Woman of Valor (49 page)

The main purpose of this trip, however, was to mobilize opinion, not to modify behavior, and the most important item in Margaret's cargo was the portable typewriter she carried everywhere, along with a carefully prepared press list and an ample stock of attractive photographs of herself for reproduction. Advised that it would be necessary to initiate and manage her own publicity, Margaret took along a young reporter from Pittsburgh by the name of Anna Jane Phillips, who, in turn, wrote daily releases for the local papers and wire services and kept a running diary of the trip that was reproduced in installments and sent home with great fanfare to American birth control supporters. Wherever Margaret went during her stay of several months, prominent coverage was generated in the local English language press and a steady stream of stories ran in American newspapers as well.
¹⁰

This extraordinary propaganda machine first got underway during a stopover in London, where Margaret was toasted by H. G. Wells at yet another fund-raising dinner. Wells was most gracious on this occasion. “Alexander the Great changed a few boundaries and killed a certain number of men,” he said, “but he made no lasting change in civilization. Both he and Napoleon were forced into fame by circumstances outside themselves and by currents of the time, but Margaret Sanger made currents and circumstances. When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.”

While in London, Margaret also had the good fortune to meet with Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru, who had recently been released from a four-year prison sentence in connection with his agitation for home rule. Already considered the likely successor to Gandhi in the movement for independence, Nehru, by contrast to his mentor, possessed an aristocratic British education and a decidedly modern outlook. In town to select a school for his seventeen-year-old daughter and future successor as prime minister, Indira Gandhi, he enthusiastically endorsed the dissemination of birth control in India.
¹¹

India's population was growing at an astonishing rate of nearly 10 percent per decade, with 370 million people accounted for in the 1931 census. The adverse economic consequences of this demographic surge were severe. Ninety-five percent of the country's working population earned less than five cents a day, scarcely enough to provide one full meal, and the accelerating dislocation of peasants from traditional village culture was threatening to overwhelm the cities, where great Indian and British wealth and culture had been concentrated. Two hundred thousand people were sleeping on the streets of Calcutta alone. The chawls, or tenement houses of Bombay, teemed with impoverished, malnourished families, creating an unforgettable tableau that Anna Phillips vividly described in the newsletters Margaret sent home. At the same time, however, the country's rate of infant death remained tragically high, with one-half of all children dying before the age of five. Meaningful reductions in infant mortality awaited advances in medicine and antisepsis introduced after World War II and the war for independence.

Traveling from London aboard the
Viceroy of India
through the Suez Canal, Margaret arrived in December and was welcomed by local supporters who hung garlands of flowers around her neck. Crisscrossing the vast Indian subcontinent several times during her ten-week stay, she traveled a total of 10,000 miles by spending twenty-one nights on railroad trains. She held some forty formal meetings, spoke over the local radio, met with scores of influential individuals privately, and made a significant impact on the ongoing debate of the issue among the country's elites. Her appearance at the All India Women's Conference in Trivandrum in December sparked controversy when a local maharani capitulated to Catholic missionaries who ran the school system and objected to Margaret's appearance on the grounds that birth control would promote immorality and racial suicide. Proponents prevailed, however, and following her speech, a majority of delegates endorsed contraception on humanitarian and economic grounds and encouraged its initial distribution through existing public health channels in urban areas.
¹²

The trip achieved its high point when Margaret met for an extended conversation with Gandhi at his simple ashram in the rural province of Wardha. Never one to miss the potential publicity value of such an encounter, she personally recorded the event in her diary and thus preserved it for interested partisans at home. An avid tourist, as well as a savvy publicist, she was careful to chronicle the experience with an eye to its most exotic details.

By her own telling, Margaret's party traveled in a horsecart from the train station and arrived in the early morning to be ushered immediately onto the verandah of the clean and peaceful guesthouse that formed part of the compound where the internationally acclaimed prophet of nonviolent resistance lived. With its white-plastered walls, bamboo roof, and rough-hewn stone flooring, the simple structure very much appealed to her. She was greeted by a gracious, smiling Gandhi—an unusual light emanating from his face like a mist, by her awed description—but since she had unwittingly come on his traditional day of silence, their conversation had to be postponed.

Margaret and her party spent the day inspecting the primitive industries connected with the colony. A satisfying dinner followed, consisting of the vegetable purees and soups, dry pancakes, rice, and fruits with which Gandhi was experimenting in his desire to eat only the most economical and wholesome foods. Evening prayers preceded a restful night of sleep on a porch open to the moon and stars, and the discussions began the following morning after a refreshing bath and a breakfast of sweetened porridge and milk.

With a personal rapport quickly established, Margaret solemnly inquired about the dignified leader's views on the social and economic degradation of women. By her account, he responded patiently, using his own marriage as a model and describing the depth of the personal struggle he had endured to overcome his own “animal passions,” because of his determination to prove that pure love between men and women can and must transcend carnal lust. Led on by his astute interviewer's gentle insistence that men less extraordinary than he could hardly be expected to achieve a comparable degree of self-control, he enjoined women to resist their husbands, where necessary.

