Woman of Valor (77 page)

11.
Margaret discusses the meaning of mysticism and of Rosicrucianism, specifically, in a letter to Lawrence Lader, Mar. 2, 1954, MS-SS, and in handwritten notes on correspondence with the Rosicrucians, in MS-LC. She liked them, as well, because of their interest in the enhanced spiritual powers of women and their sympathy for political feminism. See George Plummer to M.S., Apr. 13 and Apr. 19, 1944, and Apr. 14, 1944, MS-SS; and R. Swinburne Clymer, M.D.,
The Rosicrucians: Their Teaching, Their Manifestos
(Quakertown, Pa.: 1941). A 1974 undergraduate thesis by Barbara Livingston of Wesleyan University, entitled “Dreams and Inspirations: A Footnote to a Biography of Margaret Sanger,” provides an interesting summary of this fascination with the mystical and the occult, MS-SS. On “talking” to the dead, see M.S. Journal, July 28, 1919, MS-SS, and M.S. to Juliet Rublee, n.d (1923 or 24), MS-DC.

12.
Sanger's resentment of the Ferrerists over Peggy's illness is from my phone conversation with Nelle Dick; that she nevertheless courted them after the death is evident from Margaret Sanger, “To My Friends and Comrades,” in
Revolt
1 (Jan.-Mar. 1916), a short-lived anarchist journal edited by Hippolyte Havel, available at the New York Public Library.

13.
A sampling of Sanger's letters to and from her sons is in MS-SS. For the Grant Sanger quotes, see G.S. to M.S., Feb. 20, Mar. 6, and Nov. 17, 1918. These impressions and the Stuart Sanger memory are also taken from my personal interviews with Grant Sanger, Stuart Sanger, Alexander Sanger, and Margaret Sanger Marston. Again, my thanks to Alex for piecing together old family films.

14.
Edith How-Martyn to M.S., Mar. 26, 1916, MS-SS.

15.
Autobiography
, pp. 183, 186; Morris Kahn to “To Whom It May Concern,” Dec. 30, 1915, MS-LC, contains Sanger's margin notes on refusing to use it. Criticism of her trial strategy is in Max Eastman to M.S., Jan. 11, 1916, and Samuel Guggenheimer to M.S., Dec. 6, 1915, in MS-LC; support is in Bolton Hall to Leonard Abbott, Dec. 13, 1915; Leonard Abbott to M.S., “Saturday,” n.d. (1915), and Emma Goldman to M.S., Dec. 7, 1915, all in MS-LC. Also see M.S. to “To My Friends and Comrades, Jan. 5, 1916, MS-LC, and M.S., “To My Friends,”
Mother Earth
10:12 (Feb. 1916), p. 405.

16.
Autobiography
, p. 186. M.S., “To My Friends,” Jan. 26, 1916, soliciting letters to President Wilson and Judge Clayton of the Federal District Court, is in the Rose Pastor Stokes Papers, Department of Manuscript and Archives, Yale University Library, hereinafter RPS-Yale. A similar appeal on National Birth Control League letterhead, dated Feb. 7, 1916 is in RPS, Tamiment-NYU. Petitions to Judge Clayton and to the President from all over the country are in MS-LC. M.S. to Marie Stopes, n.d. (1915), “Torrington Square,” in the Marie Stopes Papers, in the Manuscript Division of the British Museum in London (hereinafter Stopes-BM), discusses a draft of the Wilson letter. Also see Marie Stopes to M.S., n.d. (1915), enclosing a personal letter she sent to Wilson and a copy of the official letter from “H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes et al. to the President of the United States,” Sept. 1915, both in MS-LC. For the effect of all the publicity, see “Mrs. Sanger's Federal Trial Scrapbook,” MS-LC; James Waldo Fawcett, “The Sanger Case,”
The Call
, Jan. 13, 1916, 6:3; and subsequent articles on the trial in
The Call
, Jan. 18, 19, 21.
The New York Times
also covered the story. See, for example,“Mrs. Sanger Draws Crowd,” Jan 19, 1916, 22:4. For general support mail, see Edric B. Smith to M.S., Jan. 29, 1916; Georgia Kalsch to “Dear Comrades,” Jan. 18, 1916, and B. Greenberg to M.S. Feb. 19, 1916, all in MS-LC.

17.
Margaret Sanger, Hotel Brevoort Speech, Jan. 17, 1916, MS-LC. Mrs. Sanger's Federal Trial Scrapbook, MS-LC. Correspondence regarding the dinner and a list of prospective attendees are in RPS, Tamiment-NYU.
Sanger was considerably less than forthright in her
Autobiography
, p. 189, about the support she had received from the National Birth Control League, an omission that reflected the long and intense rivalry she was to engage in with Mary Ware Dennett. Other discrepancies in her account of these events--such as that Walter Lippmann had been present, when, in fact, it was his colleague, Herbert Croly--seem the result of honest confusion after more than twenty years, but with respect to anyone who ever crossed her, such as Dennett or Emma Goldman, she clearly altered the facts.

