Woman of Valor (65 page)

For the time being at least, President Johnson also insisted on keeping a cautious distance in public from family planning activists. White House staff firmly rejected all requests for formal meetings. They did not want the administration's policies to provoke resistance from Catholics and, in fact, maintained informal procedures for keeping in touch with key church officials about what was going on. Johnson himself wrote to Lew Douglas, who was a longtime personal friend, saying that he was “not unaware of the innovations and trail blazing” of Margaret Sanger but was constrained by the recommendations of the panel he had appointed to review award nominations. He clearly intended to do nothing.

No record of the panel's deliberations can be found, but subsequent correspondence with Johnson refers to “certain difficulties” that arose in connection with the 1965 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and given the President's acknowledged sensitivity to thinking within the Catholic Church, it is not hard to contemplate what those difficulties might have been. It was one thing to inaugurate pilot family planning programs, quite another to honor the country's best-known antagonist of Catholics.

In fact, the Johnson administration would move ahead on family planning with circumspection. Following Margaret's death, the President did agree to accept an award from Planned Parenthood for his international achievements which was given in her name, but he did not show up in person for the presentation ceremony. He was increasingly preoccupied by Vietnam and by the violence spreading through the country's urban ghettos, where black militants were becoming increasingly vocal. Johnson would not dramatically expand family planning assistance abroad or at home until legislated to do so by Congress in 1967. At that time, the historic Title X Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act authorized $35 million for family planning assistance to foreign governments, United Nations agencies, and private nonprofit organizations (including the International Planned Parenthood Federation), while amendments to the Social Security Act designated that no less than 6 percent of funds for Maternal and Child Health Services be spent on domestic family planning programs. These were not Presidential initiatives, however, but rather the work of a bipartisan coalition in the Senate, including Democratic Senators Fulbright and Gruening, who chaired extensive hearings, along with Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania, Joseph D. Tydings of Maryland, Alan Cranston of California, and the maverick Republican, Robert Packwood of Oregon. In the House, critical leadership was provided by two liberal Democrats, Morris Udall of Arizona and James Scheuer of New York, and by two Republicans, Robert Taft of Ohio, and a newcomer from Texas. His name was George H. Bush, and he would remain a staunch advocate of reproductive freedom for women until political considerations during the 1980 Presidential elections accounted for one of the most dramatic and cynical public policy reversals in modern American politics.
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Margaret did not live long enough to witness these developments. Happily, she did die with the comfort of knowing that the United States Supreme Court had made its historic decision in
Griswold v. Connecticut
. Though increasingly senile and frail, she also appeared to understand when told that the government of Japan in 1965 had granted her one of its highest honors, the Third Order of the Sacred Crown. She never learned, however, of a letter of August 11, 1966, sent by Lady Bird Johnson at the urging of mutual friends, wishing her good health and happiness on behalf of the President, though this informal communication was as close to official recognition as she ever received from her own country.
²⁶

She died of arteriosclerosis on September 6, 1966, just a few days short of her eighty-eighth birthday.
The New York Times
ran a front-page obituary, and Edwina Sanger, traveling with her younger children in Greece, learned of the death from a cover photograph and story in
The Times
of London. On the floor of the United States Senate, Ernest Gruening mourned the passing of “a great woman, a courageous and indomitable person who lived to see one of the remarkable revolutions of modern times—a revolution which her torch kindled—the breakthrough which enables us to discuss birth control and the population explosion and to seek acceptable solutions.”
²⁷

A private funeral service was held two days later at St. Phillips-in-the-Hills, the Episcopal Church Margaret had occasionally attended in Tucson. Grant flew out with his oldest son, Michael, and Stuart came up alone from Mexico, but aside from a few local friends, no one else could make it. The Rev. George Ferguson delivered a eulogy that did not ignore Margaret's achievements on behalf of humanity but remembered her more for the marvelous sense of fun she brought to Tucson during the many years they knew each other, with her lively interests, festive parties, and essential joy in living.

