Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  As far as Margaret Sanger was concerned this was flinging down the gauntlet. She determined to pick it up. Bill encouraged her, urging her to write up her articles into a pamphlet for distribution by hand. “You go ahead and finish your writing,” she quotes him as saying, “and I’ll get the dinner and wash the dishes.”17 This he would then do “drawing the shades so no one would see him.” The children were not so co-operative. She describes her sons hating to come home and find her writing. But a sense of mission had begun to inspire her and she began trying to find out all she could about every form of contraception available. Her quest took her to various libraries, where she missed a lot of valuable information apparently through not knowing how to look for it, and to talk with socialists like Bill Haywood who had a great interest in the subject of limiting families through judicious use of contraception. Emma Goldman, whom Margaret also met, had already included the subject in her lectures. But as she went about her enquiries, interrupted by helping to organize picket lines during the Paterson silk-workers’ strike of February 1913, Margaret began to doubt whether even those advocating contraception were doing so for the reasons which inspired her. Were any of them really thinking about the women, or were they just influenced by political and economic considerations? “I was enough of a feminist,” she wrote, “to resent the fact that woman and her requirements were not being taken into account in reconstructing this new world about which all were talking. They were failing to consider the quality of life itself.”18 This, she became convinced, was for women intimately bound up with being able not only to choose to have babies but also to enjoy the act which produced them. But where was the simple, safe contraceptive which even an illiterate woman could use? She might find it, Bill Haywood said, in France.

  There was really no sense in going to France in person (and perhaps no real need at all if only Margaret could have tapped existing American sources) but both the Sangers became wildly enthusiastic about such a venture. Bill was tired of being an architect, and was not in any case doing very well even though Margaret says she was told he was one of “the best eight draftsmen in New York.” He said he had always wanted to be “a real artist” and Paris was his natural home. So in October 1913 the entire Sanger family sailed for Europe. (How they paid for the trip Margaret never revealed – she said such questions were “irritating”.) First they went to Glasgow, where a youth from the Municipal Corporation, one Willie MacGuire, was employed to look after the children while the parents went sightseeing; then they travelled by cattle boat to Antwerp and from there by train to France. They ended up on the Left Bank in Paris. Bill immediately plunged himself into the art world, where he met Matisse and was “aglow” with pleasure, while Margaret followed up Bill Haywood’s introductions to people who would help her find out about contraception. What she discovered was that although there was no actual movement there was a large body of individual knowledge about family limitation in existence. “I went into shops and bookstalls,” she wrote, “and purchased all the devices of contraception available.”19 She was shown pamphlets which were in circulation and talked to women who possessed “recipes” for suppositories passed down from generation to generation. It amazed her that in a Catholic country it should prove easier to learn about contraception for women than in New York, where the Comstock laws had made the circulation of information impossible.

  When the three-month trip was at an end it was Margaret and not Bill Sanger who was ready to go home. She was full of enthusiasm for her cause, eager to return to New York with samples of all kinds of contraceptives and ready to put into practice what she had learned. Beside the thought of this mission the fun of being in Paris was nothing. But Bill did not agree. He loved Paris, felt he was making progress as an artist, and had no desire at all to return. Far from causing conflict in the Sanger marriage this difference of opinion was faced by both Bill and Margaret with equanimity. He would stay, she would go. In fact, Margaret was glad to go back just with the children. She wanted a return to America “to stir up a national campaign”20 and Bill would just get in the way. But of course there was more to it than that. After twelve years of marriage Margaret was beginning once more to view the institution as “a kind of suicide”. She felt stifled by being married. Although Bill was the most understanding and accommodating of husbands she still wanted to be on her own and free of the emotional obligation under which he placed her. Nobody mentioned the phrase “trial separation” but it is clear Margaret thought that was what she was embarking on when in December 1913 she sailed for home.

  As soon as she arrived she rented an apartment in upper Manhattan and set about planning the production of her own newspaper in order to spread contraceptive advice. At once she came up against those laws with which she was already familiar, the Comstock laws. These proved far more all-embracing and obstructive than she had ever realized, especially since Anthony Comstock himself was still in office as Special Inspector of the Post Office. He had been responsible personally for 700 arrests, 333 sentences and the seizure of 34,836 articles classed as “for immoral use.” Margaret raged against him – “his stunted, neurotic nature and savage methods of attack had ruined thousands of women’s lives”21 – but she was not quite so silly as to doubt that any direct challenge to Comstock would invite certain prosecution and probable imprisonment.

  For a while, she cast about trying to find ways of getting round the Comstock laws, as many had done before her, and seeking help for her general mission. Naturally, she approached influential feminists, among them Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They advised her (so she said) to join them in helping to win the vote and then all would be well – women would vote for the right to information on contraception. Margaret did not believe them, nor did she have any intention of waiting until the millennium dawned. It made her angry that the avowed feminists were not giving priority to the release of woman from her biological subservience which in her opinion was a far greater obstacle to progress than not having the vote. The Socialists were of more use to her (and of course a great many of them were also feminists) because they gave her hints on how to set about publishing a clandestine newspaper, which they had great experience in doing. But Margaret was determined to accept only advice from her political friends and nothing more: her newspaper would not be part of any general political propaganda but specifically feminist in purpose. She said she wished to make it “as red and flaming as possible” in order to bring to everyone’s notice the problems affecting women.

