Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  Yet there was still no movement either in America or England. All attempts at spreading contraceptive advice were isolated and uncoordinated, even if remarkably successful within their limited scope. If you had not access to the information that existed on contraceptive methods you went on relying on old wives’ tales and hoping for the best. It was Margaret Sanger who decided this was wrong. She did not create female contraception, nor was she the first even in her own day to advocate it, but what she did was organize it into a movement and a movement primarily for women. She did this in the first quarter of the twentieth century in the face of both feminist apathy and hostility: she made it a feminist issue. To her it was no use women demanding the vote or better education or equal rights at law if they could not control their own bodies which gave them “the key to the temple of liberty.”4 Endless childbearing was “tyranny” and “the feminine spirit” must reject it. Contraception, she stated unequivocally, was women’s business, not men’s. Furthermore, it was not just going to free women from unwanted pregnancies it was going to free them from all fear about sex. Behind the advocacy of continence, she declared, lay “a loathing of sex” and women had come to believe themselves actually superior if they were indifferent to it. Efficient contraception in their own hands was going to enable women to enjoy sex as much as men had enjoyed it for centuries.

  It is not surprising that with these views, loudly voiced, Margaret Sanger was more hated and feared than any of the other feminist activists. Josephine Butler’s attack on the double standard was a feeble slap compared to this powerful punch. What Margaret Sanger threatened to do was free even those who did not wish to be freed by turning completely upside-down women’s own attitude to sex. No longer was it simply to be a duty, a means of procreating children as the marriage service decreed, something quite unavoidable. It was to become something done for its own sake. By presenting women with such a prospect Margaret Sanger challenged their very function as women.

  * * *

  Margaret Higgins was one of the few feminist activist leaders to come from a working-class background. She was born on September 14th, 1879 (a date carefully concealed as she always made herself four years younger) in Corning, a factory town near New York. She was the sixth of eleven children and realized very early what being part of a large, poor family meant: going without. Yet, in spite of the material deprivation she suffered, she valued the love she had been given by her parents and remembered with gratitude the closeness of her family. There was respect and affection among them in the midst of all the hardship. The family was dominated by the father, Michael Higgins, born in Ireland and once a drummer boy in Lincoln’s army. He was a large, red-headed, free-thinking man, a stonemason by trade, and his one rule in life was that people should “say what they mean.” He was a member of the Knights of Labour and organized visits from other free-thinkers which often ended in fights. Margaret was, she said, neither ashamed nor frightened on these occasions and was in fact quite proud of being called, with her brothers and sisters, “children of the devil”. Her father represented power to her. Her mother, Anne (also of Irish descent), worked hard to keep the family and the house clean and tidy even though she was not physically strong. She always had a cough and was always recovering from or about to undergo childbirth. But there was no friction between these parents – “no quarreling or bickering” – and they each idolized the other. Michael Higgins was a great believer in woman’s rights, supporting female suffrage and even the wearing of the Bloomer costume, but this “never evidenced itself in practical ways.”5 He would sit “when he had nothing on hand” laughing and joking while Anne worked incessantly around him.

  Outside her home, the young Margaret was conscious of different lives going on. Coming was an unattractive place and the poor, like the Higgins family, lived in the most unattractive part, on the crowded river banks near the factories. The rich lived literally above them, on the hill tops above all the noise, dirt and overcrowding. Margaret envied them. She noticed in particular the contrast between her mother’s way of life and that of the women who lived up there: “mothers . . . played croquet and tennis with their husbands in the evening . . . (they were) young looking . . . with pretty, clean dresses and they smelled of perfume.”6 Margaret’s own mother usually smelled of milk as she produced and fed baby after baby, all delivered by Michael Higgins himself He would never allow a doctor anywhere near his wife, not even to attend to her cough. After every birth she was weaker and coughed more but he dosed her with whisky and eventually she would be on her feet again. None of this put Margaret off childbirth. She loved the babies and looked forward to having her own. She liked to look at pictures of the Virgin Mary and fantasized herself looking like that after she had had a baby. “Sex knowledge,” she wrote, “was a natural part of my life.”7 She always knew how babies were made and how they arrived and there seemed nothing repugnant or scaring about either process. Babies were always welcome in the overcrowded Higgins household and if one died the grief was real. Margaret remembered vividly the death of Henry, aged four, and her mother’s inconsolable distress which her father tried to soothe. He took Margaret with him in the night to the cemetery where he dug up Henry’s coffin, opened it, took a plaster cast of his face and next day made a bust of the dead child for his wife. She was greatly comforted.

  But if she loved her family, Margaret hated Corning. She wanted to get out. Her two older sisters, Mary and Nan, recognizing that she had talent and ambition deserving something better than they had had, saved up to send her away to school. Both of them had worked from the age of fourteen as companions and maids to supplement the family income and they wanted Margaret to escape this likely fate. Entirely through their self-sacrifice, Margaret was sent to Claverack, one of the first co-educational schools in the East, at the age of thirteen, supplementing her board by helping as a domestic assistant. At home, she had had no background of learning although her father was an intelligent man and a great reader of political tracts. The entire family library consisted of the Bible, Aesop’s Fables, a medical book, a general history of the world, a book on phrenology and Henry George’s Progress of Poverty. She had a great deal of background to make up but did well, although causing some problems as the ringleader in various escapades.

