Woman of Valor (33 page)

While Margaret joined ranks with women of the establishment, she was also never completely comfortable with any but the most independent-minded—some might say the most eccentric—among them. She convinced herself that Jones, like Mary Ware Dennett before her, was simply not a compatible spirit, if for no other reason than that she looked down upon Margaret's social background and schooling. “I wonder if Mrs. J. thinks the N.R. asks ‘uneducated' people to write for its columns,” she wrote caustically to Juliet Rublee early in 1929, when
The New Republic
published a piece Margaret had prepared about her New York clinic. Her ego must still have been bruised a year later when Havelock Ellis responded to one of her letters in consolation: “The BC movement was magnificent in its day and it is splendid that you should be its St. Margaret,” he responded, “but it is no longer a visionary movement, no longer an adventure, but, though always important, quite dull and commonplace and best left to dull and commonplace people.”
²⁰

There was, indeed, a disturbing change of emphasis in the league under Jones's direction. For almost a decade, Margaret had pandered to a eugenically minded audience, but she was always careful to qualify her definition of hereditary fitness to exclude outright prejudice on the basis of race, ethnicity, or class. By contrast, Jones was unabashedly elitist and undemocratic. “Couples who cannot endow their children with health, vigor, and intelligence should have fewer children than those who can,” she told the National Conference of Social Work in 1929. “In order that people of inferior stock shall have fewer children, all we need to do is to remove the obstacles put in the way of their getting birth control advice.” The following year Jones applied to the Rockefeller family-supported Bureau of Social Hygiene and to other foundations for funding to underwrite a “systematic campaign against the present dysgenic multiplication of the unfit.” She explained her intentions this way: “The public is beginning to realize that scientific, constructive philanthropy does not merely care for the diseased, the poor, and the degenerate, but takes steps to prevent the birth of babies destined to be paupers, invalids, degenerates, or all three.”

A tactful Lawrence Dunham, director of the Social Hygiene Bureau's staff, counseled his board that the application “assumed as facts statements which were in reality highly debatable opinions.” Elsewhere he added: “The [birth control] movement has the support of many of the best and most intelligent people in the world and it also has the support of some persons whose mental balance is not the best. In between these two classes, we find the people who hold debatable opinions, the most capable group being the Eugenists [sic], some of whom make claims which many eminent scientists in the field of biology and other related sciences contend are utterly false, or at least unproven.”

Dunham did not recommend support for the league's application. He instead took the advice of another member of his staff—to await the results of research on birth control being conducted under the auspices of Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. The American Birth Control League was given $10,000 to continue educational work among physicians, but its funding from the Rockefellers did not grow beyond that level so long as Eleanor Jones—“a martinet,” as she was described in another Bureau of Social Hygiene memorandum—remained in charge.
²¹

By contrast, Margaret's own reputation, however controversial she remained in many quarters, transcended the identity of the group she had founded. Freed of bureaucratic constraints and infighting, and fiercely determined to best her detractors, she moved forward on her own, expanding the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York, while also launching her proposed educational and lobbying campaign for birth control in Washington. Indeed, she fortuitously located the headquarters of this effort in the nation's capital just as that city found itself the center of the country's New Deal reform energies, and, in so doing, she valiantly attempted to ally the birth control cause with affirmative social welfare and planning initiatives in response to the economic crisis.

By leaving the league, Margaret deprived it of her firebrand temperament. She also took much of its fund-raising capability, as the Bureau of Social Hygiene records clearly confirm. Eroding the confidence of the Rockefellers was no small matter, but they did inevitably fund both the league and many of Margaret's new requests, as well, at least in small amounts. The far more significant loss proved to be a stately, monocled, self-made millionaire by the name of James Henry Noah Slee, who had become the birth control movement's principal benefactor by way of marrying Margaret Sanger. Having secured this one man's devotion and his checkbook, she was, for the time being at least, substantially able to pay her own way.

