Woman of Valor (75 page)

14.
Edward Carpenter,
Love's Coming of Age: A Series of Papers on the Relations of the Sexes
(Kansas: 1927), esp. pp. 28-51, and C. V. Drysdale,
The Small Family System, Is It Injurious or Immoral
? (New York: 1914). On Neo-Malthusianism and labor, see Ledbetter,
Malthusian League
, pp. 87-115, and Sheila Rowbotham,
Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women in History from the 17th Century to the Present
(London: 1976), pp. 70-76.
Both Besant and Carpenter were Fabian Socialists. Even in the 1920s, the Labour Party, then in power, refused to endorse contraception, despite efforts to place it on the party platform by Mrs. Bertrand Russell and other prominent members.

15.
Sanger Journal, Dec. 22, Dec. 28, 1914, MS-LC; Havelock Ellis, My
Life
(New York: 1940), p. 520. The first evidence of Sanger lying about her age as an adult is on the Bertha Watson passport in MS-LC.
A more skeptical view of Karezza is in H.E. to M.S., Jan. 1921, MS-LC, in which he cautions that her apparent enthusiasm may be a bit excessive--“while there is much good and beautiful” about it when it can be achieved, there is “no need to belittle other things.” On Stockham and her mentor, John Humphrey Noyes of the Oneida Colony, see Janet Brodie, “Family Limitation in American Culture: 1830-1900,” doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, 1982, pp. 69-71.

16.
Ellis,
My Life
, esp. pp. 59, 84-86, 162-63, 169-71. Also see Phyllis Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis: A Biography
(New York: 1980), Chap. 1; and Arthur Calder-Marshall,
A Life of Havelock Ellis
(New York: 1956).

17.
The ten volumes were condensed for a Modern Library edition in the 1930s which contains the essentials and is a good deal more readable than the originals. See Havelock Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
: Vols. 1 and 2 (New York: 1936), esp. Part II, “The Sexual Impulse in Women.” The best analysis of Ellis's contributions to the history of sexual ideology is in Paul Robinson,
The Modernization of Sex
(New York: 1976), pp. 1-41. A brief but elegant portrait of Ellis appears in Fran¸ois Lafitte, “Havelock Ellis,”
Alta: University of Birmingham Review 5
(Spring, 1968). Professor Lafitte, the son of Françoise Lafitte Cyon, the companion of Ellis's mature years, shared this article and his personal recollections of Ellis and Sanger in an interview of Jan. 29, 1987, at his home in Birmingham, Eng., for which I am very grateful. Sanger's comments are in
Autobiography
, p. 94.

18.
Ellis's quotes on Freud are from Joseph Wortis, M.D.,
Fragments of an Analysis with Freud
(New York: 1954). Wortis was a follower of Ellis who became interested in psychoanalysis and was analyzed by Freud in Vienna during the 1930s. See esp. pp. 11-16, 30, 45, 63, 168, 175, 199.
Wortis's own critique of Freud in his “Retrospect and Conclusions,” pp. 185-203, reflects much of Ellis's thinking and quotes letters from Ellis warning him against psychoanalysis. Ellis and Wortis foreshadowed the criticism of Freud explored by the ego psychologists in their emphasis on complex family and social relationships and situations over sexual absolutism, although they were not willing to accept even the basic analytic assumptions that shape this revisionism. I am grateful to James Reed for this citation. See Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, p. 91, and p. 398, f.n.
I am also grateful to Joseph Wortis, who reminisced about Ellis with me on Mar. 13, 1987, at his home in Brooklyn, New York, after I had written a first draft of this chapter. Also see Joseph Wortis, M.D., “Havelock Ellis,”
Recent Advances in Biological Psychiatry
(New York: 1960). The relationship of Ellis and Freud is also explored in Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, pp. 232-35, 291-93, 387-93. Dr. Wortis, I should add, takes great exception to the Grosskurth biography, which, he claims, is biased toward Freud and provides a mistaken evaluation of Ellis's personality and intellect, unfairly reducing his stature to that of “some kind of kook.”

19.
For these viewpoints also see Havelock Ellis,
The Task of Social Hygiene
(Boston: 1914); reprinted with an introduction by Sheila M. Rothman, (New York: 1978), pp. 49-133, and
Essays in Wartime: Further Studies in the Task of Social Hygiene
(Boston and New York: 1917), esp. p. 186 on marriage.

