachelor's Creek, North Carolina, and, through the war's end in April of the following year, was listed as missing in action. In June, he was honorably discharged. Years later, when pressed to recount his military mettle in a pension application, the single incident he could identify must have been the one that accounted for the MIA designation, a reconnaissance mission that took him behind enemy lines, where he captured a lone Confederate soldier on a mule.
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Still, Higgins left the Union Army as a decorated veteran and returned with a fellow soldier after the war to Flemington, New Jersey, then a small but prosperous farming community about forty-five miles from New York City. There, in 1869, he found his Irish bride, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a day laborer named Joseph Purcell, who also traced his roots back to County Cork. An enterprising family, the Purcells owned real estate valued on the 1870 census at a very respectable $3,500. Having succeeded far better than most of their kinsmen, despite humble origins and illiteracy, they apparently resented Higgins's independent mind, his contempt for religious authority, his sharp tongue and high spirits. They were understandably worried about his prospects.

The newlyweds moved almost immediately to Queens County, New York, where Higgins apprenticed himself to a stonemason. They tried their luck next in Brooklyn and then went west to Massillon, Ohio, but were back in Flemington in 1875, already by then the parents of four small children. Two years later they settled permanently in Corning, where the town's renowned glassworks provided jobs for a large and devout Irish Catholic community, whose fancy cemetery monuments were a visible symbol of its heavenly devotions and earthly rewards. According to local lore, the irreverent Higgins bartered a gravestone adorned with angels and saints for the rental of the house in the river flats where his daughter Margaret was born. It was a ramshackle structure owned by a small local railroad company whose trains ran on tracks just beyond the front door. Cut off from the more densely populated immigrant districts in town, it was transformed in her published memoirs from a simple shanty to an idealized cottage in the woods surrounded by pine trees.
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Michael opened a marble and stonecutting business in Corning, but he was an artisan, not a businessman, a talker, not a doer, and as his wife's family had predicted, he never knew material success. While American craftsmen and manufacturers made a historic transition to the structured, time-disciplined habits of the modern workplace, he lagged behind, always mingling work with conversation and drink. He claimed at one point to have been the victim of an embezzlement, but his sons offered a different interpretation of these reverses, blaming them on their father's own improvidence and remembering that often when a customer appeared in his shop, they would have to haul him out of some heated argument, so he could make a sale. Others shared their assessment and thought him at worst a worthless drunk, at best, a foolish spouter. Few respected his principled advocacy of the rights of labor and other advanced social causes of the day. Yet, as success in business eluded him, he seems to have depended all the more for self-esteem on his political convictions. His granddaughter, Olive Byrne Richard, remembers him fondly in the early years of this century as an energetic old man with carrot red hair, freckled face, and twinkling blue eyes, standing at the factory gate, exhorting the glassworkers to organize in pursuit of economic justice and individual freedom. By Margaret's account, his heroes were the legendary single-tax advocate, Henry George, the free-thinker, anticleric and notable early feminist, Robert Ingersoll, and the Socialist Party organizer, Eugene V. Debs, whom she also came to revere.
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Higgins got started in politics as a member of the Knights of Labor, a fraternal association that predated the movement for trade unionism by craft in this country and espoused a Utopian brand of Socialism. What made this affiliation most unusual was the Knights' strident opposition to America's open-door immigration policy, even to Michael's fellow Irishmen, on the grounds that a steady stream of imported labor would only further erode domestic wages. The Catholic Church was especially suspicious of this sentiment and of the Knights' anticlerical tendencies.

Corning's glass industry prospered in the late 1880s, and substantial support did develop for some form of worker organization. By 1887, local tensions erupted in the wake of the national labor unrest that produced the American Federation of Labor. The glassblowers organized a strike and demanded shorter hours and better wages in the first of what would be many confrontations with the tightly knit family that still retains control of Corning Industries today. The well-publicized imprisonments of the organizers of Chicago's landmark Haymarket labor uprisings that same year fueled local passions, but the union went down to defeat after a train crash killed a number of strikers who were returning home from temporary jobs they had found in Ohio while they were out of work. The glassworks was not successfully organized until the 1930s.
⁷

The town's highly skilled craftsmen were a proud and yet, in many respects, a conservative lot, who labored by hand over the dangerous molten substance they molded and blew into glass. Their industry was startlingly slow to mechanize. All the men really wanted from a union was more money and safer working conditions, not the drastically altered industrial and social arrangements of which Michael Higgins dreamed. What is more, Higgins directed his ire not only at the town's economic establishment, but at a diffident, local parish hierarchy that sided with management during the glass strike and appeared to subvert the interests of its own constituents.
*

This vocal apostasy won him few friends in any quarter and cost him dearly in work for church cemeteries. His livelihood never transcended these indiscretions, and the situation only deteriorated further after he identified himself publicly with the infamous atheist, Robert Ingersoll, an incident that Margaret later claimed as another of her clearest memories.

Ingersoll was a prominent and widely published tribune of rationalism and freedom from superstition, as well as an enthusiastic advocate of human liberty and the rights of women. He was also an early proponent of artificial contraception. To the faithful, of course, he was seen as a symbol of evil incarnate. Ingersoll, according to his own biographer, toured the towns of upstate New York in 1894. Margaret's account of his visit to Corning is unclear in many details but does recall vividly that tomatoes, apples, and cabbage stumps began to fly as supporters of the church prevented the infidel lecturer from using the town's major meeting hall. While there is no corroboration of these facts, she claims he spoke instead from an outdoor field and provided her a first lesson in the value of free speech and free thought. And, at the same time, she openly links the event to the social ostracism and deprivation that followed in its wake. The Higgins children were branded as “children of the devil,” their names shouted and scorned by schoolmates.
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Margaret always harbored a distinct ambivalence toward her father's political beliefs. On the one hand, she admired his convictions deeply and identified his radicalism as “the spring” from which she drank. She often quoted his admonition that the only obligation of his children was to “leave the world a better place,” but the emotional price of this iconoclasm also left a strong imprint. A compulsion to make something concrete of Michael's well-meaning but largely empty political gestures surely underlay her own enthusiasm for reform. Yet with his experience in mind, perhaps, she could never tolerate a losing cause and, after a brief infatuation with radicalism of her own, adopted a strategy of political accommodation and tried to secure herself against the potential public censure of her ideas by aligning herself with individuals of recognized social and professional standing. When they came her way, she thrived unabashedly on acceptance and acclaim. Her style in a curious way mirrored Ingersoll's, an embattled public figure, who, quite unlike her father, had carefully secured himself an education, wealth, and impeccable social credentials, all of which helped insulate him from popular disapproval.
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With the decline in Michael's fortunes, the Higgins family was evicted from its cottage in the river flats and moved for a time to makeshift quarters above his failing monument shop. The oldest brothers—Joseph, John, and Thomas—then successively left school and found jobs for a time in the glass factory, while the older girls, Mary and Nan, took positions respectively as maid and governess in local Corning homes. Their salaries allowed the family to rent a succession of houses in the more established Irish and Italian districts on Corning's western hills. By a neighbor's recollection, Anne Higgins also took in washing to help earn money, and the parish priests supplied baskets of food. Years later, Margaret and her younger sister, Ethel, still recalled having walked miles to a milk station to save a penny on the retail price of a five cent quart, so money would be left for candy.
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