Woman of Valor (36 page)

The clinic's regimen of exercise, diet, and outdoor rest on a verandah, however, apparently restored Margaret's health and spirits. The couple reunited at the Ritz in Paris in October, completed final details of the publication of her conference report in London in November, and then visited Agnes Smedley in Berlin.

 

Smedley, the rebellious feminist and journalist, had become another of Margaret's emissaries abroad when she moved from New York to Germany in 1920, where she carried out intermittent birth control assignments. During World War I Smedley got herself into trouble in New York by supporting a community of insurgents, who were working for the seemingly just cause of home rule in the state of India. She came to the attention of American intelligence agents when several of her friends were accused of collaborating with Germany against the Allied war interests.

Berlin became a postwar haven for exiled Indian nationalists, and Smedley lived there for a time in a tempestuous common-law marriage with a Bengali freedom fighter by the name of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, who was known for his extremism and his belief in the virtues of a socialist economy for a free India, and with whom she shared a growing intoxication with the Russian Soviet experiment. In 1928, she traveled to Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution and wrote Margaret enthusiastically of the progress that had been achieved there.

She was particularly optimistic about Russia's promise for women and provided a rhapsodic description of government-sponsored research on birth control, including pessaries, pastes, and an experimental “spermatoxin,” which when injected into the blood of women, not only prevented impregnation, but allegedly also “restored vigor, sex energy and youthfulness.”
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Smedley supported herself during these years by teaching English and selling sporadic pieces of journalism. She also leaned on friends at home in New York, especially Margaret and Noah, whose generosity she tried to repay by rounding up diaphragms from German suppliers and sending them under cover to New York. When they visited her in Berlin in 1927, Smedley arranged two lecture engagements for Margaret, the first before an association of German women doctors who were protesting a proposed law that would make criminal penalties for abortion more severe, the second before groups of Indian and Chinese students.

Basking in the success of Geneva, and still in a generous mood because of his then anticipated sale of 3-in-One Oil, Noah left Smedley with funds to establish a birth control clinic. Social welfare policies under the Weimar Republic were promoting secular, scientific attitudes toward marriage and family life. The German marriage bureaus that subsequently served as models for the Sanger Bureau's counseling services in New York were already open, and there were no formal laws against birth control. With the translation of her next book,
Happiness in Marriage
, into German, Margaret was determined to try to internationalize her reputation and influence. She encouraged Smedley and Josephine Bennett, a friend from the early days of birth control activity in New York who was living in Berlin, to find support for a clinic from local physicians.
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In July of 1928, the two women opened a small facility in Berlin with the help of a physician prominent in Germany's then reigning Social Democratic party. By this time, however, Smedley was working closely with German Communists, and the clinic also had a number of them on its board. To protect Margaret from the danger of red-baiting at home, to avoid provoking local opposition to the clinic as a conspiracy of foreigners, and quite possibly to avoid upsetting the politically conservative Slee, his seed money was never made public, and he was never asked to give any more.
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Margaret and Noah, meanwhile, had spent the winter months at fashionable St. Moritz in Switzerland, while Stuart and Grant went on a holiday cruise with college friends in the Caribbean. Margaret wrote them enthusiastically about her skating, alpine skiing, shopping, and other tourist conventions but admitted that “just now time hangs heavy on my hands. I am no good as a loafer.” She might have developed doubts about the deprivations of Communism, but she found the amusements of the rich scarcely more tolerable.

When she returned permanently to New York in the spring of 1928, she wrote Juliet that she was trying to learn to relax with Noah at Willowlake by taking up swimming, tennis, and even some golf, though this new commitment to vigorous exercise seemed more a result of her concern that he had gained so much weight in Europe, than of anything else. Within the year, however, she was again fed up with him. “He will not let me out of his sight without a protest. I feel sorry for him & yet can I go on like this?” she asked Juliet, who had by then left her own husband in Washington and gone off to realize a long-held fantasy of making a movie in Mexico. “He's like a spoiled child,” she added in another letter. “It simply breaks my heart to think of his loneliness. A few years ago I would not be moved by it, but now I am just sad at it all.”

The truth was that Margaret had little capacity and no real desire to sustain a permanent intimacy with one man—and most assuredly not with Noah. He never satisfied her yearning for romantic love, and, indeed, the more time she actually spent with him, the poorer his prospects would become. Her emotions in this respect had come rather close to the surface in a letter written to Noah from the spa where she was working on the conference report after the event was over.

