Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  When she returned from California (and put Grant back into school as quickly as she had snatched him out) she felt rejuvenated. She had also decided to try new tactics to get clinics opened. Aware that certain prominent medical men, such as Dr Robert Dickinson (who was one of America’s most eminent gynaecologists) were beginning to feel uneasy about their profession’s attitude to birth control, Margaret Sanger decided to set about suggesting her movement could be put into the hands of doctors. In 1923 she opened a Clinical Research Bureau on Fifth Avenue in New York and then asked Dickinson if he and his newly formed Committee on Maternal Health (composed of New York obstetricians and gynaecologists and privately financed) would like to take the bureau over and develop it. She herself, of course, would still control it but she would be more than happy to involve Dickinson and his colleagues in the running of it. If they wanted to, they could man it completely. For seven years of constant argument Dickinson tried to get doctors to do this but he failed. The stumbling block was always Mrs Sanger herself. The doctors neither liked nor trusted her. They suspected her motives, doubted her competence and feared her interference. Yet in spite of this setback, Margaret was more hopeful and buoyant than she had been since her imprisonment. She had failed to get any “Doctors only” legislation through state legislatures and failed to get medical co-operation for her research bureau but everywhere she saw her movement making headway.

  The post-First World War world was different. Contraceptives were being used without any changes in the law. The judiciary was making itself ludicrous with cases like United States of America v. One Packet of Japanese Contraceptives. Judges were being educated to changed mores and their jobs made impossible. What was even more significant were the signs that the birth control movement was becoming world-wide. Although she wrote, “I had an uncanny dread of social organisations” Margaret had in fact inaugurated world conferences on birth control (even though many of these were principally occupied with eugenics). In 1925 she organized the Sixth International Birth Control Conference in New York and had the immense satisfaction of accepting Dr Aletta Jacob’s apology for her brusque treatment often years before. Mrs Sanger, said Dr Jacobs, had done what she herself would have liked to do but had not succeeded in doing which was making birth control into a movement. In 1927 another triumph was the holding of a World Population conference in Geneva.

  It seemed, in the twenties and thirties, that Margaret Sanger was everywhere, endlessly travelling and lecturing and preaching for her cause. Her personal life was also happier. In 1920 she had been quietly divorced from Bill Sanger for whom she still felt affection but nothing more. He irritated her, he was in the way. In the way of what she did not quite know, and when she got her official freedom she describes in her autobiography how she went through a period of slight panic during which she attempted to form closer relationships with her sons, then seventeen and twelve. Grant, the younger one, was easier for her to woo. He was always the more original and still young enough for her to dominate. In 1921 she once more took him out of school, against the advice of the headmaster who strenuously objected on the grounds that Grant’s studies were continually interrupted to serve as his mother’s companion, and took him with her to Japan. He was “a tall, dark, rather gawky youth,” very affectionate and demonstrative. Margaret was extremely proud of him, referring to him as “Exhibit A”.44 She was rather hurt when, during the last part of this Far Eastern tour, he announced he was fed up and wished he could get to see some decent tennis. She let him go home ahead of her but missed him dreadfully.

  When she arrived home herself she amazed her friends by marrying again, in 1922. Noah Slee, her new husband, was a business man twenty years older than she who had courted her with presents of filing cabinets and date stamps. Hearing that although she was a formidable career lady she was frivolous enough to enjoy dancing he had also taken ten lessons at Arthur Murray’s Dancing School so that he could partner her. Once again, Margaret succumbed to the prospect of a way of life put before her. Noah Slee was a rich widower. He was only too willing to put considerable amounts of money and his business organization at the service of birth control. So, at the age of forty-three, Margaret married him, on the understanding that she would not be tied down by the marriage. Noah kept his word. He rented a villa between Nice and Monte Carlo so that Margaret would have a base for her European conferences and meetings, and he obligingly imported Mensinga diaphragms from Germany through his oil plant in Canada as well as giving large sums of money (amounting to 56,000 dollars between 1921 and 1926) to fight legal battles for the birth control movement. For her part, Margaret respected and loved him rather more than people knew. Everyone assumed it was a marriage of convenience, and it bore all the signs of it, but there are letters which show that even ten years later Margaret did love Noah – “Dearest Noah – darling – it is really always lonely to be away from you even one day,”45 she could write. She never wrote like that during her marriage to Bill Sanger.

  The same year that she married Noah Slee, Margaret had also published another book – The Pivot of Civilization. In it she had a great deal to say about the importance of sex. “Woman,” she wrote, “must elevate sex into another sphere.” To do so, she must reject the present teaching that sex was merely a means of procreating children. This was “a superficial and shameful view of the sexual instinct.” Birth control carried with it, she argued, “a thorough training in bodily cleanliness and physiology, and a definitive knowledge of the physiology and function of sex.” She attacked the Catholic church for saying birth control was “unnatural” when what was in fact unnatural was being forced to thwart or subdue the sexual instinct. Mankind had gone forward to “capture and control the forces of nature” and this should be a matter of rejoicing. No longer need fear inhibit women – “women can attain freedom only by concrete, definite knowledge of themselves, a knowledge based on biology, physiology and psychology.” Using birth control was the means to all this, she claimed. Margaret Sanger called this book her “head” book, full of reasoned argument she hoped, while her earlier one, Woman and the New Race, was her “heart” book, full of passion and emotion. In fact, they were both similar, setting out the same arguments and only differing in the emphasis on sex and in the examples she chose to illustrate her points. They both sold well and established her more firmly as a figure on the international birth control scene. But she was not a secure figure in her own country. From the day she founded the American Birth Control League (in 1921) Margaret Sanger was involved in internal power struggles and in 1928 she resigned as its president. She also gave up the Birth Control Review, and Noah withdrew his financial support. From then onwards, she confined herself to the research bureau and to a new organization she set up, the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control.

