Woman of Valor (48 page)

Another important emissary for the birth control cause was Ruby Black, then a wire service reporter who had befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, when the two women traveled together in Puerto Rico in 1934. Black transmitted a personal letter from Margaret to the First Lady, emphasizing the anomaly of legal conditions that allowed the dissemination of information about the rhythm method but not about artificial contraceptives. Yet again, there was no official response.
²⁵

As the costs of conciliation mounted, Margaret could scarcely restrain herself. “Women's lives are being sacrificed by the thousands,” she wrote, claiming no prejudice to Catholics, but then identifying their position on birth control as “barbaric and savage.” This could not have made her relations with the White House any easier. The embattled President was privately polling the influence of Father Coughlin and Louisiana Senator Huey Long, to assess the threat they might pose to his reelection prospects the following year. Roosevelt was also contending with the dismay of church officials who were upset about a recommendation for public subsidy of contraception in Puerto Rico, where the administration had launched a major reconstruction program. Ernest Gruening, the young Department of Interior employee responsible for the controversial proposal (later a prominent Senator and family planning advocate from Alaska), was made to drop the idea when Cardinal Spellman of New York protested to Democratic National Committee Chairman Jim Farley. Gruening, however, did manage to help underwrite some programs indirectly, with private contributions from the philanthropist Clarence Gamble.
²⁶

Three years earlier, Harry Hopkins had expressly identified the murky legal situation surrounding birth control as an excuse for refusing to include it in public programs. Contraception was officially banned, yet a 1935 survey by the American Birth Control League discovered that the experience of the Sanger clinic in New York was not atypical. State and local officials occasionally circumvented policy guidelines and referred relief clients to clinics or private physicians. Asked by
Time
to comment on this practice, Hopkins admitted in 1935 that his agency would not interfere where birth control was legal under state or local laws. But in the entire country, only the state relief administrator of Michigan was willing to declare his support for birth control.

In several instances, however, relief agents quietly underwrote the cost of contraception. This was the case in localities without a powerful Catholic political presence, such as Los Angeles County, where the incorporation of birth control services into local public health clinics had been well-established prior to the infusion of federal relief dollars, and in the impoverished South, where rates of both birth and of infant death were alarmingly high.
Time
, for example, identified publicly run contraceptive programs in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Greene County, Missouri. In Miami, Dr. Lydia DeVilbiss, who years earlier had refused to start an unlicensed birth control clinic in New York, was able to hire Works Progress Administration employees as field workers for the maternal health clinics she had started. Yet the WPA would not pay for contraception directly and actually fired women workers on its rolls when they became pregnant. “Rather than lose their jobs, they are lacing themselves with corsets and bandages and are having their abortions in the WPA toilets,” DeVilbiss reported to Margaret in 1936.
²⁷

These developments called for revised strategies. A dispirited Hazel Moore left the National Federation, but Margaret brought new blood into the organization. She hired the sister of pioneering Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, Edna Rankin McKinnon, who, in turn, suggested new legislative initiatives intended to circumvent the bottleneck of the powerful judiciary committees in both houses of Congress. One of her ideas was to file legislation with the Post Office Committee, codifying existing administrative and judicial regulations regarding the transport of birth control material for medical purposes. Another was to amend the new Social Security Act to allow for the public provision of contraception, while a third contemplated adding a birth control rider to some omnibus appropriation bill, where it might be overlooked. None succeeded, however, and the situation deteriorated even further with the deaths of several key supporters in the House. Margaret orchestrated a new round of publicity with a “coming of age” dinner that honored the twenty-first anniversary of the birth control movement, but she then embarked on a long-delayed trip to India and the Far East, and in the increasingly contentious political environment of the waning days of Franklin Roosevelt's first term, birth control reform lost what little momentum it had briefly enjoyed.
²⁸

T
he Depression deterred, but did not defeat, Magaret's ambitions to promote herself abroad and build an international birth control organization. In 1930, she opened a Birth Control Information Centre in London with a $2,000 surplus resulting from Edith How-Martyn's rigorous management of the budget of the Geneva Population Conference. How-Martyn staffed the operation, and its letterhead identified “correspondents” for birth control in thirty-two countries, spanning the alphabet from Australia and Austria to Sweden, Syria, and the United States. Most of the members were physicians and social workers, many of them women, already at work in clinics or hoping to start such facilities, and Margaret's objective was to establish a network among them, comparable to what had been achieved for the men at Geneva.

When the economic decline dried up anticipated funding sources, she personally guaranteed a loan to cover the organizational costs of a second conference in Zurich in the summer of 1930. In fact, the event achieved her objective by bringing together the nucleus of women who would play key leadership roles in international population initiatives following World War II. It also provided an opportunity for Ernst Grafenberg, a German physician, to report on his clinical trials with an intrauterine contraceptive device made of silk gut and silver wire, similar to what Frances Halton had demonstrated in New York. Years later, when assembled from plastic components, the IUD would, of course, achieve medical credibility and revolutionize contraceptive technology.

