Woman of Valor (32 page)

A still feisty Michael Higgins survived his oldest daughter, and Margaret also observed the irony of this situation, but within weeks of Mary's death, he suffered a severe stroke at the cottage in Truro, where he was living. He spent the following year as an invalid. When he then died at the ripe age of eighty-eight, most of his children did not even bother to attend the funeral. Margaret, however, did make the trip to Corning and took Grant along with her, who many years later recalled his horror that Michael had been buried apart from his wife at the cemetery's edge. Yet no observation of these events appears in Margaret's journals or correspondence, just as there is no record of any response by her father to her work. He would emerge as a far larger presence in her autobiographies than in these less self-conscious materials.
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Though scarcely mentioned, the deaths may nonetheless have been deeply felt. Margaret wrote frequently during this period to such intimate friends as Juliet and Hugh, confiding the wish that she might abandon America altogether for the more tolerant and happy atmosphere of Europe. Pampered and undisciplined, Juliet had long since tired of birth control and was preoccupied with archaeology and filmmaking, her two newest passions. En route to Italy in 1925, where she was about to descend to the ocean floor in a cylinder to look for ruins, she scribbled back to Margaret: “Darling—we must hurry—hurry—hurry—to pass B.C. on to others so that we can work for this other, super, bigger thing which will make men and women into Gods and Goddesses. B.C. was a necessary step, but useless unless we can also create finer human beings spiritually and mentally…. The desire and will to Freedom & free imagination & aspiration—Realization of all the Beauties & joys they have dreamed of, must be stirred and awakened in women just as you have succeeded in stirring & awakening them to a desire to control their own bodies.”

Such romantic excess was characteristic of the letters the two women often exchanged. Juliet would tempt Margaret to slip away and indulge in the loftier personal and intellectual pursuits to which they had been introduced by the Wantley circle. This was no simple invitation to sexual promiscuity, but an honestly perceived commitment to the development of a higher and more spiritually attuned life—an idealized existence set apart from the turmoil of the real world. Invariably, Margaret would agree, promising to let go and allow others to carry on the more mundane matters of birth control, but then she would find an excuse to recant, usually arguing that she could find no one with comparable vision to succeed her.
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In fact, her international stature had grown substantially as a result of Dennett's decline and in the wake of the American Birth Control League's sponsorship in New York in 1925 of the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian Conference and Birth Control. Neo-Malthusian sympathizers of various European nationalities had been meeting together since 1900, when a first conclave was held in Paris, which Emma Goldman attended. Delegates gathered again in Belgium in 1905, in the Netherlands in 1910, and in Germany a year later. Little came of these prewar sessions other than spirited debate about the relevance of Malthusian doctrine to Marxism. But the fifth session, in London in 1922, which Margaret attended, had attracted the attention of mainstream economists, demographers, social theorists and physicians, including such notable figures as John Maynard Keynes and H. G. Wells. As birthrates in the West declined, interest began to develop, albeit slowly, in the problems of unrestrained population growth in the developing nations.

The 1925 gathering in New York then drew more than 1,000 delegates, produced four volumes of papers, was covered extensively by the press and made a significant impression on professional, scholarly, and political audiences. Among the participants from Europe was Aletta Jacobs, M.D., and from the United States, the Freudian A. A. Brill, the Socialist Norman Thomas, and the flamboyant feminist and pacifist Rosika Schwimmer, who would be denied United States citizenship in 1929 in a historic Supreme Court case challenging her refusal to promise to bear arms in defense of her country. Also attending were numbers of professionals from medicine and the social sciences who were less controversial but perhaps more influential. Having hosted this event and been left with the responsibility of perpetuating international contacts and cooperation, Margaret was enjoying new prominence in what was becoming a movement of worldwide interest.
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The conference hardly provided an excuse to retreat from her public responsibilities as Juliet beckoned, but it did present an opportunity to indulge the fantasy of spending more time in Europe, where the demands of international leadership could more comfortably accommodate intellectual, aesthetic, and no doubt romantic opportunities, as well. With the business of clinic organization at home proceeding slowly, and with legislative reform in Albany and Washington stalled, Margaret decided to grant herself a sabbatical from her obligations in the United States and once again go abroad.

In June of 1926, she announced to the New York newspapers that she would be taking a leave of absence from the American league to study and prepare for another international conference scheduled the following year in Geneva, home of the League of Nations, whose delegates she sought to impress with the importance of population doctrine to world peace and prosperity. She did not resign from the organization, but instead named as acting president a formidable younger woman named Eleanor Dwight Jones, who had risen out of the ranks of birth control volunteers.