Without a trace of irony, she wrote that she had dreamed of a new packaging concept for 3-in-One Oil cans: “I saw it with a new cap [spout] which one could turn and let out a pouring stream—then turn half way around & it allowed only drops by drops,” she explained. “Continue the turn & it checked the flow entirely. It was such a vivid dream & the picture of the handy can so real, I thought it like a good spirit trying to get to you.” However valid an idea, her symbolic betrayal of a desire to influence Noah's output quite apart from his business enterprise seems apparent.
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Yet their shared public enterprise in behalf of the birth control cause continued to thrive. By supporting her work and immersing himself in its financial aspects so indefatigably, Noah won Margaret's enduring loyalty, and she apparently was warm and demonstrative toward him when she wanted to be. She once admitted, if rather too matter-of-factly, that “there is all the attraction between us that the world counts essential and necessary.” Neither her commitment to her work, nor her apparent preference for men of more romantic excess—men who incidentally made no ongoing demands of her—ever seemed to compromise her ability to give him pleasure when they were intermittently together. Private letters testify to the fact that Noah remained sexually active into his old age. On one occasion, Margaret even wrote him that he was “a great lover, and there are few born or made,” though she did so at a point in the marriage when they were spending so little time together that her candor seems highly questionable. Margaret stayed away for weeks, or often months, at a time and returned to find her husband “old and stooped and reluctant to action,” as she put it in a confidential letter to Havelock Ellis: “But at sight of me and affection and harmony, he awakens—becomes active and happy—thinks clearly—his memory improves—dresses up—puts on gay neckties—sleeps and eats and walks at a different tempo…. He is just as alert at the sight of a lovely shape & just as urgent in his desires as he was when I first knew him at the age of 63.”
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Margaret could scarcely claim absolute success in marriage, but she always thought of herself as an authority on the subject. Indeed, in 1926, when the market for domestic advice books was still strong, she published the third of the books comprising what she considered a kind of trilogy. As
Woman and the New Race
emphasized the relationship of birth control to women's rights and
Pivot of Civilization
its economic and social dimension,
Happiness in Marriage
stressed the central role it would play in family life. The book was intended to remove any remaining onus of immorality that still attached to the practice, and, perhaps not incidentally, it provided a product to compete with her competitor Marie Stopes's wildly successful advice manual,
Married Love
, when the ban on its publication in the United States was lifted.

Happiness in Marriage
idealizes a conjugal relationship of shared companionship, obligation, and love. “Marriage no longer means the slavish subservience of the woman to the will of the man,” Margaret insisted, carefully distinguishing the personal aspirations of her generation from what was universally perceived to have been the conventional arrangements of their parents. A “companionate marriage”—as it came to be known in the 1920s, and as she herself helped to define the arrangement—would follow a period of extended romantic courtship in which man and woman alike had ample opportunity to know, to seduce, and to freely choose one another. Once united, both parties to the relationship would respect each other's personal privacy and individual rights, even within the confines of small living quarters. To keep monotony and routine from threatening their happiness, they would freshen it each day with romantic gestures, no matter how stressed or tired they might be when they both returned home from their jobs. They would jointly establish a household budget, postpone childbearing until economically secure and comfortably situated, and share the chores and the responsibilities of child rearing. (The book skirts the issue of whether women with young children should work full-time.) They would practice birth control, so childbirth became “not a penalty or a punishment, but the road by which she [woman] travels onward toward completely rounded self-development.”
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Margaret gave fair warning about common pitfalls in the marital relationship, offering descriptions of personal conflict quite obviously drawn from her own troubled experiences. “Petty quarrels, bickering and disagreements over details non-essential may become a habit,” she wrote, undoubtedly thinking of Noah. “When they do, a separation, at least a spiritual separation, has already taken place. And a separation of the heart is more injurious to love than a physical separation. Petty quarrels inevitably lead to more serious ones.” It was Bill Sanger, on the other hand, who probably inspired her recollection of “one charming young man with poetic and romantic longings, but absolutely irresponsible toward the prosaic matters as rent bills, grocery bills, gas bills and such unpleasant obligations. Constantly hoping to please his young wife, he spent money on orchids, violets, and trinkets of all kinds. These are gestures not to be condemned in themselves; yet in this particular case they did not make the wife happy…the children needed shoes…. The poetic husband sulked.”
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She offered practical advice on how to overcome these problems, but the very title of her book betrayed a dangerous optimism and a flagrant dishonesty. Margaret remained an unrepentant romantic about love and sexuality, but she obviously joined the two to the institution of marriage solely for commercial purposes. This is nowhere more evident in the book than when she abandoned such routine subjects as housework and child care to talk directly about sex:

To this end, the entire second half of the book offers a frank and unabashed description of the human sexual and reproductive organs and also tackles the actual mechanics of lovemaking. Much of what Margaret had to say in the latter regard was premised on Havelock Ellis's assumptions about the periodicity of sexual desire in women, the presumably slower pace of their arousal, and the nature of their response patterns. She translated his guidelines into an elaborate seduction ritual culminating in coitus and mutual orgasmic satisfaction for both husband and wife. She wrote with a self-consciousness and uncharacteristic concern for delicacy:

But she then immediately added an important qualification: “In the ordinary normal woman this may be more retarded than the man might expect, gauging her nature by his own.”
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In a subsequent passage, she repeated the admonition that women are “as a rule constitutionally unable to reach the climax of love at the same time as men,” assuring her reader that this was no sign of frigidity. Her tortured prose undoubtedly reflected her concern about possible censorship and the fact that she was offering the first popular sex counseling, which proclaimed every women's right to an orgasm but, at the same time, also cautioned that many would not be able to achieve their desired response in a conventional marital posture. Despite her idealization of the relationship, she tried to keep expectations reasonable: “Each marriage is an individual problem, to be solved only by the participants. Happiness in marriage does not spring full grown from the bridal bed. To endure, it must be won gradually. Sex communion demands time and commitment.”
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