Margaret then managed to scrounge together enough money to keep How-Martyn employed for another seven years as a link between her struggling birth control lobby in Washington and interested foreign parties. In 1934, How-Martyn scored a coveted success of her own in England, when Parliament passed a bill requiring the government to include contraception in its public health programs, which was, of course, a good deal more than the Americans had been able to accomplish. Yet she once described herself as no more than a “porter” on behalf of birth control during these years, with much of her time spent in India, where Margaret turned her own attention in 1935, when the complexities of politics in Washington wore her down.

How-Martyn spent most of 1934 in India, preparing the way for Margaret by establishing contacts among groups of women, physicians, and social scientists. She met with sympathetic personnel in the Raj bureaucracy and in the independence movement, as well. Plans were made for Margaret's itinerary and for the subsequent organization of demonstration clinics intended to provide practical instruction in contraceptive methods for local midwives.
¹

 

Birth control had first become a subject of public discussion in India in 1925 when Mahatma Gandhi condemned the separation of sex and procreation and called artificial methods of contraception undignified. He insisted that their use would undermine marriage by stimulating the sexual appetites of husband and wife and instead advocated the practice of continence as a means to limit fertility. Gandhi's ascetic doctrine had a distinct political motive. He exhorted his countrymen to conquer their carnal passions for food, drink, and sex so they would develop the personal discipline and moral character they would need to guarantee the larger success of political self-rule. When his views on sex and birth control were first made public, Margaret wrote in protest, and in a gracious letter of response, he professed to be open to more education on the subject. Admiring his idealism, she then began planning a visit to India, but events at home intervened, and she never made the trip.
²

Indians were accustomed to seeing graphic representations of divine sexual acts in their religious painting and sculpture, but physical sexuality had simply never been considered an appropriate matter of secular discourse, and Gandhi's pronouncements, though highly idiosyncratic, provided something of a breakthrough in social attitudes, even as they provoked bemused opposition from the country's professionals and intelligentsia. A small community of Neo-Malthusians and eugenicists was developing at the time in cities like New Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay, where a physician by the name of A. P. Pillay also corresponded regularly with Margaret in New York and later began to publish an internationally respected journal,
Marriage Hygiene
. The local discussion at this juncture molded Western arguments about the social, economic, and health benefits of family planning, rather than outright continence, to Gandhi's larger political goals and led to the opening of a few small contraceptive clinics under medical auspices. Nevertheless, prudery generally prevailed among the associations of native elites and British missionaries who were best organized to advance health and welfare reforms on a wide scale.

In 1929, however, the All India Women's Conference, a prestigious voluntary association of Indians and British working to improve educational opportunities and claiming to represent some 10 million women, decided to add social issues to its reform agenda. Several years later, at the risk of alienating dissident members, the conference went on record in support of artificial contraception, making it the largest group in the world to have done so at the time. In 1935, it extended an invitation for Margaret to come to India and speak on birth control. Arrangements were made through Margaret Cousins, an Irish-born freethinker, feminist, and celebrated nationalist, who would soon go to jail to protest British restrictions on free speech. Cousins was a follower of Annie Besant, the Victorian reformer who had left England after her persecution for circulating birth control pamphlets in the 1880s, renouncing Western religion and culture for an Eastern regimen of material simplicity and spiritual containment. Until her death in 1933, Besant lived in Madras as the head of a colony of British expatriate Theosophists, whose metaphysical and psychic beliefs had also long drawn Margaret to the magic of India.
³

Meanwhile, the plight of India's women had also been catapulted to the attention of their sisters in England and America as a result of the publication in 1927 of Katherine Mayo's controversial book,
Mother India
. In her scathing attack on the oppressive conditions of female life there, Mayo featured graphic descriptions of child marriage, sexual abuse, polygamy, bride burning, rampant venereal disease, primitive childbirth, and other pathologies. Excerpted in popular magazines, the book quickly became a best-seller and prompted extensive interpretation and analysis. Mayo, who had spent only several months in India, was criticized for condemning an entire culture on the basis of a narrow and uncharacteristic sample of female experience and for failing to mention the ongoing efforts of Indian women themselves to reform these anachronistic practices. Although she was dismissed by many as an apologist for British imperialism, the book shaped popular perceptions. Margaret, whose own views of India had largely been formed earlier by Agnes Smedley, shared Mayo's outrage over the indignities suffered by many of its women but advocated national sovereignty as their best hope for a better life. She did not see any reason why conflict over the dismantling of a colonial empire should stand in the way of common, humanitarian agreement on the need to disseminate birth control. She would try to rise above faction by pleading her cause without regard to competing political ideologies. But however well-intentioned, this goal was hardly practical, as the predicament in which her friend Agnes Smedley found herself, should have forewarned.
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Margaret had long been counting on Smedley to help accomplish her dream of undertaking a birth control campaign in the Far East. Soon after their visit together in Berlin in 1928 Smedley had published
Daughter of Earth
, the powerful autobiographical account of her childhood among the troubled mining families of Colorado, which established her international reputation as a writer. The following winter, carrying a three-year contract as a correspondent for the
Frankfurter Zeitung
, a left-leaning German newspaper, she'd made her way across Russia through Manchuria to Shanghai, then the economic, political, and cultural center of China and a cauldron of anticolonialist sentiment for the entire region. Tracked by British intelligence agents, she wrote to Margaret, asking for help in the event that she disappeared or was arrested.
⁵

