Woman of Valor (86 page)

15.
Dickinson's comments are in “England and Birth Control,” notes made in 1926, RLD-CL, cited in Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, p. 177. Also see CMH minutes for Jan. 21, 1926 and Dec. 10, 1926, cited in Reed,
idem
. A transcript of the hearing before the Board of Charities on Jan. 15, 1926, is in MS-LC. Members of the panel were Lee K. Frankel, M.D., Wm. R. Stewart, M.D., and Richard J. Kevin, M.D. Their private comments to Michael M.Davis, of the Rockefeller-funded Committee on Dispensary Development, which had endorsed the Dickinson-Sanger merger plan, are documented in the CMH minutes for Jan. 17, 1927, cited in Reed,
idem
, pp. 178-79.

16.
“Annual Report: Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau,” Dec. 1, 1929-Nov. 1, 1930, MS-SS. Also see, Marie E. Kopp, Ph.D.,
Birth Control in Practice: Analysis of 10,000 Cases and Stories of The Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau
(New York: 1934). Various directories of staff nurses and doctors, all of them women and many of them also affiliates of local hospitals, are in MS-SS. A memo from Sanger to Hazel Zbrowskie, the administrator of the clinic, dated Feb. 2, 1935, directs her to advertise the availability of evening hours for working women, MS-LC. On Sanger's scrambling for funds, see M.S. to Edwin Embree of the Julius Rosenwald Fund and Embree to M.S., May 9, 1929, MS-LC. The clinic's $30,000 budget in 1928 was largely self-financing, with contributions of more than $500 to make up the small deficit coming from Mrs. Otto Kahn, Mrs. Thomas Cochran, Mrs. Henry Phipps, and an R. J. Caldwell. Rosenwald then personally pledged $1,000. The sale of the cultured pearls, the scheduling of an afternoon tea and other fund-raising initiatives are discussed in BCCRB Report of Board of Manager Meetings, Sept. 19, 1929, Dec. 2, 1929, June 11, 1930, MS-LC.

17.
“Report of Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, January 1, 1929 to November 28, 1929,” MS-SS. Finally, see M.S., “Education and the Birth Control Clinic,” unpublished manuscript, 1930, MS-LC.

18.
“Raid Sanger Clinic on Birth Control--Dismissal Predicted,”
The New York Times
, Apr. 16, 1929, 31:3. “Doctors Aroused Over Raid,”
NYT
, Apr. 19, 1929, 27:2; “500 in Court to Aid 5 Seized at Clinic,”
NYT
, Apr. 20, 1929, 21:6. Stories ran in the paper for more than a week, and regularly thereafter through the resolution of the trial and the demotion of Sullivan: “Doctors are Freed in B.C. Raid,”
NYT
, May 15, 1929, 20:4-5. Also see “The Raid,”
Birth Control Review
13:5 (May 1929), p. 139. “The Raid,”
BCR
13:6 (June, 1929), p. 154, and editorial on p. 148 of the same issue; Margaret Sanger, “The Birth Control Raid,”
The New Republic
, May 1, 1929, clipping in MS-LC. Finally see J. J. Goldstein to M.S. June 3, 1929, and M.S. to J. J. Goldstein, June 6, 1929, MS-LC; M.S. to Havelock Ellis, May 29, 1929, MS-LC; and M.S. to Juliet Rublee “Friday 26” (1929), MS-DC.

19.
“Maternity Research Council Memorandum on Plan as made originally with Mrs. Sanger…” dated “9-17-29,” MS-LC. Minutes of BCCRB Advisory Committee, Nov. 20, 1929, MS-LC. M.S. to R.L.D., Nov. 26, 1929, MS-LC. The extensive debate over the matter is chronicled in the following letters: Louise Bryant to M.S., Feb. 25, 1929; E. M. East to M.S., Mar. 29, 1929; John Favill to M.S., Mar. 14, 1929; Adolf Meyer to M.S., Mar. 14, 1929; M.S. to John B. Solley, Jr., M.D., Mar. 15, 1929; Ira. S. Wile to M.S., Mar. 15, 1929; Benjamin Tilton, M.D., to M.S., Mar. 27, 1929; Louise Bryant to M.S., July 17, 1929; M.S. to Adolf Meyer, Dec. 14, 1929; M.S. to Stuart Mudd, Dec. 31, 1929; Morns Waldman to M.S., Dec. 12, 1929, and M.S. to Waldman, Dec. 31, 1929, all in MS-LC. The Mudd quote is from Stuart Mudd, M.D., to M.S., June 30, 1929, MS-LC; the Sanger quote, from M.S. to Stuart Mudd, Oct. 17, 1929, MS-SS; and the Dickinson quote, from R.L.D. to “My Dear Doctor,” Dec. 4, 1929, MS-LC. Also see R.L.D. to M.S., Dec. 4, 1929, and M.S. to R.L.D., Dec. 9, 1929, MS-LC.

