Authors: Ellen Chesler
Woman of Valor (69 page)
If she was not sufficiently sensitive to the hazards of her association with eugenics, however, she did immediately regret and criticize the merger on the other grounds that many of her critics have since seized upon to assign her blame. Under the banner of Planned Parenthood, what had begun as a movement for social transformation offered little resistance to the country's prevailing postwar tendencies toward social cohesion. Planned Parenthood affiliates spent much of the 1950s and 1960s building clinics in local communities that served married women with infertility and marriage counseling services, as well as contraception. By adhering to accepted social mores, they tried to escape their still risqué reputation.
Even as the organized movement acquiesced to the conventions and norms of the postwar era, however, Sanger again went off on her own and found the funding to help develop the hormonal birth control pill, which has since made reliable contraception far more widely available and is widely credited as the technological innovation that has helped women fulfill the promise of feminism by allowing them to plan and space pregnancies and combine jobs and families. Though conservatives like to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s on the pill, social scientists generally agree that its major impact has been economic, not moral, and in this respect, it did help realize Sanger's lifelong commitment to contraception as a liberating force for women.
30
Moreover, women without private doctors first gained access to the pill and other maternal and reproductive health-care services in substantial numbers through Planned Parenthood clinics, which transformed themselves into essential government medical contractors after the first federal family planning laws were enacted in the late 1960sâlong before the development of the kind of comprehensive neighborhood-based health care that is now more widely available in poor and working-class communities. And even today in many communities, Planned Parenthood plays an essential role in the delivery of services to women and teens. They rely on it for quality of care and for the courage and professionalism of its staff, which continues to work under threat of intimidation, violence, and tragically, as we have seen in recent years, even death. When a Planned Parenthood receptionist was slain by an abortion protestor in Bostonâand Dr. Barnett Slepian later died from a zealot's bullet in BuffaloâI pointed out that Margaret Sanger had endured abusive epithets and taunts for more than fifty years, but no one ever actually took a shot at her.
Â
I took the title of this biography from an award that Eleanor Roosevelt presented to Margaret Sanger, as a “woman of integrity, vision and valor,” an occasion celebrated in the
New York Herald Tribune
editorial that provides the book's epigraph. I was aware, of course, that in doing so I was also identifying Sanger with the cherished psalm of the Jewish faith that celebrates virtue in women as a dimension of their degree of compassion and hard work in the service of others, not of themselves. I knew that some might be offended, but I wanted to rescue Sanger's reputation, whatever misgivings about some of her tangled views and associations even I continued to express. I wanted to make the point that she served women well by claiming their right to self-realization without denying their larger responsibility to what the Old Testament elsewhere refers to as “loving kindness” or deeds of social obligation.
I was writing, of course, for a popular audience, and after many years as a professional outside the academy. So while I shamelessly wrapped a woman long considered an infidel in a favorite metaphor of the faithful, I made another conscious decision to leave out of the book a section I had drafted explaining my views about her in the language of the philosopher whom intellectuals of my generation had canonized as the reigning ethical eminence of our era, and the arbiter of all transgressive behaviors of the sort Margaret Sanger has been accused of. I deliberately left out Michel Foucault.
Fifteen years later, as a brief final word on what I might do differently today, I want to add him back in, not to belabor the many ways in which his complex observations on sexuality and power can further illumine just what was at stake for Sanger or what has motivated her many enemiesâthat is the stuff of another essay. I mention Foucault only to observe that he better than anyone else, perhaps, recognized the conundrum of the politics of reproduction, which has so long ensnarled Sanger and all others who have tried to discipline it.
As so many writers under Foucault's broad influence have since observed, reproduction is by its very nature experienced individually and socially at the same time. In claiming women's fundamental right to control their own bodies, Margaret Sanger also always kept in mind the dense fabric of cultural, political, and economic relationships in which those rights are exercised. Like Foucault himself in many ways, she tried to find a balance in her own life and in the behaviors she prescribed for others between the contentment that derives from individual self-realization, or the right to be different sexually and in other ways, and the contrary urge to participate in a shared human experience, governed by common mores, rules, and laws. That she kept working on how to get that balance quite right is what continues to generate controversy around her and the movement she founded. It is also what continues to make her so interesting and worthy of sustained inquiry.
