Woman of Valor (52 page)

Always restless without some kind of project, Margaret also brought a team of best-selling authors along with her to Tucson and embarked for a second time on the tortuous enterprise of reexamining her life.
My Fight for Birth Control
was out of print, and the firm of W. W. Norton, Inc., had offered her a contract for a new autobiography, believing in its commercial potential in light of the tremendous publicity her Washington lobby and her trips abroad had received. Norton suggested as collaborators Rackholm Holt and Walter Heywood, two journalists who had just published a bestseller about the medical profession. The three closeted themselves in Tucson for days at a time, while Margaret spoke into a recording device. The final manuscript emerged out of a professional reworking of these conversations.

Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography
has a narrative strength far superior to its predecessor—a slicker style and a more uplifting tone. This second venture in memoir writing is, in fact, far more typical of the way women have traditionally approached the genre—a good deal more modest and genteel than the first. Demure and lady-like, the book glosses over conflict and doesn't dare complain about the enormous obstacles Margaret was made to overcome in attempting to put her convictions into action. As such, it lacks essential credibility and, despite a bevy of favorable reviews, it also did not turn out to be the commercial triumph that had been expected. Margaret blamed a weak title and poor promotion by the publisher, but the truth is that in her own eagerness to be seen as an unqualified success, she had kept the best parts of herself hidden. The rough hide, the fragile core, the fiery temperament, the romantic yearning, the droll humor—all were lost, along with the complex dynamic of personal, political, and social conflict that had given her life its great resonance.
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Though she refused to hold herself accountable, the decision to be bland was clearly calculated. An unfettered woman might have sold more books, but Margaret had little to gain politically at this juncture by painting too complex a portrait of herself. She had spent too many years working to make herself mainstream, and even as she abdicated power, the fruits of these labors were being incorporated into the larger institutions she created.

“We have moved up into the social strata to get money to run the cause,” she would admit sometime later to one of her most loyal supporters, Rabbi Sidney Goldstein of the Free Synagogue in New York, who was urging her to push for the incorporation of contraception into New York's public health services and was baffled by her diminished militance. “In this strata [sic] they do not like fighting crusading spirits, they want pleasant harmonious conciliatory efforts, to bring about results.”
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Having passed on the official mantle of leadership, and with little immediate progress likely for birth control on either the domestic or international fronts, Margaret found herself out of the public eye for increasingly long stretches of time, filling her days as a private citizen in Tucson by enrolling in classes in drawing and painting and by planning extravagant parties, outings, and other entertainments. Under the right circumstances these frivolous activities might have provided a welcome sabbatical, but Noah's health and spirits were steadily deteriorating, and his condition put a decided damper on her opportunity for self-indulgence. She confided bitterly in her journal that, far from a sense of liberation, she felt herself bondaged to the care of an ailing and increasingly obdurate old man, whom she had come to abhor.

As is so often the case in old age, what had been the principal preoccupation of Noah's productive years became the virtual obsession of his decline. Money, no matter how small and insignificant the amount, remained his only interest, and he spent most of his time counting what he had left, and worrying about what he spent. Indeed, in his wife's less than charitable eyes, he became little more than a tyrant, intent on causing everyone around him only anguish and pain. After only a few months together out west, Margaret's diary began to refer to her husband vituperatively as “the sadist.” One typical entry reads:

Margaret apparently went out on her walk despite this protest, but by the next week, and the next, and for more than the year that followed, she could find little improvement in Noah's behavior. The complaints she recorded were always the same. He was forever scolding, grumbling, and nagging at her. He could only find fault in everything and everybody around him. He was, by her description, “sad and pitiful,” his dinner table conversation, “trite and stupid.”

Visitors were her only salvation. Grant and Stuart both came for vacations, as did Nan Higgins, and the charming, erudite cultural anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, a friend of Havelock Ellis. Malinowski was also spending winters in Arizona and helped Margaret to manage as best she could by keeping herself intellectually current. With Noah in tow, Margaret also made a quick trip to London in the fall of 1938 to visit Ellis as he approached his eightieth birthday. There were, in addition, intermittent forays back East to keep pushing the Roosevelt administration on the birth control question, each of which became more and more critical to her sense of well-being and self-esteem. Occasionally she would give a lecture or accept an award from some local group as well. A tiny birth control clinic had been operating in Tucson since 1935, principally serving Mexican-American women, and sometimes she went over there to help out, but free of any real obligation, she had almost nothing to do.
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She wrote less and less in her journal, but the few sparse thoughts she did record reveal a deepening depression. She began to dream about dying, and at first the prospect frightened her. One evening during 1938, she reported having seen a man during her sleep who was walking with a lovely dog on a leash. A pack of wolves then came into view; the man let go of the dog into the pack; the dog fought until his fur and flesh were ripped apart and then lay down in front of Margaret, vomited, and died. When the wolves devoured his carcass, she woke up startled and recorded her dream without comment. The following year she had a similar dream of death, but on this occasion there was no recollection of fright on her part, or of any mediating symbols. Death had come to her directly in her dream and seemed welcome. She had felt her life going and seen a great figure with wings and light radiating over her head, and she awoke, by her own account, to a pleasant sensation.
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Of course, the troubles that disturbed Margaret's sleep were a good deal more complicated than Noah's provocations and other trivial discontents. She had been in the public eye for so many years—the focus of so much admiration, on the one hand, so much vilification, on the other—that her sudden isolation and anonymity became a kind of curse. However deep the sense of victimization she had often felt as a public figure (and more or less directly revealed in her dreams), it was also clear that she thrived on celebrity and felt herself lacking in vitality without it. It was, as she once said, “her intoxicant.”