20.
Ellis,
Studies
, especially in Vol 1., Part II: “Analysis of the Sexual Impulse” and “Love and Pain,” and Part IV, “Sexual Inversion,” passim. The references to fetishism and the material in direct quotation about erotic symbolism are also from
Studies
, Vol. 2 of this edition, p. 113, also quoted in Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, p. 91, and Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, p. 228. Ellis's views on the uniqueness of human sexuality informed the final volume of his studies, originally published in 1910 as
Sex in Relation to Society
.
Also see, Havelock Ellis, “The Love Rights of Women,”
The Birth Control Review
2:5 (June 1918), pp. 5-6, and Robinson,
Modernization
, pp. 6-27. Criticism of Ellis's views on female homosexuality and his heterosexual imperative are in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936,” in her
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America
(New York: 1985), pp. 275-81. Finally, see Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, pp. 216-235 passim, though her analysis of Ellis's sexual theories is, in my view, the weakest part of the biography. Sanger's comment on Ellis's explicitness is from
Autobiography
, p. 94. Her comments on lesbianism are in
Woman and the New Race
(New York: 1920), pp. 18-19.

21.
Ellis,
Studies
, Vol. 1, Part II, “The Sexual Impulse in Women,” passim. Havelock Ellis,
Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characteristics
(New York: 1904), esp. pp. 1-20, and p. 362. Similar views about female sexuality were also advanced at this time in England by Edward Carpenter and by the German sexologist, Dr. Iwan Bloch. See Peter Gay,
The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud
, Vol. 1:
Education of the Sexes
(New York: 1984), p. 133. Also, see Ellis,
Task of Social Hygiene
, pp. 113-33, and
Essays in Wartime
, p. 233; Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, pp. 225 and 229-31, and Robinson,
Modernization
.
I have taken the polarity of “guilt v. responsibility” in Ellis's writings about sex from Professor Lafitte's article “Havelock Ellis.” On romanticism and materialism in sexuality, also see Herbert W. Richardson,
Nun, Witch, Playmate: The Americanization of Sex
(New York: 1971), esp. p. 12. A measured criticism of Ellis's sexual ideology is in Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks,
Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis
(London: 1977), p. 23, and of Sanger's, in Linda Gordon and Ellen Dubois, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Dangers and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist and Sexual Thought,”
Feminist Studies
9:1 (Spring 1983), p.18.

22.
Ellis,
My Life
, 388-447, Robinson,
Modernization
, pp. 3, 29-33, 19195.

23.
Ellis,
My Life
, pp. 223-34, 244-68, 348, 388-89, 447. On Edith's lesbianism, see M. S. to Vincent Brome, Jan. 6, 1954, MS-SS; and Françoise Lafitte Cyon to M.S., Dec. 1, 1955, uncollected letters now in MS-SS; Calder-Marshall,
Life of Havelock Ellis
, p. 143, and Mrs. Havelock Ellis,
Steve's Woman
(New York: 1909), published in England as
Kit's Woman
. Grosskurth says that Ellis identified Schreiner as the only “true woman of genius” he ever knew, which, in this respect, certainly delimits the nature of his attraction to Margaret Sanger.

24.
Françoise Delisle, (“Delisle” was an anagram of the French “de Ellis”),
Friendship's Odyssey
(London: 1946), pp. 278-79. Calder-Marshall,
Life of Havelock Ellis
, pp. 249-55 accepts Cyon's impression of a gradually transformed relationship; Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, pp. 285-87 has doubts, pointing out that Cyon never explicitly states that there was conventional consummation of their relationship.

25.
H.E. to M.S., Dec. 30, 1914, Jan. 5, Jan. 6, Jan. 22, Feb. 2, Feb 27, and “Friday afternoon” (n.d.) 1915, all in MS-LC. For an interpretation of the Reading Room of the British Museum as symbolic of liberation to women of the era, see Clive Bell,
Virginia Woolf: A Biography
, p. 145.

26.
H.E. to M.S., Jan. 13, Jan. 15, Feb. 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, Mar. 29, Apr. 1, 3, 8, 9, 21, 22, 28, 1915, MS-LC. Ellis himself loved Spain and had written quite passionately about the countryside and the people in Havelock Ellis,
The Soul of Spain
(London: 1908).