20.
John A. Hartwell, M.D., president of the New York Academy of Medicine to M.S., Dec. 20, 1929, and Sanger to Hartwell, Dec. 31, 1929, MS-SS; Hannah M. Stone to M.S., Jan. 12, 1930, MS-SS; Mary Macaulay to M.S., Jan. 31, 1930, MS-LC. “Excerpt from letter written to Mrs. Margaret Sanger by Linsly H. Williams, M.D.,” Dec. 31, 1931, MS-SS. Linsly R. Williams, M.D., to M.S., May 23, 1932, MS-LC. The best summary of these events is in Ruth Topping, “File Memorandum: Action of New York Academy of Medicine in Relation to Birth Control,” May 5, 1931, Bureau of Social Hygiene papers, Rocky-RG2. Also see Hannah M. Stone, M.D., “The NYAM and Birth Control,”
Birth Control Review
16:6 (June 1932), pp. 188-89.

21.
On the initial dispute over the study, see “Marie Kopp Study: Summary of Controversy Over Funding and Attribution,” n.d., MS-SS. Also, Ruth Topping “File Memorandum: BCCRB Report--Providing Mrs. Sanger with a Copy,” Feb. 18, 1931, BSH, Rocky-RG2; M.S. to R.L.D., Oct. 5, 1933, and M.S. to H.E.,July 15, 1933, MS-SS. Finally, see Marie E. Kopp,
Birth Control in Practice: An Analysis of 10,000 Cases of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau
(New York: 1934), foreword and pp. 1-47.
Another perspective on the Sanger--Dickinson relationship is in M.S. to Dr. Wells P. Eagleton, Nov. 29, 1932, MS-LC, previously cited. Sanger was apparently sufficiently accommodating to Dickinson that she asked him to speak in her stead before physicians who protested her presence at medical meetings. “You have done exactly the best and biggest thing--to fight on issues and principles and
not
on personalities,” she wrote when her invitation was withdrawn. For Dickinson's change of heart on Sanger, see R.L.D. to M.S., Dec. 14, 1933, MS-LC; R.L.D., “Concerning Teamwork for Birth Control,” memorandum to the directors of the American Birth Control League, Mar. 23, 1937, copies in MS-SS, and in the Norman Himes papers of the Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard, also cited in Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, p. 180. The final quote is from R.L.D. to M.S., May 20, 1942, MS-SS. Also see Dorothy Dickinson Barbour to M.S., n.d. (1950s, after her father's death), MS-SS.

14: A COMMUNITY OF WOMEN

1.
Admonition to Sanger about the dangers of her leadership hold are in John Price Jones Corporation, “A Survey and Plan of Fund-Raising for the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control,” copies in MS-SS and MS-LC. See especially pp. 108-23. The report cost $3,500, which was paid by Noah Slee. Sanger's acid response to paying that amount, only to be told to step down, is in a note attached to her personal secretary's letter paying the bill. See Florence Rose to J.P.J. Company, Sept. 29, 1930, MS-LC.

2.
M.S. to Francis Warren, Jan. 13, 1932, and M.S. to Marjorie Prevost, Mar. 28, 1932, both in MS-LC.

3.
Sanger's own description of Stone is preserved in a handwritten eleven page Journal entry for July 14, 1941, the day following Stone's funeral, MS-SS, from which the quote is taken, and in a public statement that was included in “Hannah M. Stone--In Memoriam,”
The Journal of Fertility
6:4 (Aug. 1941), pp. 109-110, copy in MS-SS. An editorial from
The Nation
, July 26, 1941, also cited in this memorial volume, p. 112, provides additional perspective. Miscellaneous Sanger-Stone correspondence from the 1920s and 30s is in MS-SS. Only one letter suggests even a hint of any acrimony. On Apr. 1, 1930, Sanger complained to Stone that a recent publication of hers mistakenly listed the BCCRB as a division of the American Birth Control League and left off Sanger's name altogether. “I know you don't mean it,” she wrote, “but it seems to me that it is time for us who are working together to come out and stick together and make no bones of where we stand.” The mistake was never repeated. The Mary McCarthy quote is from
The Group
(New York: 1954).

4.
Lena Levine's recollections are from her remarks in
Proceedings of the Birth Control and National Recovery Conference
(Washington, D.C. 1934):, p. 361, MS-SS. The Bruno recollections are from Regina Markell Morantz, “Interview with Gerda Bruno, M.D.,” Lawrence, Kansas, 1976. Morantz shared the taped interview along with additional recollections of Bruno's that were not on the tape in a private letter to the author in 1976. Bruno, who fled the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, did not deny that eugenic considerations underlay some of the support for the early birth control movement, but she insisted that Margaret Sanger was “different” and that overall, “humanitarian motives” predominated and masked any less benign impulses. A clinic “Doctor's List” for Sept. 1935 identifies fifteen employees including Stone and Levine. “Memo: to Mrs. Sanger from M.W.,” Mar. 15, 1933, describes a visit to the clinic by Sophie Aberle, M.D., of Yale Medical School, who came in search of instruction for her students.

