Woman of Valor (43 page)

“It's What I'd Have Written Myself,” said Margaret in newspaper headlines about the report, though, of course, her role in bringing it about was never acknowledged. She congratulated the Federal Council on its intelligence and its scientific approach, yet when she mailed the statement to Havelock Ellis in London, he responded in mock horror at the thought that anything the two of them approved of could possibly be acceptable to officials of any church!

In fact, such advanced views did not prevail in America's largest Protestant hierarchy without considerable controversy. While the more liberal, elite constituents like the Congregationalists and Presbyterians went along with the statement, more conservative members of the organization, including some Methodists, protested, demanding additional study of the matter before the endorsement became official, an enterprise for which Margaret also raised funds. Disgruntled Presbyterians in the deep South briefly severed their affiliation with the parent body completely, resulting in a loss of revenue for which she also tried to compensate. Indeed, after two years of wrangling over the issue, no consensus was achieved, and the Federal Council actually never endorsed its own committee's report, though the document had by then received so much publicity that the absence of formal approval was barely noticed. The Federal Council enjoyed what was called a “cooperative” relationship with the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, and a “consultive” connection to the Lutherans, but the governing bodies of these denominations also did not immediately comply. A deeply divided Episcopal House of Bishops finally endorsed birth control in 1934, but only over the protests of many bishops who thought it indecent even to bring the subject before a house of God. Margaret's own lobbyists petitioned the Episcopalians with great determination, as they did nearly every convention of churchmen that met in the 1930s, but elsewhere they were not always so successful. The Missouri Synod, largest and most conservative of the Lutheran constituencies, for example, once accused the American Birth Control League of “spattering the country with its slime” and did not reverse its official opposition to contraception until the 1950s. Birth control remained a point of contention between left-wing and right-wing constituencies in the Protestant churches.
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Still, the support of liberal Protestants marked a critical turning point, the significance of which was underscored in the vituperative responses it occasioned. American Catholics called the Federal Council's report a “liquidation of historic Protestantism by its own trustees,” an observation that simply replicated earlier pronouncements from the Vatican about the Lambeth Conference ruling.

In 1930, Pope Pius XI had issued the historic encyclical
Casti Conubii
(Of Chaste Marriage), which finally codified decades of ad hoc positions on birth control by Catholic officialdom in Europe and the United States. Referring specifically to his Anglican counterparts, the Pope wrote:

The Papal document went on to synthesize and distill a revisionist view of historical Christian doctrine on marriage, emphasizing the immutability of Augustine's ancient prohibitions against infidelity, divorce, contraception, and abortion, but affirming the value of conjugal love by proclaiming that the sex act in marriage bears “no taint of evil.” While taking pains to dispute the darker Augustinian view of sex itself, the encyclical explicitly condemned “the false liberty and unnatural equality” of modern women and demanded recognition of the husband as head of household, so long as “the civil rights of women” were protected.

It could not have been more emphatic in its condemnation of any contraceptive practice at all. Yet, at the same time, it established a new precedent by proceeding to enumerate such “secondary ends” of marriage as “mutual aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence which husband and wife are not forbidden to consider so long as they are subordinated to the primary end and so long as the intrinsic nature of the act is preserved.” To this end, the Pope explicitly approved the continued exercise of marital rights after menopause when “on account of natural reasons, either of time or of certain defects, new life cannot be brought forth.”
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Casti Conubii
was never intended to condone the affirmative, rhythmic use of the monthly sterile period for the purposes of contraception. As a result of its concessions to natural causes, however, it was widely subject to this reading, especially in the United States, where it made the front pages of newspapers and then continued to receive more attention than any papal edict ever had before. Ranking church officials here, especially the powerful Washington figure John Ryan, encouraged the most liberal interpretation possible to permit the deliberate use of the rhythm method by “any married person with a serious reason for avoiding offspring,” even though this view remained highly controversial within the church.

The moral and physiological efficacy of using the sterile period as a deliberate way of avoiding pregnancy had, in fact, been debated intermittently and inconclusively among Catholic theologians since the 1870s, when Auguste Lecomte, a French churchman with some primitive training in biology, first recommended it. In the intervening years, scientific opinion on the precise boundaries of the fertile cycle had remained inconclusive, and so it mattered little that moral thinking was likewise.
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By 1929, however, what was considered a definitive medical finding—that ovulation occurs sixteen to twelve days before the onset of menstruation—was published by doctors working independently in both Germany and Japan, and their common conclusion inspired renewed consideration of the option. The concurrence of these scientific advances and the publication of
Casti Conubii
had a profound practical effect in the United States. Parish priests found in the doctrine of natural sterility a welcome answer to the most troubling problem of the confessional and began to counsel its use. Asked directly for further clarification on the matter, the Sacred Penitentiary in Rome in July of 1932 actually reissued the more strictly constructed papal prohibition against “Onanism” from 1880, but this response did little to end the confusion. Those Catholics who wouldn't condone rhythm outright used the 1932 communication as evidence that Rome was at least willing to countenance the sterile period in extreme circumstances, in preference to the even more detestable practice of withdrawal.