On September 21, 1966, the autumnal equinox, the extended Sanger family, along with numerous colleagues from the birth control movement, gathered for a memorial service at St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square in New York, where Noah Slee had long worshipped. Included among the famous and powerful was Mrs. Rose Halpern, then a spry little lady of eighty, who had been one of Margaret's first patients in Brownsville and a member of the welcoming party that greeted her when she left jail.

The city's heaviest rainfall in sixty-three years produced gale-force winds and tortuous traffic congestion that day, and many of the mourners arrived late for the service in the large and beautiful church. A choir of twenty members robed in scarlet flanked an altar adorned with the flowers Margaret had most loved. Morris Ernst eulogized her in a light vein, enumerating her courageous accomplishments but emphasizing her wit and charm, and Hobson Pittman offered an even more personal remembrance. The new rector at St. George's had never met Margaret, but her long-devoted secretary, Florence Rose, sent along copies of past tributes, so he had good material with which to work. The weather provided him his best line. It was, he said, “a stormy day to end a stormy life.”
²⁸

But the last word must be Margaret's own.

In one of their final conversations, Margaret Marston asked her grandmother what she wanted said after she died. And Margaret said she hoped she would be remembered for helping women, because women are the strength of the future. They take care of culture and tradition and preserve what is good.

That, she hoped, would be her remembrance.
²⁹

It has been nearly thirty years since I began to research this biography of Margaret Sanger. Many of her papers are housed in the library of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, others at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and I have fond memories of languorous days as a graduate student, sojourning through the past. But, in truth, it has never been easy for me to curl up in libraries—even with material as colorful and absorbing as Sanger's turned out to be. For better or for worse, I kept finding myself then, as I often have since, drawn away from the archives by the compelling political and policy predicaments of my own day.

In the late 1970s I put aside what was then still a doctoral dissertation and turned a volunteer position into full-time work in government with Carol Bellamy, the first woman ever elected to a major public office in New York City. Given the city's vast size, Carol was actually the first woman anywhere in the country who ever received more than a million votes, incredible as that may seem today, with at least one woman now in front of the Democratic pack for president, another leading the House of Representatives, and record numbers of women serving in both houses of Congress and in state and local posts—though to be sure we still have a long way to go. As a young woman back then, I had a crash course in urban public policy and played a small role in an array of developments that left New York City a better place to live and work, but among my proudest achievements are the laws we helped change and the programmatic innovation we introduced to advance rights and opportunities for women and girls where there had been few before—among them the city's first network of community-based family planning clinics, its first teen pregnancy programs, shelters for victims of domestic abuse, and expanded day care.

I returned to Columbia University and first published this biography in 1992, but then quickly found myself drawn back to policy and politics, most recently through my work at the Open Society Institute, the international foundation started by the philanthropist George Soros, where I was fortunate to have the opportunity to address women's issues on a global scale. I directed millions of dollars to organizations working to defend women's rights and expand access to reproductive health care in the United States, and made strategic investments to improve the status of women in a number of countries around the world as part of the foundation's efforts to secure democratic practices and advance human rights.

For many years now, I have thus lived something of a double life, alternating between writing and activism, my perspectives on Sanger's life and work always enriched as much by my own practical experience in trying to effect change as by conventional scholarship. But it has also been the other way around. The complicated trajectory of Sanger's career as a sometimes celebrated but also much maligned social reformer has always seemed strikingly relevant to my own concerns, and I have enjoyed having her as a muse. Indeed, each time I return to this book, I am convinced that I need Sanger to help me reaffirm and sort out my own political and professional identity and commitments, as much as she may need me to rescue hers.

