Woman of Valor (57 page)

It was scheduled for completion in October of 1949, a gift Margaret may have intended to mark the milestone of her seventieth birthday, though, of course, she was admitting publicly to a more respectable age. Even for a woman of less vanity, turning seventy would have been an event of some consequence, but to make matters considerably worse, Margaret was suddenly confronted by unexpected illness. While overextending herself in the heat of the Tucson summer, she suffered a heart attack and found herself in a local hospital for two months, denied all contacts beyond the medical staff and her family.

The unexpected confrontation with death was a sobering experience, but she tried at first to take it in good humor: “There is no organ of the body that gives one pause like a heart attack. Just one little beat too few & out you go,” she confided to Françoise Cyon in England, when she was finally feeling a little better. “But modern medical research has done miracles & I am no longer suspect to clotting and thrombosis & that's a relief.”

From back in New York, however, Dorothy Brush offered a different prognosis. “You are 3/4 spirit & only 1/4 body, & keeping your spirits high will be the most important part of your cure,” she wrote with exceptional clairvoyance. For even as Margaret slowly recuperated—even as she defiantly insisted on returning to work—she never fully recovered that indomitable spirit. During the remaining decade of her active, public life, she would essentially live on borrowed time, age and illness magnifying her eccentricities and compromising her effectiveness.
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W
hile convalescing in the fall of 1949, Margaret received a letter from a Pennsylvania journalist writing a feature story on how to handle life over sixty-five. She advised him to keep caring for a cause so much that you have little time to think of your own complaints. “All of life,” she told him, “you must have a vital interest in something outside yourself.”

Just as soon as the doctors would permit, she traveled to Chicago for a luncheon celebrating birth control pioneers; her speech was broadcast on national radio and received extensive newspaper attention, including an editorial in the
Washington Post
written by Agnes Meyer, the wife of the publisher and an old supporter and friend. Christmas was spent with Grant and his children, but easily exhausted, Margaret was home in Tucson by the new year. Comfortably settled in her new surroundings, she sent greetings to Hugh in London, reporting rhapsodically of the simple beauty of her sunshine-filled yard—with its lawn opening up to Stuart's pool next door—and the rose-copper hues shining off the distant mountains at sunset.

Yet this was a time of intense personal reckoning. Having brushed death so closely, she was gathering together the private correspondence and papers she would so carefully deposit in the archives at Smith College, and “veins of sadness,” as she told Hugh, were opened by the exchange of old letters, filled with memories that “dim slowly.”
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There were professional accounts to tally as well. For years she had remained nominally at the helm of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in New York, which continued to function as an independent not-for-profit facility, loosely affiliated with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Following the tragic and unexpected loss of Hannah Stone from a heart attack in 1941, Drs. Abraham Stone and Lena Levine had taken charge under the increasingly lax administration of a voluntary board of managers, which for a time included Grant Sanger, though his interest was always tepid. Margaret kept a distant watch over expenditures and policies through a regular correspondence with her personally loyal and devoted executive secretary, Mary Compton.

The clinic's volume of business remained steady during the war and immediately thereafter, but the nature of its clientele changed, with greater numbers of women, many of them unmarried, coming to have a diaphragm fitted and then never returning. It was difficult to predict income under such circumstances, and for several years, Margaret covered operating deficits and awarded bonuses to staff, by drawing on her own capital.

Without a substantial repeat clientele, the research objectives of the organization also suffered. It continued as a laboratory for testing new products—a plastic diaphragm to replace the latex variety, when rubber was scarce during the war, and simple remedies for mass marketing, such as tampons soaked in varieties of ordinary household spermacides. But technological advances of greater consequence would have required more substantial resources than Margaret could muster in these years. There was no progress, for example, on a biological solution to the problem of contraception—on a “spermatoxin,” as she referred to it, using old-fashioned terminology. She corresponded extensively on the subject with clinic board member Stuart Mudd, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, whose own unavailing research in this field she did support with several grants. The single innovation of the clinic remained the diaphragm and jelly, and a landmark study of fertility in Indianapolis, Indiana, during the 1940s demonstrated that even it was beginning to lose the small market share it had enjoyed.