27.
I emphasize this point because the impression of a complete compatibility is so firm in Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, p. 94, and in the Ellis biographies, especially Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, 242-53, 255-56. Grosskurth also says that Ellis did not know about Portet, though she does not document this assertion, and his letters quite clearly suggest otherwise. See H.E. to M.S., Mar. 15, Apr. 22, May 27, June 1, 3, and 17, 1915, in MS-LC. Ellis's letter to his wife is quoted in
My Life
, p. 550. The relationship with “Mneme” is chronicled in Grosskurth,
idem
, pp. 161-62, 257.

28.
Ellis,
My Life
, pp. 337-43, 513-19, Calder-Marshall,
Life of Havelock Ellis
, pp. 198-201, and Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, 247-53. H.E. to M.S., Mar. 13, 1915, MS-LC, quotes Edith's letter about her, which is reprinted in
My Life
, p. 437, with the “fanatical and unbalanced” part left out. Also see H.E. to M.S., Mar. 15, 1915. Margaret's comments on Edith are in the Brome letter cited above.

29.
H.E. to M.S., June 1, 3, July 8, 14, 15, 22, Aug. 25, 29, Sept. 1, 6, 1915, in MS-LC, Calder-Marshall,
Life of Havelock Ellis
, p. 205. In her autobiography, Margaret wrote that there had been discussion of Edith's bringing her daughter, Peggy, to Europe, but Grosskurth finds no evidence to support this claim, see Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, pp. 251-52. Edith's letter is quoted in Ellis,
My Life
.

30.
M.S. to Vincent Brome, Jan. 6, 1954, MS-SS. A letter to Calder-Marshall from the same period is completely evasive on these issues and calls his questions “impertinent,” also in MS-SS.

31.
I am struck by the similarity of Sanger's situation and Margaret Mead's, as described by her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, in her enchanting memoir,
With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson
(New York: 1984), p. 127. Bateson says Mead “moved generously through a diversity of relationships,” that while she might have wished for more order in her personal affairs--and wanted the intimacy of having shared many experiences with only one significant companion--she accepted this fragmentation as the price of her professional autonomy.

32.
See especially Margaret Sanger, “Havelock Ellis,” an editorial clipped from the
Birth Control Review
, Jan. 21, 1929, MS-LC, and M.S. and Dorothy Gordon, “Let's Talk It Over,” transcript of a radio interview, July 17, 1939, on the occasion of Ellis's death, further discussed in Chapter 18. Also see Havelock Ellis,
Little Essays of Love and Virtue
(New York: 1922) and
The Dance of Life
(Cambridge: 1923), both offering light, philosophic reflections on love and life that convinced Sanger of Ellis's essential humanism, and the importance of sexual expression to sane living. Sanger reviewed
Little Essays
in
Birth Control Review
7:4 (Apr. 1923), p. 95.
When Ellis's writings were condensed and republished in the United States in 1933, she wrote in M.S. to H.E., n.d. (1933), MS-SS: “& now you have combined some of the essentials from your ‘studies' with the findings of modern reports & one feels a great satisfaction in the result. I am deep in it now & as always when reading your books I melt in reverence & admiration for your great spirit & wisdom.”

33.
On Ellis's politics see Grosskurth,
Havelock Ellis
, pp. 259-60, which quotes his own description of his interest in “socialization” from
The Labour Manual of 1895
. Also, Ellis,
Man and Woman
, pp. 1-20, 122-23, and
Task of Social Hygiene
, esp. the introduction, pp. 1-48, “The Significance of a Falling Birth Rate,” pp. 181-92, “Eugenics and Love,” pp. 195-97, “Individualism and Socialism,” pp. 381-405. On eugenics in the United States see, Donald K. Pickens,
Eugenics and the Progressives
(Nashville, Tenn.: 1968), esp. pp. 3, 12, 18, 28-29; John Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925
(New York: 1974), pp. 149-50, 158-162; and the more recent study by Daniel J. Kevles,
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
(New York: 1985), first excerpted in a four-part series in
The New Yorker
(October 7-29, 1984). Many of these observations come from Part II of that series. Another example of a progressive argument for the compatibility of eugenics and social reform is in Scott Nearing,
The Super Race: An American Problem
(New York: 1912), esp. pp. 15-24, 26-27, 41-42. The Kropotkin quote is from his lecture to the Eugenics Congress in London in 1905.