Woman of Valor (35 page)

Noah also made numerous in-kind contributions of time and management expertise on behalf of birth control. Though he needled Margaret incessantly about her devotion to the cause, and begrudged every hour she was away from him, he assumed an active role in the movement himself—one that became even more central to his life after he sold his business and had only economic investments to occupy his time. As assistant treasurer of the league (the official treasurer's title always remained with a woman, Frances Ackerman), and later at the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, he solicited contributions from wealthy friends and kept a watchful eye on operations, expenses, and accounting procedures.

He also put international business contacts and resources at Margaret's disposal when her New York clinic decided to dispense the rubber-spring diaphragm then manufactured in Holland and Germany but still unavailable in the United States. He had large quantities of the devices shipped to his factory in Montreal, and from there they were then smuggled into New York in 3-in-One Oil containers. When the clinic ran into a problem securing the spermacidal jelly used in conjunction with the diaphragm, he took the German formula and began to produce it clandestinely at his plant in Rah-way, New Jersey. In 1925, he staked Margaret's former boyfriend, Herbert Simonds, in a business called the Holland-Rantos Company, which formally manufactured contraceptives and brought an end to the need for contraband supplies. Several years later a federal court decision allowed for the advertisement and shipment by mail of contraceptive devices to those states where they were lawful for the prevention of disease. A booming demand quickly developed among physicians and druggists, and established pharmaceutical companies began to compete in what became an extremely profitable trade. Noah was careful that Margaret's integrity as a reformer be uncompromised, and he never profited personally from this venture. It was, nonetheless, a virtuoso performance for a capitalist, if not exactly for a Sunday school rector.
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By most conventional standards, of course, Margaret's marriage to Noah Slee was a failure. She never seemed to care deeply for him or to find sustained happiness in his company. From the start they bickered a great deal when they were together, and she found constant excuses to be apart. At the same time, her appreciation for the considerable grace he brought to her life, not to speak of his boundless support of her work, was most certainly genuine. This was especially true after her success with the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference in New York in 1925. In apparent gratitude for his making her personal triumph at that event possible, Margaret's attention to the relationship improved after the conference was over and only deteriorated again when she finally began to spend more time with her husband and confronted the dismal reality of his personal limitations.

It was with considerable excitement that they planned her sabbatical in Europe the following year to include several winter months together on the terribly fashionable southern coast of France. They rented a charming whitewashed villa, with a skylighted atrium and a roof of bright green tile, perched high above the Mediterranean in the village of Cap d'Ail. The American writer James Gould Cozzens, then just out of Harvard and chasing a Vassar girl who was also a friend of Grant Sanger's, spent some time as a guest there and later used the setting in his semiautobiographical novel,
Ask Me Tomorrow
, which had as its theme the subject of a young man's angst in coming to terms with youthful passion. Cozzens apparently made his hostess the model for one of the characters in the book—his American patron in Europe, a woman of about fifty whom he called Mrs. Cunningham and described as “rich, well-educated and domineering but kind”—just as Margaret might have appeared at this time: “The girl's face remained close behind the relaxed cheeks and the wholesome but aging skin. The shape was strangely unaffected; just as her wide, well-placed eyes and candid brow were not themselves affected by the glasses, horned-rimmed, she wore. Undoubtedly she had been beautiful.”

Cozzens wrote palpably of the romance of the Côte d'Azur. A flight of stone steps led down to the Slee villa. The gentle fragrance of flowering vines and the softness of sea-washed sunlight enveloped it. If the location inspired reasonably good fiction, however, it does not seem to have had a comparably enriching effect on its erstwhile occupants. Despite her protestations to the contrary, Margaret's mind as ususal focused on her work and not on her husband that winter, and her emotions, once back in Europe, seem to have been engaged elsewhere.
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The family gathered for the Christmas and New Year holidays in 1926-27 at Cap d'Ail, and Margaret spent much of January there, but by the end of the month she was back in London alone, working out the details of the international population conference in Geneva later that year, at which she was planning to bring together a large roster of internationally renowned demographers, biologists, sociologists, and physicians. Noah accompanied Nan Higgins to Spain and then returned to the villa. Margaret wrote him from London:

The following day, she sent repeated assurances: “Nothing gives me more power than to feel you love me and want me to succeed. No one in the world thrills me as you do or ever did, and as we go on together, it becomes lovelier.” A third letter carried on in the same vein: “Blessed one I adore you more and more. You are my hearts desire. No one can take your place in the world.” Beyond these remonstrances, however, and several coy expressions of her concern hat Nan was the one secure in his arms, Margaret communicated little of substance to her husband.