In fact, from a purely scientific standpoint, the Sanger clinic during these years made its greatest contributions to the treatment of problems of infertility, not to contraceptive research. Abraham Stone and Lena Levine were pioneers in sterility research and in artificial insemination, and with the postwar baby boom creating demand, they began to emphasize this speciality. At its peak, the service recorded nearly 7,000 patient visits per year, many of them referred by their own doctors after an article reporting substantial rates of success. From far away in Tucson, Margaret disputed the growing emphasis on fertility and marriage counseling at the expense of contraception and haggled over the myriad complications of maintaining the building on West 16th Street in which the clinic was housed. Though the records are unclear, there also appear to have been bureau accounts into which royalties from her books, articles, and lectures were paid, accounts on which, she, in turn, drew for some personal expenses. The determination of what was properly hers, and what was not, became an increasing problem, and she finally proposed that Dr. Stone and a group of friends purchase the outstanding mortgages of $23,350 on the handsome brownstone, thereby releasing her of all responsibilities and obligations. Working out the details of this arrangement took almost a year.
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During a summer vacation with Stuart's family in northern Arizona in the 1950s, Margaret then suffered a second heart attack and was returned to the hospital in Tucson. Following another prolonged convalescence, she emerged with a permanent, disabling case of angina, which caused episodic but extremely intense outbursts of chest pain brought on by the restricted flow of blood to her heart through clogged arteries. Corrective bypass surgery, which is commonplace today, was not yet standard medical practice, and she found herself uncharacteristically depressed, her anxiety about her health intensified by concern over the adequacy of her financial resources in the event of a protracted illness. The pyramiding expenses of doctors and nurses, along with other living costs and higher taxes, were taking a toll on her already diminished capital.

Loyal friends in New York tried to cheer her up by placing her name in circulation for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor she had long sought and one not uncommonly connected with the intensity of the promotional effort launched in a nominee's behalf. In 1931, the reformer Jane Addams had received the award for her work with the International League for Peace and Freedom, and Margaret's efforts on behalf of birth control and world population seemed no less worthy of recognition. Periodic campaigns would be mounted for ten years but would never generate more than occasional letters of interest from various members of the prize committee.

As something of a consolation, Mary Lasker insisted in the fall of 1950 that Planned Parenthood present Margaret with the prize she and her husband had established to recognize pioneering work in family planning, much as the prestigous Lasker prize in medicine honored important research on disease. Margaret was far too weak to come East to accept the award, but Grant delivered her speech in her behalf.

It was not his mother's finest moment. Margaret's standard remarks in these years painted a sentimental, historical portrait of the birth control movement, emphasizing her own early heroism. But, on this occasion, she added a coarse note to her assessment of what had been accomplished by lampooning costly government welfare programs for their failure to weed out the “feebleminded and unfit,” terms that were very much out of fashion following the tragic revelations of a decade of Nazi-inspired eugenic terror. Margaret proposed the idea that Planned Parenthood promote a program of “bonus” or “incentive” sterilization, calling on the federal government to guarantee a lifetime pension to any couple of “defective heredity” who would agree to the procedure. Pioneering research was just underway on the contraceptive effectiveness and safety of simple methods of tubal ligation, but sterilization still carried the stigma of coercion, and a new generation of leadership at Planned Parenthood wanted no association whatsoever with this dark legacy. Until the 1970s, Planned Parenthood would cautiously refrain from endorsing sterilization even under voluntary circumstances, and by then its use was already widespread among married American couples. Margaret's enthusiasm for the procedure, coupled with an uncharacteristic carping about the costs of social welfare, eroded her credibility with younger reformers. She sounded like the American Birth Control League ladies she had once deplored, and she never mentioned the idea again.

