by Jill Lepore
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 at
46 AMBOY STREET.
On the day the clinic opened, Jewish and Italian women pushing prams and with toddlers in tow lined up around the corner, Sanger recalled, “some shawled, some hatless, their red hands clasping the cold, chapped, smaller ones of their children.” They paid ten cents to register. Then Sanger or Byrne met with seven or eight at once to show them how to use pessaries.
Nine days later, an undercover policewoman came, posing as a mother of two who couldn’t afford any more children. Mindell sold her a copy of “What Every Girl Should Know.” Byrne discussed contraception with her. The next day, the police arrived, confiscated the examination table, shut down the clinic, and arrested Sanger.
Mindell was convicted on obscenity charges; her conviction was eventually overturned. Byrne and Sanger 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.” (The fear was that contraception promotes promiscuity.) Byrne’s lawyer argued that the penal code was unconstitutional because it infringed on a woman’s right to the “pursuit of happiness.” She was found guilty. Sentenced to thirty days, she went on a hunger strike and nearly died. 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.”
At Sanger’s trial, during which the judge waved a cervical cap from the bench, Sanger hoped to argue that the law preventing the distribution of contraception was unconstitutional: exposing women, against their will, to the danger of dying in childbirth violated a woman’s right to life. The judge allowed that doctors could prescribe contraception—which is what made it possible, subsequently, for Sanger to open more clinics—but ruled that no woman has “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception”: if a woman isn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex. Sanger went to Queens County Penitentiary. She was sentenced to thirty days.21
The month after Sanger was released from prison, she published, in the Birth Control Review, an essay by Popenoe, whose point was that “birth control as at present practiced in the United States is the reverse of eugenic.”22 Hard-line eugenicists like Popenoe almost always objected to birth control; but the more eugenicists objected to her agenda, the more vigorously Sanger courted their support.
Meanwhile, eugenicists kept worrying about race suicide, exactly because college-educated women like Clara Savage were working instead of marrying and having babies or, almost as bad, were marrying and having babies but not having enough of them, or not raising them well enough. Eugenicists therefore insisted that Anglo-Saxon parents needed not birth control but parental education, urgently: the unfit races, with their teeming hordes of dark-eyed children, seemed to know how to take care of babies, instinctively, like animals, but fit parents, with their small families, were woefully ignorant. Social services that helped poor mothers were interfering with the workings of natural selection. What were fit women to do?
In the Journal of Heredity, in 1916, Popenoe published an influential monograph by Mary L. Read, the educational director of the National Association for Mothercraft Education. Read confessed herself baffled: “It is one of the riddles of history why, when the life and welfare of children are of such vital concern to the family and the race, society has never taken the trouble to see to it that the woman in whose charge these precious baby lives rested were highly trained and fittingly prepared for their responsibility.” A well-bred and genetically fit woman who hadn’t been taught how to take care of babies, “however pretty and even charming,” Read warned, would raise “sickly, peevish, stupid children.” If providing social services to the poor couldn’t be stopped, then, at a bare minimum, fit parents needed their own social services; they needed parental education.23
In 1918, Savage went to Europe as Good Housekeeping’s foreign editor; she wanted to cover politics, but she was stymied. When peace came, she quit. In 1920, at the age of twenty-nine, she married Harold Littledale, who went on to become an editor at the New York Times. The next year, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League. Sanger fielded letters from women all over the country, begging her for information about contraception. One wrote from Kentucky, “I have Ben married 4 years the 5 december and I have all Redy given Birth to 3 children and all 3 of my children ar Boys and I am all most Broken down and am only 24 yers old. . . . mrs sanger I do want you to write me an Return mail what to do to keep from Bring these Little one to this awfel world.”24
The Progressive-era debate about parenthood contained within it debates about who had too many children, who had too few, who had a right to write about it, and how. In 1922, at the age of thirty-one, Clara Savage Littledale gave birth to a daughter. Motherhood does not appear to have been all she had hoped for. In 1924, she wrote a short, bitter piece for the New Republic about her experience sharing a room in a maternity ward with a woman whose baby had been stillborn. We never learn the woman’s name; Littledale calls her “41A.” Weirdly, the story, called “Sublimation,” which takes the form of a conversation overheard during a visit from 41A’s husband, has a lot in common with “Hills Like White Elephants,” a short story Hemingway published three years later, in Men Without Women. The couple never mentions the dead baby, but everything they say is about the dead baby.
“Is my aunt cookin’ your meals?” she asked.
“Yep, and, say, we had a pie.”
“What kind of a pie?” the girl demanded fiercely.
“Apple pie.”
“Did she use up those apples I was savin’?” The face of 41A was white and set.25
Parenthood came late to Clara Savage Littledale, but for the rest of her life, she wrote about almost nothing else.