This may be nothing more than a deeply felt case of what all historians and biographers know to be true—that we are essentially prisoners of our own experience. Even so established a veteran of the historical establishment as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. embraced this fundamental tenet of postmodernism when he wrote in April 2006: “We are all entrapped in the egocentric predicament. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personality and the preoccupations of our age.…Conceptions of the past are far from stable. They are perennially revised by the urgencies of the present.”
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As Schlesinger observed, we also need to keep our engagement with history lively, because history is to the body politic as memory is to the individual. We become disoriented without it. Absent a vibrant sense of where we've come from, we inevitably lose our way. We need the past to help us navigate our own troubled times and find a path into the future. We dig into other people's lives to make some sense of them on their own terms, but also to help us figure out our own.

But what if the dig itself spans nearly two generations? How have constantly shifting developments reshaped my earlier thinking about Sanger? How does my work hold up in light of current events? How does it stand up to the rich body of scholarship that has since expanded on but also challenged some of my ideas? Fifteen years later, what more or what different might I have to say?

 

Margaret Sanger's fundamental heresy was in claiming the right of women to own and control their own bodies—to experience their sexuality free of consequence, just as men have always done. This is the idea that defined her and defines this book. Following in the footsteps of a first generation of educated women who had proudly forgone sexuality and marriage in order to seek fulfillment outside the home, she offered birth control as the necessary condition to the resolution of a broader range of personal and professional satisfactions. The hardest challenge in writing about her for modern audiences, for whom this claim has become routine, has been to explain how absolutely destabilizing it seemed in her own time.

This intellectual hurdle was perhaps even higher in 1992 than today, with the years since the publication of this book having witnessed such an intense and vicious backlash against women's reproductive rights. But even with so much lingering animus toward changes in women's status here in the United States and around the world, it is difficult to inhabit an era when sexuality was considered more an obligation of women than a pleasure. In an age when the typical American woman spends only five years of her life trying to get pregnant, and gives birth just twice in a lifetime, it is hard to remember that until a century ago reproduction was her principal purpose and motherhood her primary role.

It is even harder to fathom that for most of human history, and even into Sanger's time, it was simply assumed that women had no need to acquire identities or rights of their own, independent of those they enjoyed by virtue of their relationships with men, and that this principle was central to the enduring opposition women encountered in seeking rights to inheritance and property, suffrage, and most especially birth control. Even violence against women was condoned under the principle of male coverture that defined women's legal identities, with the U.S. Supreme Court in 1910 denying damages to a wife injured by violent beatings on the grounds that to do so would undermine “the peace of the household.”
²

For all the significance this book accords to Sanger as an iconoclast, then, I'm not sure it credits her enough for her originality as a feminist theorist in demanding civil protection of women's reproductive liberty and of her claims to autonomy and bodily integrity, even within marriage. If I were writing this book today I would spend more time analyzing her contributions as a thinker in the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose visionary 1792 tract,
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
, first applied to women natural rights theories from the French Enlightenment that upheld the sovereignty of the individual. I would identify her with John Stuart Mill, whose 1869
Essay on the Subjection of Women
asked for the first time whether home and family are women's only natural vocation, or whether in a world where formal work was moving outside the home, women must necessarily follow. I would position her more squarely in the intellectual company of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose poignant meditation on female identity in her final public address in 1892,
The Solitude of the Self
, foreshadowed Margaret's own.
³

Sanger always reminded her audiences that she did not invent birth control. She was only the messenger of an idea whose time had come. As recent scholarly works have made even more clear, the country's birthrate had been declining long before she came on the scene, as a result of private arrangements and a healthy trade in condoms, douches, and various contraptions sold largely under the subterfuge of feminine hygiene. But she did invent and popularize the term and in doing so gave it essential public and political currency. She first recognized the far-reaching consequences of bringing sexuality and contraception out in the open and claiming them as a woman's right. When she opened a clinic and deliberately staged her own arrest, she challenged anachronistic obscenity laws that remained on the books as the legacy of the notorious antivice crusader Anthony Comstock, whose evangelical fervor had captured Victorian politics and led to the adoption by the states and federal government of broad criminal sanctions on sexual speech and commerce, including all materials related to contraception and abortion. Her critique, however, was not just of legal constraints on obscenity, but also on women's place.
⁴

In this respect Sanger helped to inaugurate a modern human rights movement that moves beyond traditional civil and political claims of liberty on behalf of women to embrace social and cultural ones. She understood that to advance women's rights it is necessary to address—and the state has an obligation to protect—personal as well as public spheres of conduct. It must establish broad safeguards for women and intervene to eliminate everyday forms of discrimination and abuse.