B
orn in Capetown, South Africa, in 1860 to a family of shopkeepers, Noah Slee, as he preferred to be called, migrated to America with his widowed mother at the age of twelve. At seventeen, he found a job in a company in Baltimore manufacturing machine lubricants. Subsequently, he patented his own formula for a blended, compound oil, which proved particularly successful at keeping bicycle chains in working order. When the country went crazy for bicycling in the 1890s, he promoted his 3-in-One Oil in a nationwide advertising campaign and cornered the emerging domestic market for such a product. Quick to see the benefits of mechanization, he then cut labor and production costs in his factories and substantially increased profits. The company he founded in 1894 with a $1,200 investment had capital assets listed at several million dollars thirty years later and annual international sales exceeding that amount. He reportedly sold it in 1929 for more than three times book value—nearly $7 million.

Slee had been married for more than thirty years to Mary Roosevelt West of New Windsor, New York, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. He was active in the socially impeccable Union League Club and in Episcopal Church affairs in New York City, where for years he scrupulously administered the Sunday school of St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square. (Whenever Margaret told this story, she insisted that she had nearly fainted when she first heard it.) Beneath these appearances of respectability, however, lay a restless, unfulfilled man who had found no contentment in his relations with a wife he once described as so cold that each of his children had cost him dearly in gifts of diamonds and pearls. Margaret herself candidly portrayed Noah as a “babe in the woods—a deprived and hungry man with the passions of a youngster.”

They met at a dinner party hosted by Juliet Rublee in 1921, where he had been coaxed by a friend under considerable duress. Expecting to face a coarse and militant feminist, he was instead beguiled by the evening's guest of honor. Within months, he left his wife at their estate in Dutchess County, New York, and placed his business in the hands of a grown son. He pursued Margaret tirelessly, standing by her side during the legal tribulations that followed her arrest at Town Hall in New York and thereafter for almost a year, as she lectured in a dozen American cities and then embarked from San Francisco for a round-the-world speaking tour.
¹

She was herself only recently divorced, having finally secured a legal separation from William Sanger in Barnstable, Massachusetts, in October of 1921, on grounds of desertion, since he still refused his consent. Following the death of Billy Williams and the marriage of Jonah Goldstein, she had been without a reliable companion in New York. Nonetheless, her calendar for 1920 and 1921 notes occasional evenings and holidays in the company of the still devoted Harold Hersey and others, including Sanger himself, with whom relations seem to have eased somewhat, once her independence from him was made official. Marriage made “not a whit of difference” to her, she confided in a letter to Hugh de Selincourt after the divorce was final. Earlier she had vowed that if she ever married again, it would be for money alone, and then, only so that she could come and live nearby him in England. She was “no fit person for love or home or children or friends or anything which needs attention or consideration,” she admitted candidly in still a third letter, this one mentioning Noah Slee directly, though not by name. She referred to him only as “the millionaire.”
²

They could not have been a more improbable couple. She tended to be irreverent and fun-loving, he staid and sober. She was an atheist, he a pietist; she a Socialist, he a Republican; she a veteran of bohemia, he a pillar of the establishment. He remained wary of her zealous dedication to her work; she never stopped begrudging him his wealth and his leisure. Yet, though she bewildered and often exasperated him, he found her irresistible. She gave him satisfaction in love, and he, in turn, made her socially respectable, showered her with money, and instructed her in the habits of businesslike punctuality, reliability, and caution that made possible her transition from the birth control movement's wild-eyed and controversial pioneer to its preeminent, if still controversial, professional leader. He even persuaded her to bring men onto her staff, which she once acknowledged was a “big jump” for her.

