Woman of Valor (68 page)

What this book does defend is Sanger's argument that, as the country for the first time committed itself to provide a better quality of life through public investment in education and health care, it should also provide access to modern methods of birth control, so as not to overburden public funds. When questioned in public testimony during the 1930s, she emphasized that the family planning programs she was asking the government to support would be voluntary, and that once legalized they would enjoy the broad protections of legislative and judicial oversight guaranteed in a democracy. In the view of her harshest critics then and since, however, this reasoning created a situational ethics that defined birth control as a right of the privileged, but as a duty or obligation of the poor. This argument was at the heart of scholar-activist Angela Davis's widely disseminated indictment of Sanger, which has informed a great deal of writing on the subject ever since.

It is also the central argument of Dorothy Roberts's continuing critique of the birth control movement in her powerfully argued 1997 book,
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty
. Roberts acknowledges recent scholarship that more clearly locates Sanger in the intellectual and political currents of her time, as well as recent research by a number of young scholars looking in depth at the operations of birth control clinics across the country during this period and demonstrating the willing participation of many black women in birth control programs that delivered them welcome services and relief from unwanted childbirth, the dangers of home contraceptive remedies, and illegal abortion. These case studies uncover a diversity of local experiences and draw compelling portraits of the professional and lay women who staffed birth control services, some of whom did exhibit class-bound prejudice, but many more of whom, working long hours and with great dedication, displayed impressive respect and concern for their clients and sustained deep and lasting bonds of affection with them. While not denying the benefits of birth control services to individual women, Roberts argues nonetheless that the movement's prevailing culture and rhetoric consistently abetted racism, most especially when it condoned sterilization and turned its back on abuses, which were tolerated, in her view, only because the victims were black.
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There is no disputing the harsh realities of the racism that predominated in this country, especially before World War II. Nor can one deny Roberts's allegations about coercive practices in birth control clinics, even as recently as the 1970s, when surgical sterilization first became a widespread and much sought-after method of family planning among middle-class women and was, in unfortunate circumstances, harshly imposed on others who did not always fully understand the consequences. A procedure heralded at the time as a cherished right of some women became a distinct vulnerability for others. Planned Parenthood has long acknowledged these infractions and worked tirelessly ever since to build cultural diversity into its professional and volunteer ranks, to guarantee informed consent for all patients, and to safeguard individual rights.
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The question returns then to Sanger and whether or not she helped establish norms that permitted such abuses, and here the record is mixed. To be sure, she did encourage women to have only the number of children they could afford to raise, and at an age when they could assume responsibility for them, even as she argued for broad government responsibilities for social welfare. She assumed, with what sometimes seemed a romantic fervor, that most women would want contraception and were capable of using it successfully. She proudly marshaled clinical data to disprove popular stereotypes to the contrary by demonstrating that women across ethnic, class, and racial lines were reliably using the diaphragm regimen her clinics provided. Indeed, the pioneering clinical research she published in the 1930s conveyed an optimism that the widespread successful use of modern methods of contraception in recent years since has since confirmed.
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Still, the obligation to respect and protect the rights of individuals who do not conform to prevailing mores must remain firm, and Sanger, living in an era indifferent to this obligation, did not always fulfill it. Instead, her shrill rhetoric about the growing burden of large families among individuals of low intelligence and defective heredity may have provoked additional intolerance and hardly seems compatible with the larger progressive politics she adhered to.

The historian Carole McCann argues that Sanger's views comprised a contradictory mix of “adherence” and “resistance” to the dominant viewpoints of her era. Agreeing that Sanger rejected the eugenic orthodoxy of equating merit with a particular ethnic, class, or racial identity, she identifies her as having promoted a kind of “cultural determinism” about the value of small families, egalitarian marriages, and reproductive self-determination for women. I agree with this formulation but would also observe that Sanger sought and found considerable support for these values and worked tirelessly and quite successfully to build a consensus around them. This is evident from the new research in many places around this country that demonstrates the satisfaction most women found—and the communities they built—around local birth control clinics. And today it is evident around the world, and especially in the developing world, where, as I have pointed out, a human rights discourse promoting and protecting reproductive freedom has taken root among women who, as active participants in the liberation movements of their countries, see the promotion of family planning and the elimination of locally sanctioned gender discrimination as important ends in and of themselves, and also as fundamental conditions for the building of cultures that can sustain larger democratic institutions and practices. Again, however, fundamental respect for human dignity and a guarantee of individual rights in all circumstances must always be central to this mission.
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Beyond considerations of ideology, there are also some plain facts that need further clarification. Despite her eugenic sympathies, Sanger's views on race were actually advanced for her day. She first opened an integrated clinic in Harlem in the early 1930s, when the mixing of races was unheard of even in the North. She then encouraged private support for birth control and maternal health programs for black women in the South, when local white officials denied them any access to the New Deal's first federally supported health and welfare assistance. In both ventures she enjoyed the endorsement and active support of W.E.B. DuBois of the NAACP and Mary McLeod Bethune, the senior black official in the Roosevelt administration—along with other organizations and individuals of prominence in the black community. This support, however, was in marked distinction to the vocal opposition birth control incurred even then from conservative black churches and from black nationalist leaders such as Marcus Garvey, who opposed contraception on the grounds that only by increasing their numbers would black Americans prevail—not by improving their relative economic or educational status, as the NAACP and other reform-minded organizations counseled. Sanger very much endorsed the NAACP point of view, and it was her efforts on behalf of the Negro Project (the name reflecting how black Americans were then commonly identified) that won her the public support of Eleanor Roosevelt, whose progressive views on race were well established. In 1941, once her husband was safely back in the White House for a third term, Mrs. Roosevelt finally broke free of prior political constraints and publicly endorsed birth control in order to support these initiatives.
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Private correspondence with the philanthropist Albert Lasker and others documents Sanger's progressive views on race. And to this record the Sanger Papers Project has since added documentation of views she expressed in public, including a 1945 article condemning discrimination and encouraging racial reconciliation in
The Chicago Defender
, a leading black publication of the period. But if academic discourse on this matter has for the most part grown more balanced in recent years, the same cannot be said for popular opinion, where Sanger's reputation has become hostage to repeated scurrilous attacks on her integrity by conservative opponents of abortion and of women's rights.
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Again, a single quotation of Sanger's, taken out of context, has been used repeatedly to attack her as a bigot. It comes from a 1939 letter she wrote in connection with the Negro Project in the South, where ignorance of modern contraception was widespread and where black churches were further encouraging confusion and distrust of the program's intentions. Writing in a private letter and failing to choose her words carefully, she encouraged the hiring of black ministers and nurses in order to dispel any misapprehensions, adding: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population…” First cited out of context many years ago by Linda Gordon, this quotation has been widely disseminated and taken on a life of its own.

