Woman of Valor (42 page)

In the clinic's early years patients revealing sex problems were routinely referred to staff social workers for counseling. In 1931, convinced of the need for better trained advisers, Hannah Stone then inaugurated her own consultation service in conjunction with her husband, Abraham, a practicing urologist. The Stones worked initially under the auspices of the New York City Labor Temple and the Community Church, both nonsectarian institutions, but within a year they moved counseling into the bureau itself. Individualized services were provided free to established clinic patients, while outsiders paid a small fee. Sometimes husbands were invited in along with their wives. Premarital counseling, still a controversial moral issue, was also offered to newlyweds and included individualized sex education, along with actual medical intervention when surgical rupture of the bride's hymen was recommended. This procedure was intended to help alleviate anxiety and to facilitate diaphragm use by a virginal bride.
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Marriage counseling was still a new and innovative concept. It had originated in Germany where the Weimar Republic's pioneering social welfare system first funded marriage and sex advice bureaus in seven major municipalities. The Stones' practice in New York became the first freestanding American equivalent, though some established family welfare agencies were beginning to give their social workers special training in sexual counseling or hiring specialists in the field. The American Institute of Family Relations was also founded in Los Angeles in 1930 to promote education for marriage and parenthood, but its primary interests were eugenic not therapeutic, and it did not initially offer counseling services. Even as Fascism took hold abroad during the 1930s, and ideas about promoting human betterment lost an audience here, widespread consensus survived about the value of sex education and counseling in promoting human happiness. This was especially true for women, whose right of contentment as wives had only recently been proclaimed.
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It was this mission that inspired the Stones. Along with Havelock Ellis and Margaret herself, they blamed sexual dysfunction more on social repression than on individual psychological development. They believed that adult barriers to fulfillment generally derive from external taboos, which prevent adults from learning how to abandon themselves totally to sexual stimulation. Loosening standards of behavior had unleashed erotic expectations that were not always being met. Sex education and therapy were necessary to resolve these tensions.
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The Stones argued with good sense that the prescriptive sex literature of the 1920s had changed popular thinking about sex, fostering higher levels of sexual aspiration and intensifying anxiety about performance. The new sexual discourse licensed a freedom that many young Americans, by their own observation and according to interviews subsequently conducted by Alfred Kinsey, were claiming as their own. For some this freedom generated its own set of problems by establishing standards of behavior that were not necessarily easy to achieve. As a group, women seemed to have had the most difficulty and suffered the most severe letdown, because even as their capacity for sexual pleasure was affirmed, few could agree precisely on its components. Psychologists and sex counselors suddenly mobilized around the reported problem of female frigidity, but could not even offer a precise definition of the condition. Was the woman who experienced orgasm through clitoral stimulation, but not in conventional coitus, still to be considered frigid, for example? Orthodox psychoanalytic theory only exacerbated the confusion when Freud branded the clitoral orgasm as an immature, childlike response and demanded that adult women somehow learn to transfer their sexual sensitivity to the more womanly vagina.
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The Stones rejected the claim that female sexual response patterns are wholly subjective and instead tried to reduce their variable nature to physiological, rather than psychological, components. Their bestselling
A Marriage Manual
, first published in 1935, would repeat Margaret's earlier admonition that many women may only reach orgasm through direct manipulation of the clitoris. Far more clinical in orientation than she had been, they offered specific instruction on the importance of stimulation through sexual foreplay or digital manipulation during intercourse, devoting eight full pages to the subject. Male climax, by their observation, is rarely difficult to achieve, but as reported, erection in most men lasts only one to two minutes after penetration, thus not necessarily providing sufficient stimulation to evoke a female response.
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Yet, much like Sanger and Van de Velde before them, the Stones promoted the ideal of a synchronized mutual orgasm in coitus and sent a generation of young Americans searching for this often elusive ecstasy. The inherent contradiction between their clinical observations and the behavior they prescribed can only be explained by the title and format of their book, and by the precarious position they occupied as associates of a prominent woman, who was also pursuing a political agenda for birth control.
A Marriage Manual
was organized as a series of hypothetical counseling sessions between wholesome young couples and sober, scientifically trained doctors. The book was very deliberately confined to the subject of sex within marriage and not apart from it. It disparaged autonomous sexual experience through masturbation, condemned homosexuality, and argued emphatically for sexual fidelity in marriage. This intense moralism would only be dropped in editions published after the Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1952 had encouraged greater tolerance of deviance—and after Kinsey himself had registered his complaint: that too many women still reported failure to reach orgasm in conventional coital postures, and should be encouraged to achieve sexual pleasure by whatever direct stimulation is necessary.