In 1932, Leo J. Latz, M.D., a Catholic physician on the staff of Loyola University Medical School in Chicago, wrote a book encouraging women to keep a calendar and confine their marital “cohabitations” to the twenty days per month at each end of the menstrual cycle when they are sterile by nature's intent. Simply titled
The Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women
(or in later editions, just
The Rhythm
), the book was published through a private foundation organized with the support of prominent Catholics in Chicago and advertised in a circular headlined “The Big Problem of Married People Solved,” which was distributed by mail order and through commercial bookstores. Within eighteen months, four editions of 60,000 copies of the book had been sold, along with an almost equal number of “record calendars.” Even the American Medical Association gave its tacit approval, while still refusing to endorse the diaphragm or any other mechanical or chemical contraceptives. Almost overnight, the medical and moral efficacy of the procedure was widely established, though, within only a few years, studies would demonstrate that variability in menstrual cycles makes rhythm a risky method for most women.

The Latz book also constituted a wholesale reversal of Catholic moral and social doctrines enunciated in the 1920s, as the following excerpts suggest:

Far from protesting, however, some church officials enthusiastically embraced the book. The Archdiocese of Chicago gave its official imprimatur, and a second work popularizing rhythm was published in New York, despite continued protests against the practice under any conditions by the archconservative Cardinal Hayes, who continued to stress the tragedy of the declining birthrate. In Washington, John Ryan did his part as well, even though the National Catholic Welfare Council and the National Conference of Catholic Charities never endorsed Latz's book as an approved statement of Catholic teaching. Indeed, many leading Catholic theologians Ryan had quoted in the past (especially the celebrated Arthur Versmeerch in Belgium) continued to inveigh against rhythm and warn against “the heresy of the empty cradle.” The popular association of rhythm with Catholicism was so deeply rooted that it hardly mattered that the Pope never endorsed the practice until 1951, when Pius XII's
Moral Questions Affecting Married Life
appeared, again proclaiming childbearing as the primary obligation of married women, and reiterating the church's absolute condemnation of abortion, artificial contraception, and surgical sterilization. But it finally defended the moral use of the nonfertile periods when precaution against pregnancy was absolutely necessary on medical, eugenic, economic, or social grounds.
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Reduced to a dispute over natural versus artificial means, the Catholic argument against birth control lacked intellectual rigor, but it more than made up for this deficit with its practical utility. The rhythm method provided American Catholics a vehicle for joining the birth control debate on their own terms, a means to distinguish the behavior of the faithful from everyone else's. The church, in effect, had its own marriage manual, and for at least one generation, substantial numbers of Catholics—more than half, according to opinion polls—were willing to listen. By distributing daily menstrual calendars, the local dioceses maintained a measure of control over the personal behavior of their members. The situation among Catholics remained stable, until the pill was made available in the 1960s.

 

As these historic developments unfolded in religious circles, Margaret was quietly but effectively building a national political campaign for birth control by organizing the country from the bottom up, mobilizing volunteers and constituents by Congressional district and in turn by state and region. In 1929, she convened representatives from the Midwest in Columbus, Ohio, and the following year, she held a western conference in Los Angeles. By 1931, four regional directors, overseeing at least some presence in almost every state, were reporting to a national headquarters in Washington. Once again, the new recruits were predominantly Protestant and Jewish women, many of them also former suffragists, skilled in the art of political organization and lobbying. The Maryland state chairman, Mrs. Robert H. Walker, for example, came from one of the state's most prominent families but saw herself as a rebel because she had once gone to jail during a demonstration for the woman's vote in Washington. The head of the western region, Mrs. Verner Z. Reed of Denver, was also an advocate of women's rights and a major benefactor of Colorado hospitals, libraries, and universities. There were simpler folk, as well, like Viola Kaufman, a frugal retired schoolteacher and onetime suffrage volunteer in California, who was living in a boarding house paying $2.00 a week rent when she came to work for Margaret and then suddenly died, leaving to the cause an estate of Depression-devalued real estate holdings totaling $12,000.
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Major financial support also came from women, predominantly in New York and its environs, where Margaret's loyal lieutenant, Ida Timme, solicited contributions in increments of $1,000 and up. Timme fell short of her pre-Crash goals by about 50 percent, and managed to find only $25,000 in the first two years of trying, most of it from the same women who financed the New York clinic. The Rockefeller family's Bureau of Social Hygiene turned down an initial request for funds on the grounds that it did not support lobbying in general and didn't think it worthwhile in this instance. Donations of $4,000 and up, however, were secured from individuals like Mrs. Felix Warburg and Mrs. Felix Fuld, of the investment banking families, from Albert and Mary Lasker, the medical philanthropists, from Ethel Clyde, an eccentric, progressive Southerner, and from the Milbank Memorial Fund, which agreed to finance a campaign to have poor women seeking contraceptive advice write to their Congressmen.

Timme also solicited smaller sums, appealing in one mailing: “Do you, a woman, realize that true emancipation and acknowledgment of an equal status for women can never be realized until motherhood is by choice and not by chance? This is the first time in the world's history that an organized drive at race betterment, through conscientious intelligent, forward looking parenthood, is being launched and women must lead the way since women are the mothers of the race.” Hundreds of gifts of $25 or less were received in response. When the Federal Committee finally closed its books in 1936, annual expenditures were more than $50,000, a respectable sum for the time, but never really enough. Even the Rockefellers' resistance had been worn down. Between 1934 and 1936, the family anonymously contributed $10,000, having adopted Margaret's theory that lobbying was justified from a public relations point of view, however slight the chances of actual legislative victory might be.
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