Sex Wars

by Marge Piercy

  People would ask, as Rose had, why did you stay alone? She could only laugh. She had founded a family None of them would be poor again unless they were complete schlemiels. She had dragged them all into the middle class—never a lot of money but enough if they were careful. At seventy-four she still had her wits and much of her strength. She had even taken a little to religion in her old age, keeping the holidays—for the sake of the children, she said, but it was for herself, to celebrate the turning of the years, to celebrate her family, to celebrate being a Jew, to celebrate survival, above all survival. She was a matriarch, one without a husband but rich in love and connection. Let it continue to be so, she prayed to no one in particular. Let it continue for a while, so I can enjoy.

  1915

  Anthony had an enemy whose evil ways preyed on him, as had been the case with the Woodhull woman, with Restell—now it was a young harlot named Sanger. She was married but that didn’t keep her from taking up with radicals and artists and writers and who knew what free-thinking trash. She had been preaching her devil’s gospel of preventing conception, trying to make sex free and light for women, trying to keep women from facing the consequences of their sins. Instead of carrying out the mission for which the Lord had created them, they wanted to take control of their bodies away from their husbands and their God and do exactly whatever they wished.

  He had believed he thoroughly crushed that particular evil, but then the anarchist Jewess Emma Goldman started speaking about family limitation in public and even giving obscene demonstrations of the use of rubber articles to prevent conception. She was promptly jailed, but when she got out she went on with the devil’s work. Lately she had passed on the mantle to young Sanger. Goldman had been a midwife; Sanger was a nurse. Women who stayed at home with their children never caused this kind of trouble.

  Society needed him more than ever. He might be old, he might sometimes be weary, but his calling was more important than before, for morals were slipping. He did not always win in court these days. His favorite judges had retired. The newspapers ridiculed him when he went after those who showed paintings of naked women, as if there were any difference between dirty French postcards and dirty oils hung in a gallery or a museum. Both corrupted through the eyes. When he arrested a female bookkeeper at the Art Students League in New York because the so-called artists were advertising a show of pictures of naked ladies, the newspapers vied with each other in cartoons. They made a fuss when he had a vile play by an Irishman named Shaw—Mrs. Warren’s Profession—closed down. They also went after him when he arrested a spiritualist, Ida Craddock, who had written a clearly obscene sex primer called The Wedding Night full of diagrams and so-called scientific explanations. He had her convicted in federal court. Before she could go to prison, she slashed her wrists and turned on the gas. Good riddance, but the papers made a fuss. As if any right-thinking man needed a manual to do what he should with his wife. He remembered his own beautiful wedding night with Maggie.

  He suppressed a suffragette paper for printing articles about prostitution. Respectable women did not write about such things or care to read them. But the worst of the criminals he had been pursuing was the public nurse who worked on the Lower East Side out of the Henry Street Settlement House, Mrs. Sanger. She came from a pious Catholic home—her mother had been pregnant eighteen times—but she had married a free-thinking Jew, William Sanger, and been corrupted. She wrote articles about the artificial prevention of birth for The Call, a scurrilous socialist rag. He got the P.O. to notify The Call it would be seized if it continued to run her series “What Every Girl Should Know.” The next issue came out with a large blank space where Sanger’s column had been, headlined “What Every Girl Should Know by Order of the Post Office—NOTHING.”

  Then the hussy went off to France with her husband. When she returned, she wrote more obscene articles for an even more noxious rag, this one published by the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—called The Woman Rebel. Right on its masthead it proclaimed heresy: No Gods, No Masters. The Jewess Goldman wrote for it. He had Sanger indicted on a whole string of counts in federal court. This time he would put her away. She was part of that swarm of commies and free lovers and so-called artists who infested Greenwich Village. Misfits from every small town in the country collected there and egged each other on.

  Her lawyer got her postponement after postponement. Finally the day came for trial, but Sanger did not show up. He learned she had written a pamphlet, Family Limitation, printed by a Wobbly press. Then she disappeared, a fugitive. However, her husband was still in his studio. Anthony suspected William Sanger must have a cache of obscene pamphlets. In the meantime, it was Thanksgiving and he took a week off in Asbury Park, where he had moved Maggie and Adele. Adele was a woman now, just as pleasant and compliant as she had been as a little girl. She was a real help to Maggie, doing a good part of the cooking. As long as she didn’t get distracted, she was a fine helper. Maggie was thinner than ever and suffered from rheumatism; still she kept everything in order. He came home to a world of comfort and warmth where he could relax and be catered to. The following Monday he was ready to resume his chores and plan his attack on William Sanger.