  When her schooldays ended, she found a job in a new public school in Southern Jersey as a student teacher but she was called home after a few months. Her mother was dying. The TB from which she had clearly suffered for a decade at least, even if it did go undiagnosed, had flared up after the birth of her eleventh child and not even Michael Higgins’s all-purpose whisky cure worked. Her death was a long drawn out affair during which she tried desperately to protect her children from witnessing the full horror of it. One by one they were sent off on “holidays” to stay with friends and relatives in the surrounding area while she battled to prepare her husband for the inevitable end. But he remained wilfully blind and unprepared. When Anne Higgins died, aged only forty-eight, Michael Higgins became an embittered, unpleasant, belligerent man. Grief made him violent and tyrannical. Margaret began to hate him. She was expected to look after the smaller children and require no life of her own. If she went out with her sister Ethel to a dance they were quite likely to come back and find the door bolted against them. Margaret stood this for a year but then she had had enough. She managed to find a place for herself at White Plains Hospital, near New York, where she could train as a nurse. It was not what she wanted, which was to be a doctor so that she could save people like her mother, but it was the best escape route she could find.

  White Plains, which she entered in 1898 aged eighteen, was not a modern hospital run on any kind of Nightingale lines. The building was old, a three-storey manor house set in overgrown grounds which gave it a “spooky” air to the young nurses. There was no resident intern. The probationers not only made and fixed dressings but also did a great deal of heavy domestic work. They also assisted at operations and Margaret was pleased to find s
he could do so without feeling squeamish. The hardest part of her job was night-duty which she hated. All sorts of emergencies, with which she was not equipped to deal, tended to happen at night and she found it frightening to have to cope with them. In addition, since the supply of registered nurses in the White Plains catchment area was limited, the probationers there were in any case always being pushed out into situations for which they were not ready.

  Most of these were maternity cases. They would arrive to find neither qualified midwife nor doctor present and would just have to go ahead and deliver the baby themselves. Naturally, this gave Margaret valuable practical obstetric experience, which she found exciting, but it also plunged her into a world she had never encountered before. Most of the mothers were not ecstatic with joy at giving birth and new babies were not greeted with the rapture which had awaited them in the Higgins household. The circumstances in which they arrived were often not just poor but desperate. The most common question Margaret was asked by the mothers whose confinements she attended was “Miss, what should I do not to have another baby straight away?” She did not know. When she referred the question to the doctor on the case, if there was one, he would brush it aside and remonstrate with the mother for asking it of a young nurse. She grew used to seeing not just women but men, too, driven nearly insane with worry about having more children. Something, clearly, was wrong. “To see a baby born is one of the greatest experiences that a human being can have,” she wrote. “As often as I have witnessed the miracle, held the perfect creature with its tiny hands and tiny feet, each time I have felt as though I were entering a cathedral with prayer in my heart.”8 But the mothers into whose arms she put these scraps of perfection were uninspired by her emotion.

  The last six months of Margaret’s three-year training were spent at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. While there, she met a young architect called William Sanger at one of the hospital dances. He was eight years older than Margaret and the first serious suitor she had had. His mother was German and his father had been a wealthy sheep farmer in Australia. He was, wrote Margaret, “a dark young man with intense, fiery eyes”9 who was very romantic and ardent. He proposed marriage very quickly but Margaret says she was adamant she did not want to marry. It was, she said, “a kind of suicide”. But Bill Sanger was “impatient of conventionalities, intense in his new love” and she was deeply attracted to him. He admired her tremendously, writing that he thought her “really heroic” for putting up with the hours she did and he didn’t know how she could stand it – “I must have at least six hours sleep,” he wrote, “and you have none at all at night!”10 He wanted her to “give up this strenuous life” and promised he would soon be able to provide her with “a real home . . . a little house nestling under the trees – we shall build it, of course we shall.”11 His confidence was infectious. When he not only professed undying love but promised “we shall soon be in easy street . . . you will be able to have all the leisure you want”12 Margaret began to envisage a future as Mrs Sanger in which her fantasy of being one of those hill top mothers of her childhood would be fulfilled.

  In the last week of her training she capitulated and married him. Bill whisked her off to a secret wedding ceremony. “That beast of a man William,” she wrote to her sister Mary, “took me for a drive last Monday and drove me to a minister’s residence and married me. I wept with anger and wouldn’t look at him for it was so unexpected . . . I had on an old blue dress and looked horrid . . . He was afraid this precious article would be lost to him . . . I am very, very sorry to have the thing occur but yet I am very, very happy.”13 To her sister Nan she gave a simpler explanation. Bill was, she wrote, “beastly, insanely jealous.” He insisted on marriage and, since she did not want to lose him and he would not wait, she married him. But even then Margaret was a strong character. She would never have married Bill Sanger if she had not thought she loved him and certainly not out of fear of losing him alone. The fact was, she was not just attracted to him but irresistibly drawn to the way of life he could offer her.