31
My thanks to Simon & Schuster and especially to the incomparable Alice Mayhew and her able assistant, Serena Jones, and to copy-editing supervisor Edith Lewis, for their enthusiasm and expertise in bringing out this new edition.
A
PRIL
2007
1: GHOSTS
1.
The chapter title is taken from
Ghosts
(1881) by Henrik Ibsen in
Four Great Plays
(New York: 1959), Introduction by John Gassner, which observes: “It is not just the things we inherit from our parents. It is the ideas that live on in us as ghosts which define our path of duty.”
The Sanger memory is from Margaret Sanger,
My Fight for Birth Control
(New York: 1931), p. 13. The incident is paired with a recollection of running away from the house and inadvertently getting lost, a commonly understood sign of separation stress. Both are dropped from Margaret Sanger,
An Autobiography
(New York: 1938), a journalistically polished and considerably more upbeat account of her life, produced with the help of a team of best-selling authors.
2.
The Higgins family Bible was deposited in the Margaret Sanger papers of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, hereinafter MS-SS. For the census data, see the Planned Parenthood of the Southern Tier Newsletter, special Margaret Sanger issue, Jan. 1973, MS-SS.
3.
The material in quotation on the perfectly formed new babies is in
My Fight
, p. 12, and
Autobiography
, p. 14. A Higgins family tree is in MS-SS, but does not seem totally correct as a result of confusion caused by changes of names. The siblings, in order, were Mary, 1870, Joseph, 1872, Anna (Nan), 1874, John, 1875, Thomas, 1877, Margaret, 1879, Ethel, 1883, Clio (changed name to Lawrence), 1886, George McGlynn, 1887, Richard, 1889, Arlington (changed named to Robert), 1892. Also see Richard Higgins to M.S., Sept. 11, 1936, Margaret Sanger papers in the Library of Congress, hereinafter MS-LC; and Robert Higgins to M.S., n.d. (1938), MS-SS, enclosing newspaper clipping of his election to the College Football Hall of Fame with a note that reads “by the grace of God I had four wonderful sisters.”
A particular Yeats line that comes to mind is: “Not Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught/ Or hers before a looking glass, for such,/ Being made beautiful overmuch/ Consider beauty a sufficient end/ Lose natural kindness and maybe/ The heart-revealing intimacy/ That chooses right, and never find a friend.” From “A Prayer for My Daughter,” in William Butler Yeats,
Selected Poetry
(London: 1974).
4.
Autobiography
, p. 12. Higgins's 1846 birth date is on the Steuben County Census records for 1880 and 1900. His Volunteer Enlistment record, dated Dec. 1863, New York City has the 1843 date, suggesting that he was lying in order to qualify. His military record is chronicled in the Abstracts of Civil War Muster Rolls, New York State Archives, Albany, New York (which includes a Medical File Card) and in the Records of the 12th Regiment of New York Cavalry at the National Archives, Washington, D.C. I am indebted to Alex Sanger, Margaret's grandson, for providing me with copies of these documents, which he has collected for a family genealogy. Margaret's handwritten notes on a letter about her father's pension application from her uncle, Sen. William Purcell, to his sister, Anne Higgins, May 23, 1910, tell the mule story, MS-LC. Also see Harold Hersey, “Margaret Sanger: The Biography of the Birth Control Pioneer” New York (1938). Hersey's completed manuscript was printed but never published when his publisher went bankrupt during the Depression. It was discovered in the New York Public Library by Alex Sanger in 1969 and can be found there and in MS-SS, and MS-LC. Hersey was a journalist who met and fell in love with Sanger in 1919 and contributed to her first periodical publication
The Birth Control Review
. He wrote this biography long after their love affair had ended, and she adamantly refused his request for permission to publish the book because she did not want it to compete with her own and because Hersey's numerous interviews with people who knew her as a child challenged her own sanitized account of her family. The book is an important source of information from the only contemporary of Sanger's who wrote about her. Correspondence from Harold Hersey to M.S., 1920 and 1938, is in MS-SS. James Reed,
The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue
(Princeton: 1984), fn. p. 395, discusses Hersey.
5.