  He received a report that Margaret Sanger was in England. Somehow she had acquired a false passport and escaped him, for a while. A war was on in Europe and that might keep her there for a year or two. Now, he could not go in person to William Sanger, as the man had seen him in court when his wife was indicted. He sent his assistant. “Charlie, you pose as a dealer in condoms. You say how you admire her filthy articles and you want to help distribute her pamphlet. Get him to sell you one. Tell him we’ll translate it into Jewish and Italian.”

  It worked. Sanger rooted around and came up with a copy, giving it to Anthony’s assistant Charlie. Now he could raid Sanger’s studio for more copies. They found a mother lode. He would have the pamphlet declared obscene. Then everything had to be put on the back burner when President Wilson required his presence as a delegate to the International Purity Conference in San Francisco. Preparation took most of his time through May. San Francisco was wet and chilly. He returned from the conference to the hot muggy late spring at home with a cold that turned into pneumonia. The lawyers had been wrangling over William Sanger all this time, but his trial was scheduled before the State Supreme Court of the Fourth District in September. Anthony would be ready. He was going to get this freethinker and stow him away in anticipation of the day he could lock up the wife.

  The trial was tumultuous, with Sanger conducting his own defense. Anthony got angry and said bluntly that Mrs. Sanger was a heinous criminal who sought to turn every home into a brothel. He got into shouting matches with members of the public allowed into the court, including the Jewess Goldman’s lover Alexander Berkman and that notorious Red, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. When he saw who came to defend Sanger, he was surer than ever that these were dangerous elements who must be locked away. William Sanger kept making speeches, calling Anthony “a victim of an incurable sex phobia who lacked the intelligence to distinguish between pornography and scientific information.”

  Anthony wasn’t fond of Judge McInerney, who censured him for speaking out of turn, but at least he refused to let Sanger plead free speech. The best judges, who always ruled in his favor, were gone from the bench. In the end the judge ruled that Family Limitation was indecent, immoral and a menace to society. “This crime is not only a violation of the laws of man but the law of God as well in your scheme to prevent motherhood. If persons would go around and urge Christian women to bear children instead of wasting their time on women’s suffrage, this city and society would be better off.” But all McInerney slapped on Sanger was a fine of $150 or thirty days in jail. Sanger went off to jail. Anthony went home, sick again. What was the use of winning when the penalty was a mere inconvenience?

  He felt weak and feverish. He could barely make his way to New Jersey. Maggie forced him to bed. The doctor said pneumonia had returned. H
e was running a high fever and cooking as in an oven. The trial had worn him out, all those Reds screaming. The judge had not done his job, for he should have held them all in contempt of court. It had been a circus, and in the end Sanger was given such a light sentence it turned the trial into a farce. Anthony was bitter. He had worn himself out on the side of good, and the judge had the nerve to tell him to shut up. That thirty-day sentence made a mockery of his crusade.

  The doctor said his pneumonia had taken an acute form. Maggie kept vigil at his bedside. His minister came—not a man he was as close to as he had been to Budington, but a good old-fashioned blood-and-thunder type. Anthony drifted in and out of the room. Sometimes he was in court shouting his wrath. Sometimes he was stalking a pornographer, pistol in hand. Sometimes he was lecturing on traps for the young. Sometimes he was in his bedroom, a warm September day with a hornet buzzing against the bedroom window and Maggie in a chair wiping his forehead with a damp cloth and praying. Sometimes the minister was back and prayed with her. He saw William Sanger, his face red with anger, shouting about free speech. He saw Madame Restell wrapped in silks and furs running away from him in her carriage pulled by black and white horses. He saw the shyster Howe with his diamonds twinkling in a purple and green vest and the Woodhull strumpets at the bar. He saw Victoria being led up to a scaffolding while he waited to pull on the rope.

  Twice he rallied enough to pray with Maggie and the minister, sending for his secretary to dictate a report to the society. He could feel himself slipping away. The fever was burning him up. He worried a little, not about his soul but about his successor, who lacked drive. Anthony had arrested enough people during his career to fill a sixty-car passenger train. Who else could boast as good service to morality? He might be going to his reward, but the laws he had pushed through Congress were on the books to be used, and they would be, for they had teeth and claws. His successor would do his job, but he would not rejoice in being the mighty right hand of the Lord as Anthony had. Then once again he slid into the hot dark, the pool of burning mud where the sinners he had pursued were cooking like dumplings in soup. I’ve got you, he shouted, watching them burning naked and boiling like lobsters. I’ve got you once and for all!

  MARGARET SANGER RETURNED to the States late in 1915, hoping that in her absence the legal situation might have changed. Comstock was dead, although his brutal laws remained on the books. Newspapers, periodicals, lecturers were openly arguing the legitimacy of contraception. The term she had first used in The Woman Rebel, “birth control,” was everywhere now. It was suddenly respectable, even necessary, to discuss what Comstock had forbidden to be mentioned.

