Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  A network of birth control clinics was already in existence in Holland under the direction of Dr Aletta Jacobs, a great feminist as well as the country’s first qualified woman doctor. Unfortunately, Dr Jacobs was not as friendly or helpful as Dr Rutgers. She was deeply suspicious of this young, non-medical American woman and refused either to meet her or to take her round her clinics. Brusquely, she said birth control was not a matter for lay-people. Offended and annoyed, Margaret had to make do with visiting other doctors. She also discovered that, in spite of the insistence by them that this was a medical matter, women could actually go into shops throughout Holland and be fitted up. She went into several herself and found “. . . there was a small, adjoining room, containing a reclining chair and a wash basin. The woman, if she so desired, was taken into this room, examined, and fitted by the shop attendant.”26 It seemed to her that this being so there must be room for some sort of compromise. Nurses, for example, like herself, were surely medical – perhaps it would be possible to run clinics with specially-trained nurses in charge. What she wanted was a system whereby women went to places specifically designed for this one purpose and where they would find other women specifically catering for this purpose without doctors necessarily being in control as Dr Jacobs insisted they must be. Besides that, pamphlets paled into insignificance. What she wanted to do now was return to New York, face her trial, then put her energies into opening clinics. But first she extended her trip to Spain, where she found women in a state of “oriental seclusion”, and then went back to London where she sat down and wrote three more pamphlets, setting out very clearly what she had learned in Holland (and also gave a lecture which Marie Stopes attended. They had tea together afterwards when Maries Stopes gave Margaret a copy of Married Love and told her of her own ambition to open a clinic.) The pamphlets were printed and sent on to America but the ship carrying them was torpedoed. It seemed an ominous sign: perhaps if she went herself the same would happen to her. For a while, she hesitated. In her autobiography she goes over the alternatives: should she bring Grant and Peggy over to join her, leaving Stuart at school, and take them to Paris to write a book? But that was as risky as returning herself. Which risk ought she to take?

  While all this agonizing was going on Bill Sanger, back in New York, had been arrested by Comstock’s agents for possessing one of Margaret’s Family Limitation pamphlets. He wrote telling her what had happened and assuring her that he was proud to be standing trial for her sake. Offered a free pardon by Comstock if he revealed where his wife was Bill boasted that he had replied he would “Let hell freeze over first.”27 If he expected Margaret to be impressed or touched he was greatly mistaken. She was extremely angry, commenting “Bill had to get mixed up in my work after all and of course it made it harder for me.”28 She saw his stand as showing-off and an attempt to ingratiate himself with her. But at least it brought her to a rapid decision: she must return at once before Bill grabbed any more of the limelight. In September 1915 she sailed, via Bordeaux, through the torpedo-threatened Atlantic to New York, arriving safely only to find Bill had already been released after serving a nominal jail sentence and that, ironically, his trial had been the occasion of Anthony Comstock catching a chill which had killed him. She also found that in other ways the birth control scene had significantly changed. Other people were now interested and trying to take control of a movement she had regarded as hers to head and lead. One of these “other people” was Mary Ware Dennet who infuriated Margaret by explaining that she envisaged, now that Comstock was dead, an orderly campaign staying strictly within the law aimed at repealing those statutes blocking the advance of birth control. This Margaret rejected. What she wanted was direct action, challenging the law flamboyantly, and starting with her own deferred court case for which she desired maximum publicity. As far as she was concerned “. . . the whole issue is not one of a mistake, whereby getting into jail or keeping out of jail is important, but the issue is to raise . . . birth control out of the gutter of obscenity and into the light of understanding.”29 To attract even more “light” she intended to conduct her own defence at her trial.

  Before this was to take place, Margaret Sanger had a trial of a different sort to go through. On November 6th, 1915, five-year-old Peggy died of pneumonia. Margaret was never able to write about it, as Josephine Butler later managed to, nor was this normally expressive woman able to express her grief. “The joy in the fullness of life went out of it on that morning,” she wrote, “and has never returned.”30 As well as grief there was also guilt to confront – guilt that of Peggy’s short life she had robbed herself of almost a quarter by leaving her to go to England and that during the remainder she had very often indeed put her second to work. But there was no breakdown. The horror of Peggy’s death seemed to freeze all emotion in her. Her only way of dealing with it was to block it out by redoubling her efforts for the birth control cause. She longed passionately for her trial to begin and was bitterly upset when told that instead the case against her was to be dropped. She needed that trial, needed to make it the focus of her damaged life, needed to stand up and show she had left Peggy for something that mattered. But pressure had been brought to bear upon the government to prevent them making fools of themselves. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “Comstockery is a world joke at the expense of the US” and the laughter was growing uncomfortably loud. The New York Sun commented accurately, “The Sanger case presents the anomaly of a prosecutor loath to prosecute and a defendant anxious to be tried.” But on February 18th, 1916 the government finally entered a nolle prosequi.

