Woman of Valor (31 page)

The Baltimore experience was unique. In 1927, the staid physicians of Johns Hopkins University, not yet convinced that Margaret Sanger was doing good work, agreed to sponsor a five-year experiment among their dispensary patients who exhibited clear medical indications for contraception. Their proposal was advertised to every physician, hospital, and social agency in the state of Maryland. But with a handful of women doctors working only part-time and devoting up to an hour for each patient visit, even this well-connected effort wound up handling little more than 1,000 cases in total.

Elsewhere, the American Birth Control League in New York sent its own organizers into the field. In 1925, Margaret hired James Cooper, M.D., a former instructor at Boston University's medical school, who had recently returned from medical missionary work in China. Cooper acted as her emissary to professional medical societies, which would never have deigned to listen to a lay woman propagandist. Until his resignation in 1929, he traveled to virtually every state in the nation and reached thousands of physicians through individual contacts and lectures, his reputation considerably enhanced by the publication of his
Technique of Contraception
, the first well-regarded technical text on the subject. In journeys of more than 40,000 miles, he also mobilized social workers, nurses, volunteers, and businessmen to support birth control affiliates. Another field secretary by the name of Henrietta Hart explained in a memo summarizing her activities for 1927 that it had been necessary to hold a total of twenty-seven separate meetings in eleven different communities in order to get a state league going in New Jersey, which then raised several thousand dollars to open a single birth control clinic in downtown Newark.

By 1930, there were also small facilities advertising themselves as birth control clinics in Cincinnati, Atlanta, Denver, and San Antonio. A sociologist surveying the movement's progress identified thirty clinics nationwide, though her figure was deceptive, because it incorporated some negligible operations annexed to private practices or hospitals. Indeed, in 1930, Margaret's own Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York alone serviced almost twice as many patients as all of the rest of the clinics in the country combined.
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The law prohibited contraception outright in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and for almost a decade Catholic threats there effectively quieted local activists. Then in 1928, Dr. Antoinette Konikow was arrested in Boston for distributing a handbill advertising a lecture on birth control and sex hygiene. The incident propelled the imperious Blanche Ames back into action to reform the state obscenity statute. Ames brought Margaret up to speak, but a birth control bill introduced in the state legislature never made it beyond committee, and several small clinics that opened around the state during the Depression were closed down by police raids in 1937—raids launched on the authority of the Commonwealth's original Comstock provisions of 1879. A case was brought on behalf of the clinic in Salem, but the statute was sustained in the lower courts and by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which refused to make any exceptions to the ban on distributing contraception, even for licensed physicians. In neighboring Connecticut, clinics were opened in New Haven, Danbury, Greenwich, and Waterbury. The closing of the Waterbury facility in 1937 also provoked a legal challenge, but as in Massachusetts, state courts sustained the action, and all the clinics shut down after a final appeal was lost in 1940. Connecticut had no organized birth control services until 1961, when services were made available through Planned Parenthood in New Haven. The forced closing of this operation provided the test case that wound its way to the United States Supreme Court four years later and resulted in the historic ruling in
Griswold v. Connecticut
, when the Supreme Court finally accepted jurisdiction and declared contraception a constitutional right of married Americans.
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Yet even where birth control was legal, the cautious interpretation of provisions governing the transport of supplies and the eligibility of patients also acted as impediments to growth of the movement overall. Progress rested largely on the voluntary efforts of women whose financial and organizational resources never kept pace with their dedication to the cause, and whose sense of propriety in some cases actually compromised their effectiveness. Increasingly conservative by temperament, many of the new generation of activists outside New York shied away from publicity for fear of provoking controversy, and this made it especially hard for needy clients to find them. Many clinics, shunned by established social welfare networks that feared reprisals from Catholic voluntary agencies, were cut off from professional referrals. What is more, medical indications for birth control were often construed narrowly to conform to the letter of laws defining medical eligibility, while, at the same time, economic criteria for clinic service were also established, so as not to offend private physicians who were quick to voice their dismay about middle-class women receiving a subsidy. Finally, doubts were raised about the efficacy and cost of the recommended diaphragm procedure. All in all, there seem to have been almost as many constraints on expansion as there were incentives for growth.

