Woman of Valor (87 page)

10.
On fund-raising, compare the 1931 listing of the board of managers of the BCCRB with a memo titled “Status of Tentative Directorate,” Jan. 11, 1932, and minutes of the original meeting of the new board of trustees, Dec. 21, 1931, all in MS-LC. Also see M.S. to Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, Jan. 7, 1932, and M.S. to Charles Scribner, Feb. 22, 1932, MS-LC, in which she says that she will not cede authority to a board unless it is legally bound to assume financial and administrative responsibility for the clinic. Robert Dickinson to Dr. Linsly Williams, Mar. 8, 1932, MS-LC, claims that the legal obligation was secured, and says that, while Sanger would remain on the board, she desired to withdraw from active participation. Dickinson was writing to secure Williams's help in recruiting a medical board for the clinic and may have wanted to understate Sanger's role. She does not seem to have become any less active in day-to-day operations until several years later. Finally, see Ruth Topping, BCCRB file memo, June 28, 1932, and “BCCRB-Reorganization Meeting, March 5, 1932”; Mr. Packard to files (on conversation with Raymond B. Fosdick about the BCCRB); Arthur Packard to Miss Anna Kelly (secretary to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) Dec. 6, 1932, and Nov. 14, 1932; John D. Rockefeller III to “Dear Father,” Mar. 17, 1934; “Statement of Appropriations in the Field of Social Hygiene and Sex Research, 1929-1933”; and Mr. Packard to J.D.R. III, Dec. 19, 1936, all in Rocky-RG2. For a personal side to Arthur Packard's friendship with Sanger, also see Sanger's letter introducing him to Havelock Ellis, July 7, 1937, MS-SS. Also revealing are Anna Kelly to M.S., May 24, 1929, and M.S. to Mrs. J.D.R. Jr., Sept. 29, 1930, Nov. 19, 1931, Jan. 12, 1932, Oct. 21, 1933, and Jan. 3, 1935, all in MS-LC. The letter of 1933 has the abortion pitch.
Caroline Hadley Robinson,
Seventy Birth Control Clinics: A Survey and Analysis Including the General Effects of Control on Size and Quality of Population
(Baltimore: 1930), pp. 116-17, has the fund-raising reference. Gordon,
Woman's Body
, p. 313, wears the same blinders when she accepts Robinson's criticism of Sanger's fund-raising without qualification. Robinson (and Gordon) are correct, however, that the clinic was not receiving as many large foundation grants as it should have, although there were exceptions they may not have known about, such as the anonymous Rockefeller and Bureau of Social Hygiene support.
Finally, see M.S. to George A. Hastings, Feb. 22, 1938, and M.S., to “Dear Mrs. Generous,” n.d. (1937), both in MS-SS.

11.
Dickinson and Kopp,
Birth Control in Practice
, pp. 48-52, 56-57, 61, 109-23, 130. On the relationship of this data to New York City norms, see Norman Himes,
Medical History of Contraception
(Baltimore: 1936), p. 367. Median family income for the country overall had come back to $1,160 by 1935-36, but $2,500 still placed a family in the top tenth percentile. See Susan Ware,
Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s
(Boston: 1982), p. 2.

12.
Dickinson and Kopp,
Birth Control in Practice
, pp. 58, 61. Also see Florence Rose memo, n.d., and Florence Rose to M.S., June 29, 1936, and “How to Establish a Birth Control Clinic,” BCCRB, 1938, all in MS-SS.

