Woman of Valor (56 page)

Stopping in London on her return, Margaret lined up a commitment from Britain's Family Planning Association to sponsor a follow-up meeting at Cheltenham, England. She pledged to cover $5,000 in organizational costs from the proceeds of the anticipated sale of her large house in Tucson, and then back in New York, wangled a grant of similar dimension out of John D. Rockefeller III, whose philanthropic activities, like his father's, were still being guided by her old friend, Arthur Packard.

“It would be impossible to define Mrs. Sanger's work in this period,” Dorothy Brush later remembered. “Almost single-handed, she created this conference, and those that followed, out of nothing but will power. She was unyielding, relentless, and egotistical in a way that was something to behold.”
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No less important than the Rockefellers' money, Packard used the family's influence to help Margaret assemble a prestigious American delegation to Cheltenham in August of 1948, which included the influential and highly regarded demographers, Frank Lorimer and Pascal Whelpton, both of whom had long bemoaned the nation's declining birthrate and opposed organized birth control. Frank Notestein, the vocal critic of clinics and diaphragms, also lent his name, though in the end he did not attend.

The participation of these men signaled a dramatic shift of focus within their profession. Long preoccupied by the issue of stagnant fertility in the West, they were just turning their attention to a startling increase in population worldwide that had taken place as a result of dramatic wartime advances in the control of famine and epidemic disease. The populations of developing nations such as India were doubling in the space of years, as the conquest of death, especially among infants and children, outpaced the control of birth. A demographic transition that had transpired over the course of a century in the West was occurring in the East in the space of a few years and threatening prospects for economic growth and political stability among peoples newly unleashed from colonial rule and eager to improve their lives. The same demographers who had long argued that birthrates are largely determined by wholesale social and economic forces beyond the control of well-meaning reformers reluctantly began to heed Margaret's prophetic warnings that some kind of intervention was warranted—that even the slightest amelioration of the situation was better than none at all.

Any solutions, however, would have to accommodate a deep suspicion of Western motives, which endured in these countries as the legacy of centuries of colonial dominion. Postwar baby booms in America and Europe also made it especially difficult to counsel population control elsewhere. Margaret, to her credit, did not discriminate between East and West. She advised universal restraint in childbearing and indeed endured the ridicule of just about every newspaper in London, when, during a trip there in 1947, she admonished the British to limit their childbearing until postwar economic reconstruction was complete.

Beyond considerations of geography, race, and class, of course, there were even more intractable philosophical problems to confront. Preoccupied with the relationship of fertility to such abstract factors as migration, industrialization, urbanization, class, and race, most of the men who assumed positions of leadership in the postwar population control movement were not inclined to identify the poor, uneducated, and often unenfranchised peoples of the developing nations of the world as potential agents of change. They were even more baffled by Margaret's continued faith in the power of the contraceptive philosophy to take root among
women
, if only enough money and political support were put behind it. Convinced that few women outside the Western democracies would recognize the potential benefits of reproductive autonomy, they could scarcely conceal their contempt for propaganda that advocated birth control as a solution to the world's economic, social, and sexual ills. Arguing the relative merits of condoms, douches, and diaphragms, moreover, hardly seemed a terribly “manly” endeavor, as one participant in these debates put it. Indeed, the necessary association of contraception and sexuality became a distinct liability. Trapped in a largely self-defeating intellectual conundrum over what to do once reproduction rates were officially computed, even sympathetic advocates of population planning wasted precious years doing very little at all.

The program at Cheltenham's International Congress on Population and World Resources in Relation to the Family examined traditional Neo-Malthusian concerns about the relationship of birthrates and natural resources with an attempt at sensitivity to some of these thorny questions of sociology, religion, and politics. Papers were also presented that surveyed the latest medical research in contraceptive technology. For many of the men attending, however, the credibility of Margaret's program was compromised by the very fervor with which she approached her mission. Still, the conference drew 140 participants from seventeen countries, along with a representative from the newly formed United Nations.

The U.N. ought to have provided a continuing forum for discussion of population concerns, but family planning was quickly shelved from its technical assistance agenda by an unlikely alliance of Catholic and Communist nations opposed respectively on moral and ideological grounds. Committed to resisting American encroachment in the developing Third World, whatever its manifestation, the Communist bloc took the lofty position that family planning was a paltry substitute for full-scale economic justice.

This rapid politicization of the population issue left the field open to voluntary initiatives, and for the moment Margaret received the professional recognition she was long due. Though again she deliberately ceded the chair at Cheltenham to a prominent British physician, this time she did at least officially preside at a session on population trends, gave a conciliatory speech calling for “worldwide cooperation” and hosted a festive party, where the delegates mingled with her surviving British friends, among them Hugh de Selincourt, whom she hadn't seen in years. She was also treating her niece, Virginia Higgins—the one who later married and had so many children—to a first trip abroad, and when all the work of the conference was finally complete, they motored through Shakespeare country with Dorothy Brush and her young daughter, Sylvia, the child of Dorothy's failed second marriage to Alexander Dick.
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A decision was reached at Cheltenham to employ a permanent secretary in London who would maintain communications through an International Planned Parenthood Committee. Margaret leaned on Dorothy for another $5,000 from the Brush Foundation to cover the secretary's salary, and from far away in Tucson and New York then tried to press her own priorities on the work of that individual.