The relationship was at once foolishly romantic and eminently practical. An early coworker recalled years later that Noah first secured Margaret's affections by providing her with an addressograph machine, an up-to-date filing system, and a new examination table for her office. The gifts were a ploy to encourage her to stay home and share breakfast with him in the morning, rather than go early to the office in order to answer the mail by hand.
³

Slee's indispensability was never more apparent than when he accompanied Margaret to the Orient in February of 1922. Through the auspices of her friend, Agnes Smedley, she had been invited to lecture on population issues in Japan. The contact was made through Shidzue Ishimoto, a young Japanese woman of noble lineage, who first learned about birth control on a trip to New York. Margaret was to be part of a series sponsored by a liberal group that published
Kaizo Reconstruction
, a monthly review of politics, literature, and social theory. The group also extended invitations to such luminaries of the West as H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Einstein.

Unwilling to endure a second, prolonged separation from her sons, she again took thirteen-year-old Grant out of school for a semester, and Noah came along ostensibly to provide companionship for the young boy aboard ship and during the month that she traversed the Japanese countryside, delivering lengthy lectures (painstakingly translated into the native tongue) before various groups of women and of medical professionals. Together, the Sanger party toured the temples, palaces, theaters, and gardens of conventional tourist interest, and Margaret also went off on her own to investigate working conditions for women and children in the cotton and silk factories, along with the relative living standards of geishas and lesser castes of Japanese prostitutes, whose independence from the repressive patriarchal norms of Japanese society she quite frankly admired.

She kept a journal and travelogue of her trip, but in 183 handwritten pages, Noah Slee's name only appears in passing—once as a facilitator of travel arrangements, and on another occasion when his “cross and disgruntled” behavior apparently spoiled her day. Allowing herself to become absorbed in material concerns was uncharacteristic of Margaret, and the absence of almost any reflection at all about her companion is striking, though she was, in fact, kept busy enough to be able to ignore him much of the time.

Her appearance in Japan sparked intense interest from the moment she arrived and was denied an entry visa, because Japanese representatives to the Washington Naval Conference, who were returning home on the same ship with her, ostensibly questioned whether their government ought to admit a woman whose right to free speech had been suppressed in her own country. Though the records are not clear, the American government may also have intervened, because the Federal Bureau of Investigation, still identifying Margaret as an individual with radical ties, feared her potential influence over the rise of Communist sentiment in Japan. Margaret succeeded in getting herself a visa by charming one influential vice-minister among the Japanese delegates aboard ship, but she was forced to agree in writing that she would not describe specific birth control techniques and would, instead, lecture only on the abstract social and economic implications of family limitation. So constrained, she found herself trailed everywhere by reporters and photographers. A nascent group of Japanese feminists was pursuing modernization for women by establishing their right at least to attend political meetings, and Margaret's lectures became a focus of their interest and public protest, as well. An article of Margaret's had already been published in Japanese, and her books were being translated and circulated among intellectuals. “It is very amazing the way interest in birth control has been aroused here through my coming,” she wrote Juliet Rublee. “Every paper in the country carried headlines & front page stories & editorials on the subject for a full week.”

From Japan, Margaret and her party traveled westward via Korea, mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Ceylon, across the Indian Ocean and through the Suez Canal to Egypt. In Peking they traversed the Great Wall for more than a mile, and she lectured at the National University. In Shanghai, she addressed a labor organization. “Six months here with you, Mrs. K, Anna, and Kitty, and we would revolutionize China,” she again wrote enthusiastically to Juliet.

In Cairo, there was an enchanting, moonlight visit to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx. If Noah made any impression during these outings, however, once again she made no mention of him in her journal, though she did take the time to record Grant's enthusiastic responses. In Eygpt, Grant took ill with a fever, and nursing him back to health consumed all of his frantic mother's energies, but with his recovery, the idyllic journey continued to Alexandria and then, via the Adriatic Sea, to Venice, Milan, Paris, and finally London, where Margaret was scheduled to attend the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian Conference. She had collected fees for her lectures in Japan and China, but one can reasonably assume that her generous suitor picked up the tab for much of this exquisite return voyage.
⁴