Just before this biography first went to press in 1992, the journalist Molly Ivins brought to my attention a pamphlet circulating among conservatives called
The Legacy of Planned Parenthood
that vilifies Sanger as a racist and eugenicist. The smear campaign that began with this single publication of limited circulation, however, has since turned into a virtual industry, fueled by the Internet. A recent survey of cyberspace by the editors of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project uncovered ceaseless repetition by antiabortion and antifeminist Web sites and blogs of a handful of alleged quotes from Sanger that are either completely inaccurate or cited entirely out of context. “False information,” as the editors of the papers project recently wrote, “is repeated so often that many of the more mainstream sites and reference publications feel compelled to construct a false debate: Sanger the humanitarian feminist vs. Sanger the racist eugenicist.”

Among their examples is the popular anonymous-source reference site Wikipedia, which shows up at the top of the list for most Google and other popular Internet engine searches of individuals of prominence. Constantly being revised and easily corrupted by readers with ideological agendas, the Wikipedia entry on Sanger is more often than not factually incorrect and intellectually incoherent in its efforts to meld differing points of view. But it is where thousands of individuals, and especially young people, are getting their information about her. Erroneous and scurrilous information is indeed now so ubiquitous that Planned Parenthood feels compelled to post denials and clarifications on its own popular Web site, including a moving testimonial to the “kinship” between the family planning and civil rights movements by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., when he accepted Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Award in 1966.
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The question of the company Sanger kept raises another set of concerns. Sanger has been fairly criticized as a sometimes impatient, willful individual, but her many differences with and her ultimate resignation in 1928 from the American Birth Control League she had founded seven years earlier had as much to do with politics as with personality. Many of the elite men and women she'd attracted to the organization and come to depend on for funds irritated her with their defense of economic privilege. Though again the record has often been distorted, she was, for example, unwilling to make necessary compromises to secure the endorsement of organized eugenic societies when others wished to do so in 1925 and again three years later. She would not concede to the view that middle-class women should be encouraged to have more children. The later opposition of many among the league's leadership to most New Deal programs created further rifts. Sanger publicly endorsed the New Deal's activist responses to the economic crisis, even as she privately deplored Roosevelt's failure to include birth control and public health and always, in protest, quietly cast her own presidential vote for the Socialist, Norman Thomas. And as this book goes to great lengths to point out, she built a broad alliance for birth control among New Dealers and others widely seen as progressives in the politics of their time. That said, there is no denying that Sanger declined to criticize the movement's economic royalists publicly—even though she often mocked them privately—because to do so would have only provided political fodder for her opponents. (This timidity extended to her own second husband, Noah Slee, who helped bankroll her efforts and to whom she stayed married for many years, even as she privately disparaged him and his politics, as well as to her sons, both of whom became physicians suspicious of social medicine.)

Instead, once the federal court in New York invalidated the Corn-stock laws in 1936 and provided the legal victory on contraception she had long sought, Sanger gave up on politics altogether and retreated from the organized birth control movement in the U.S. In doing so, however, she acceded to a merger of competing constituencies, including many eugenicists who had publicly tempered their hostility to birth control in response to growing evidence of the universal decline in fertility during the intervening years across all regions of the country and across ethnic and economic lines. By this time, eugenicists here and abroad were also scrambling to distance themselves from the tragic developments beginning to unfold in Nazi Germany. And when the horrifying excesses of the European holocaust were fully revealed, they, of course, widely repudiated German extermination policies as an unfathomable perversion of their movement's original intentions. Recent monographs, however, have revealed that coercive sterilization practices continued for a long time thereafter in mental institutions in states such as California and North Carolina, leading to public repudiation and apologies by public officials in recent years, a situation about which Sanger appears to have been either uninformed or indifferent.
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