  Margaret’s immediate reaction was to go off on a speaking tour for three months. She made the same speech 119 times, first practising it from the roof of her hotel in Lexington Avenue. In it, she went over seven sets of circumstances in which birth control should be used, including the first two years of any young couple’s marriage “to give them a chance to grow together.” She began in New Rochelle by reading her speech but by Pittsburgh she had memorized it and become less nervous. She presented a curious spectacle wherever she went because of her apparent fragility. For a while, conscious that she might not look “serious”, she wore “severe suits” but soon gave up because they made her feel constrained and uncomfortable. In any case, she quickly realized that there was in fact an advantage in looking frail and feminine – it made audiences protective and that was an asset. She was described by one reporter as “a rather slight woman, very beautiful, with wide apart eyes and a crown of auburn hair . . .”31 This appearance, and her low, soft voice disarmed those who, as usual when any woman spoke in public on any woman’s rights issue whatsoever, expected a battleaxe. Wherever she went she was a great success. People packed the halls in which she spoke and supporters marched the streets with banners proclaiming such slogans as “Poverty and large families go hand-in-hand.” The atmosphere everywhere on this issue was highly charged and Margaret delighted in inflaming passions. She wrote that “my flaming Feminist speeches . . . scared some . . . out of their wits.”32 When the opposition took action by arresting her or locking her out of halls she was pleased and said, “I see immense advantages in being gagged. It silences me but it makes millions of others talk about me and the cause in which I live.”33

  But Margaret Sanger’s avowed purpose in returning to America had been to open clinics and once her tour was over she began to consider how and where she could start. She had already been quoted in Tribune as saying, “I have the word of four prominent physicians that they will support me in the work . . . There will be nurses in attendance at the clinic and doctors who will instruct women in the things they need to know. All married women, or women about to be married, will be assisted free and without question.”34 As she herself added, “A splendid promise but difficult to fulfil.” For a start, which “prominent physician” when it came to the bit would put his professional head on the legal block? The answer, as she found, was not one of them. Carefully, she went over and over the two sections of the
1873 Comstock Law, under which she would be prosecuted if she opened a clinic, looking for a loophole. Section 1142, the one most often cited, said no one could give information to prevent conception to anyone for any reason, but Section 1145 did say that doctors could give advice “to cure or prevent” sexual diseases. This had been squeezed in to cover venereal disease but Margaret saw how it might be used if the prevention of disease was interpreted as covering lives endangered through too many pregnancies. But she did not, of course, really imagine that such a specious line of argument would be accepted. Obviously, as soon as she opened a clinic it would be closed and she would then face arrest and trial. She knew this, and accepted her fate not just with resignation but with positive relish.

  This decided, she set about finding premises and helpers. “I preferred a Jewish landlord,” she wrote later, “and a Mr Rabinowitz was the answer.”35 The point of him being Jewish was that she had the idea “Jewish people were more interested in health.” The obliging Mr Rabinowitz lived in Brownsville, a poor but perfectly respectable immigrant district of New York. “He was willing to let us have No. 46, Amboy St. at 50 dollars a month, a reduction from the regular rent because he realized what we were trying to do.”36 He spent hours cleaning the rooms they were going to use and even insisted on white-washing all the walls so that the atmosphere would be “more hospital looking.” This amused Margaret but she saw the point. A house-to-house canvas of local inhabitants was then made. Five thousand handbills were distributed in English, Yiddish and Italian saying:

  MOTHERS!

  Can you afford to have a large family?

  Do you want any more children?

  If not, why do you have them?

  DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT.

  Safe, harmless information can be obtained of

  TRAINED NURSES at

  46 Amboy St.

  nr. Pitkin Ave, Brooklyn.

  Tell your friends and Neighbours.

  All Mothers Welcome.

  A registration of 10 cents entitles any mother to this information.

  On the morning the clinic was due to open, October i6th, 1916, there was a long queue outside – “halfway to the corner they were standing in line, at least one hundred and fifty, some shawled, some hatless, their red hands clasping the cold, chapped, smaller ones of their children.”37 It was a pathetic and moving sight. By seven in the evening, they were still arriving, standing patiently and hopefully in line, many of them accompanied by men. It was impossible to see them all. When the doors were regretfully closed at the end of that first exhausting day a hundred women had been seen – but not one by a doctor. Margaret had failed to recruit a single qualified doctor. She had to run the clinic herself with the help of her sister Ethel, also a nurse. Another friend, Fania Mindell, helped by keeping the records and looking after the children while Ethel and Margaret lectured batches of seven to ten women each, in separate rooms, on contraception in general. It had not escaped Margaret’s notice that in Holland no records were kept. She had rightly concluded that if there had been records, which could be collated and published, they might be of great value for research purposes and so she was determined from the beginning to adopt this business-like approach – it was all part of her greater design and indicated the scope of her ambition. She knew quite well that her Brownsville clinic would in itself be insignificant but that was not the point. The point was to make a positive beginning from which all else would flow.