Margaret had been traveling for the better part of the year, but her supporters at home made certain that her fact-finding journey through the poverty-stricken Orient received sufficient press coverage to maintain and, indeed, enhance her domestic reputation and prestige. In London, she told a crowded public session at the conference that opinion makers and moral leaders of the struggling nations of the East were ready to acknowledge the value of birth control. Quite unlike the American birth control movement, where women predominated, British Malthusianism remained primarily the preserve of men, who emphasized the political, economic, and eugenic dimension of the subject over its humane, individual aspects. Margaret, as the only woman invited to chair a session of the 1922 conference in London, presented material on the Far East that proved to be of great interest to the men. But along with it she also painted a sentimental portrait of the downtrodden mothers of these nations, which won her the admiration of women delegates, who had been up in arms over the “male tone” of the assembly. Her celebrity was also enhanced by the publication of a revised British edition of
Woman and the New Race
under the more benign title of
The New Motherhood
.
⁵

She shared a platform in London with H. G. Wells, and during her prolonged visit, they saw one another privately as well. She also found time for Hugh de Selincourt. Grant had gone back home to summer camp in the States, and she apparently kept Noah at bay. His whereabouts during at least part of her stay are unclear, but he did remain in Europe, and in August secured a French divorce from his American wife on the obviously specious grounds that she had refused to follow him to Paris. Then quite suddenly, on September 18, 1922, James Henry Noah Slee and Margaret Higgins Sanger were secretly wed by the registrar of marriages for the district of St. Giles, in Bloomsbury, London.

Earlier that year, before Margaret left New York, the same seer who analyzed the conflicting strains of her temperament had also predicted that she would soon find herself in a “fruitful and happy” second marriage. At the same time, the woman warned her against taking any precipitous action at all during the entire month of September. “You must be very careful,” she said. “A flower may hide a snake.” Margaret, however, needed no crystal ball to know that the marriage she was entering into was a risk. So uncertain were its prospects, in fact, that she at first chose not to make the news public beyond family and friends.

But eighteen months later
The New York Times
, the city's tabloids, and the national wire services got wind of the Cinderella story of how Sanger, “once a member of the advanced Greenwich Village set,” had been wooed and wed by a millionaire. She told reporters that she hadn't bothered to make an announcement at first, because her private relations were not the public's business, yet she didn't seem in a hurry to own up to the decision. Even Bill Sanger was not informed until many months after the event, when he announced that he too would be remarried—to a woman by the name of Vedya Merz.

Margaret had, in fact, been counseled against the marriage by sources somewhat more reliable than the New York psychic. Harold Hersey wrote quite hysterically that for his “Margoldit” to marry “an old man” would most certainly destroy her. To Havelock Ellis, Margaret had described her suitor as “nice and kind and generous” but also inclined to disapprove and dislike everything she really stood for. Ellis took Slee's own best interests into consideration. “He seems a nice man,” Ellis wrote back, “and deserves a more suitable wife.”
⁶

Yet, according to Margaret, Slee agreed in writing at their wedding that they would maintain separate residences with separate keys in New York, that she would keep her own name professionally, that, in all respects, she would maintain her freedom. And for the twenty-one years of the marriage, until his death in 1943, he held, however grudgingly, to this contract. Though they argued more or less constantly about her frequent absences from him and her fierce commitments to her work and to her friends, he always welcomed her home with warmth and affection. He called her “my adorable sweetheart” or “my precious love” or just “my darling Margy.”

To what extent he was aware of her compromised affections—or of her intimacies with such men as Wells, de Selincourt, and Child—is not clear. She always wrote to him innocently of her European escapades, and even included him on several trips to London, so he could meet the Wantley circle. Though he remained distinctly an outsider to the group, he was welcomed on his visits with apparent good humor and was assigned his very own role to play. In the strange constellation of characters where Havelock Ellis was affectionately called “the King,” and Hugh de Selincourt, “the poet,” Noah became known simply as “the squire.”