by Jill Lepore
Wonder Woman was born in bohemia. In the 1910s, when Ethel Byrne and Margaret Sanger were living in Greenwich Village, Amazons were everywhere. In 1913, Max Eastman published a book of verse called Child of the Amazons and Other Poems. In the title poem, an Amazonian girl tells the Amazonian queen that she has fallen in love with a man. To marry him and bear his children, though, would violate an Amazonian law: “No Amazon shall enter motherhood / Until she hath performed such deeds, and wrought / Such impact on the energetic world / That thou canst it behold and name her thine.” So she decides, in the end, that she cannot follow love until “the far age when men shall cease / Their tyranny” and “Amazons their revolt.”17 The next year, Inez Haynes Gillmore, who had helped Maud Wood Park found the National College Equal Suffrage League and who was also a member of Heterodoxy, published a novel called Angel Island. Its plot involves five American men who are shipwrecked on a desert island that turns out to be inhabited by “super-humanly beautiful” women with wings, “their bodies just short of heroic size, deep-bosomed, broad-waisted, long-limbed; their arms round like a woman’s and strong like a man’s.” The men, overcome with desire, capture the women, tie them up, and cut off their wings, leaving them utterly helpless because, although the women have feet, they have never used them before and cannot walk. Eventually, the strongest of them leads the other women in waging a revolution: she learns to walk “with the splendid, swinging gait of an Amazon.”18
Wonder Woman’s origin story, in which Captain Steve Trevor crashes his plane on Paradise Island and Diana, princess of the Amazons, falls in love with him—an attachment that is both in violation of Amazon law and a threat to her independence—comes straight out of Eastman’s poem and Gillmore’s novel. But it wasn’t only “Child of the Amazons” and Angel Island: in the 1910s, this story line was a stock feminist plot. In 1915, Heterodoxy’s Charlotte Perkins Gilman published Herland, a utopian novel in which women live entirely free from men, bearing only daughters, by parthenogenesis. (On Paradise Island, Queen Hippolyte carves her daughter out of clay.) In prewar, early-twentieth-century feminist fiction, women rule the world in peace and equality, until men come, threatening to bring war and inequality. In Angel Island and Herland, men have to be taught that if they want to live with women—if they want to marry them and have children with them—they will be allowed to do so only on terms of equality. And for that to happen, there has got to be a way for the men and women to have sex, but without the women getting pregnant all the time. The women in Gilman’s utopia practice what at the time was called “voluntary motherhood,” a subject Gilman approaches with a certain primness. “You see they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless, involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another,” Gilman wrote, “but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.”19
The Amazons in Inez Haynes Gillmore’s 1914 novel, Angel Island (illustration credit 10.6)
Margaret Sanger, who dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank, thought women ought to be conscious makers of people, too. But she had a different word for that kind of thing.20 She called it birth control.
THE WOMAN REBEL
IN 1912, when Olive Byrne was eight years old, Margaret Sanger wrote a twelve-part series in the New York Call, the socialist daily that published Lou Rogers’s cartoons. The series was called “What Every Girl Should Know.” It covered, matter-of-factly, the subjects of sexual attraction, masturbation, intercourse, venereal disease, pregnancy, and childbirth. The U.S. Post Office banned Part 12, “Some Consequences of Ignorance and Silence,” on grounds of obscenity. In its place, the Call ran an announcement: “ ‘What Every Girl Should Know’: NOTHING!”1
Sanger was not easily silenced. In 1914, with help from Ethel Byrne, she began publishing Woman Rebel, an eight-page feminist monthly, in which she coined the term “birth control.” (To fund it, she tried to enlist the support of the Heterodoxy Club but was turned down; instead, she raised money through advance subscriptions.)2 Its first issue included a manifesto called “Why the Woman Rebel?”
Because I believe that deep down in woman’s nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt.
Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.
Because I believe that woman’s freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against these things which enslave her.
Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously.3
In Woman Rebel, Sanger promised to expose the bondage of motherhood and to explain birth control, asking, “Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception?” Six of the magazine’s seven issues were declared obscene and seized.4 Sanger was indicted. John Reed raised money for her defense, but Sanger fled the country; she left her children, two boys and a girl, with Ethel Byrne.5
In England, Sanger collected information about contraception. She also met Havelock Ellis, a doctor, psychologist, and theorist of sex. Ellis celebrated sexual candor, sexual expression, and sexual diversity. His 1897 book, Sexual Inversion, which had been banned, treated homosexuality with sympathy, as did his six-volume Studies in the Psychology of the Sex. To discredit the idea that women were without passion, Ellis argued that the evolution of marriage as an institution had resulted in the prohibition on female sexual pleasure, which was derided as wanton and abnormal. Ellis insisted on what he called “the erotic rights of women” and criticized heterosexual men who, “failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions that they find in themselves . . . have concluded that there are none at all.” Erotic equality, Ellis insisted, was no less important than political equality, if more difficult to achieve: “The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box,” he wrote. “That is why the erotic rights of woman have been the last of all to be attained.”6
The day Sanger met Ellis, she wrote in her diary, “I count this as a glorious day to have conversed with the one man who has done more than anyone in this Century toward giving women & men a clear & sane understanding of their sex lives & of all life.” Sanger and Ellis became friends, then lovers.7
Sanger next wrote a fifteen-page pamphlet called Family Limitation, in which she gave frank instructions on how to use the best methods she’d been able to discover in Europe. “It seems inartistic and sordid to insert a pessary or a tablet in anticipation of the sexual act,” she told her readers. “But it is far more sordid to find yourself, several years later, burdened down with half-a-dozen unwanted children, helpless, starved, shoddily clothed, dragging at your skirt, yourself a dragged-out shadow of the woman you once were.” Family Limitation was marked “for private circulation” and was handed out on the streets.8 That was illegal, too.