  She called her newspaper The Woman Rebel. The first issue, on eight pages of cheap paper, came out in March 1914 and was a very serious-looking publication. Bill Sanger had sent over some cartoons to enliven the pages but Margaret scorned them – she was serious and was not going to dress up what she had to offer. The whole tone of her paper was strident and belligerent, full of startling statements like “The marriage bed is the most degenerating influence of the social order.” It was sent by mail to a list of 2,000 subscribers obtained from socialist friends. There was no precise contraceptive advice given but it was made clear that contraception was approved of and known about. Meanwhile, Margaret was working hard to provide this very information. A pamphlet she was writing called Family Limitation was going to be absolutely explicit.

  Family Limitation was written in plain, strong, fearless language. It was outspokenly feminist, stating women’s right to enjoy sex as much as men and even asserting that if they did not it was usually because men were “clumsy fools”. It tried to rouse women to help themselves, speaking scornfully of women who were lazy or sentimental – “of course it is troublesome to get up to douche, it is also a nuisance to have to trouble about the date of the menstrual period . . . it seems inartistic and sordid to insert a pessary or a suppository . . . but it is far more sordid to find yourself several years later burdened down with half-a-dozen unwanted children . . . yourself a dragged out shadow of a woman . . .” What to do to prevent yourself becoming a shadow was starkly set out. The
importance of keeping a calendar of monthly periods was stressed, the existence of any “safe” period emphatically denied, coitus interruptus condemned as well as all douches labelled as cleansing but not preventative in themselves. Advice on condoms was thorough (what they were made of, which were best, where to buy them, how to make sure they were used properly) but the real emphasis was on female contraceptives.

  Crude, and rather alarming, diagrams (Marie Stopes found them “prurient”) illustrated how to use a pessary and fears about the use of it were banished – it was “silly” to think this object might “go up too far” and mysteriously get lost – “It cannot get into the womb nor can it get lost.” Nor was there any need to worry about it spoiling a man’s pleasure (though the pamphlet made it quite clear what it thought on that subject). Sponges, if used with the right chemical solution, were recommended and if all else failed suppositories were better than nothing. A recipe was given for a vaginal suppository for those quite unable to get them – “take i ounce of cocoa butter, 60 grains quinine, melt the cocoa butter, mix the quinine with it, form it into suppositories by letting the mixture harden into a cake and then cutting it up into ten pieces – insert one into the vagina 3 minutes before the act.” An address was given for mail-order goods in case anybody lived far from a chemist. At the end of the pamphlet fourteen of the most common queries about contraception were printed (eg “Does nursing a baby prevent pregnancy?”) and dealt with. Women were urged to tell other women how to avoid pregnancy – “spread this important knowledge!” – and to help the movement towards birth control (a term she had coined and now used for the first time) which it was prophesied “will shortly win full acceptance and sanction by public morality as well.”

  Naturally, once Margaret finished her pamphlet she then found it difficult to get it printed. She touted it round various socialist printers, who all “turned deadly pale” and told her the risks were too great, until she found Russian-born Bill Shatoff who was prepared to do the job on his own after hours so that it could be kept completely secret and nobody else would risk imprisonment. But, as soon as the printing of 100,000 copies had been arranged in the summer of 1914, events began to move too fast. Within days of the first issue of Woman Rebel coming out in March letters started to arrive asking for specific information, but by that time the Post Office had sent word to say the newspaper was breaking the Comstock Law. Margaret ignored the communication and went ahead with the April issue. There were no objections to that one. In May, July, August, other issues appeared and then at the end of August Margaret received a visit from two officials. They told her the last three issues broke the law on nine counts. They refused to say how but announced they had orders to arrest her. She received the news calmly, but was instantly aware that she must move very fast to exploit her arrest as much as possible.

  Margaret was told she would have plenty of time to prepare her case but in October she was “suddenly informed” that it would be in two days’ time. Considering she had had six weeks since August 25th when she was told a trial would take place she was perhaps unreasonable to find this “sudden” but she seems to have been genuinely startled. In any case, although thrilled at the thought of hearing the words “The People v. Margaret Sanger”, and longing to stand up in open court and proclaim her beliefs, she had no intention of going to battle over the Woman Rebel. She wanted to do so over Family Limitation. It seemed to her foolish to risk losing the chance to fight over this much more important document so she decided to take the drastic step of leaving the country, having Family Limitation released as soon as she was safely away, then returning after an interval with a case prepared specifically on the birth control issue. In one way, this made obvious sense, but it was fraught with problems. The most important one was the fate of her children. Stuart, then ten, was at camp and could stay there until he returned to his boarding school where he had been for some years but Grant was only five and Peggy three. Bill Sanger was still in Paris and for the first time Margaret found that her long-suffering sisters were not disposed to be surrogate mothers. She had banked on the ever-obliging Nan taking them in and was stunned when a shocked Nan said she would not be party to this flight from maternal responsibility. She refused pointblank to have them. Mary, in Buffalo, was too far away to be of immediate use and so was Ethel.