Indeed, as a measure of her disingenuousness, one has only to compare these letters with those she was writing at the same time to Hugh de Selincourt, who had just dedicated his most recent book to her. She told Hugh on hearing the news: “You precious darling. You certainly have given me a surprise—a lift, a jolt and the greatest happiness. I reach up to kiss your dear face.” Several days later, having read the book, she added that Hugh had a special talent for dealing with intimate and delicate subjects in an “entrancing way.” Then she reminded him that Noah wanted to commission him to write up her life: “Won't you be shocked to know me really. How I smothered my little sister with a pillow whenever my mother left us alone!…how I stole money to buy flowers to put at the feet of the Virgin Mary! Oh-Oh—What fun we shall have—[But] You must promise not to publish it while I live—or at least while I am young enough to care.” In the meantime, she asked him for biographical information in return, so she could line up a lecture series for him in America while they worked together on the book. “All that I know about you would not sound well from the wife of the Pres. of 3 in One,” she teased. “No idea of your age, nothing about you but…” Several weeks later, when she was finally en route to rejoin Noah in France, she wrote again saying she would miss Hugh terribly at the villa. “I have no right to miss you, but I shall just the same.”
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Margaret went to Cap d'Ail for several days and then returned to Paris via Geneva. The train trip through the lakes and mountains of Switzerland is one of the most majestically beautiful in the world, and there were plans for Noah to come along, but he apparently was wary of the strain of travel. She wrote to reprimand him gently for staying behind, telling him that a drunken man had tried to enter her compartment in the middle of the night. From February through April she moved back and forth between London and Paris, continuing the conference planning and also studying French. Noah and her sister took short excursions with Cap d'Ail as their base and then closed up the house. In early April, headquarters were opened in Geneva for the conference scheduled there in August. Noah joined her and remained in Geneva for the summer, but at the end of May, Margaret was on her way back to the United States to deal with the tangled administrative affairs of the American Birth Control League, only to return in time for the actual proceedings to begin, during which her husband dutifully stood by her side at the social receptions.

 

Margaret had hired the British feminist Edith How-Martyn, an alumna of British suffrage battles, to help organize the Geneva Population Conference. As a young woman in London in 1907, How-Martyn relinquished a teaching post in mathematics to devote herself full-time to the suffrage cause. In 1915, she made the arrangements for the letter to Woodrow Wilson signed by prominent Britons in Margaret's behalf. Continuing to work as an organizer under the Pankhursts in the Women's Social and Political Union, she grew skeptical of the extremist politics of hunger strikers willing to compromise their health and spirits in merciless devotion to their cause and found herself sympathetic to the more moderate course of reform that Margaret was then charting for the birth control movement. Though she identified herself as a woman of “uncompromised feminist and democratic views,” she was nonetheless willing to follow Margaret's lead in trying to encourage support from the professional mainstream, which, of course, meant reaching out to men. She managed the assignment with the clear understanding that the women would do all the work of the conference but give the men all the credit.

With How-Martyn's help, Margaret organized the entire event, paid her own expenses and funded the rest with grants from the Rockefeller-financed Bureau of Social Hygiene and from other smaller benefactors in New York and London, including Noah. Research papers were assembled that carefully documented the economic and social dimensions of population growth and change, while staying clear of propaganda and cant. Preliminary publicity was so extensive, however, that some number of the distinguished academicians who planned to attend became alarmed that they would be viewed as providing a platform for feminist birth control propaganda, with which they either disagreed outright or simply considered beneath their dignity. As a result, Margaret bought peace by agreeing that she would not participate in any of the formal meetings or discussions. With the single exception of a representative from Italy, who called her a tigress, most of the delegates took away a favorable personal impression and enhanced respect for her seriousness of purpose. In the end, she received a spontaneous standing ovation, which, in turn, inspired a round of “For she's a jolly good fellow” from the British delegation in attendance, and she felt especially good about her effort. How-Martyn, on the other hand, was more than relieved, as she put it with evident sarcasm in a private letter, to send “the distinguished scientists…back to their flies and mice.” The men, in fact, did return to their laboratories, but only after organizing the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population, an association of demographers that for years had not one woman among its members.
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“I have had my hand kissed by every nation of Europe and Asia except Italy (whose ambitions are not ordinary),” Margaret wrote to Hugh, “and [I] have now decided never to live in USA longer than I can help it…. The squire, J.N. is well and talks of the ‘poet' very often and misses it when you do not write to me!! Wonders why and so do I. When everyone knows I love you.”
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No sooner were the sessions over than she summarily dismissed her husband once more on the grounds that the tribulations of the event, following on the heels of her difficult negotiations in New York, had left her in a state of exhaustion. She demanded time to edit the Geneva Conference proceedings for publication, while resting alone at a spa. The papers were mostly long and highly technical treatises on differential fertility by nation and region, and on patterns of migration, the consumption of natural resources, and mortality. It was not an easy job. “What a woman needs is to be alone, absolutely alone with God for a few days or weeks, until she has filled up the reservoir of her soul again with faith, hope & courage,” she wrote Noah. “I have been impatient I know and really horrid at times. You have been tired & disappointed.”

Noah went off to London, where he felt more comfortable than he had been in France, because he could at least speak the language. He occupied himself with visits to see Margaret's friends, but he was clearly miserable. The tensions in the marriage provoked Margaret to an uncharacteristic philosophical reflection about their differences. In her next letter, she told Noah bluntly that, despite their physical compatibility, they shared no common interests.