The Stones' earlier writing, by contrast, reflected a widespread concern that external pressures brought on by the Depression and war were taking a severe toll on personal intimacy and on marriage as a social institution. Sexual expression is presented in the first editions of their book as a kind of palliative, a refuge from hard times, and they do seem overly optimistic in promising that every sexual relationship in every marriage can be made to work. The book also moves beyond the bedroom to touch upon such common domestic conflicts as work, money, household responsibility, and child rearing. Sex by the Stones' definition is intended to culminate a marital bond of “mutual love and affection, a community of interests, of tastes, of standards, an adequate economic arrangement and a satisfactory adjustment in many personal, family and social relationships.” Far more than just an erotic experience, it is meant to be the foundation of a family life reorganized on democratic, rather than authoritarian, principles. The issue then is not technique alone, but the larger problem of mutuality for women in every aspect of marriage, including sex.
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Quaint as all of this may now sound,
A Marriage Manual
endured several battles with censors over advertising and was rejected by the major book clubs because it was considered too explicit. It went on, nevertheless, to outsell the pathbreaking
Ideal Marriage
, a situation that pleased its publisher, Lincoln Schuster, who was both a personal friend of the Stones and an emerging rival of Van de Velde's publisher, Random House. Since the Stones also devoted an entire chapter to the subject of birth control, and listed Hannah as medical director of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, their success may have enhanced Margaret's own reputation in some circles, while the controversy they inspired obviously extended to her as well. There is, however, no documentation of what she actually thought of their book.
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It would not be long, however, until the fundamental premise of
A Marriage Manual
found itself under attack. Soon, critics would argue that sex cannot be taught like any other subject—indeed, that too much obsession with sexual technique threatens to depersonalize human relationships and creates a “sex as work” ethic that robs human intimacy of the potential for individual expression and feeling. By the 1960s, one woman, quoted in a
Time
magazine feature on the subject, would capture the general complaint when she claimed that she could determine from the rhythms of her husband's lovemaking exactly when he was turning from one page of their marriage manual to another. Sobered by Kinsey's much talked about data on the variability of human sexual expression, a new generation came of age, rejecting the existing advice literature in favor of the dictum that the best sex is what comes naturally, and the most appropriate prescription for sexual behavior, none at all.

Even more salient from the standpoint of Margaret Sanger's legacy, however, was the argument that marriage counselors were overvaluing the sexual satisfaction of women at the expense of their autonomy and equality in the larger society—that they were undermining the very goals the pioneers in the field set out to promote. When a discontented writer, by the name of Betty Friedan, claimed in
The Feminine Mystique
of 1963 that the pursuit of greater sexual fulfillment was subverting women's aspirations for accomplishment as individuals outside the family, the liberation of one generation of women became another's tyranny.

Margaret would surely have been perplexed. She had long made it her business to try to win public approval with the tamest, most plausible, and least controversial arguments for birth control—the economic burdens, the negative health effects, and demographic consequences of large families—but, always, these arguments were meant to advance an underlying agenda.

What, after all, was the intent of her rhetoric and her jealously guarded clinical services, if not to end the enforced marriage and childbearing she once called an “an outrage upon the women”? Woman, as she said over and over again in her long career, was not meant to be a “brood animal for the masculine civilizations of the world.”

