Since the early nineteenth century, information about both pregnancy prevention and termination had been available through midwives and print publications; by the 1850s, advertisements for contraceptive products appeared in newspapers, magazines, and other popular literature. The growing visibility of contraceptive devices and information made them an obvious target for Christian outrage and obscenity charges, and their prohibition became authorized in the Comstock Law passed by Congress on March 3, 1873. Officially called the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, the federal law stipulated imprisonment and steep fines for anyone who possessed, published, sold, or mailed any printed object, image, or instrument deemed obscene, including “any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing abortion.”2 Search-and-seizure warrants could be issued by a judge to an appropriate authority, who would take possession of such materials and destroy them. This far-reaching law raised almost no controversy at the time, and many states subsequently passed their own anti-obscenity laws, so that offenders could be prosecuted in state as well as federal courts.
The national prohibition on mailing obscene materials meant that postal workers too were now censors, and President Ulysses Grant promptly appointed Comstock to serve as a special postal agent to oversee and implement mail confiscation procedures. As early as January 1, 1874, Comstock claimed to have seized 194,000 obscene images; 134,000 pounds of obscene books; and hundreds of thousands of printing plates, contraceptive writings and devices, sex-related drugs, and more. This decades-long fight against obscenity resulted in scores of high-profile trials, book burnings, and the arrests of bookstore workers, writers, activists, actresses, and art gallery owners.
The Comstock Law, and the proliferation of similar state laws that followed, made the distribution of contraceptive information illegal and sharply curtailed the practices of midwives. After 1873, many states punished people who received information about contraception as strenuously as those who disseminated it. Fourteen states—Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wyoming—proscribed oral instruction about birth control. Others criminalized the possession of written guidelines, some authorizing search-and-seizure procedures for suspected offenders. One state—Colorado—thought it possible to ban the transport of mere knowledge pertaining to pregnancy prevention into its borders, while another state—Connecticut—prohibited the very act of preventing conception.3 Methods that had been well known, accessible, and increasingly reliable in the nineteenth century—condoms, vaginal sponges, and pessaries or “womb veils” (early versions of what would come to be called the diaphragm)—were now banned for large sectors of the population. While some states exempted doctors or druggists from the laws, seventeen states along with the District of Columbia barred doctors from contraceptive instruction even in their own medical offices. The success of Comstock and his allied Protestant reformers in outlawing contraception was truly vast in scope, illustrating the broad Christian consensus that existed regarding concepts of sexual vice, immorality, and the need for legal constraint.
Efforts to legalize contraceptive access gained momentum in the early twentieth century, largely through the work of radicals such as Margaret Sanger, who eventually became the movement’s major leader. Born Margaret Higgins, she was the sixth of eleven children born to an atheistic father and a pious Catholic mother of Irish descent. The family lived in Corning, New York, amid a largely Catholic community of laborers who mixed little with the affluent class. Her mother took the responsibility of seeing to it that young Margaret was baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church.4 Her father, however, was a staunch critic of the church who valued freedom of thought—“freedom of the mind from dogma and cant,” as she later put it; it was he, she wrote, who “taught me to think.” After her father brought the famous freethinker Robert Ingersoll to Corning for a speech, the family was shunned and her father’s livelihood greatly reduced in spite of her mother’s well-known piety. In her mother’s life, Margaret wrote, she saw the brutal costs that childbearing could impose on women. After bearing eleven children over twenty-two years, her mother died at fifty; her father lived into his eighties.5
Margaret married William Sanger in 1902, and they had three children together, living first in Westchester and then New York City. Margaret’s real passion for contraceptive access emerged when, a few years after her marriage, she worked as a nurse and midwife among poor families in lower Manhattan. She later described how the cruel conditions facing women and girls horrified her. Women were forever pregnant or nursing, children were always hungry, babies died from neglect and hunger (sometimes to the relief of their haggard parents), and the cramped quarters facilitated men raping their own daughters. “The menace of another pregnancy hung like a sword over the head of every poor woman I came in contact with,” she wrote. As a result of these conditions, improvised abortions were rampant, and full of perils that women were lucky to survive.6 According to Sanger’s autobiography, the destitute women spoke bitterly of how “the rich” knew tricks for preventing pregnancy, while poor women resorted frantically to remedies ranging from drinking turpentine and rolling down stairs to shoving shoe hooks or knitting needles high up into their cervices. Catholic women spoke of “Yankee tricks” among the wealthier classes and asked “what the Protestants did to keep their families down”—a sign that well-to-do women outside Catholic circles seemed to have some knowledge of controlling conception, legal or not. Sickened by this “heartbreaking” situation, in which impoverished women lived terrified lives as “beasts of burden,” Margaret recalled, “my own happy love life became a reproach.”7 The death of one of her patients after a second attempted abortion was the last straw. Haunted by her own ignorance and failure to ease poor women’s suffering, she had found her cause.