  In 1937, the Committee on Contraception of the American Medical Association agreed that physicians now had the right to give contraceptive advice and that the subject should be taught in medical schools. By then, the anti-contraception laws had been side-stepped for nearly a decade anyway and the birth control movement had become respectable. But Margaret Sanger saw this victory as only the first official one of the many more needed. The next battle was to get the government to make birth control a Public Health programme. “Birth control must seep down until it reaches the strata where the need is greatest; until it has been democratised there can be no rest.”46 A visit to India in 1936 had made her see the true evils of overpopulation and she was haunted by the sight of the “unspeakable poverty . . . the poorest women of Bombay, sober faced and dull looking . . . lived in the grubby and deadly ‘chawls’, huts of corrugated iron, no windows, no lights, no lamps, just three walls and sometimes old pieces of rag or paper hung up in front in a pitiful attempt at privacy.”47 It made her determined not just to establish a whole, world-wide system of birth control clinics but to continue to seek a better, simpler, cheaper female contraceptive. The rest of her life remained devoted to th
is quest. From her winter home in Tucson, Arizona, and her New York estate, Willow Lake in Dutchess County, she sallied forth agitating for more money to spend on research and contributing a good share of her own from the inheritance Noah left her on his death in 1943. It was her research bureau which financed Dr Ernst Graefenberg, pioneer of the IUD, and began work on hormonal contraceptives which led to the development of the Pill. In 1959, Dr Gregory Pincus inscribed the report on oral contraceptives “to Margaret Sanger with affectionate greetings – this product of her pioneering resoluteness.” By then, she was living full-time in Arizona, on her own, feeling very much out of contact with what was going on in the movement to which she had dedicated her life. “I would hesitate to go anywhere to speak on birth control these days,”48 she said. There was no need to do so. By the time she died in 1966, it looked as though the Pill had solved the whole birth control problem, at least in the Western world, and with it many of the problems feminism had been unable to overcome.

  * * *

  Margaret Sanger had many enemies, both feminist and anti-feminist. In the course of her career she provided all of them with plenty of ammunition. One of her slogans, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief aim of birth control”49 was particularly unfortunate having as it did both elitist and racist implications. It was hardly surprising that feminists should accuse her of losing sight of her feminism in her conversion to eugenics. She had been accused of robbing feminism of its ideology and she has been depicted as a megalomaniac with no concept of democratic leadership.

  Many of these and similar accusations are true. To her, the end always justified the means – she did not much care how or why birth control was spread so long as it was spread as far and wide as possible. She did indeed wish the movement she had organized to remain under her own personal direction and she was certainly guilty of leaving unacknowledged debts to all kinds of people who had worked as hard as she had and often in a more altruistic fashion. Like Marie Stopes50 (whom she first met in London in 1915) Margaret Sanger liked the limelight. It was never an evil necessity. Her relish for public controversy was despised by contemporaries. They liked modesty and humility in their women and she was neither modest nor humble. She went out and grabbed headlines and faced cameras with confidence. She was thought of as a publicity seeker whose values were suspect and whose thinking was not quite sound. She lacked intellectual depth and her writings and speeches were too often glib, a hotch-potch of ideas culled from other people. Her outlook was often blinkered – she failed completely, for example, to understand what were really the dilemmas for the Roman Catholics.51 Again and again she oversimplified issues and antagonized people by her scorn for their difficulties. Yet in spite of these truths Margaret Sanger ought not to be underrated, nor ought she to be condemned by feminists. The whole starting point of her original campaign was “concern for the suffering of women” and a passionate desire to change the lives and status of all women. It is simply perverse to doubt her sincerity. Her feminism may have been different from the accepted feminism of her day, but it was just as valid and every bit as tenable.