Sanger lived just long enough to witness the fulfillment of at least part of this vision when the U.S. Supreme Court protected the private use of contraception in its landmark decision in
Griswold v. Connecticut
of 1965, the year before she died at the ripe age of 87. The extension of that privacy doctrine to abortion eight years later in
Roe v. Wade
, and the court's reinterpretation of that law in
Planned Parenthood v. Casey
in 1992, has moved it further in the direction of achieving her intent by explicitly ruling that women are not obliged to seek spousal consent in decisions about whether or not to bear a child. But as feminist legal theorists from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Catherine MacKinnon have pointed out, privacy is not a secure judicial philosophy for women since it only protects couples from unwarranted state interference and does not mandate positive state obligation for the equal protection of women under the law.
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What has become clear to me in recent years, however, is that Sanger's views are more fully realized in international human rights constructs than in U.S. constitutional law. If I were beginning this book anew today, I would further develop these ideas and explore what if any contact she had with her friends, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit of India, when they were both involved in the years after World War II in the founding of the United Nations and in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This visionary declaration is the world's first formal claim that discrimination against women is an appropriate matter for international concern, not a category privileged and protected by local sovereignty or by traditional cultural or religious practice governing marriage and family relations. It establishes broad protections for women as citizens and workers and also specifically accords freedom of consent in marriage and divorce and right of access to necessary provisions to care for themselves and their children. It thus paves the way for the later extension of rights in other areas of women's private lives, including reproduction and sexuality, through successive United Nations treaties such as CEDAW, the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, adopted in 1979, which provides binding protection to a broad range of rights in marriage and family relations, including property, inheritance, and access to health care, with an explicit mention of family planning, though not of abortion. The controversial language of the Platform of Action from the U.N. 1996 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing is even more direct in claiming: “The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence.”
⁶

International human rights law thus moves beyond traditional constructs guaranteeing sex-neutral norms measured by male standards in terms of citizenship, education, and employment to obligate state response to what is now finally understood as pervasive and systematic discrimination against women around the world. And these constructs have since provided the framework for many state constitutions, such as in South Africa, where they have been translated into enforceable law. Universal standards for human rights and development, however, by no means offer a sure cure for violations of women that still persist with uncanny fortitude and, often, unimaginable cruelty in many places around the world. To the contrary, women and girls seem especially vulnerable today as conservative elements rise up to contest the advance of these secular, rational ideas. Attempting to negotiate globalization's assault on their cultures, forces of reaction have made women and the family an arena of intense political conflict. Even in the United States a quarter century of substantial economic and social progress by women has fueled a fierce backlash in defense of traditional values that threatens to compromise long-established women's rights. Hampered by a long tradition of conservative hostility to international human rights obligations in both political parties—and with conservative Republicans especially wary of provisions relating to women in recent years—the U.S. also remains among just a handful of “rogue” countries in the world that have failed to ratify CEDAW, in the unlikely company of Iran, Sudan, and Somalia.
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American enthusiasm for the entire human rights enterprise foundered early in the 1950s, and Eleanor Roosevelt left the United Nations when Dwight David Eisenhower was elected president and repudiated her work on human rights. There is no reason to believe, therefore, that Sanger was aware of the important women's rights work that continued there even after Mrs. Roosevelt's departure, or of the potential of this discourse to buttress arguments for universal access to contraception or serve the global family planning institutions Sanger was eagerly trying to build at the time. More research on these matters, however, would be valuable, and I particularly look forward to new insights that may become available from a promised fourth volume of published papers on Sanger's international work from the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, which has now been under way for many years at New York University, and has already published two valuable volumes of letters and documents on her career through 1939.
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