To some who knew her well, this meaning was always obvious. “From time to time, in such remarks as these,” a canny reporter for
The New Yorker
had pointed out in 1930, “Mrs. Sanger has let herself go and revealed a feminism so violent as to scare half her supporters out of their wits if they thought she meant it.” Just how scared became clear that year when she left Hannah Stone in charge of the clinic in New York and traveled to Washington to fight for birth control in the halls of Congress.
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T
here is no way of knowing for certain what prompted Margaret to undertake a new national campaign for repeal of the Comstock laws. Was it the continued frustration of working under a legal cloud? The timidity of demographers in Geneva, of physicians in New York, of volunteer women around the country? Was it an irrational thirst for power and celebrity or perhaps just a function of her own biological clock? She had, after all, celebrated her fiftieth birthday in September of 1929, observing the milestone in private, because she had long since stopped counting the years honestly, even to her own husband, children, and friends. Only Nan and Ethel Higgins might have set the record straight, but fame and fortune had by then shifted the balance of power among the sisters, and they knew better than to tell the truth. Yet the self is never wholly deceived. Margaret bounded across this most humbling of life's chronological divides with an unmistakable outburst of energy—perhaps a postmenopausal zest, as another remarkable woman of this era, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, might have characterized it.

First, she looked back. Venerated for her “magnetism,” her “great personal courage” and “sincerity” in the same 1930
New Yorker
profile that heralded her as a feminist, she was again courted by publishing houses. The scheme to make Hugh de Selincourt her biographer came crashing down along with the stock market's collapse, but she went ahead on the project anyway and in 1931 produced a workmanlike autobiography with the unacknowledged help of Robert Parker and Guy Moysten, another of the old Greenwich Village crowd of journalists.

At the urging of both Moysten and Havelock Ellis, she wrote in a genre of self-congratulation typical of the reflections of men in public life, but rather unusual for a woman, even one so flamboyant. She made no apologies and admitted no regrets for having chosen risk and exposure over the conventional, safer life she could have led. Destiny may have chosen her to vindicate poor Anne Higgins's predicament, but having been called to her work was not exactly an accident either. She made a secure claim for her talent, her indefatigable energy, her clairvoyance—for the place she thought she deserved among history's foremost rebels and pioneers. Working on the book was “like digging down into my subconscious and stirring its depths—not always a pleasant thing,” she admitted to Hugh. So self-absorbed was the project that—to the dismay of many coworkers and friends who had loyally served the birth control cause along with her—she scarcely even mentioned their names. She also glossed over her youthful radicalism and willfully distorted information that might have embarrassed her, if only to make a better story and, at the same time, to serve her paramount goal: reform of the Comstock laws in Congress.
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Reviewers, nevertheless, tended to like the book and gave it considerable attention. It made the coveted front cover of the fall announcement issue of the
New York Herald Tribune
's book section, illustrated by an attractive engraving of the author. “Margaret Sanger is one of our generation's world-changers,” wrote social critic Mary Ross, “one of perhaps a half-dozen or so whose individual lives swerve or push the course of the world in a direction it might not know at that time except for them.” The historian Mary Beard enthusiastically agreed in the
Saturday Review of Literature
, calling Margaret “a maker rather than a mirror of history.” Her praises were sung in
The New York Times
,
The New Republic
, and in countless daily newspapers across the country, and Ellis branded the book simply “splendid.”

Yet the condemnation of a single critic, writing in private, sent her into depths of despair for an entire week. She was devastated when Hugh, from his distant perch in England, attacked her as “egotistical” and unfair to public competitors like Marie Stopes and Mary Ware Dennett, a criticism which stung especially hard, because she thought she had succeeded in handling these women with forbearance. He reserved his harshest words, however, for her flagrantly dishonest portraits of the private aspects of her life. She had barely mentioned him at all, and to this, she offered only the reasonable response that however steadfast the personal commitments she maintained, she was hardly in a position to invite the public into her bedroom. Imploring him to understand the “staggering complexities” that faced a woman in her position, she hastened to assure: “There is no lie to any caress or kiss I have ever given—
Ever
!”
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Released in the depths of the Depression,
My Fight for Birth Control
never sold very well, although the favorable notices it received did confer a coveted degree of public respectability on the author. Several months after the book came out, Margaret held a dinner at the new Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York with 500 paying guests in attendance, the venerable educator John Dewey as chairman and H. G. Wells as honored guest. Still unchallenged in his preeminence as a writer, Wells actually loathed public speaking and only lectured for the money and the publicity. Appearing in Margaret's behalf was at least in part a gracious, personal gesture, and as they sat beside each other on the dais, he apparently whispered to her with the total absence of reserve that had long characterized their relationship. Amplifiers had been hidden in the table decorations to give resonance to his thin, reed-like voice when he got up to speak, and Margaret later reported to Havelock Ellis that she spent the entire dinner in a panic lest what Wells was saying in her ear be heard at the back of the room.