Again, my thanks to Alex Sanger for the genealogical record on Anne Higgins (sometimes called Annie), and for extracts from the 1870 census for Hunterdon County, N.J. (M-583, Roll 870, Raritan Township, Flemington), which identifies Joseph Purcell's family and real estate holdings. Also see Hersey, pp. 10, 27-28, 32. The Higgins family Bible in MS-SS, chronicles the family's early travels by listing the birthplaces of the older children. The question of where Sanger was born is discussed in Ronni MacLaren and Elissa Mautner, “Corning's Margaret Higgins Sanger,”
Andaste Inquirer
7:1 (May 1978), pp. 9-18 (a publication of the Painted Post Historical Society of Corning, New York, to which I am grateful for a copy). MacLaren and Mautner were students in a 1977 Smith College seminar on Sanger, and some of the research materials for their article remain in MS-SS. Sanger's
Autobiography
says she was born in a house in the woods, beyond the city limits, where her father had gone because of her mother's poor health. Finally, for context on nineteenth century Irish family life, see Hasia Diner,
Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the 19th Century
(Baltimore: 1983), passim.
6.
Hersey, “Margaret Sanger,” pp. 12-13. The extent of Higgins's drinking is disputed. Grant Sanger, who spent time with him as a boy on Cape Cod during the 1920s, says he was an “alcoholic” for many years, but Olive Richard, who lived with him as a child in Corning, vehemently denies this, saying that though he carried a whiskey flask, and liked an occasional nip, he actually drank in moderation.
See author's interview with Grant Sanger, M.D., Aug. 1976, for the Schlesinger-Rockefeller Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, p. 3. Olive Richard's comments are from an interview with the author on Mar. 28, 1985, in Indian Shores, Fla. On modernization see Richard D. Brown,
Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865
(New York: 1976). And on the disruption of the American artisan system, Sean Wilentz,
Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850
(New York: 1984), esp. pp. 4-5.
7.
Hersey, “Margaret Sanger,” pp. 14, 39. Recollection of the glassworkers' strike is from Nelson L. Somers,
Corning Memories
, Collection of the Painted Post Historical Society, Corning, New York. On glassblowing at Corning, also see
Fortune
, 1:1 (Jan. 1930) with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White and text by Dwight Macdonald.
8.
On the church and organized labor, see John Tracy Ellis,
American Catholicism
(Chicago: 1969), pp. 106-108.
My Fight
, p. 7,
Autobiography
. p. 21, and Hersey, “Margaret Sanger,” pp. 22-24 discuss the Ingersoll incident, which may be part truth, part fabrication. Orvin Larson,
American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll
(New York, 1962), has Ingersoll stopping in Corning, the best documentation of Sanger's story that exists. For an early example of how Sanger wove the Ingersoll story into a moral lesson about the courage to speak one's convictions, see Ruth Hale, “The Child Who Was Mother to a Woman,”
The New Yorker
1:8 (Apr. 11, 1925), pp. 11-12, an extremely flattering profile written in the magazine's first year of publication. For Ingersoll on birth control, see the reprint of an address he delivered at the Hollis Theatre in Boston on June 2, 1899, published as “Robert Ingersoll on Birth Control,”
The Birth Control Review
3:10 (Oct. 1919), p. 1.
9.
Autobiography
, p. 23. Henry George's
Progress and Poverty
was first published in 1879, the year of Margaret's birth, and sold 5 million copies in its first twenty-five years in print. For Sanger on Ingersoll's influence, also see the correspondence between Sanger and Lawrence Lader in MS-SS. Sanger cooperated with Lader on a biography, Lawrence Lader,
The Margaret Sanger Story
(New York: 1955).
10.
My Fight
, p. 21,
Autobiography
, p. 33, Hersey, “Margaret Sanger,” p. 33. Olive Richard told the story about the milk in her interview with the author. Also see Catherine Shafter to Ronni MacLaren and Elissa Mautner, Apr. 28, 1977, MS-SS.
11.
My Fight
, pp. 19-21,
Autobiography
, pp. 30-31. On the intense separation of gender spheres common to Irish families, see Diner,
Erin's Daughters
, p. 16. On the significance of the Victorian daughter's special sense of having been “chosen” by her father and given a taste of a man's life, see Judith Thurman's distinguished biography,
Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller
(New York: 1982), p. 26. On changing attitudes toward the idea of infant damnation in the nineteenth century, see Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860,” in
Clio's Consciousness Raised
, edited by Mary S. Hartman and Lois W. Banner (New York: 1974), p. 140.