  When she finally came to trial, she had wide public and elite support, now a sought-after lecturer and a celebrity. All charges were dropped.

  A year later, with her sister Ethel—nurses, both of them—she opened the first birth control clinic in America in Brownsville, in Brooklyn. From a storefront she distributed handbills through the neighborhood in English, Yiddish and Italian. “Mothers—can you afford to have a large family? Do you want more children?” When they opened the clinic, the line of women, most with baby carriages, stretched around the block. They managed to see almost five hundred women before the police closed them down. Margaret served thirty days in the Tombs, treating it as a rest and relaxation cure. Her case was won on appeal. A few years later they opened a legal clinic unmolested.

  Acknowledgments

  I HAVE RELIED ON many books and several interviews in doing the research for this novel. An even reasonably complete bibliography would cover at least seven or eight pages, but I wish to give particular thanks to the following: Anne M. Derousie at the Woman’s Rights National Historical Park for her help on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her time in Seneca Falls, and Michael Callahan, historian, raconteur and ranger at Castle Clinton National Monument in Manhattan.

  For Victoria Woodhull, some of the most useful books were: Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, by Barbara Goldsmith (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which I found great on all the characters; The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull, by Lois Beachy Underhill (Bridge Works, 1995); The Victoria Woodhull Reader, edited by Madeleine Stern (M & S Press, 1974), which contains her speeches and articles; and Notorious Victoria, by Mary Gabriel (Algonquin Books, 1998). Not surprisingly, given her penchant for rewriting her own past, many of the stories and facts are in contradiction, and I have chosen those I thought likeliest.

  For Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friend Susan B. Anthony, I found most useful of the many biographies and histories: The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement, by Miriam Gurko (Schocken Books, 1974); Feminism & Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, by Ellen Carol DuBois (Cornell University Press, 1978); The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, edited by Ellen Carol DuBois (Northeastern University Press, 1981); Extraordinary Woman: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by Elisabeth Griffith (Oxford University Press, 1984); Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Northeastern University Press, 1993; first published in 1898).

  For Anthony Comstock, I relied on his own writings and on what I found to be the best biography, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord, by Anna Louise Bates (University Press of America, 1995), and on information from the many histories of censorship and birth control in the States.

  For Freydeh, I used general histories of Jewish immigrant experience in New York, histories of Jewish life in the Pale and more specific works such as The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women, by Sydney Stahl Weinberg (University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

  Several more general books were helpful: Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America, by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), which is outstanding; Everyday Life in the 1800s, by Marc McCutcheon (Writer’s Digest Books, 1993), which—supplemented by The Oxford English Dictionary and my editor Caroline Marino’s sharp eye—kept me from anachronisms; America’s Gilded Age: Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change, by Milton Rugoff (Henry Holt, 1989); Luc Sante’s Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991); Lights and Shadows of New York Life; or, The Sights and Sensations of the Great City, by James D. McCabe Jr. (National Publishing, 1872; facsimile edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970); City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920, by Timothy Gilfoyle (W. W. Norton, 1992); Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America, by Janet Farrell Brodie (Cornell University Press, 1994); Free Love and Heavenly Sinners: The Story of the Great Henry Ward Beecher Scandal, by Robert Shaplen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954); and Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America, by Altina L. Waller (Basic Books, 1980).

  Jacob Riis’s photographs, although of a slightly later period, evoked the life of the streets and tenements. The Museum of Sex in New York offered concrete glimpses of some of the events and places I was writing about. The Tenement Museum of New York was also fascinating, and the guides there knowledgeable.

  It has been a most interesting journey, researching and writing this novel. I hope reading it will prove as interesting to you.

  About the Author

  MARGE PIERCY is the author of fifteen previous novels, including Gone to Soldiers and Woman on the Edge of Time, and sixteen books of poetry, including The Art of Blessing the Day and Circle on the Water. She lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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  Praise for Sex Wars

  “A resonant tale of public and private lives during a time of staggering so cietal shifts… This is a big American story. It feels most American in its dissension, in its struggles, and in its ultimately hopeful tone. Sex Wars shows, in t
he way a deeply felt tale can, the roots of the battles we still fight today.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Piercy does a nice job with the sexual politics… The sights, sounds…of early New York City linger long after the story is done.”

  —People

  “The genuine article—a ripping yarn that gives you a real feeling of and for the times and the people… Powerful.”

  —Washington Times

  “Any novel that starts out by tweaking men for not knowing how to find a lover’s clitoris gets my rapt attention. And sustains it throughout this spirited romp through the Gilded Age, with some of the era’s most col orful and accomplished characters.”

  —Alix Kates Shulman

  “Mesmerizing, sexy, and forthright… Piercy’s portrayals of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are strikingly affectionate and funny.”

  —Booklist