Even so, numerous small clinics sprouted up, in response to increased attention and demand brought on by the Depression. By the mid-1930s birth control leagues existed in more than half the states, and there were at one point as many as 300 clinics. Still, it was unreasonable to expect that the essentially voluntary efforts of women could possibly result in comprehensive service delivery. Until the marketing of the pill and the provision of federal funding in the 1960s, the growth of birth control clinics stalled.

 

However halting, the slow progress of this clinic organization was still more substantial than the league's legislative accomplishments. Despite her bleak view of politicians, Margaret grew convinced that birth control would never win full acceptance as a social and medical practice while the onus of illegality still hung over it. In 1923 she persuaded Samuel Rosenman, then a well-connected young legislator from Manhattan, but soon to become senior speech writer and adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, to sponsor a new birth control bill in the New York State Assembly. The measure affirmatively licensed physicians to prescribe contraception for reasons of health, in accordance with the judicial ruling she had achieved earlier. The support of a mainstream Democrat was noteworthy, and the bill was also widely endorsed by grass-roots women's organizations, including, for the first time, the 10,000 member New York State League of Women Voters. Several leading Manhattan physicians also testified in its behalf, along with the same cast of liberal clergymen, university professors, and society women who had been to Albany to lobby for birth control in years past. To restore the effort's credibility as an issue for working people, Margaret also recruited Norman Thomas, then head of a Socialist Labor organization called the League for Industrial Democracy. Thomas gave a rousing speech to those who convened in the state capital to push the bill, but his appearance, however well-intended, did little to further its prospects.

When Margaret herself was scheduled to address this lobby, the mayor of the substantially Catholic town of Albany arbitrarily revoked the permit licensing the hotel meeting room where she was to speak. Her appearance was canceled and then moved to a private home. Once again, the intervention provoked a militant confrontation and created a rash of newspaper publicity, furthering the educational objectives of the movement but, at the same time, entrenching the opposition and effectively killing any hope of victory. In a sarcastic editorial in the
Birth Control Review
, Margaret then attacked the integrity of the elected officials who stood by in the face of this “despotism” and refused to grant her a respectful hearing. She suggested facetiously that “intelligence tests”—then still the rage of eugenicists and psychologists—be required for all legislators. The Rosenman bill never made it out of the Assembly Codes Committee, but the virtue of pursuing a strategy of legal reform at the state level was nonetheless affirmed, either because of Margaret's persuasiveness, or perhaps because the strategy replicated the prior efforts of suffragists, who had spent years in the states before focusing on Washington.

The weight of Margaret's argument for a doctor's preference also prevailed, even over Mary Ware Dennett's efforts in Washington. Dennett had strongly opposed Margaret's decision to pursue a legislative campaign in Albany. Earlier she had promised to support Margaret's efforts to establish clinics, if Margaret in turn stayed out of politics, a compromise Margaret saw no reason to make. In December of 1923, on her sixteenth request, Dennett finally enlisted Sen. Albert B. Cummins of Iowa, then president pro tempore of the Senate, to introduce her legislation, but this time she made a concession to Margaret by inserting a provision requiring five physicians to certify the reliability of any contraceptive product protected by law. Hearings were held by a joint subcommittee of the judiciary committees of the House and Senate, but the Cummins-Vaile bill (identified by the names of its Senate and House sponsors, the latter, Colorado Congressman William N. Vaile) then stalled and never got to the floor of either chamber. Support eroded for Dennett's goal of trying to repeal the federal Comstock statutes altogether, and within a year her Voluntary Parenthood League closed down, leaving Margaret's hegemony over the birth control movement uncontested. Dennett more or less retired to writing and subsequently attacked Margaret publicly in a book entitled
Birth Control Laws
, which made a final plea for the repeal of the federal Comstock statutes. “The poor sick woman has failed in her work and in order to explain her failure, she throws the blame on me and my work and early views, most of them very good but
radical
,” Margaret confided in a private letter. To Juliet, she described it as “devilish and cruel,” but she refrained from public comment.
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However much she scorned Dennett in private, Margaret saw an opening for herself in this legislative setback on Capitol Hill. During the 1924 Presidential campaign, she quietly made an effort to put birth control on the national political agenda by enlisting Oswald Garrison Villard, the eminent publisher of
The Nation
, to talk to Progressive Presidential candidate Robert LaFollette about it. Predictably, however, LaFollette resisted embracing a contentious issue that would inevitably detract from the major domestic issues of his campaign. Delegates to the major party conventions were also lobbied on birth control that year, but to no avail.