Mrs. F. Robertson Jones, as she liked to be known, was the wife of an establishment New York lawyer, and her many concessions to social convention may have deceived Margaret into believing that she had chosen a deferential stand-in. Instead, Jones emerged as a determined, independent presence, and with Margaret no longer around to interfere, she quickly instituted more professional standards of management for the organization. She regularized what had been fairly lax administrative practices, streamlined fund-raising, established formal accounting procedures, and instituted changes in governance, which diffused powers the president had previously exercised unilaterally.
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Margaret was not initially averse to these changes. She recognized the need to introduce formal procedures to an operation that had expanded substantially from its beginnings as a largely volunteer cause, whose leaders were emotionally driven. Indeed, she returned to the United States briefly in 1927 and agreed to a series of Jones's proposals, including her desire to remove Anne Kennedy, an original recruit and a close personal friend of Margaret's, from the organization altogether. Margaret apparently promised to find Anne a position in private business but then went back to Europe and did nothing about it. Later that year, Mrs. Jones then fired Kennedy outright, ostensibly because she had neglected to file daily expense sheets in connection with her field activities, though staff and board members who wrote confidentially to Margaret about the incident said that overall insubordination to Jones underlay the action. Recognizing the unhappy truth that the old-timers were accustomed to more or less making up rules as they went along and would probably never be able to accommodate to professional standards of accountability, Margaret brought Anne over to Europe temporarily to assist with the Geneva conference. She then sent her off to Cleveland, where she helped organize the clinic there, and then for an entire year drove herself by car through the midwestern states and as far away as Texas, in some cases literally knocking on the doors of strangers, to introduce herself and the birth control cause. Later, Margaret helped secure a permanent position for her with a company manufacturing diaphragms. Margaret complained that Jones had been clumsy in handling the departure but went along with it nonetheless. Indeed, of her own accord and in an identical spirit of committing herself to a higher level of professionalism, she also found a position outside the movement for Anna Lifschiz, her devoted secretary of more than thirteen years, who had been with her since the days of the Brownsville Clinic.
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Margaret may have been willing to sacrifice some of her most loyal associates, but she was not prepared to allow the league's new administrative regulations and procedures to interfere with her own work. In 1928, when she returned to New York permanently and resumed the presidency of the organization, she found herself in the untenable position of being a supplicant to a board of directors, whose views did not always reflect her own. Like most self-styled pioneers in social causes, she did not always move gracefully among a second generation of reformers who brought a corporate mentality to an endeavor in which they had far less of a personal stake. A deep emotional investment in her work and a temperamental disdain for the give-and-take of bureaucracy made her testy toward newcomers who thought they knew better than she did. On the other hand, she was happy to have them carry on independently when she wasn't prepared to pay attention, as this same group of women had done reasonably well during the eighteen months she spent in Europe.

On her return, minor disputes arose over the most trivial of expenditures, and in June of 1928, telling Juliet that she could not do her best work in an atmosphere that had sacrificed “spirit, love and trust” to “rules and regulations,” Margaret submitted her resignation as president. She tried to name her own successor by engineering the election of Charlotte Delafield, a current vice president and director of the organization who had been loyal in the past, but when that maneuver failed, she acquiesced to the permanent election of Eleanor Jones. Her official letter of resignation acknowledged a growing interest in birth control research and clinical service, along with a recognition that the league had reached a new stage of “maturity and organization” and was moving forward in its educational and legislative objectives without her. She could afford to be gracious, because the league board had worked out an agreement allowing her to remain as a director and also retain her title as editor-in-chief of the
Birth Control Review
. She thought she could continue to exercise control where she wanted it, without being president.
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But within months, this carefully constructed détente proved unworkable. Margaret had initially incorporated and always administered the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau as an autonomous legal and financial entity, wholly independent of the league, and she insisted it should remain so. Mrs. Jones argued instead that the parent organization had made important policy decisions with respect to the clinic and should continue in an advisory role. Cordial relations quickly deteriorated between the two women, and the resolution of legitimate differences became impossible. Margaret convinced herself that Jones was, on the one hand, a timid soul who only did what her lawyer-husband advised her to do, and on the other, a personally ambitious woman whose foremost interest was self-aggrandizement. In Margaret's view, Jones displayed an impertinent disregard for her own judgment and years of prior experience. The final break came when Jones, having lost the battle over the clinic, tried to reclaim control of the
Review
by appointing an editorial advisory board. Margaret then angrily resigned altogether, leaving the magazine behind, but taking the clinic with her.

“Politics, jealousies, selfishness, desire for glory and power kill the spirit always,” she wrote to Hugh in a confession that may have described her own behavior as accurately as her adversary's. And yet she hardly seemed all that concerned over the entire matter, adding: “the movement grows and blossoms & I am getting happier everyday over it.” She told the press that the controversy represented the maturing of the movement, which, like a growing cell, got to a certain point and then divided. “We are still the same body, however,” she hastened to add.

Both women seem to have behaved badly, yet whatever character weaknesses they revealed, their personal dispute, much like those that had embroiled Margaret in the past, also reflected substantive differences in leadership style and in basic ideology. The schism was probably inevitable because Jones and the board members she controlled were intent on building an institution quietly and methodically by slowly compiling a record of endorsements, affiliations, and clinic openings. Margaret had little patience for this incremental approach and was, instead, eager to take risks and extend the organization beyond conventional and prudent tactics. Busy building institutions in the United States and in Europe, she had also been out of the press and the public eye for several years. As soon as she returned from Europe, she began to talk about throwing caution to the winds and mounting another major legislative campaign in Washington. She did not necessarily count on political victory but saw no other means except renewed lobbying to educate and arouse an increasingly apathetic public. She was willing to let Senators tell her what to do only for so long.
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Still defending her position to a wary ABCL leadership in 1932, she would admit that whether the Comstock laws actually still meant much or were enforced was not important to her. “There is no better way of educating public opinion than by changing the laws,” she explained. “Such agitation arouses interest, awakens forces that have been sleeping or apathetic and creates a new attitude not only toward government, but toward our part in bringing about constructive changes in obsolete and vicious laws. In my estimation the agitation for legislation is the means, and precedes the knowledge and the awakening of interest in the establishment of clinics.” Eleanor Jones, however, believed that lobbying would only divert energy and money from the practical, constructive work of bringing contraceptive services to the poor. As the Depression took hold, Jones also decided that propaganda was having a negative effect by encouraging a middle-class birthrate that was already too low. She could see no instrumental value in public relations arising from legal issues.
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