In September 1915, the month William Moulton Marston married Sadie Elizabeth Holloway in Massachusetts, Margaret Sanger’s husband, William Sanger, was tried and convicted in New York for distributing Family Limitation. “Your crime is not only a violation of the laws of man, but of the law of God as well,” the judge told him. “If some persons would go around and urge Christian women to bear children, instead of wasting their time on woman suffrage, this city and society would be better off.”9
The month after her husband’s trial, Margaret Sanger returned to the United States to be with her daughter, Peggy, who had contracted pneumonia and was being cared for by Ethel Byrne at Mount Sinai Hospital.
“I want Aunt Ethel to hold me; not you,” Peggy said when she first saw her mother.10 Peggy died. Sanger was devastated.
Olive Byrne was eleven, and living in a convent school in Rochester in January 1916, when Margaret Sanger appeared in federal court in New York to face the cha
rges against her for Woman Rebel. Appeals on her behalf had been sent to President Wilson, pleading the cause: “While men stand proudly and face the sun, boasting that they have quenched the wickedness of slavery, what chains of slavery are, have been or ever could be so intimate a horror as the shackles on every limb—on every thought—on the very soul of an unwilling pregnant woman?”11 Sanger refused a lawyer and insisted on representing herself. In February, the charges against her were dropped, the court believing that prosecuting a mother grieving the death of a five-year-old daughter would only aid her cause.12 Sanger, disappointed not to have her day in court, was determined to provoke another arrest.
In October 1916, Margaret Sanger and Ethel Byrne rented a storefront in Brooklyn and posted handbills in English, Italian, and Yiddish:
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 STREET.
Mothers pushing baby carriages and holding toddlers’ tiny hands lined up around the corner. They paid ten cents to register. Sanger or Byrne met with seven or eight at once to show them how to use pessaries and condoms. Nine days after the clinic opened, an undercover policewoman posing as a mother of two came and met with Ethel Byrne, who discussed contraception with her. The next day, Byrne and Sanger were arrested. They were charged with violating a section of the New York State Penal Code, under which it was illegal to distribute “any recipe, drug, or medicine for the prevention of conception.”13
Margaret Sanger (in fur-trimmed coat) and Ethel Byrne (to the right of the woman holding the baby) leaving the Brooklyn birth control clinic in 1916 (illustration credit 11.1)
Byrne was tried first, beginning on January 4, 1917. Her lawyer argued that the penal code was unconstitutional, insisting that it infringed on a woman’s right to the “pursuit of happiness.” That proved unconvincing. Byrne was found guilty on January 8.14
Margaret Sanger (left) and Ethel Byrne in court in 1917 (illustration credit 11.2)
In the national news, Byrne’s trial and imprisonment dwarfed the attention given to the suffrage movement. On January 10, Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party began their suffrage vigil outside the White House, carrying signs reading, “mr. president how long must women wait for liberty?”15 That was dramatic, but not quite as dramatic as what was happening to Ethel Byrne in New York.
On January 22, Byrne took two hours off from her hospital work to attend a hearing. She was sentenced to thirty days at Blackwell’s Island. “The children Mrs. Ethel Byrne was nursing through the measles will have to get another nurse,” the New York Tribune reported. Nothing was said, in any of the coverage of Byrne’s trial, about her own two children; reporters seem not to have known about them.
“I shall go on a hunger strike at once,” Ethel Byrne announced in court. “They can take me to the Workhouse, but they cannot make me eat or drink or work while I am there.”16
Byrne’s inspiration was Emmeline Pankhurst.17 Byrne’s grandson believes that Byrne, like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, spent time in England sometime before 1916, working for Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members, when jailed, went on hunger strikes. Photographs of these women being force-fed—steel devices bracing open their mouths—had only advanced their cause, which is why, in the fall of 1911, the Harvard Corporation had refused to allow Pankhurst to speak on campus, and which is also why, in the winter of 1917, Byrne’s decision to follow Pankhurst’s lead riveted the nation’s attention, even while suffragists were picketing outside the White House day and night. The New York Times ran the Byrne story on its front page for four days in a row.18
In the police van, on her way to Blackwell’s Island, Byrne told other women prisoners how to use contraception. On the second day of her hunger strike, she was brought back to federal court. Her lawyer attempted to secure her release through a writ of habeas corpus but failed. Byrne collapsed during the hearing, after which she spent the night at a prison called the Tombs. Brought back to Blackwell’s Island, she issued a statement through her lawyer, from cell 139.