Introducing her honored guest and dear friend that night, she recalled that he had interceded with President Wilson on her behalf long ago in 1914. The “magic” of his name had saved her from jail, she insisted, taking considerable liberty with the facts, but then adding, with perhaps unintentional candor, that this was before he even knew of her “womanly charms.” Wells's address was, in turn, courtly and respectful, and his salutation so eloquent that Margaret had him write it down on the occasion of a second dinner a month later, when she was finally honored for the first time by a prestigious, mainstream women's organization, the American Woman's Association, whose recognition of her inspired the epigraph of this book. Wells called her the “greatest woman in the world” and offered one of the prognostications for which he was famous. “The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time in controlling man's destiny on earth,” he said.
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These gala evenings certified Margaret's ability to attract money and attention even as the economic crisis worsened. The Wells event was a fund-raiser for the National Committee for Federal Legislation for Birth Control, the Congressional lobbying campaign she constructed out of her particular genius for public relations, her sheer tenacity, energy, and willfulness. The same development consultants from the John Price Jones Corporation who had told her to give up her New York clinic also predicted she could never raise money to change laws that were enforced only by exception and affected few potential donors personally. Others like Mary Ware Dennett and Rachelle Yarros of Chicago were willing to come aboard only if she agreed to abandon her medical exception strategy in favor of a bid for clean repeal of the Comstock laws.

Even the American Birth Control League wouldn't help and at the outset tried to make her life difficult by denying her access to mailing lists and other organizational tools she had helped develop. She went ahead without all of them, defiantly molding old arguments to new circumstances, disciplining her troops, vastly extending her organizational goals, and outperforming everyone else. Under pressure from many constituents, Eleanor Jones then relented and offered the board's tacit support, though never any active cooperation. Margaret, in turn, begrudgingly conceded the need for a unified front on the birth control issue, though she resented it and always believed that her own successes as a publicist were the engine of the league's limited organizational gains—that the women there needed her more than she needed them. The league operated at a deficit after 1932, quietly opening up clinics and taking credit for ones it actually had little to do with. Apart from a major rally at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1935, it would scarcely make a headline.
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Until 1931, Noah had kept the hope alive that he would succeed in a suit brought against the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the legitimacy of tax benefits for his contributions to the American Birth Control League. The league was officially chartered as a charitable and educational enterprise under New York law, but because it engaged in some political lobbying, the deductibility of contributions to it had been disallowed. Noah first initiated an action to overturn this ruling in 1926, when he tired of paying full taxes on the substantial income he had to draw out of 3-in-One Oil in order to pay his wife's bills. Represented by one of George Rublee's partners in the firm of Covington, Burling, & Rublee in Washington, his case wound its way over the course of four years through various administrative hearings and appeals and finally ended up in federal court in New York City. During these proceedings, investigators for the Internal Revenue Service not only confirmed the league's intermittent legislative activities, but also accused its officers of violating the federal Comstock law, because addresses of birth control clinics around the country were being mailed to any woman who requested them. For a time Margaret was concerned that legal charges would be brought over these infractions, and indeed the entire matter may well have added another element to her dispute with the league board. The Washington lawyers, in any event, advised her to maintain a low profile until all available legal recourse to her husband had been exhausted. They were particularly chagrined by the news in 1929 that she intended to organize an all-out legislative campaign in Washington, but she had given up on the case by then, convinced that no matter what the facts, the government would rule against Noah. Only when the lawyers lost a final appeal the following year, however, was she technically free to make as much trouble as she pleased, and by then, the outcome mattered less to her personally, since Noah's income was beginning to take a beating. His $40,000 settlement with the IRS appears to have been his last major outlay for birth control.
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These personal considerations aside, the early years of the Depression also provided a coherent public rationale for renewed organization for birth control reform, though surely no easy way to pay for it. With Herbert Hoover still in the White House, a path to national economic recovery was charted by way of lowered public expectations and reduced personal demand, and women were made targets of public consumer policy, because they usually controlled the vast bulk of family spending. What is more, the country's mood still tended toward cooperation and compliance. Volunteerism was still very much in vogue. There was not yet the despair of the later years of the crisis nor the zeal for wholesale reform that gave rise to the inventive, pump-priming expenditures and programs of the New Deal. Helping people to help themselves remained the only agreed upon agenda of reform, and in this context, stepping up the dissemination of reliable birth control to women had unassailable logic.