13.
Records of the Harlem clinic are divided between MS-SS and MS-LC. At Smith, see Harlem Clinic Annual Reports, Feb. 1931, Nov. 1932, and Nov. 1934; minutes of organizing meetings, May 20, 1931, June 17, 1931, Mar. 23, 1932, Oct. 25, 1932, and listing of advisory committee formed of local black leaders and physicians. At the Library of Congress: “Totals for Harlem Branch, Feb. 1-Nov. 1, 1930; M.S. to W.E.B. DuBois, Nov. 11, 1930 and Dec. 8, 1930; Dubois to M.S., Nov. 17, 1930; Dr. M. O. Bousfield (a black physician who inspected the facility) to Michael Davis (medical director of the Rosenwald Fund), Apr. 9, 1932; Dr. Lucien M. Brown, “Keeping Fit,” clipping from the
Amsterdam News
, n.d. (1932), in which a black doctor argues the vital importance of birth control to achieving a “higher standard of physical fitness, mental capacity, and financial stability”; and W. E. B. DuBois in
Negroes and Birth Control
, a pamphlet published by the Birth Control Federation of America (New York: 1939), MS-SS.
For the contrasting views of Marcus Garvey, I am indebted to Rebecca McKay, a student in my senior research seminar at Barnard College, 1988-89. Also see minutes of the Harlem Clinic Advisory Board for Oct. 18 and 25, 1932; press release on Sanger speech at Abyssinian Baptist Church, Dec. 7, 1932; Marie Levinson Warner (medical director of the clinic) to M.S., July 11, 1933; Florence Rose to “M.P.” (Marie Pichel Levinson Warner), Jan. 31, 1936. The statistics are from Marie Warner, M.D., “Birth Control and the Negro,” a four-year summary and progress report, paper delivered at a symposium, Birth Control and Depression Problems in Harlem in 1935, copy in MS-SS. On black fertility in Harlem also see Clyde V. Kiser, “Harlem Negroes,”
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly
13:3 (July 1935), pp. 273-85.
Bessie L. Moses, M.D.,
Contraception as a Therapeutic Measure
(Baltimore: 1936), pp. 72, 82-83, also analyzed statistics on birth control practice by race. Twenty percent of the Baltimore clientele was black. Less than half of the total succeeded with the diaphragm regimen--a success rate even worse than in New York--yet Moses still maintained the virtue of her clinic experiment. She insisted that most of her patients were able to learn the diaphragm method, that only factors of “emotion”--a term that encompassed the patient's overall attitude toward sex--compromised their effectiveness. She saw no distinctions on the basis of race, intelligence, or income. She claimed, as well, that a marked “physical” and “emotional” improvement could be seen in all women who participated in the research for as long as one year, whether or not they managed the diaphragm, and thus endorsed clinical contraception in all circumstances, insisting that it be made a standard practice of preventive social medicine.
Recent analyses of black fertility patterns have confirmed Margaret's views, finding comparable numbers of desired children among black and white women, but demonstrating that fertility outcomes only remain greater for black women because so many first become pregnant as teenagers. See, for example, Harriet B. Presser, “The Timing of the First Birth: Female Roles and Black Fertility,”
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly
49: 3 (July 1971), pp. 329-61.

14.
Regine K. Stix, M.D., and Frank W. Notestein, “Effectiveness of Contraceptive Practice in a Selected Group of New York Women,”
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly
12:1 (Jan. 1934), pp. 57-68, and Stix-Notestein follow-up study in
MMFQ
13:2 (Apr. 1935), pp. 162-78. Stix and Notestein published the same findings and other research in book form in 1940. See Regine K. Stix, M.D. and Frank W. Notestein,
Controlled Fertility
(Baltimore: 1940). For the quoted material on her concerns about the book, see M.S. to Frank G. Boudreau, M.D., executive director of the Milbank Memorial Fund, June 25, 1940, uncataloged papers of the Margaret Sanger Center, New York City. Also see Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 204-10. At the height of his career in the 1950s, Notestein would serve as president of the Rockefeller-funded Population Council. See Chaps. 19 and 20.

15.
Quote is from M.S. to Hannah Stone, Jan. 13, 1932, MS-SS. On BCCRB research and testing of simple methods and commercial contraceptive products, see, for example: “Statement to Commercial Concerns Who Offer New Contraceptive Devices or Materials for Trial and Error,” signed by Margaret Sanger, director, and Hannah Stone, M.D., n.d. AS-Countway; M.S. to Hannah Stone, Feb. 2, 1932, MS-SS; Helen Holt, “Confidential Report to Members of BCCRB Advisory Council, Plan and Scope of Research, June, 1933,” and Helen Holt, “The Spermicidal Powers of Commercial Contraceptives,” Dec. 30, 1933; “Contraception and Birth Control,” clipping of an editorial reporting on BCCRB tests of commercial products in
Journal of the American Medical Association
, Sept. 8, 1934, all in uncataloged papers, Margaret Sanger Center, NYC. Examples of her concern over specific products are in M.S. to Mrs. Post, manager, Peck & Sterba Company, n.d., and in various letters to and from Herbert Simonds, the owner, and a Mr. Hicks, the general manager, of Holland-Rantos Co., Inc., on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary in 1944, all in MS-SS. Also see M.S. to Mr. Ralph Hull, Sept. 24, 1931, regarding a vaginal irrigator he invented, MS-LC; M.S. to Ira S. Wile, M.D., July 6, 1933, and L. J. Cole, Ph.D. to M.S., Oct. 21, 1933, comment on Holt's research plan, both in MS-SS. Finally, see selected minutes of medical staff meetings, for example, Mar. 27, 1934, and Oct. 29, 1941, and memo from Hazel Zabrowski to M.S., “Drugstore Contraception,” May 10, 1935, all in MS-SS. Again, Gordon in
Woman's Body
, pp. 308-10, leaves the impression that the clinic only recommended the diaphragm, which is not true, as these materials, along with the Dickinson-Kopp study and the Stix-Notestein data, make clear.