After two years without any birth control activity in Washington, Margaret then decided to try to fill the vacuum by attempting some lobbying of her own devising. In 1926, she sent Anne Kennedy to Washington to test the waters for a “physicians' bill,” but after surveying the scene, Kennedy left without even drafting legislation, convinced any effort would probably be futile, and that money was better expended elsewhere for the time being. Told by Senator Cummins that he had never been able to get his bill taken seriously—by others that it was “the laughing stock of the cloakroom”—Kennedy encouraged Margaret to invest in more public education.
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While in Washington, Kennedy also went to interview a National Catholic Welfare Conference public relations deputy by the name of Patrick J. Ward, whom she understood to be the official spokesman of the organization. Kennedy subsequently transcribed the interview, had Ward sign off on its contents, and then quoted him in an American Birth Control League circular saying that the NCWC was organizing a special committee to fight birth control openly and to legislate for Catholics and non-Catholics alike, according to the dictates of the church. When Kennedy made the contents of the interview public, however, Father John Burke, general secretary of the NCWC, first angrily denied that Ward had any authority to speak at all for the organization and then subsequently challenged the authenticity of Kennedy's account. Predictably annoyed, Margaret published a scathing attack in
The New Republic
.

She also intensified her public excoriation of the Catholic Church. In a particularly extreme example from 1928, the
Birth Control Review
carried an article by the journalist Floyd Dell called “The Anti-Birth Control Neurosis.” A popularizer of Freudian theory, Dell boldly charged that Catholic clerics who opposed birth control were really just counteracting their own impotency anxiety. This kind of material was certainly not calculated to win support from Catholics—or from any politicians for that matter.

Having all but given up on partisan politics for the moment, Margaret attacked the Democrats for nominating New York's Catholic Governor, Al Smith, as their candidate for President and voted for Herbert Hoover, just to be safe. Nevertheless, she continued to file legislation in Albany to repeal the state's birth control laws, as she had been doing each year since 1923, only to have it repeatedly stalled in committee. By 1929, an opposition led by Catholic interests had rallied in force, and public lobbies for and against birth control met head to head in the Capitol chambers.
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The frustrations of continued setbacks and political defeats weighed heavily upon her, and Margaret blamed them for the periodic bouts of depression that began to plague her again in middecade. This recurrent malaise may also have been occasioned by the loss of her revered older sister, Mary, who died in 1926 from the complications of a ruptured appendix. Always the compliant domestic servant, Mary simply refused to tell anyone she wasn't feeling well before it was too late. In this respect and all others, the two sisters could not have been more different, or followed more divergent paths. They saw each other infrequently, if at all. Yet when Mary was operated on in 1925 in Buffalo, where for almost thirty years she had worked for the same family, Margaret at long last went up to visit. She returned soon thereafter for the funeral and noted in her journal that Mary had been “the stable sympathetic member of a large family. Her passing loosens up the foundations.” With a small bequest from Mary, she built a rose arbor in her memory.