The two women had agreed privately that the one would organize birth control clinics in China in the other's behalf, and during her first year in Shanghai, Smedley wrote of her intention to do so in cooperation with a local employee of the YMCA. Margaret, in turn, sent $50 to get the project underway, but Smedley used the money instead to pay her way to Peking, ostensibly because a group of concerned Western reformers would be meeting with Chinese officials to plan a coherent birth control policy for the country. As it turned out, Smedley had no patience with the conference's hollow endorsement of birth control as “a vital contribution to maternal health” and quickly wrote Margaret of her increasing disenchantment. In her view, the local missionary movement was only interested in contraception as a means of approaching Chinese women with a Christian propaganda she could not abide. Nor could she countenance the strict social distinctions observed between Westerners and native Chinese. She refused to join British and American clubs that openly discriminated on the basis of race, and this made it all the more difficult for her to interact with potential Western allies.

What is more, as Smedley grew increasingly familiar with China, she uncovered living conditions so ghastly and a depth of poverty so overwhelming that she could no longer see the practical benefit of birth control to any but those among the ruling elites, who already had some access to it anyway. She pointed out to Margaret that the elementary hygiene necessary to practice contraception was simply not available to most Chinese, who lived without running water. “I am more and more convinced that no b.c. work is possible until there is a national revolution that will wipe out the whole capitalist class, the land-owner class, and the foreign imperialists,” she wrote, endorsing an orthodox Marxist viewpoint.
⁶

By 1932, Smedley was telling Margaret that their only hope was to get birth control into the few provinces already controlled by the peasant Communist governments. The logistics of so bold a strategy were then discussed, with Margaret, in response, describing the contraceptive properties of simple regimens that might be appropriate, such as using sponges soaked in quinine, then being tested at the Clinical Research Bureau in New York. Margaret's attention at this juncture was consumed by legislative developments in Washington, but she nonetheless continued to send small checks and supplies for the clinic in Shanghai that never materialized, all the while reiterating her confidence in Smedley, never challenging her political judgment or delving too deeply into her situation. It seems never to have occurred to her that birth control might be of little interest to the belligerent leadership of a fledgling Communist Party whose principle aim was to break the hold of the Western values over China that small families exemplified. Within a year, however, Smedley refused to accept any more assistance at all, and what had been a steady correspondence between the two women suddenly came to an end.
⁷

Though personally loyal to Smedley, Margaret certainly harbored no ideological illusions of her own about Communism. Still curious about the Soviet experiment, she had eagerly made an on-site inspection of Russian health and welfare initiatives during her trip there in 1934 with Grant and H. G. Wells, but unlike her old friend, she did not discover a Utopia for women. To the contrary, she had found the same disturbing incongruities that long bothered her about revolutionary movements at home. Russian women were accorded equal rights as a matter of law, and some maternal benefits were provided. Birth control was legal, and abortions were condoned as a necessary evil, but by Margaret's observation, the practical conditions of life for women did not match the stature they were granted in theory. She was especially disappointed by the poor quality of the medicine practiced in the clinics she visited—by the high numbers of abortions performed without any anesthesia and the primitive nature of what little contraceptive technology she was able to uncover.

Yet even as Margaret expressed her own disenchantment, she did not condemn old friends like Smedley, Ella Reeve Bloor, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, all of whom either joined the Communist Party or became high-profile sympathizers during the 1930s, and she never seemed to worry about being associated with them. So too, after Smedley went to Moscow in 1933-34, to write a book about the rural revolutionary movement emerging in China, she returned there via the United States where she visited with Margaret and rekindled their friendship.
⁸

Perhaps naively, though possibly as part of a deliberate strategy, Margaret wrote in 1935 to the Chinese ambassador in Washington on behalf of Smedley, who was by then under attack in China and at home as a Soviet spy. She strongly defended her friend's sympathies for the cause of Chinese and Indian nationalism and flatly denied all Communist ties, maintaining instead that Smedley had gone to China to start birth control clinics at her request and with her financial support, a half-truth, but one that at least provided some evidence against the accusation that Smedley had enlisted as a Soviet agent from the start.
*
No matter how much Margaret tried to keep politics out of birth control, it always kept getting in the way, and India would be no exception.
⁹

 

Bound for Bombay, Margaret departed New York via ship in October of 1935, laden with a large inventory of medical supplies and educational tools, including a demonstration film and fifty contraptions called gynaeplaques, which Hannah Stone used to instruct women at the clinic in New York. These life-sized, three-dimensional models of the female pelvis came apart to reveal the organs of the reproductive tract like pieces of a puzzle. They remained in use in India for years thereafter in the scattered villages Margaret visited, another anonymous gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who at her personal request had donated the money to pay for them.