  Those who sneered at Margaret Sanger for what they thought of as her melodramatic and mawkish stories about the conditions on the East Side which had inspired her forgot how well acquainted she was with life there. There was a distinct failure of the imagination to visualize what she had experienced and to recognize its cumulative effect. Unlike many of her detractors, Margaret Sanger was no theorist – she had had a practical working knowledge of everything she described. This made her truly compassionate, and compassion is at least as praiseworthy as a starting point for feminism as anger or resentment or ambition. She viewed the women who came to her first clinic with something very close to real anguish – “. . . these puzzled, groping women; misled and bewildered in a tangled jungle of popular superstitions, old wives’ remedies and back fence advice – all the ignorant sex teaching of the poor, an unguided fumbling after truth.”52 She genuinely wanted to solve their problems and rescue them from the nightmare of unwanted pregnancy. She wanted to give them back their health and make them cherish instead of dread sex. She was familiar with bad housing, poor diets and the whole joyless nature of many women’s lives. She knew what a botched abortion looked like, what suffering in childbirth was when it took place in an atmosphere of hopeless fear. In the early days of her movement the memory of all this haunted her and even in the mid-1920s when she was far removed from it she never forgot. She was overwhelmed with depression on her visit to China at the suffering she saw – “Pestilence, famine and war are the loathesome substitutes for contraception,”53 she wrote. If anyone could argue against birth control in those circumstances she thought there was no hope for them.

  But Margaret Sanger’s feminism showed itself not just in her compassionate concern for women less fortunate than herself – which was, after all, not much different in essence from the outlook of the nineteenth-century philanthropists – but in her determination that sex should be enjoyed by women purely for its own sake. Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote of Margaret Sanger that “she was the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.” This was what really frightened the feminists. Loudly and clearly Margaret Sanger announced that birth control would increase the quality of sexual intercourse for women not just that it would make it safe. Sex was, she also said, a thing of the spirit not just of the body, and love of it should not be suppressed. She wanted women to glory in the beauty of sex and this, in feminist eyes, brought her dangerously near to advocating that free love doctrine they saw as a trap. Carrie Chapman Catt wrote to Margaret Sanger that she could not possibly sponsor the American Birth Control League because “your reform is too narrow to appeal to me and too sordid. When the advocacy of contraception is combined with as strong a propaganda for continence (not to prevent conception but in the interest of common decency) it will find me a more willing sponsor . . .”54 The same suspicion of sexual pleasure for women made many more feminists wary of Margaret Sanger who they saw as destroying the family which was, they thought, women’s protection. There was open confusion about how birth control would affect sexual morality and whether this would work against women or not. In the midst of all the worry and debate, the sound of Margaret Sanger proclaiming from the rooftops that sex was “glorious” and should be “enjoyed by women as much as men had enjoyed it for centuries” was too much. Feminism, at that stage, was not prepared to endorse such an inflammatory doctrine.

  Yet by the end of Margaret Sanger’s work it was forced to do so. There was no going back. Women, through the use of birth control and that knowledge Margaret Sanger had given them of their own “biology, physiology and psychology,” did look upon sexual pleasure as their right. In that region, as in others, gender was not to be tolerated as preventing self-fulfilment. The woman as the passive partner, ashamed to admit she desired sex and was ready for it, had been banished even if lip service was still paid to the old image – the reality was that women no longer needed to pay the penalty they had always had to pay. Women had done with blaming men for unwanted pregnancies or if they had not they no longer had justification. Margaret Sanger had taught them to look after themselves. They must, she said, expect nothing from men, birth control was “not men’s business” and she would listen to no nonsense about joint responsibility for it. Women had to bear the babies if birth control was not properly managed, therefore it was their responsibility. It was also their responsibility to assert their rights within marriage. The church, with its notion of conjugal rights, sanctioned “lawful rapes” and women should not put up with it. They should never simply service men under some mistaken belief that this was their duty, that a man’s “natural urge” had to be accommodated. If a woman did not also feel the urge then she should decline to satisfy a man’s. Yet women should not regard, at the other extreme, all sex as lust. This was wrong. When she met Gandhi in India and he described the sex act as
merely lust which should be gratified no more than three or four times in a man’s life, and otherwise conquered and subdued, Margaret Sanger was horrified. It distressed her beyond measure to hear this view of sexual relations.

  But, although her arguments for enjoying sex make it sound as if this was to be birth control’s finest gift, this was not all she intended her movement to do. It was her contention that for feminism to have any future at all women must be able to plan their families. Otherwise, nothing else could be planned. Birth control, to Margaret Sanger, was the logical starting point for, not the product of, self-fulfilment. At the Sexual Reform Congress in 1921 Naomi Mitchison put the problem well: “Intelligent . . . women want two things: they want to – live like a woman, to have masses of children by the men they love, and leisure to be aware of both lovers and children; and they want to do their own work, whatever it may be. The two things are not compatible, except in very rare cases. So, even if they live violently, twice as hard as men, fitting things in, wasting no time on anything of less importance than the fundamentals (and this is all very difficult and only the very healthy can keep it up indefinitely) yet they cannot make two hours out of one. They insist, as I think they should, on having both worlds, not specializing like bees or machines, but they must give up something of both, not necessarily all the time, but sometimes the work and sometimes their full sex life. It is very unfortunate but there seems to be no way out of it. Adequate contraceptive methods are an essential part of this compromise.” Margaret Sanger gave women the means to make this kind of compromise and thought that in doing so she had solved the last great problem feminism faced. No longer would nature dictate terms. As in so many other respects, man had learned to bend nature to his will. For the first time a woman’s right to choose had real meaning. There was no need for martyrdom any more. A woman could have a career and have a family and all she had to do was a little planning.