“I will eat nothing until I am released,” she said. “It does not make much difference whether I starve or not, so long as my plight calls attention to the archaic laws which would prevent our telling the truth about the facts of life. The fight is to go on.” (The worst part, she later said, was going without water: “At night the woman whose duty it was to go up and down the corridors to give the prisoners a drink if they wanted it stopped right by my cell and cried, ‘Water! Water’ till it seemed as if I could not stand it.”)19
Failing fast, Byrne was moved to the prison hospital. She compared her fate to the fate of women who die during abortions. “With the Health Department reporting 8,000 deaths a year in the State from illegal operations on women, one more death won’t make much difference, anyway,” Byrne said. Her supporters compared her struggle to the battle for suffrage, finding the fight for the right to contraception more urgent: “No amount of votes women ever get will do as much as the solution of this age-old problem.”20
At Carnegie Hall, speaking at a rally in Byrne’s honor—attended by more than three thousand supporters—Sanger said, “I come not from the stake of Salem where women were tried for blasphemy, but from the shadow of Blackwell’s Island where women are tortured for obscenity.” After five days without eating or drinking, Byrne was unable to get out of bed. Newspapers reported her vital signs daily. Byrne’s attorney said she was in imminent danger of falling into a coma. Sanger, who was not allowed to visit, said her sister was on the verge of death. “I didn’t advise her to undertake this hunger strike, but I certainly would not tell her to end it now,” Sanger told reporters. An editorial in the New York Tribune begged the governor to issue a pardon, threatening him with the judgment of history: “It will be hard to make the youth of 1967 believe that in 1917 a woman was imprisoned for doing what Mrs. Byrne did.”21
On the sixth day of Byrne’s hunger strike, Sanger went to Rochester, ostensibly to speak at the local Birth Control League. (While Sanger was in Rochester, the Birth Control League sent a petition to the governor, in Albany, asking him to stop “the further persecution of the noble women who are leading the birth control movement.”) But really, she’d gone to Rochester to see Olive Byrne, who was twelve years old, and living in a convent school called the Nazareth Academy. In Rochester, Sanger, hoping to help the cause, revealed to the press, for the first time, that her sister had two children. Sanger told reporters that Byrne had been preparing to bring her children to New York to live with her, and had finally gotten an apartment ready for them, but that this plan had been derailed by her arrest. (None of this was true.) Then she said she had come to Rochester to tell Olive what had happened to her mother. “Mrs. Byrne’s sister explained that she feels the children should know about their mother and understand her motives,” one paper reported.22 That part, anyway, was true.
“There is a woman here who says she is your aunt and she wants to see you,” the mother superior of the Nazareth Academy said to Olive Byrne when she sent for her. “You don’t have to see her, you know.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Olive said, stifling her excitement. No one had ever visited her before.
At first the nuns had refused to let Sanger past the gates. It had taken Sanger three days and a lawyer to get in. “But Margaret was not a pioneer of women’s rights for nothing,” Olive later wrote. “She threatened to call the police and charge abduction. At last the matter was referred to the Bishop who reluctantly agreed that she could see me in the presence of the Mother Superior.”
Olive was escorted to a room filled with nuns, two priests, a bishop, and Margaret Sanger, who was tiny and glamorous. Olive thought she looked like a movie star. (Later that year, Sanger starred in a silent
film called Birth Control; it was suppressed.)23
Olive was astonished. “I was a dumpy kind of child with a freckled face and wearing a most unbecoming school uniform, but that beautiful woman came to me, swept me into her arms and said, ‘Oh, you lovely darling.’ As no one had ever made such an extravagant gesture of love to me before, I was overcome with shyness and could not speak. But a wonderful glow filled me so I thought I would cry, and I was afraid they might send her away if I did.”
Sanger hugged Olive and told her that her mother loved her very much. She did not, as the bishop feared, tell this little girl about birth control.24
By then, Ethel Byrne had been refusing to eat or drink for a week. Prison doctors began forcibly feeding her milk and eggs through a rubber tube. Sanger said that Byrne had been unable to resist the start of the feedings because she was unconscious at the time. Byrne was the first woman prisoner in the United States submitted to forced feeding.25
On January 31, Sanger and a delegation of birth control advocates met with the governor in Albany; he offered to pardon Byrne if she would agree to never again participate in the birth control movement.26 The next day, Sanger was allowed to visit Byrne in prison. Byrne was too weak to speak. Sanger sent the governor a telegram, begging him to pardon her sister. The governor, en route from Albany to New York, missed the telegram, but later that day, Sanger and her delegation met with him in New York.
“My sister is dying,” she told him.