In New York she participated actively in the Socialist Party and the labor activism of the Industrial Workers of the World, among comrades who included radicals such as Emma Goldman, ten years her senior and a strong proponent of legalizing contraception. Sanger’s labor activism amplified her concern about the suffering of destitute women and children, further confirming her sense that women needed access to contraception. Not only were working women unable to control their childbearing, but the starving, shivering mothers who attempted to join strikes against their employers risked further poverty for their children. All of this suffering—so needless, in Margaret Sanger’s view, if Americans could only bring themselves to act on their humanitarian ideals—was her professed motivation for launching a movement to give women access to contraceptives and to making reproductive rights her life’s work.
Sanger clashed almost immediately with Comstock. In early 1913, he banned her weekly sex education column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” printed in the Socialist paper the New York Call. (The following week, the indignant editor ran an empty box under the heading, “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing! By Order of the Post Office Department.”) In 1914, after launching her own magazine (The Woman Rebel) to challenge Comstock’s restrictions on sexual information, Sanger was indicted for indecency and the first issue seized by the post office; she was soon arrested and charged on criminal counts that carried a possible sentence of forty-five years in prison, impelling her to flee for Europe. She remained there in exile until late 1915, when Comstock was safely in the grave. His death that September at age seventy-one had come shortly after his final trial: a dogged and ultimately successful endeavor to convict her husband William Sanger under the Criminal Code for distributing a birth control pamphlet she wrote. His New York Times obituary reported that up to his final year, Comstock “caused the arraignment in State and Federal courts of 3,697 persons, of which 2,740 either pleaded guilty or were convicted.”8 Despite his death, Comstock’s impact would long be felt as what Sanger termed “the dead hand” that still imprisoned co
ntraceptive information; for although Comstock’s “body has been entombed,” Sanger wrote five years after his death, “the evil that he did lives after him,” forcing ignorance on the people and oppressing them with his “witch hunting” crusade.9
Sanger refused to let that “dead hand” control her. After his death, this nurse-midwife who had been galvanized by her early public health work in the immigrant ghettoes of New York worked steadily to promote a movement for birth control, which she profoundly believed to be a just, noble, and humane cause. Over the next few years, as she recognized the need to appeal to broad factions of people in order to build strength for the movement, she grew more pragmatic in her tactics. The New York papers and national magazines like Harper’s Weekly and Current Opinion published sympathetic pieces that treated contraception as a scientific issue, examining questions of eugenic improvement, public health, and women’s rights.
Not all attention was sympathetic, though; her growing influence prompted the formidable Catholic leader and Catholic University of America social ethicist John A. Ryan to urge his fellow clergy to be clear, forceful, and persistent in articulating the moral law against contraception, as well as staunchly enforcing that law.10 Ryan’s ethics included support for social justice and labor rights as well as opposition to “race suicide,” a term popularized some years earlier by President Theodore Roosevelt in warning Americans that the fertility rate of immigrants and ethnic minorities outpaced that of white Anglo-Saxons and that for the latter to use birth control was to risk the extinction of the white race. Ryan and other Catholic leaders, while less direct about whiteness, clearly meant to call attention to the greater hazard of reducing the population of what Ryan’s fellow Jesuit M. P. Dowling called “those who are in a position to rear sturdy sons and daughters, who are best fitted to be the bulwark of the nation… the privileged classes.”11 In the eyes of these Catholics, Sanger was steering the nation to race suicide; indeed, she was becoming what one historian calls “a particular bête noire” to clerics because, to their minds, she encouraged women to be selfish and materialistic in refusing to bear as many children as God would send.12 Sanger herself increasingly sensed that Catholic leaders could be a potent enemy to her cause.
Her fame growing, Sanger traveled widely to deliver lectures, and she lobbied for reform of obscenity laws. In October 1916, she opened in Brooklyn the first American clinic explicitly focused on birth control (Planned Parenthood dates its origins back to this very facility). She was again charged with distributing birth control information and devices, and although she and her lawyers made sure that court witnesses heard testimony from Brownsville mothers about the horrific conditions in which they lived and the assistance they and their infants received from Sanger’s clinic, she was jailed for thirty days anyway. She worked with, though did not belong to, both of the competing birth control associations in New York, and she began publishing pamphlets (including her collected columns “What Every Girl Should Know”) and the Birth Control Review.13
In 1920, the same year that women’s suffrage triumphed, Sanger earned still more recognition from the publicity surrounding her latest book, a feminist manifesto titled Woman and the New Race. An argument for contraception as an essential instrument for women’s freedom (and, incidentally, for men’s full freedom and happiness as well), the book spoke directly of the need for a “new sex morality,” in contrast to that of conservative religion: a morality crafted by women themselves and one that differed substantially from current values, in that “the new standard will be based upon knowledge and freedom while the old is founded upon ignorance and submission.” Sanger knew that this morality threatened church doctrine, and she proclaimed it proudly: “Let it be realized that this creation of new sex ideals is a challenge to the church.”14 The book was an immediate success, selling out in hardcover and undergoing several printings before being reissued in softcover by Truth Publishing, a radical press whose list prominently featured other titles in sexology and birth control.