Far removed from the international stage on which she had long acted, she anxiously anticipated the arrival of mail each day from friends and colleagues around the world, and she rose early each morning to write some responses by hand from her big, old-fashioned, and comfortably pillow-laden white bed. In the still cool hours that followed, she might then sit with a secretary at a table on her terrace, dictating her more formal replies.

But her circle of correspondents was narrowing.

The most deeply felt loss came in July of 1939 with the death of Ellis, who for so long had been at the center of Margaret's cerebral world. He had seemed unusually frail during their visit the preceding fall, and sensing that the end was near, she spent the early months of the new year pulling together a “festschrift” in anticipation of his birthday. The contributions she gathered together instead served as inspiration for a memorial tribute.

In an international radio broadcast with the journalist Dorothy Gordon, Margaret praised Ellis as a physician, philosopher, and poet who would long be remembered for two qualities above all—his humanism and his feminism. As yet unaware of the degree to which Freud's expanding reputation would eclipse her friend, she predicted that future generations would honor him for dignifying sexuality and insisting on its importance to the “spiritual lives of men and women.” To claim Ellis as a friend, she said, had been the greatest honor of her life. Indeed, so intense was her investment in the association by this time, that she embellished the truth, claiming he had guided her reading for one and a half years in the British Museum, when, of course, she had spent only about one and a half months, during which she was distracted by her other interests on the Continent. Several weeks later, however, in the privacy of her journal, she acknowledged that it was less the man himself she missed than the twenty-five-year habit of using him as a sounding board for her own observations and thoughts, often even her dreams. To Françoise Cyon she admitted that “it is as if a current of my very being has been cut off from its source.”
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For this reason, Ellis's casually dismissive treatment of Margaret in the autobiography published the year following his death left her deeply shocked and saddened, even as she expressed an understanding of the complicated emotional context in which their friendship had first developed. Ellis had actually drafted the manuscript in 1918-1919, shortly after his wife Edith's premature death, and the book reads as nothing less than an elegy to their highly unconventional marriage. He had apparently never resolved a sense of responsibility for Edith's emotional turmoil and, perhaps for this reason, did not even mention Margaret by name in the book (only by the initial M), or acknowledge how intensely he had for a time pursued her. The two had, of course, remained devoted friends for the intervening twenty-one years and had visited and corresponded frequently. Margaret had gone to great lengths to build Ellis's audience and advance his reputation in the United States, and he had willingly accepted her money and other gifts. Yet the autobiography concludes that “beautiful as my new friend was to me and continues to be to this day, I have sometimes been tempted to wish that I had not met her,” a passage that hurt deeply when she first read it in 1940, though she may have presumed the cause of her rebuke.

“Well I doubtless deserved it—no one gives us what we have not attracted to ourselves,” she would admit some years later to Hugh. What she could never accept, however, was her longtime mentor's apparent remorse for a marriage that had been more compelling on a subjective or psychological plane than it had ever been in actuality, a relationship where passion had, quite literally, transcended the physical. In Margaret's view, the romantic intensity of the memoirs undermined the empirical, scientific basis of Ellis's sex research and theory, which for so long had provided a secure foundation, not only for his reputation, but for her own life and work. She saw the book as a repudiation of virtually everything he had advocated, and she, in turn, had advanced as practical marriage counseling. Worst of all, it was an implicit condemnation of her own personal behavior. She was bereft for weeks after it came out.
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But soon enough there was the welcome distraction of historic developments in the government's birth control policy. Escalating concern over the matter had finally propelled President Roosevelt to form an Intergovernmental Committee to Coordinate Health and Welfare Policy, which included Surgeon General Parran and Katherine Lenroot. (An invitation was also extended for Margaret to visit privately with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House, but the two women's schedules could not be coordinated at this time.) In January of 1939, the committee invited a delegation of birth control partisans, including Margaret, Robert L. Dickinson, Morris Ernst, and the demographer Frank Lorimer, to present testimony. Margaret's presentation pointed out that with 37 percent of the national income being spent on social welfare, it no longer made sense to prohibit funding of birth control. “It is not a panacea,” she conceded, “but it will probably do more for the health and happiness of mothers and children than any other single instrument.”
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As the committee was holding these hearings, lawyers at the Surgeon General's office also officially sanctioned the distribution of contraceptive supplies under the terms of the Venereal Disease Control Act, and assistants to Dr. Parran quietly began to issue approvals for some programs, but to no avail. Although the Public Health Service administered these programs, funding was still being channeled through Social Security dollars controlled by Lenroot, and she refused to have anything to do with the new policies, at least until the President personally intervened.

Birth control momentarily became a political issue in 1940, when Mrs. Roosevelt, for the first time since she had arrived in Washington, admitted to reporters that she favored “planned families” but would never impose her own views on others. Another invitation to the White House was extended to Margaret when she was to be in Washington in May, but a delayed flight prevented her from making the appointment. Promises were made instead to get together during the summer in Hyde Park. Following her husband's election to an unprecedented third term later that year, Eleanor Roosevelt finally felt free of political constraints altogether and called together birth control activists and government administrators at the White House. She acted at the behest of the philanthropists Albert and Mary Lasker, friends and trusted confidants of the First Family, who had recently become the largest individual donors to birth control programs in the country. The Laskers were funding Margaret's birth control demonstration project among blacks in the South, and Mrs. Roosevelt was desperately concerned about helping this beleaguered population; it was, indeed because of this commitment that she finally got involved in birth control.
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