Woman of Valor (70 page)

18.
Mary Sanger diary, Aug. 25, 1897, MS-SS. For the experience of Irish domestics in acquiring modern bourgeois tastes, see Diner,
Erin's Daughters
, p. 84, and on the rise of the Victorian bourgeoisie, Robert Wiebe,
The Search for Order 1877-1920
(New York: 1967). Stansell,
City of Women
, pp. 155-68, and 219-20, takes a bleak view of the relations between homemaker and servant in New York City, yet agrees that bourgeois values ultimately triumphed, reshaping the aspirations of servants and destroying their cultural autonomy.

19.
My Fight
, p. 21.
Autobiography
, p. 28. Sanger's lifelong preoccupation with wealth and status is evident in her private correspondence with her longtime friend, Juliet Barrett Rublee, recently discovered in the attic of Rublee's former summer house in Cornish, New Hampshire, and now housed in the Dartmouth College Library, hereinafter, MS-DC. Also see Grant Sanger interview, Aug. 1976. Stuart Sanger also talked about his mother's conflicts over money in an interview with the author on March 17, 1986, in Tucson, Ariz. On status incongruity, see Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb,
The Hidden Injuries of Class
(New York: 1972), pp. 21-31.

20.
Autobiography
, p. 16.
My Fight
, p. 11. Diner,
Erin's Daughters
, pp. 22-23, suggests that the Higgins marital intimacy was indeed unusual for the Irish community. See Chodorow,
Reproduction
, p. 197, on how women take refuge in romance as a reasonable response to actual economic and social subordination and dependence.

21.
The Higgins family photographs are in MS-SS. Sanger's descriptions of her mother are in
Autobiography
, p. 11 and
My Fight
, p. 4. On the influence of Anne Higgins and the contempt of the Higgins children for their father, see Grant Sanger interview, pp. 1-5.

22.
On FitzGerald see “Edward FitzGerald, 1809-1883, Poet and Translator,” in Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee,
Dictionary of National Biography
(New York, 1908), pp. 111-13; Alfred Terhume,
The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Translator of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(London: 1947), and Grant Sanger interview, p. 1.

23.
Autobiography
, p. 16,
My Fight
, p. 5. Author's interview with Margaret Sanger Marston, Arlington, Va., Feb. 1986.

24.
My Fight
, p. 12. On the Victorian culture of TB, see Susan Sontag,
Illness as Metaphor
(New York: 1979), p. 14. For an understanding of the etiology of TB, I am grateful to Paul Brandt-Rauf, M.D., of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, who lectured on the subject at the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine on July 26, 1984.
Anne Higgins's suffering was only alleviated by popular notions that identified victims of TB as particularly edified and gave rise to such enduring heroines as Mimi in Puccini's
La Boheme
, who, in a febrile blush, meets her death in a Parisian garret--beautifully and peacefully and without apparent remorse. This cultural stereotype may also have reinforced the refined aura Anne and her daughters so deliberately cultivated.