  What Margaret then decided to do is very difficult to understand. Grant and Peggy were sent on holiday to the Catskills with a friend and extremely precarious arrangements made for their return – a network of friends and neighbours with nobody in actual control except Mary in Buffalo and Bill on his way back (she hoped). She wrote years later that what she did in leaving her small children to this kind of care was “a spiritual crucifixion” but it calls into question her own strangely conflicting notions on motherhood and her relationship with her children. She seems to have convinced herself that she had made the “supreme sacrifice” a mother could make. She claimed to be “passionately maternal” and yet thought sending children away, to school or anywhere else, “the most unselfish act . . . because it shows a selfless consideration for the child’s good rather than an egoistic self-indulgence in sentimentality.”22 Any consideration for her own children’s good seems nevertheless to have been entirely lacking when she decided, the day before she was due to appear in court, to take the train for Montreal. This can either be seen as heroic or as incomprehensible but either way it puts Margaret Sanger’s attitude to motherhood in a different category from most women’s.

  In Montreal, Margaret was put up by some friends until a place was found for her on the RMS Virginian, sailing for Liverpool on November 1st, 1914. She selected the pseudonym “Bertha Watson”, which she said was a name so “atrociously ugly” that it robbed her of her femininity every time she answered to it. Unable to produce a passport she had no idea how she would get herself into England, especially in wartime conditions, but she says she made friends with an official on board who managed to arrange her entry. She stayed in Liverpool for a few “dreadful bleak weeks” suddenly feeling not quite so brave and noble and miserably conscious that her children, especially Peggy whom she had left with a sore leg, might be missing her as much as she was missing them. Then she went to London where she rented a room in Torrington Square. From there, she went every day to the British Museum to do research on birth control methods.

  She was not friendless, arriving in London with several useful introductions to leading exponents of birth control in England. The Drysdales asked her to tea and through them she received an invitation to visit Havelock Ellis whose books she had just read and admired. She took a bus to Dover Mansions in Brixton and had tea and toast with him in front of the fire. Afterwards, they met in the British Museum where Ellis showed himself keen to direct the studies of this young and attractive student. Very soon they were close friends, though never lovers technically if Ellis is to be relied upon. “On me this first meeting simply left a pleasant impression,” he wrote, “aided by sympathy with her lonely situation in a strange city,”23 and after the second he found himself brought into “a relationship of friendship, I may say of affectionate friendship . . .”24 Within two weeks they were on kissing terms which for Ellis, says his biographer, counted as “near rape by anyone else.” Even if, as Ellis maintained, the friendship with Margaret merely had a touch of “sweet intimacy” about it he records himself, after a kiss on New Year’s Eve, as “like a drunken man . . . all of a rapture . . . I was aching and beaten and sore.”25 Perhaps in kissing as in all else Margaret Sanger was a powerful lady. But for her part, although pleased with Ellis’ attention, she was hardly swept off her feet. Her relationship with her husband she now regarded as finished and was about to write him “an epoch making letter” telling him so. Starting another such relationship was no part of her plan. She had work to do.

  It was Ellis who suggested to her a visit to Holland where, he had been told, birth control clinics were in existence teaching the use of the comparatively newly inve
nted diaphragm. England was of course at war and the idea of going to Holland a dangerous one but Margaret set off in January 1915 with introductions to Dr Rutgers of The Hague. Dr Rutgers was elderly and harassed and his English was poor but he was very welcoming. He took Margaret to his clinic, showed her the Mensinga diaphragm and demonstrated with several of his patients how to use it. The diaphragm had been invented by a German, Dr Wilhelm Mensinga (sometimes known as C. Hasse) who had published details of his invention in German medical journals in 1882. Birth control was a field in which German physicians were for some reason prolific – popular pamphlets were on sale to the general public in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and as well as Mensinga’s treatise on the subject there were forty others published at roughly the same time. Dr Rutgers had read about Mensinga’s device and had gone to visit him the following year, bringing back with him the new contraceptive. The diaphragm was not a cervical cap of the type Margaret Sanger and others had publicized but a much simpler and more efficient cap which fitted longitudinally in the vagina, secured by the pubic bone. It amounted to the greatest advance since the condom and had the additional advantage of being for women. At his clinic, Dr Rutgers showed his fascinated visitors fourteen different sizes of the German diaphragm which, since its use in Holland, had become known as the Dutch cap, and he emphasized that accurate fitting was vital. It was, he stressed, a medical matter and decidedly not something women could do for themselves although once fitted and taught they could certainly manage to use it much more easily than a pessary. Margaret was at first disappointed. Her vision had been of women taking matters into their own hands and helping each other until a chain of self-help existed everywhere. But she accepted Dr Rutger’s verdict quickly and turned to examining how his clinics worked.