5.
The Appel recollections are from my own interview with Cheri Appel, M.D., on Feb. 1, 1989, in Manhattan, the transcript of which is now at Smith. A Hunter College graduate, Appel was one of five women in her class at New York University Medical School in 1927. She went to work at the Women's Infirmary in Manhattan and then interned in gynecology at Morrisania Hospital in the Bronx. She was married to Benjamin Segal, M.D. Hazel Zaborowski, executive secretary of the clinic, to Dr. Cheri Appel, Feb. 21, 1936, arranges for her to return to work one day a week, after she has been absent having a baby of her own. Also see Macaulay's résumé, letters of recommendation, and her correspondence with Sanger, 1929-1931, all in MS-LC. The quotation is from an undated letter from England, apparently in 1931. Florence Rose, “Summary of Activities, Feb. 24, 1936,” is in MS-SS. Additional Rose papers and correspondence are also collected under her own name at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, hereinafter FR-SS. Finally, see “Lectures Arranged from N.Y. Office,” Dec. 1, 1934, to Dec. 1, 1935, MS-SS and Cecil Damon to M.S., Aug. 3, 1936, MS-SS.

6.
The Sanger correspondence with Marcella Sideri, 1928-1932, is in MSLC, see especially Sanger to Sideri, May 26, 1931. Lini Fuhr to M.S., Jan. 12, 1936, MS-LC, is in a file that also contains an article on her return from Spain from
The Daily Worker
, May 20, 1937, and subsequent correspondence containing biographical information.
I have offered examples of satisfactory staff relations, in part to dispute the view of Sanger as an uncompromising elitist offered by Linda Gordon in
Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America
(New York: 1976). Gordon is correct that Sanger favored vibrant, intelligent, and personally loyal staff, that she demanded a high level of dedication from them, and that she often drove them beyond reasonable endurance, but these are characteristic traits of impassioned reformers, and hardly seem deserving of unqualified condemnation. Gordon's further demand that the clinic ought to have been unionized is well-motivated but unrealistic. Certainly comparable health care and social work facilities had not begun to unionize either. See Gordon,
idem
, p. 329. In 1939, Sanger did agree to meet with a former employee of the American Birth Control League who was interested in organizing clinic labor. “I have always believed it wise to listen to complaints & I have never avoided expressing my own opinion re: unionization of labor & where such should apply,” she wrote in M.S. to D. K. Rose, Mar. 25, 1939, MS-SS, making it clear that the clinic was not one of those places.

7.
On BCCRB finances, John Price Jones Corporation, “Survey and Plan,” copies in MS-SS and MS-LC. On the financial and organizational struggles of the ABCL and the NCMH (the Committee on Maternal Health went “National” in title after 1930), see Helen Payne to Miss Topping, Nov. 12, 1932, Bureau of Social Hygiene Memo, Rocky-RG2; annual memorandums on the ABCL funding requests for 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1937 in Rocky-RG2; Arthur Packard (head of the Rockefeller charitable staff), memos “To Files--NCMH (Conversation with Dr. Louise Bryant),” dated May 8, 1934 and July 9, 1934; and Raymond Fosdick to J. D. Rockefeller, Jr., Feb. 5, 1934, all in Rockefeller Archives, RG2. Also see NCMH,
A Statement of Its Programs and Needs, November, 1940
, pamphlet in the archives of the New York Academy of Medicine, and, finally, James Reed,
The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to Public Virtue
(Princeton: 1984), pp. 181-93.

8.
Cost of house and discussion of the finances is in Minutes of the Board of Managers, BCCRB, Sept. 19, 1929, Dec. 2, 1929, June 11, 1930, June 12, 1930; and in J.N.H.S. to Mrs. Felix Fuld, Feb. 18, 1937, all in MS-LC. There is a discrepancy in the figures with the Slee letter citing $75,000 as the original purchase price, but I assumed the earlier figure to be more accurate. Description of the architecture is from Alexandra Howard, “Sanger House Faces Landmark Designation,”
Our Town
, a local neighborhood paper, Sept. 24, 1976. Quotation is from M.S. to H.E., May 28, 1930, MS-SS. The Huxley speech was covered in stories in
The New York Times
and
New York Herald Tribune
, Oct. 29, 1930, clippings in MS-LC. Additional information comes from Charlotte Levine's interview, with the author, Nov. 18, 1987, Brooklyn, N.Y.

9.
BCCRB Minutes of the Board of Managers,
idem
, 1930, 1931, MS-LC. BCCRB, Memo on Unemployment, Feb. 26, 1932, MS-LC. M.S. to H.E., Aug. 29, 1931. Ruth Topping to Mr. Dunham, Application from BCCRB, Feb 3, 1931, BSH, Rocky-RGII. M.S. to Dr. Abraham Stone, Mar. 30, 1950, mentions Noah's reticence about making the clinic's complete financial statements public. Certainly, its financial accounting was a good deal looser than would be required today. “Is Preventive Work the Next Step?” story in
Birth Control Review
16:2 (Feb. 1932), pp. 42-43.