25.
My analysis of nineteenth-century contraception and American social behavior is based on a wide reading in the rich secondary source material now available. Among the best general treatments are the following: Smith-Rosenberg,
Disorderly Conduct
, esp. pp. 79-89 and 167-81; Carl Degler,
At
Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
(New York: 1980), pp. 3-85; John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York: 1988); Peter Gay,
The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
, Vol. 1:
Education of the Senses
(New York: 1984); Christopher Lasch,
Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged
(New York: 1977), pp. 3-22; Wiebe,
Search for Order
; Kennedy,
Birth Control
, pp. 36-71, and Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 19-33. For case studies on the communities of upstate New York earlier in the century, but providing important context for the Higgins family, see Paul E. Johnson,
A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 18151837
(New York: 1978), and Mary P. Ryan,
Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865
(Cambridge, Eng., and New York: 1981), esp. pp. 145-242.
Stuart M. Blumin, “The Hypothesis of Middle Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals,”
American Historical Review
90 (Apr. 1985), pp. 299-337, challenges the theory that a middle-class cohered on distinct economic grounds in the nineteenth century but nonetheless agrees that personal and social values converged in such a way as to define a perceptible middle-class experience, against which the Higgins family history can be judged.
On demographic trends and contraceptive use, specifically, see Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 3-18, 39-41 and 44-45. Especially important is his use of data compiled by Maris A. Vinovskis, “Demographic Changes in America from the Revolution to the Civil War: An Analysis of the Socio-Economic Determinants of Fertility Differentials and Trends in Massachusetts from 1765 to 1860,” doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1975, p. 12, and his citation of Charles Goodyear,
The Applications and Uses of Vulcanized Gum Elastic
(Connecticut: 1853). Also see the demographers Ainsley J. Coale and Melvin Zelnick,
New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States
(Princeton: 1963), pp. 36, 40; Linda Gordon,
Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America
(New York: 1976), esp. pp. 64-70; Degler,
At Odds
, pp. 210-26, D'Emilio and Freedman,
Intimate Matters
, pp. 57-66; Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,”
Feminist Studies
1:3 (Winter-Spring 1973), and Janet F. Brodie, “Family Limitation in American Culture: 1830-1900,” doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1982, esp. pp. 396-428. On the development of Christian sexual doctrine, see John T. Noonan, Jr.
Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists
, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass: 1986), pp. 31-55. The story of Onan is from Genesis 38: 8-10, quoted and analyzed in Noonan,
Contraception
, pp. 10 and 33-35, and in Gordon,
Woman's Body
, pp. 5-7. On the distinction between Hebrew and early Christian interpretations, also see Alvah Sulloway,
Birth Control and Catholic Doctrine
(New York: 1959), Chap. 3. For a brilliant interpretation of Augustinian doctrine and its historical significance, see Elaine Pagels,
Adam, Eve and the Serpent
(New York: 1988) and W. H. C. Frend, “The Triumph of Sin,” a review of Pagels in
The New York Review of Books
, June 30, 1988, pp. 27-30. Clinical studies of birth control practice from the 1930s confirm the endurance of withdrawal as a contraceptive practice. See Degler,
At Odds
, p. 212. On specific nineteenth century contraceptives, see One
Hundred Years of
Birth Control: An Outline of Its History
, pamphlet distributed at the First American Birth Control Conference, Nov. 1921, copy in MS-SS; Brodie, “Family Limitation in America,” pp. 56-57, 101-102, 145, 158, 161,167, 179-206, 375-78; Noonan,
Contraception
, pp. 392-94; Norman E. Himes,
Medical History of Contraception
(Baltimore: 1936), pp. 212-18; Gordon,
Woman's Body
, pp. 42-44, 64-66, 78-79, 86-87, 166-70; Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 10-13; Degler,
At Odds
, pp. 213-17. Folk remedies are the focus of Brodie, “Family Limitation in America,” pp. 61, 112-21, 136-38, 143, 360-67, 462-64.

26.
Brodie, “Family Limitation in America,” pp. 469-74; Degler,
At Odds
, pp. 262-64.

27.
An excellent comparison of the moral absolutism of Catholics and the relativism of Protestants is in Kennedy,
Birth Control
, pp. 143-44. On the nineteenth century struggle of “control v. conscience,” also see Gay,
Bourgeois Experience
, p. 263; on Roman Catholic stipulations, Sulloway,
Catholic Doctrine
, pp. 44-45, 198-99 and Noonan,
Contraception
, pp. 395-406. Noonan also covers the French experience on pp. 387-90. On the politics of American Catholicism, see Ellis,
American Catholicism
, p. 83.

28.
Autobiography
, p. 21, is less than candid about the Catholicism in her background. The Bible is in MS-SS. On the burials see Rev. Robert McNamara to Ronni MacLaren and Elissa Mautner, “Easter, 1977,” MS-SS, and Grant Sanger's interview with the author. On women and religion in the late nineteenth century and the rebellion of their daughters against piety, see Lasch's essay on Jane Addams in
New Radicalism
, p. 3, and Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity
(New Haven: 1973).