In 1921, Sanger worked to bring together a wide range of American and English birth control advocates for the First American Birth Control Conference, held that November in New York. Convening such a conference was an audacious act, teetering toward the gray areas of the laws still forbidding obscenity. The conference would become the starting point for the American Birth Control League—the predecessor organization of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America—and it would enduringly transform the way Americans thought and talked about contraception. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the furor unleashed by the events of the conference, which pitted Protestants against Catholics while also dividing Protestants into opposing camps, marked the start of the culture wars over sex that would divide Americans for decades to come.
Sanger’s ambitions for the conference were exceedingly high, and she privately predicted it would be a “turning point” for American attitudes toward contraception. She also knew that many would come out especially to hear her.15 Her supporters—a number having cut their teeth in the movement for female suffrage—held equally high aspirations, convinced that birth control was the next vital step in women’s emancipation from patriarchal control and the tyranny of unplanned pregnancies. Physicians, economists, ministers, and at least one rabbi would attend and speak at the conference, while Dr. Karl Reiland, Episcopal rector of the famed St. George’s Church (on whose vestry the senior J. Pierpont Morgan served), was slated to preside over the final public session on birth control’s morality, featuring a culminating speech by Sanger at a newly built venue in Manhattan, the Town Hall.
Sanger had amassed more than ninety women and men to serve as conference officers and committee members. It was a motley group of true believers, social climbers, and calculating hangers-on who had their own reasons for associating with Sanger’s cause: a strategically assembled federation of radical feminists and wealthy socialites, prominent physicians and New York financiers, theatrical celebrities and high-powered literati, economists and clergy. Bertha Rembaugh, the formidable lawyer for the Women’s Trade Union League of New York who passionately defended factory workers, young immigrant women, and prostitutes, was there alongside Louisa (Mrs. Pierre) Jay, better known for frequent attendance at high society debutante balls than for gritty political activism. Affluent members of the Whitney clan, such as Dorothy Whitney (Mrs. Willard) Straight and Mabel Whitney (the second Mrs. Dexter) Blagden, had social profiles resembling that of Mrs. Simeon Ford, wife of the owner of the Grand Union Hotel and also a committee member. But here, rather than being mere ladies of leisure, wealthy women could unite in common cause with the brilliant Dr. Alice Hamilton, the socially conscious physician and first woman appointed to the Harvard Medical School faculty, and the outspoken Mary Halton, a well-known gynecologist and feminist in Greenwich Village. Such mingling was hardly unusual: many elite women of the period had been goaded into political work by the suffrage movement, which perhaps reduced the shock of seeing society dames support this outwardly radical and seemingly illicit venture.16 At once interested in women’s rights, “racial improvement,” and their own wealth and social prestige, they proved an ideal fit for Sanger’s activism.
Margaret Sanger with fellow birth control advocates, New York, circa 1924. UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD/UNDERWOOD ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES.
Many men stood alongside the women on the conference committee. They were liberals, at least on social issues, and willing members of an organization headed by a famously feminist woman. Their numbers included husbands of suffragists as well as Kendall Banning, an author and the managing editor of Hearst’s Magazine and Cosmopolitan; Lowell Brentano, the author, playwright, and heir to the Brentano’s book firm, which had published Woman and the New Race in hardcover; Rabbi Rudolph I. Coffee; Herbert Croly, the editor of the New Republic; the noted writer Theodore Dreiser; the Harvard biologist E. M. East; the Yale economist Irving Fisher; the inventor John Hays Hammond Jr.; and the physician Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf. Like th
e women, they supported Sanger’s cause for a variety of reasons: to reduce poverty and overpopulation, improve public health, diminish psychiatric disturbances and infant mortality, and create better conditions for fair labor laws, among others. Diverse ideals united this motley group of men, no less than their female counterparts.
Sanger also made sure to include Protestant clergy, underscoring the fact that Protestants no longer spoke with one voice regarding contraception. Clerics affiliated with the conference committee were well known for their social activism: the Episcopal priest Arthur E. Whatham, for instance, had much earlier decried racial discrimination in the South and in the Episcopal Church, promoting the cause of hiring black bishops and corresponding with Booker T. Washington; Karl Reiland was “one of the Episcopal Church’s most outspoken liberals,” of whom it was said that he preached a gospel “burned with social zeal and a love for his fellow men.”17 Reiland would roundly call on the church to change its attitude toward birth control and “support this method of raising the level of existence,” lambasting religious objections as “irrelevant.”18 As their sermons and writings then and later made clear, these clergymen believed Christian leaders should champion birth control for the health of mothers and children and for the good of marriage and the family, themes that would be treated expansively in the conference.
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