The discussion apparently went in circles from that point forward but continued throughout the afternoon, with Gandhi earnestly defending his dedication to the triumph of the spiritual bonds of marriage over its physical dimension. By the time she left, however, Margaret had secured two concessions from him, first that in the place of absolute celibacy, he might be willing to accept some reasonable regulation of the sex functions for the masses, so as not to “waste or exhaust their vital force through sexual intercourse,” and second, that to this end, he might consider counseling the practice of sexual intercourse during the safe period of the menstrual cycle. Margaret shared this information in her private correspondence about the interview. Reeling from her most recent defeat at the hands of American Catholics, however, she could see little benefit from letting Gandhi give credibility to the rhythm method. Her public account of the interview in
Asia
magazine therefore neglected to mention these important distinctions altogether and dwelt instead on the superficial, if still intriguing, details of Gandhi's life-style.
¹³

Margaret understood that from the standpoint of her American audience, the glamour of her personal association with the legendary Indian nationalist far outweighed any real philosophical differences between them. Wire service stories and photographs of their meeting ran in all the major newspapers at home. Meanwhile, in India, though she obviously had failed to convert Gandhi, she did leave a favorable impression among an urban bourgeoisie that would play an important role in the postIndependence political life of the nation. Before departing the country she added a prestigious national medical association to her list of endorsers. She also introduced foam powder as a potential product for mass distribution and established contacts between an American supplier and interested domestic manufacturers. On return trips in 1936 and 1937, Edith How-Martyn was able to observe with pride that twenty clinics had been established and that information on contraception could be obtained at some forty additional maternal welfare centers. Nevertheless, these institutions rarely succeeded in reaching beyond the middle classes. As in the United States, the limited, voluntary efforts of British and Indian elites failed to get through to the very poor and were soon halted, in any event, by political forces beyond their control.

Personally sympathetic to the home rule cause before she ever set foot in India, Margaret was nonetheless surprised and shocked by the depth of anti-British feeling she discovered there. So as not to provoke unnecessary antagonisms, she wound up having to downplay her British associations while in the country. At Margaret Cousins's advice, she maintained an itinerary totally separate from Edith How-Martyn's. The diary Margaret kept of her own travels records her deepening sensitivity to the increasingly desperate and autocratic manifestations of colonial rule she witnessed and to the growing local resistance.
¹⁴

 

Margaret left India early in 1936, with the intention of continuing on to Malaysia, China, and Japan. In Hong Kong a recurrent bout of the gallbladder illness that had been plaguing her for years then forced her to cancel the remainder of her itinerary and return home for rest and recuperation. Within a year, however, she had rescheduled, and on this occasion, traveled with Florence Rose, her devoted secretary, Dorothy Brush, a favorite new supporter and friend, and Dorothy's son, Charles.

Ten years earlier, Brush had endured a great personal tragedy when her husband and a baby daughter died in quick succession, leaving her in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, with a substantial family fortune but nothing to do. She'd made her way to New York in search of an absorbing cause and wangled an assignment to interview Margaret Sanger for a woman's magazine. Typical of the free-spirited woman of means whom the birth control movement attracted, she started as a volunteer but wound up as a major benefactor. Beyond her own talents, she was also able to direct considerable amounts of money to Margaret's various enterprises through the Cleveland-based Brush Foundation, which under her influence developed its still flourishing interest in world population problems.
¹⁵

Margaret had not been in Japan since her much publicized trip there in 1922, but a birth control platform had been advanced in the interim by her hostess on that first trip, the local feminist and birth control reformer Shidzue Ishimoto, who had become a significant propagandist and reformer in her own right. Ishimoto once compared the impact of Margaret's 1922 visit to Japan to the sensation Commodore Perry had created in the 1850s, claiming that she had appeared “like a comet” and left “a vivid and long-enduring impression.”

In fact, the Sanger legacy in Japan owed its strength in part to the coincidence that her name, in transliteration, “Sangai-san,” is understood to mean “destructive of production.” For years a diaphragm-and-jelly kit was sold under that label in the nation's pharmacies, and other commercial abortifacients and suppositories also tried to capitalize on the identification. Beyond this happenstance, of course, deeper social and economic forces were at work in Japan, as they were in the West. The small country's burgeoning population, combined with an accelerating industrial revolution and an unusually high literacy rate, had greatly facilitated the dissemination of birth control in the wake of Margaret's first visit.

Through the 1920s, Ishimoto, in fact, pursued a Japanese organizational agenda almost identical to Margaret's in the United States. She tried to form a birth control coalition comprising different interest groups, reaching out to organized labor through a series of well-publicized lectures to miners and their wives in 1923, and later securing endorsements from physicians, Malthusian social reformers, and elite women anxious to establish some measure of autonomy and independence for themselves. With no legal restrictions or religious prohibitions standing in her way, she also set out to incorporate birth control into emerging public health programs.
¹⁶

These efforts made her a favorite target of conservative social thinkers, who parodied her advanced social views in the popular press. This opposition gained strength after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the rise to power of militarists who opposed the liberal social policies of the prior decade, which had tolerated contraception and declining birthrates. Ishimoto turned to the United States for moral and financial support. She made several trips here during these difficult years, raising money from a lecture tour arranged by Margaret's agents, and also serving her own apprenticeship at the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York. Her plan was to open a comparable facility in Tokyo under the medical direction of a Japanese physician, who had trained at the Sanger clinic in New York.

Her own personal circumstances also changed dramatically with the turn of events in Japan. The husband who had first encouraged her modern Western education suffered financial reverses, veered sharply to the right in his own politics, and went off to seek his own fortune and to promote his country's interests in Manchuria. Though divorce was not yet legally permissible, Ishimoto set up housekeeping on her own. Encouraged by another of her American friends, the historian Mary Beard, she then wrote the dramatic story of her transformation from feudal wife to modern feminist for publication in English. Margaret was prominently featured as an inspiration and muse in this book, which was called
Facing Two Ways
and enjoyed great critical acclaim in the United States, especially on the West Coast.
¹⁷