29.
Michael Higgins's pension records are in the files of the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, at the National Archives, Washington, D.C. He made his first application in 1896, alleging poor vision preventing his working, and he was awarded $6.00 a month. His condition was in no way the result of “excesses or vicious habits,” according to an affidavit filed for an increase (to $12 monthly) by a Corning physician in 1907. The intervention of his distinguished brother-in-law raised the award to $30 in 1911. See especially “Commissioner of the Bureau of Pensions (signature unclear) to Hon. W. G. Purcell,” Dec. 13, 1910, and “Special Act of the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,” Feb. 25, 1911, both in the National Archives. Also see Sen. William Purcell to Anne Higgins with Margaret's handwritten notations, May 23, 1910, MS-LC; and William Purcell to M.S., Sept. 25, 1926 and Oct. 25, 1928 with Margaret's scrawled note “and a good roman c too” in MS-SS. On William Purcell's service in Congress, see
Congressional Directory: 91st Congressional Session
, p. 92, and Purcell family genealogy, p. 4.

30.
Autobiography
, p. 16, photos in
My Fight
, Hersey, “Margaret Sanger,” p. 28, quoting a man named Charles Dolan.

31.
Though I have tried to excise psychological jargon from the narrative as much as possible, these views have been informed by readings in object-relations theory, which provides an account of personality development that forges an intermediary path between the instinctual determinism of Freud and the environmental determinism of the cultural school of psychoanalysis represented by Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, and others. Object-relations theory maintains that social relations from birth determine the course of the child's psychological growth, that personalities form and flourish, not in any single relationship, but through a dynamic series of connections with significant and beloved individuals. The achievement of an independent sense of self depends on the quality of the mother's primary nurture, which, in turn, affects secondary attachments with father and siblings, friends and colleagues, husband and children--pretty much common sense. Object-relations theory, and more particularly what is known today as “self-psychology,” place as much emphasis on the subjective reality of the analysand as revealed in conscious or “screen” memories--the very memories that biographers have at their disposal--as they do on the buried revelations of the unconscious that Freud spent so much time trying to uncover. The clinical particulars here are less important, however, than the validity for a biographer of an overall approach to personality that uses the psychoanalytic vocabulary to understand human development without succumbing to any didactic fixations. This is what I have tried to do throughout this book.
See especially, Heinz Kohut, M.D.,
How Does Analysis Cure
? (Chicago: 1984), which was edited after his death by Arnold Goldberg and Paul Stepansky and is more accessible to the lay reader than earlier writings, esp. pp. 54-56. For another variant of this approach and its relevance to the study of a gifted individual, see Alice Miller,
The Drama of the Gifted Child
, originally published as
Prisoners of Childhood
(New York: 1981), esp. pp. 9-21. Also see Margaret Mahler, “Thoughts about Development and Individuation,” in
The Psychological Study of the Child
(New York: 1963), pp. 307-22. My thanks especially to Peter and Cathy Buirski for acquainting me with the work of Kohut.
The specific memories I cite are from
Autobiography
, pp. 25-26, and
My Fight
, p. 18. Mention of Margaret's jealousy of Ethel is also in Jacqueline Van Voris's interview with Olive Byrne Richard, p. 6. “Their mother used to arrange Ethel, my mother's, hair in long curls, and Margaret said she hated Ethel because of the long curls and also because their mother spent so much time with her.”
Chodorow,
Reproduction
, p. 96, talks about the precarious situation of girls who do not form secure maternal attachments, and Phyllis Rose,
Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf
(New York: 1978), pp. 109-25, traces the pathways among emotion, creativity, and political commitment in her subject's life with admirable ingenuity and control. Reading Rose's book frankly forced me to consider my own work in a whole new light, one that I hope is respectful of Rose's insights without being unduly derivative. Also see Phyllis Rose, “Fact and Fiction in Biography,”
Writing of Women: Essays in a Renaissance
(Middletown, Conn.: 1985), pp. 64-85. Final thanks to my friend and neighbor, Francis Beaudry, M.D., for his many insights about the application of psychoanalytic theory to the study of creativity.