  The marriage was at first happy, in spite of Margaret’s poor health. She had been ill off and on throughout her nurse’s training with “gland trouble” and when she became pregnant soon after her marriage this flared into TB. She was sent to a sanatorium outside New York where she was acutely miserable and determined to leave. In November 1903 she returned home to her apartment in New York and gave birth to her first son, Stuart. It was, she commented, “agonizing” and made worse by the inexperience of the doctor who attended her. She was sent back to the hated sanatorium but quickly rebelled against the régime imposed there. Deciding that if she was going to die she’d rather do it at home she discharged herself and once more returned to New York. There she doctored herself and against all expectations the outbreak of TB began to subside (although she was never free from such outbreaks for the rest of her long life). Meanwhile, intent on fulfilling his wife’s dream and also moving her to somewhere healthier, Bill had designed and begun to build a house at Hastings-on-Hudson, a pleasant suburb outside New York. It took a long time to complete but in 1907 the Sangers moved in and early the next year Margaret gave birth to her second son, Grant. She then found herself happily in the position she had always wanted to be. She, too, played tennis and wore pretty dresses and smelled of perfume. She had a husband who was both attentive and generous, regularly bringing her presents home and taking her to the theatre and to concerts. There was nothing demanding about her domesticity and Bill even helped with shopping and was willing to be involved in all household chores. In 1910, when a daughter, Peggy, was born, everything seemed perfect.

  But it was not. Margaret was far too honest to pretend her dream life satisfied her. She became restless and critical not just of the life she was living but of the people among whom she was living it. She saw that “this quiet withdrawal into the tame domesticity of the pretty hillside suburb was bordering on stagnation.”14 It bored her. She had no great love for cooking or dressmaking or any of the other hobbies with which her neighbours filled their time and although she maintained she had “a passion for motherhood” it did not prove an all-consuming one. If Bill was disappointed he did not show it. He said he did not particularly like Hastings-on-Hudson either and was perfectly agreeable to moving. So the Sangers sold their dream house and moved back into New York, into Greenwich Village. There, they joined the local Socialist party, Labour Five, and instantly became involved in recruiting new members from the clubs of working women in the area. It beat genteel games of tennis any day. “Our living-room,” wrote Margaret proudly, “became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, socialists and IWWs could meet.”15 Modestly, she added that her role was to make the cocoa. Very soon, other jobs were found for her within Labour Five and she had also resumed her career as a nurse. Among the wives of Hastings-on-Hudson careers were rare and frowned upon but in Greenwich Village any self-respecting socialist wife wished to justify her existence. Bill’s mother came to stay to look after Peggy and Grant while Stuart was enrolled in a progressive local school and Margaret took on obstetric cases (because these were short term).

  Her work took her more and more frequently to the lower East Side of New York where she came across misery far worse than any she had found during her training. She was called to cases in tenements where families were living ten to a small room, where women had neither the food nor the money to support the babies she was delivering, where both men and women alike were prematurely aged by the struggle to survive. But what was even more of a shock to her was her involvement in botched abortions. She would be called out to what she thought was a birth and arrive to find some terrified woman bleeding to death. She passed queues on Saturday nights outside well-known (but not to the authorities) abortionists and found herself the next morning dealing with the effects of what the women had been given to take. What disturbed her most was that the women who tried to abort their babies were so very often “good” mothers. They were not the feck
less or wanton type, nor were their husbands blackguards or brutes. It was simply cause and effect. Marriage meant sex, sex meant babies, babies meant increased poverty. The only solution was abstinence but even having sexual intercourse only once a year produced a baby a year. To Margaret’s disgust she heard doctors tell one distraught husband to “go and sleep on the roof” if he wanted to avoid his wife becoming pregnant again. It was this brutal indifference to genuine suffering that made Margaret determined to do something to help.

  She was by this time not the inexperienced young girl of the White Plains days. As a married woman, who after the birth of her third child had been advised not to have any more children, she had practised contraception herself. But when she came to pass on to her patients the “secret” of not having any more babies she found that her wonderful information was virtually useless to them. “I resolved,” she wrote, “. . . to do something to change the destiny of the mothers whose miseries were as vast as the sky.”16 She discovered that explaining about coitus interruptus and condoms changed no destinies among the mothers of the lower East Side. What they needed was female contraception which was efficient and above all easy to use. They wanted the responsibility in their own hands. They also wanted to understand more about the workings of their own bodies and it was this demand for knowledge that led Margaret to give health talks for the Women’s Commission of the Socialist party and to write short articles on health matters for the New York paper Call. Out of all this came a series of articles in 1912 originally entitled What Every Mother Should Know then changed to What Every Girl Should Know. These at first simply gave information about sex and facts about reproduction which mothers were advised to tell their daughters, but then the articles became bolder, including more detailed notes on human physiology and also trying to stress that the sex act was normal and healthy and not something to be feared or shunned by women. Finally, the last article touched on venereal disease, its causes and effects, and how to avoid it. The Post Office immediately banned Call under the 1873 Comstock Law which made it illegal to send obscene matter through the US mail.