  And it did, remarkably rapidly. The clinic was only open nine days, packed to bursting all the time, before it was raided in a gratifyingly spectacular fashion. Black marias, screeching sirens, fully armed policemen, and all to herd three perfectly willing women to the local police station. If the authorities had been trying to attract sympathy for Margaret Sanger and publicity for her cause they could not have managed it better. By the time the first case was called, against Ethel, a committee of a hundred prominent women had been formed to work for the reform of the Comstock Law. On the day of Ethel’s trial, fifty of them took Margaret to breakfast at the Vanderbilt Hotel before proceeding with her to the courtroom. Ethel, sentenced under Section 1142 as expected, was given thirty days’ imprisonment. She went on hunger strike, refusing liquid as well as food. Margaret, still awaiting her own trial, was genuinely concerned for her sister’s health but determined to exploit the situation, as indeed Ethel wished her to do. She kept Ethel’s suffering in the public eye, in spite of attempts by the authorities first to keep it secret and then to play it down. By the time she herself went on trial, a month later, public opinion was widely alerted to what was going on. When she took the stand, she was impressive. Every allegation the prosecution made was fiercely contested, especially that of wishing “to do away” with Jewish people by preventing them breeding. Birth control, she said, was nothing to do with doing away of any sort, nor was it a way of making money as was also alleged. She itemized the cost of her clinic and invited those in court to do their own sums.

  After half of the fifty Brownsville mothers who had attended the clinic had given evidence, Judge Freschi said, “I can’t stand this any longer,” and adjourned the court – he was overwhelmed by the endless recitation of miscarriages, illnesses and childbirths. When it met again, a compromise was quickly offered: if Mrs Sanger would promise to agree not to break the law again she would get a free pardon this time. She refused, standing up and saying, “I cannot respect the law as it stands today.”38 She was sentenced to thirty days, like Ethel. This was more of a shock than she had thought. Whenever she had thought of going to prison she said she had somehow always imagined that at the last minute she would be saved – “I believed fully and firmly that some miracle would happen and that I should not go to jail.”39 But no miracle happened, and she went to jail, quite amazed to find the indignities of which she had heard actually coming to pass. Even so, she was given preferential treatment (not, for example, being strip-searched) and knew she had an easy time compared to others. Nobody stopped her giving birth control talks to the other prisoners and she enjoyed herself. What she enjoyed even more was coming out to the strains of the Marseillaise being sung at the gates by a crowd of her friends. “No other experience in my life has been more thrilling,”40 she wrote triumphantly.

  Yet when she took stock of what opening a clinic and going to prison had gained her she was depressed to conclude very little indeed. She was particularly disappointed at the response from the women of New York whom she described as sitting “with folded hands” and keeping “aloof from the struggle for women’s freedom.”41 She had, she felt, sounded the call to action but “American women were not going to use direct action.” The next few years, 1917 to 1921, were “leaden years”. She had resolved, after prison, on a four-part campaign: agitation, education, organization and legislation, but it was hard to be the driving force behind all four. Most of her energies went into launching a magazine again, the Birth Control Review, which she herself helped to sell on street corners. “Street selling was torture for me,” she said, “but I sometimes did it for self discipline and because only in this way could I have complete knowledge of what I was asking others to do.”42 She soon found that selling the magazine was an unsatisfactory business anyway. Those who bought it were aggrieved and disappointed when they found it contained no practical contraceptive advice. However hard she tried, it seemed impossible to give people what they undoubtedly wanted without promptly landing back in prison again and again. Not only did her work make her unhappy at this time but so did her personal life. She had been a woman on her own since her return in 1915. Her two sons were at boarding-school, and she was lonely. She had always thought she liked to be on her own but the reality of “not a cat, dog or bird to greet this homecoming, the fire dead in the grate”43 was too much. Work was not, after all, enough. Her health was poor again in the winter of 1917–18 so she went to California, uprooting Grant and taking him with her for company. There, she spent three months recuperating and writin
g a book.

  The book was Woman and the New Race finally published in 1920. In it, Margaret Sanger expounded with great fervour and passion her belief that the most important force in the remaking of the world was “a free motherhood”. Legal and suffrage rights were utterly unimportant beside birth control because “these don’t affect the most vital factors of her existence.” But “free motherhood” was not going to be given to women – she stressed repeatedly it was something they had to claim for themselves. Women had to stop accepting their inferior status. They had to realize they had power of their own because it was only through them that the future generations could be born. The “new woman” so in vogue thought the ability to earn her own living a great victory and perhaps it was but “it is of little account beside the untramelled choice of mating or not mating.” Only by using contraception could women make the most of this “untramelled choice”. The “new woman” must look after herself and not be stupid enough to leave it to men. As for any idea that using birth control was immoral – that was absurd. All that was immoral was having unwanted babies, or leading oneself to believe that governments were right to encourage large families. This was “the most serious evil of our times” especially as the modern woman was not as suited as other generations to motherhood because of the tension of modern life. There were some graphic descriptions to illustrate this, and to show what it meant “to be a broken drudge of a woman” through endless childbearing. All that marred this visionary tract from the feminist point of view was the outline given of a new great race in America – the feebleminded, the prostitutes, the very poor, and those with any history of serious illness were not to be allowed the right to breed. Margaret saw nothing wrong in advocating birth control as a means of controlling breeding. She wanted strong, healthy, fit mothers not just willing ones.