18.
Clippings from Mrs. Sanger's Federal Trial Scrapbook, MS-LC, include “U.S. Drops Birth Control Suit Against Woman Rebel,”
The Call
, Feb. 21, 1916, 3:3, and “Drops Mrs. Sanger's Case, Federal Actions Followed by Plans for a Celebration,”
The New York Times
, Feb. 19, 1916, 12:2.

19.
“Mrs. Sanger Glad: Thanks Authorities for Aiding Birth Control Cause by Publicity,” clipping from
New York Herald
Feb. 21, 1916, in scrapbook, MS-LC. Margaret Sanger, “Original Speech Given in 1916,” with handwritten notation that she delivered it 119 times, in MS-LC. Margaret Sanger, “Chicago Address to Women,” n.d. (1916), and “Itinerary for Feb. 6-17, 1916 for M. Sanger, Son, and Secretary,” MS-SS. Details of the stockyard speech in Chicago are in Bernice J. Guthmann,
The Planned Parenthood Movement in Illinois, 1923-1965
, a 1965 pamphlet, published by the Planned Parenthood Association, Chicago Area, and collected by the author in a 1976 research trip there. The Baldwin recollection is from Harlan B. Phillips, Interview with Roger Baldwin, Columbia University Oral History Project, 1953-54. Vol. 1., pp. 48-49. (Baldwin misidentifies the year as 1912.) Also see William M. Morehouse, “The Speaking of Margaret Sanger in the Birth Control Movement from 1916 to 1937,” doctoral dissertation, Purdue University, 1968, pp. 56, 74-75, 89-91, a copy of which is in MS-SS.

20.
Alexander Berkman to M.S., Dec. 9, 1915, MS-SS, is terribly affectionate and also offers condolences on Peggy's death, saying, “I would hold you in my arms again.” Also see “Edward” to M.S. n.d. (1914) MS-LC. Berkman either wrote about birth control without a byline or using the pseudonym of “Reb Raney.” See “Not Guilty,”
The Blast
1:1 (Jan. 9, 1916); “The Meaning of Margaret Sanger's Stand,”
The Blast
1:6 (Feb. 19, 1916); and the cover cartoon showing a physician handing birth control information to a well-dressed woman and turning away a poor woman and her children, with the caption “The Boss's wife can buy information to limit her family. The Boss can buy your children to supply his factories with cheap labor.”
The Blast
1:5 (Feb. 12, 1916).
The Blast
is available as a Greenwood Reprint (Fairfield, Conn.: 1968). A clipping of the Anita Block editorial comment in
The Call
is in the Rose Pastor Stokes Papers, Tamiment-NYU. Also see Marie Equi to M.S., October 20, 1916, MS-LC.
Years later, on depositing this letter in her papers at Smith College, Margaret penciled in the following description of Marie: “a rebellious soul, generous kind, brave, but so radical in her thinking that she was almost an outcast. Upon arrival she captured every well known woman who comes to Portland. Her reputation is Lesbian but to me she was like a crushed falcon which had braved the storm and winds of time and needed tenderness and love. I liked Marie always.”

21.
Goldman in the wings is from
New York Herald
, Feb. 21, 1916, clippings, MS-LC; “Respectable” quote is from “Observations and Comments,”
Mother Earth
, 10:5 (July 1915) and Reitman remarks from “The 1915-16 Tour,”
Mother Earth
11:8 (Oct. 1916); persecution of Goldman (with recognition that she was being singled out especially harshly) is in “Emma Goldman's Defense,”
The Masses
8:8 (June 1916) and “Birth Control,”
The Masses
8:9 (July 1916). Also see Emma Goldman, “My Arrest and Preliminary Hearing” in
Mother Earth
11:1 (Mar. 1916) and
Mother Earth
11:2 (Apr., 1916) and 11:3 (May 1916), essentially entire issues devoted to the birth control controversy that never once mention Sanger. Subsequent issues of
Mother Earth
contain only a scattered article or two on birth control. Sanger telegram in “Carnegie Hall Meeting endorsed by M. Sanger in Telegram,”
The New York Times
, Mar. 2, 1916, 20:4, and statement for the later Emma Goldman rally, n.d. (1916), MS-LC; clippings on Rose Stokes at Carnegie Hall, RPS, Tamiment-NYU.

22.
Conversation on pacificism is from Harold Hersey, “Margaret Sanger: The Biography of the Birth Control Pioneer,” New York (1938), p. 223, also cited in James Reed,
The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue
(Princeton: 1984), p. 96.