16.
For additional information on Gamble and his career, see Reed,
Birth Control Movement
, pp. 225-46. A clipping of a reprint of the Editors of
Fortune
magazine,
The Accident of Birth
, 1938 pamphlet, is in MS-SS. T. Lane Moore, U.S. General Services Administration, National Archives and Records Service, to the author, Sept. 24, 1975, describes the results of a search of the indexes of the
Federal Trade Commission Decisions, Finds, Orders and Stipulations
for the 1930s. Also see Elizabeth Garrett, “Birth Control's Business Baby,”
The New Republic 77
(Jan. 17, 1934), pp. 269-72. Commercial exploitation did not end with the Depression. See Grace Naismith, “The Racket in Contraceptives,”
American Mercury
71:319 (July 1950), pp. 3-13; and Christopher Tietze, M.D.,
The Condom as Contraceptive
, 1963 publication of the National Committee on Maternal Health, copy in the library of the New York Academy of Medicine. Locally, the Sanger clinic also had to be wary of disreputable practitioners who tried to capitalize on its reputation and name. See, for example, Josephine Franklin to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Oct. 2, 1945, regarding a facility on East 12th St. listing its name as the Birth Control Association, AS-Countway.

17.
Memoranda, n.d., “Registered Clinic Patients” and “Non-Registered Clinic Patients,” Margaret Sanger Center, NYC. BCCRB Memorandum, “Medical Policy, April 29, 1929,” MS-LC; State by State Statistics on Abortion and Maternal Mortality in 1930, prepared for the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, MS-LC; 1933 data gathered by Fred J. Taussig, M.D., in Helena Huntington Smith, “Wasting Women's Lives,”
The New Republic
, Mar. 28, 1934, reprint in MS-SS; Regine K. Stix, M.D., “A Study of Pregnancy Wastage,”
Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly
13:4 (Oct. 1935) pp. 347-65; Memo re: “Policy Regarding Aschheim Test,” Oct. 18, 1932, signed “M.S.,” AS-Countway; M.S. to Hannah Stone, Jan. 30, 1933; “Special Consultation Bureau, Monthly Reports, April 1, to May 4, 1933, and January, 1934,” MS-LC. Hannah Stone, “The O. D. Clinic: An Analysis of 450 ‘Overdue' Cases,” unpublished manuscript, n.d., Margaret Sanger Center, NYC; minutes of medical staff meeting for Nov. 1, 1938, re: A-Z tests, MS-SS. Cheri Appel, M.D., in her interview, Feb. 1, 1989, says she knew nothing of this abortion study but confirmed that many women who came to the clinic had been aborted or were pregnant, and that some things that went on at the clinic were “sub-rosa.”

18.
The letter from Marjorie Prevost to M.S., Feb. 10, 1932, is in MS-SS. Dr. Appel (whose husband may have been the “Dr. Seigel” referred to) did not remember the incident. Memo, “Policy Concerning Over-Due Patients,” signed by Hannah Stone, one with n.d. and one dated Nov. 12, 1940, are both in AS-Countway.
Mary Compton to M.S., Apr. 14, 1942, reports the story of the social worker, who also said that one of the doctors actually gave a woman $20 to pay the fee of an illegal abortionist. Also see Compton to M.S., Dec. 8, 1942, both in MS-SS. The case history is also cited in Gordon,
Woman's Body
, p. 382, which claims without substantiating evidence that this was an exception, and that the clinic turned away most abortion requests. Gordon did not consult the Countway archive or the uncataloged Sanger Center papers in New York, so she was not aware of Stone's data, which demonstrates that almost half the requests for abortion in the period studied were, in fact, accommodated directly, all of them presumably through licit professional channels. On the basis of the one letter, Gordon also says that the BCCRB practiced a double standard of abortion referral--one for the worthy middle-class and another for the poor. She makes this claim because Prevost was explicitly elitist in characterizing the client as someone trustworthy on the basis of her appearance. Gordon is correct that Sanger and many clinic personnel had social biases, but any class distinctions in their abortion referrals were probably less a function of overt discrimination than of the obvious need for caution in getting involved in something so controversial. That middle-class women could afford to pay the price of arrangements made privately with sympathetic physicians may also have been a factor. What happened to those who could not pay anything at all is less clear. Charlotte Levine admits that, at least when she arrived at the clinic in 1959, the doctors quietly provided the names of cheaper, illegal abortionists as well. Levine's testimony is taken from her interview with the author, Idem. Elizabeth Arnold, R.N., in her interview with James Reed for the Schlesinger Library Oral History Project, Nov. 13, 1974, p. 57, said she saw thousands of pregnant women during her seventeen years on the clinic staff and “hustled” them to psychiatrists or to known abortionists.
The Sanger clinic relationship with the New York Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion was explained by Arlene Carmen in a Jan. 1976 interview with the author conducted for the Oral History Project on Women in Population, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, pp. 27-29. Carmen ran the service on behalf of Judson pastor, the Rev. Howard Moody, who founded it.
On the Planned Parenthood Federation of America's abortion policies, see Harriet Pilpel to D. Kenneth Rose, Apr. 3, 1942, and Mary Calderone, M.D., to Alan Guttmacher, M.D. (then the organization's president), Dec. 8, 1960, both in the Mary Calderone Papers, Schlesinger Library. I am grateful to Harriet Pilpel for a personal interview at her New York office in February of 1986, in which she recalled having first heard of Margaret Sanger as a girl, when birth control first stirred controversy in the North Bronx community in which she grew up.