In 1930, the educator and Sanger clinic supporter Henry Pratt Fairchild went to see his friend, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, about funding birth control through public health facilities under his aegis. He was rebuffed because of the notoriety that attached to the issue and to Margaret personally, but one man's reticence did not deter her. Like Fairchild, many religious leaders, social scientists, physicians, and opinion makers, who had remained shy of the issue earlier, were finally beginning to speak out more comfortably because of the economic crisis, and in light of Margaret's own clinical evidence testifying to the safety and reliability of certain methods. They might be counted on to add their stature to a lobbying effort.
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Margaret also gained a valuable ally when the Lambeth Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Church met in London in the summer of 1930 and, reversing its position of a decade earlier, officially sanctioned the use of artificial methods of conception control. Acting over the protest of a vocal minority of its own membership, the conference promulgated this historic edict with great care, emphasizing the delicacy of its situation by insisting that birth control never be used to violate the sanctity of marriage—that the spiritual obligations of family life never be made subordinate to either material or personal considerations. Emphasis was placed on the principle that the relations of husband and wife be disciplined and controlled and lived in the power of Christ, whose bond with the church is symbolized in the marital vow. The practice of contraception was condoned only by exception, “where there is a clearly-felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, and where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence.” It was explicitly condemned when employed out of motives of “selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.” The qualified Lambeth ruling took great care not to endorse an unbridled liberalism, while still breaking the dam of official clerical opposition to the widespread practice of birth control. Yet whatever its reservations, the ruling was widely regarded as a major victory for reform.
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International debate of the issue in organized religious circles ensued. Universalists, Unitarians, and Reform Jews, representing the most advanced thinking in the United States, immediately followed suit with their own endorsements. Meanwhile, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, chaired by Reinhold Niebuhr and representing some 22 million Protestants ranging from Presbyterian elites to Baptist fundamentalists, took an intermediary step, first creating a Committee on Marriage and the Home to study the subject. In what was, perhaps, the most stunning example of her transformation from Greenwich Village radical to uptown reformer, Margaret then arranged to raise funds for this committee anonymously. She worked quietly but determinedly through Worth M. Tippy, executive secretary of the organization and former dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. In large part through her unheralded efforts, dollars and arguments in support of birth control were marshaled, and a host of consultants was brought in, including psychologists and physicians from the New York Academy of Medicine. In April of 1931, the committee formally endorsed birth control on medical, economic, and social grounds, proclaiming the virtue of the practice as a safeguard to the health of women and children and as a deterrent to poverty and overpopulation. As to moral concerns, the committee's statement argued that the sexual union of man and woman in marriage is intended by God not only for the procreation of children but also as a “supreme expression of their affection and comradeship—a manifestation of divine concern for the happiness of those who have so wholly merged their lives.” The inviolability of marriage was emphasized, but in framing these arguments around considerations of human contentment, the American document moved doctrinally far to the left of its British counterpart. So profound were the concessions to modernity that it even went on to acknowledge the possibility that extramarital sex relations might be encouraged as a consequence of greater knowledge of contraception. With this in mind, however, the committee endorsed sex education, rather than blind prohibition, as the more rational course toward the moral development of youth.
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