23.
Autobiography
, p. 204. For “pink tea” reference, see “Copy of part of Mrs. Dennett's statement,” Nov. 18, 1921, MS-LC, in which she says Margaret repeatedly spoke of organization and legislation as “bourgeois, pink-tea and lady-like.”

24.
See especially Mary Ware Dennett to Marie Stopes, Oct. 31, 1921, Stopes-BM. Christopher Lasch's profile of Dennett in James,
Notable American Women
, says that her divorce was over the fact that she had become a suffragist.

25.
“Birth-Control,”
The Masses
8:9 (July 1916), p. 21. A copy of the bill introduced by Abraham I. Shiplacoff, Socialist, is in MS-LC. Also see Shiplacoff to Frederick Blossom, Feb. 20 and Feb. 27, 1917, and M.S. to Shiplacoff, Mar. 2, 1917, on her decision to endorse Assemblyman Greenberg's version of the bill. Also see Mary Ware Dennett, “Beating Around the Bush With State Legislation,”
Birth Control Laws: Shall We Keep Them, Change Them or Abolish Them
? (New York: 1926), pp. 72-93; and Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 97-105. The best documentary record of the Sanger-Dennett controversy as it developed is in Dennett's letters to Marie Stopes, Stopes-BM. See especially, Stopes to Dennett, Jan. 5, 1920, and Dennett to Stopes, Jan. 27, 1920, June 14, 1921, Sept. 2, 1921, and Dec. 30, 1921. Also see the Marie Stopes papers, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, hereinafter Stopes-Wellcome: Stopes to Dennett, Nov. 19, 1921, and July 31, 1931.

26.
Margaret Sanger,
Birth Control Review
(Jan., 1919) p. 2. and
Birth Control: The Proceedings of the First American Birth Control Conference
(New York: 1922), pp. 91-92, both cited in Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 102-103.

27.
Dennett,
Birth Control Laws
. Reed,
Birth Control Movement
.

28.
Autobiography
, pp. 143-48. The autobiography, as in so many other respects, takes some liberty with the facts here, embellishing the dimension of her Dutch investigation, turning what had been only days into months. Also see Johannes Rutgers to M.S., Nov. 15, 1916, May 16, 1917, Oct. 10, 1920, MS-LC. Leonard Abbott to M.S., Feb. 11, 1916, MS-LC, and Henriette Hendrixholtz, “Aletta Jacobs,”
Birth Control Review
12:5 (May 1928), p. 139.

29.
Margaret Sanger, “Chicago Address,” MS-SS;
Autobiography
, p. 190.

30.
Paul Starr,
The Social Transformation of American Medicine
, (New York: 1987), pp. 180-97 (clinic data on pp. 191-92).

31.
S. Adolphus Knopf, M.D., “Birth Control: Its Medical, Social, Economic and Moral Aspects,”
The Survey
37:11 (Nov. 18, 1916), pp. 161-64, reprint of an address delivered at the 44th Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association, Cincinnati, Ohio, Oct. 27, 1916. C. V. Drysdale,
The Small Family System: Is It Injurious or Immoral
? (New York: 1914), pp. 59-62, applauds the Dutch example. Also see “Judge's Views Delight Birth Control Advocates,”
The New York Times Magazine
5:8:1 (Oct. 22, 1916), and “Abraham Jacobi Favors Regulation in Address to Free Synagogue,”
The New York Times
, Nov. 29, 1915, 18:4, and “Dr. Jacobi Presides Over Meeting and Urges Physician Advisors as in Europe,”
NYT
May 27, 1915. Finally, see Kennedy,
Birth Control
, pp. 173-74.

32.
The actions of the committee were reported in
Pediatrics
29 (1917), pp. 17-23, cited in Kennedy,
Birth Control
, p. 174. Dickinson's remarks are in
Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics
23 (1916), pp. 185-90, cited in Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 167-68. Also see Starr,
Social Transformation
, pp. 140-44, 215-32, 252-57, 260-66.

33.
Robert Dickinson to M.S., Nov. 7, 1945, MS-SS, recalls his rebuke. M.S.,
Autobiography
, pp. 210-15, claims that four other doctors did offer her support, on the condition that she find a doctor to staff the clinic, but the only confirmation is in William J. Robinson to M.S., July 1916, MS-LC, from which this material is taken. Also see “Mrs. Sanger Plans Clinic,”
The New York Times
, July 22, 1916, 4:3, and “For Birth Control Clinic,”
NYT
, Sept. 12, 1916, 11:4.

8: THE COMPANY SHE KEPT

1.
A photo marked “46 Amboy St., Brownsville, Brooklyn,” is in MS-SS. A copy of the circular is reprinted in M.S.,
My Fight for Birth Control
, p. 155.