12.
My Fight
, pp. 11-12. Sigmund Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
(New York: 1965), p. 235.
13.
Michael Higgins to Mary Higgins, July 31, 1902, in MS-LC tells of his lady chasing. Further commentary on how the women of the Irish immigrant community typically deemphasized romance and sexuality are in Diner,
Erin's Daughters
, pp. 16-17, 22-23, which contains a favorite folk proverb of the community of Margaret's childhood: “The three things that leave the shortest traces are a bird on a branch, a ship on the sea, and a man on a woman.” For a feminist theory of how women negotiate oedipal attachments, see Nancy Chodorow,
The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
(Berkeley: 1978), p. 140. As a physical legacy of the childhood bout with typhoid, Sanger suffered from lifelong gallbladder colic, and had gallbladder surgery in 1938, according to Dr. Grant Sanger in his interview with the author for the Schlesinger Library, p. 50.
My interpretation of Sanger's relationship to her father disputes David Kennedy,
Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger
(New Haven: 1970), p. 3, which reaches the peremptory conclusion from this incident that Sanger associated her father with an “aggressive, threatening, masculine sexual instinctâ¦that continued to color her attitudes toward men and sex.” Since Kennedy did not explore the archival materials on Sanger's personal life, he could not have known much about her sexuality or her feelings about men. His rush to judgment may nonetheless explain his skepticism about her. The mistaken view of Sanger as completely antimale is deep-rooted. See also Christopher Lasch,
The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as a Social Type
(New York: 1965), p. 62, and William O'Neill,
Everyone Was Brave
(New York: 1969).
14.
Rev. Robert F. McNamara to Ronni MacLaren and Elissa Mautner, “Easter Sunday, 1977,” enclosing notes he had compiled for a history of the parish in Corning, which was published privately in the 1940s as
A Century of Grace
, in MS-SS. The birth date on the baptismal certificate was listed as Sept. 14, 1880, and the middle name as “Elizabeth,” the first disparity suggesting how early Margaret may have begun to lie about her age, the second, that she may have taken the middle name of a sponsor outside her immediate family. Hersey, p. 21, confirms the incident and says he interviewed people who remembered it. Margaret wrote herself about the significance of religious feeling in the lives of adolescents in the newspaper column that launched her career: “What Every Boy and Girl Should Know,”
The Call
, Sunday Supplement, Collections of the Tamiment Library, New York University, hereinafter, Tamiment-NYU. On the rigid sex segregation of the Irish immigrant church, see Diner,
Erin's Daughters
, pp. 22-23. Reflections on adolescent religion and identity formation are in Erik Erickson,
Identity, Youth and Crisis
(New York: 1968), esp. p. 27, and Chodorow,
Reproduction
, pp. 79, 137-38.
15.
My Fight
, p. 22,
Autobiography
, p. 34, Hersey, “Margaret Sanger,” pp. 56-57.
16.
Printed brochures describing Claverack are in MS-SS. Also see correspondence with Sanger's school friend, Amelia Stuart Mitchell, in MS-SS and
My Fight
, p. 22.
17.
Claverack photos are in MS-SS. Also
My Fight
, pp. 23-28,
Autobiography
, pp. 35-36, and Hersey (interview with Amelia Stuart Mitchell), p. 62. M.S. to Mabel Pyott, Amelia Stuart's daughter, after Amelia died in 1955, describes Margaret's affection for her mother, in MS-SS. There are abundant letters in the Sanger files from old friends at Claverack, especially when the photograph of Margaret and Corey Albertson was published in
Life
in 1937. See, for example, M.S. to Gola Beagle, July 23, 1937, MS-LC. On female adolescent sexuality in the nineteenth century, also see Nancy Sahli, “Smashing: Women's Relationships Before the Fall,” paper delivered at the Third Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Bryn Mawr, Pa., June 11, 1976, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” in
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(New York: 1985), pp. 53-76. Margaret's theatrical aspirations are described in
Autobiography
, pp. 13, 32, 38, and in
My Fight
, p. 24, and are confirmed in Mary Higgins's diary, Mar. 2, 1898, MS-SS. On the role that clothes and material aspirations played in the fantasy life of Irish servant girls, see Christine Stansell,
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
(New York: 1986), p. 157.