The range of viewpoints expressed at Cheltenham raised fundamental questions about what the proper emphasis of any permanent international organization in family planning should be. Inclinations divided, for example, over the relative importance of education and direct service. Was additional propaganda necessary before birth control could be successfully marketed in the developing nations of the world? Was research to find a simpler, cheaper contraceptive the most important priority? Did it make sense to export the traditional clinical approach pioneered in the West, with its female clientele and its emphasis on reproductive health and sexual education?

Frank Lorimer of Princeton, representing established demographic thinking, argued emphatically for rethinking the service delivery formula completely and for isolating contraception from what he perceived to be the complicating and variable factors of gender relations and sexual ethics that vary dramatically from one culture to another. He was firmly against the establishment of freestanding medical clinics, if not yet clear on what an appropriate alternative might be.

In this respect, he incurred the vocal opposition of formidable women in positions of leadership in countries like Holland and England, where voluntary initiatives had successfully paved the way for organized government support of contraception, and where clinics staffed largely by women provided exemplary health care services. Margaret, who had never been successful at making her New York clinic a model for publicly supported facilities, took the middle ground. Arguing that freestanding clinics would be too expensive, she advocated the immediate distribution of simple contraceptive regimens through existing public health channels, wherever they existed. Her thinking at this juncture may also have been governed by a second, strategic consideration. Frank Lorimer had considerable influence with the Rockefeller family, on whom she was counting for financial support.
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Without consulting Margaret, in fact, Lorimer in the spring of 1949 approached Arthur Packard of the family's charitable staff about financing the entire annual budget of an international population organization in order to influence its “sound directions.” Projecting the costs at a negligible $25,000 a year, he presented a further caveat. He was uncertain of the wisdom of leaving Margaret Sanger in charge. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America had brought in a new president by the name of William Vogt, whose controversial book,
The Road to Survival
, identified the hazards of unrestrained population growth and claimed that if the United States had spent $2 billion developing a contraceptive, instead of the atom bomb, it would have done more for national security and also raised the world's standard of living. In light of all the attention the issue was receiving, the organization had reassessed its previous decision to concentrate resources at home. Lorimer thought it should take control of any international initiative.

Several months later, however, Margaret paid a visit of her own to Packard and expressed a predictably different view. She told him that the change of heart at Planned Parenthood had done little to renew her confidence in its leadership, and complained bitterly of Vogt's reasonable-enough request that the organization take 15 percent of all international revenues as the price of its supervision. She instead proposed a series of swift, and allegedly more cost-effective, actions she would herself oversee, including the convening of a second international conference in India, where the Nehru government, despite its Socialist leanings, had expressed interest in population programs and could probably be counted on for support. She also left Packard with a copy of a letter from Shidzue Kato (Ishimoto), who had achieved renewed prominence as one of the first women elected to the postwar parliament in Japan in 1946, and was already advancing population planning there.

Margaret had long been a favorite of Packard's. “Mrs. Sanger recognizes the crucial nature of population problems in the world today and is trying to carve out some kind of instrumentality that will get at things in a broader and more timely way than the rather grooved, rather beaten paths which characterize the present scene. This is characteristic of her pioneer spirit and social vision,” he wrote in a file memorandum following her visit. Disturbed by her unusually frank and carping complaints about various professional colleagues and circumstances on this occasion, however, he also made a second observation: “Mrs. Sanger is perhaps losing her ability to enlist the cooperation, support and collaboration of key people at the policy level,” he noted, all but auguring a future in which there would be less and less mainstream support for her endeavors.
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Several days before this meeting in New York, Margaret had attended commencement ceremonies at Smith College, where she received an honorary doctorate of laws. This was a milestone of great significance to her, and she wrote enthusiastically to Hugh with the news, coyly demanding that he pay her an appropriate respect now that she finally had a proper academic credential. Other colleges had declined to honor her in the past for fear of antagonizing constituents opposed to birth control, but Dorothy Brush, a Smith alumna, had intervened with the trustees there and then lined up distinguished friends all over the world to write on Margaret's behalf. Dorothy's deft pen was also evident in the official citation, which identified Margaret as “leader in the world-wide study of population problems and pioneer in the American Birth control movement; author, lecturer, and practical idealist; one who with deep sympathy for the oppressed and disinherited, yet with a dispassionate and scientific approach, has made a conspicuous contribution to human welfare through her integrity, courage and social vision.”

Never one to shy away from accolades, Margaret may have been especially hungry for recognition at this time of profound personal transition in her life. She had finally sold the big Elm Street house in Tucson that she had shared with Noah and had also just given up their apartment in New York. Willowlake, of course, had long been passed on, and feeling very much uprooted, she saw Packard and left the city immediately to stay at Juliet and George Rublee's country house in the mountains of New Hampshire for several weeks, before returning to Tucson to pack up her belongings there and prepare to move.
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She was building herself a new and more manageable house on the empty lot she owned on Sierra Vista Drive next door to Stuart and Barbara. With characteristic zest, she had immersed herself wholly in the project, enrolling in a correspondence course in interior design and also traveling up to Scottsdale to consult with her reputable friend, Frank Lloyd Wright, before choosing a local architect. The innovative modern structure she planned could not have been more distinct from the Spanish style typical of residential construction in the Southwest at the time. Eccentric and yet pleasantly harmonious in form, the house is shaped like a fan, with a roof that slopes downward from expansive, interior windows and sliding doors that open to a rear terrace and yard. From almost any point inside, there is a tranquil vista of the mountains in the distance.