She was clearly losing patience altogether—for cautious bureaucrats unwilling to let her have her way, for individuals incapable of making responsible reproductive choices on their own. Her increasingly impulsive judgments may also have been the consequence of a tragic regimen of drugs and alcohol on which she began to rely more and more to diminish her pain and lift her spirits. To his subsequent regret, Stuart Sanger unwittingly prescribed a painkiller called Demerol for his mother, and she became dependent on it to the point of addiction. The drug was not always incapacitating or even apparent to most outsiders, but after a time, its ebbs and flows through her bloodstream would cause convulsions, sweating, and violent mood swings.
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Indeed, Margaret's disposition deteriorated not only under the influence of the drug but beneath the weight of news she was hearing from friends all over the world. Hugh de Selincourt died in London in 1951, followed by Bessie Drysdale and then Robert Dickinson in New York and Kit Hepburn in Hartford. Ethel Byrne suffered a heart attack at Truro, and Edith How-Martyn, a stroke in Australia. With her own husband dying in New Hampshire, Juliet Rublee, frantic as ever, warned Margaret that the secret of long life is in recognizing the importance of the magic word of “moderation” in all activities. “Happiness is the great thing. Enjoying things brings & keeps youth and beauty,” she wrote. She encouraged Margaret to defy her illness through communication with “the cosmic forces,” as the two women referred to them.

Margaret took the advice and enrolled in a Rosicrucian mail-order course in self-realization, complete with daily exercises intended to help her acquire “spiritual insight and first-hand spiritual experience.” This regimen may well have sustained her by providing justification for her conviction that she would not yet die, as so many of her friends were doing, because she embodied the aspirations of all women on earth, and as their chosen agent of liberation, still had important work left to do in spreading the message and technology of contraception. Just as Anne Higgins had so long ago triumphed over adversity through the redeeming power of faith—just as she herself had once been rescued from the grief of Peggy's death with Rosicrucian homilies—so she now determined to try to make mind triumph over matter by reconsecrating her historic social mission and special destiny. A measure of her increasing self-absorption can be found in a letter she wrote to Ethel at this time requesting that her sister agree to a movie treatment being developed by a group of women in Hollywood. The proposed script would obliterate the dramatic role Ethel had played in the events surrounding the historic Brownsville Clinic trial and instead portray Margaret as the valiant hunger striker of 1916, an alteration allegedly necessary to give the plot dramatic unity. Ethel, bemused, ignored the request, and the movie project never got off the ground.

It was perhaps only the delusions of another old friend that helped lift Margaret, at least partially, out of her own. Since the death of Havelock Ellis, Françoise Cyon had been living almost totally in the past.
Friendship's Odyssey
, an elegiac 1946 memoir of her life with Ellis, had totally repudiated the Wantley circle and especially condemned Hugh de Selincourt for his sexual excesses, causing him considerable anguish. The distant and complicated relationship was nonetheless still on her mind when Hugh died, and she wrote to Margaret of her hopes that he and Ellis might reconcile their differences “on the other side.” Margaret had no patience whatsoever for this kind of remorse. As soon as she felt better during the summer of 1951, she decided to make a trip to London, where she occupied herself with meetings and paid a condolence call on Hugh's widow and daughter, but never even told Françoise she was in town.
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Little had become of the International Committee on Planned Parenthood during Margaret's long illness and absence. Scarcely any new funds had been raised or programs initiated, and Frank Lorimer, who might have lent the group credibility, had resigned. Yet, indigenous activities by family planning organizations in some twenty-five countries indicated the need of an independent coordinating body to serve as clearinghouse for information and education. The Indian government, in particular, was looking for family planning aid from abroad and under the auspices of the World Health Organization had hired Abraham Stone as a consultant to lay the groundwork for further technical assistance. To much fanfare, Stone designed a string of beads for Indian women, with colors denoting days of fertility and infertility between menstrual cycles. The simple device for observing the rhythm method was tested in clinics but met with little success. Stone meekly defended the expediency of his work to Margaret—predicting that only some simple biological method, preferably an oral one, would answer India's pressing needs—but she strongly repudiated his endorsement of the single contraceptive remedy approved by the Vatican. Absent a coherent family planning strategy, the Nehru goverment instead made economic development its priority, in the vain hope that modernization would somehow lower the birthrate.

Meanwhile in London, Margaret contributed her Lasker prize money to keep the international committee temporarily afloat and then secured another $10,000 from the Brush Foundation for a newsletter, which Dorothy Brush agreed to edit. Within two years, the publication would reach 13,000 government officials, civic leaders, and physicians in thirty countries around the world. Margaret also drummed up the money for another international conference in Bombay from G. J. Watumull, an Indian businessman in Los Angeles and Honolulu, who had created a foundation to reinvest in his native land some of the fortune he'd made in America.