Straight after George Hecht met Littledale, he hired her, and then, together, they planned their venture: Children: A Magazine for Parents. Paul Popenoe and Lillian Gilbreth served on its advisory board. The first issue came out in 1926. Margaret Sanger wanted to help poor women have smaller families; Hecht and Littledale wanted to help wealthy women raise better babies. The magazine’s argument amounted to this: parents’ job was to prolong their children’s infancy, to baby their babies, because “prolonged infancy makes, through a better preparation for life, a better use of the extended life span which we enjoy today, thanks to modern science.” Actually, it went further: childhood was more than a stage of life. It was a right. “If the constitution of the United States were being redrawn to reflect the spirit of the twentieth century,” one contributor put it, “along with the ‘right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ might be included a future ‘right to childhood,’ emphasizing the need of every human being to a protected span of years.”26
Littledale had a decided editorial vision. She weeded out submissions she hated—gossipy, Victorian-sounding drivel, mainly: “My particular detestation are manuscripts that begin, ‘As Mrs. Jones was having tea in the garden with Mrs. Smith the question of Johnny’s nail-biting came up.’ ”27 She reached out to fathers. In 1927, the year Littledale worked through her second pregnancy, she ran Taylorite articles like “Can a Tired Businessman Be a Good Father?,” which argued for what later came to be called “quality time” (“An hour can be made more significant than a day”).28 Most of all, she solicited contributions from people without either journalistic experience or academic expertise—“Mammas and papas are encouraged to contribute articles and they do”—chiefly to point out what rank amateurs they were.29
In 1927, Littledale published “Confessions of an Amateur Mother,”
the lament of Stella Crossley, a wealthy, well-educated woman who has not the least idea how to take care of her newborn. The article sounds a lot like Littledale’s diary. “Why is it that for the women of my type—professional women—motherhood, as a rule, comes so hard?” Crossley asked. Why is it that “we, for whom it should have been comparatively easy, seem to have greater difficulties with our infants than do the uneducated women, the foreign women, the wives of the great mass of toilers?” There are “motherhood clinics aplenty in the districts of the ‘poor’ women,” Crossley complained. “Why not for me?”30
Littledale loved this sort of piece, and she printed dozens like it. Meanwhile, Sanger was collecting stories, too. In 1928, she brought out Motherhood in Bondage, an anthology of letters she had received from poor women all over the country. “I am the mother of nineteen children, the baby only twenty months old,” one woman wrote. “I am forty-three years old and I had rather die than give birth to another child.” The expert advice these women wanted was where to get contraception, which, despite Sanger’s lobbying efforts, remained illegal. A doctor didn’t even have the right to discuss it with patients.
In 1926, Sanger, with colleagues at the American Birth Control League, met with sixty senators and twenty congressmen, and seventeen members of the Judiciary Committee, urging the decriminalization of contraception. They didn’t make much headway. (Mary Ware Dennett, of the Voluntary Parenthood League, had pointed out, when she lobbied the New York State Legislature in 1924, that the very men who refused to change the law had wives who broke it: congressional families had an average of 2.7 children.) Notes from the interviews, summarizing the remarks of legistators, read like this: “Knew nothing of the subject,” “Has no literature on the subject.” Senator James Reed from Missouri told the lobbyists, “He believes that Birth Control is chipping away the very foundation of our civilization. He believes in large families, that women should have many children and that poverty is no handicap but rather an asset.” Arizona senator Henry Ashurst told Sanger, “He did not wish to discuss the question with us. Stated that he had not been raised to discuss this matter with women.” Spurned by legislators, Sanger turned more of her attention to gaining the support of doctors. By 1930, the American Birth Control League was overseeing fifty-five birth control clinics in twelve states and twenty-three cities. Contraception had become more of a medical issue than a legislative one. And, by now, so had parenthood.31
Sanger continued abrasive and impatient, and often reckless and heedless. She also continued to court eugenicists; at one point, the American Birth Control League even proposed a merger with the American Eugenics Society (the society was not interested).32 But Sanger was unpopular with eugenicists because she was also a socialist, and eugenicists were more commonly laissez-faire conservatives, which is among the many reasons Sanger was at odds with her own organization. A survey conducted of nearly a thousand members of the American Birth Control League in 1927 found its membership to be more Republican than the rest of the country. In a successful bid for respectability as a reform akin to prohibition, the league had attracted to its membership the same wealthy women and men who joined organizations like the Red Cross, the Rotary Club, and the Anti-Saloon League.33 The next year, Sanger was forged to resign as the league’s president; its members objected to her feminism.
Clara Savage Littledale courted much the same Rotarian audience, filling the pages of her parenting magazine with expert advice, offered by the day’s leading psychologists and doctors and educators and scholars. But this she did with a twist: she turned her authorities into amateurs. “The staff sits up nights throwing scientific words out of the articles submitted by college professors,” she explained. She also domesticated her experts. If the magazine “publishes an article by a Ph.D.,” she said, “it hastens to explain that said Ph.D. has a baby or if the Ph.D. is a man that he is the uncle of a dear little tot.”34
Littledale was making this up as she went because, at the time, science reporting was new. Before the First World War, journalists generally didn’t report on science. After the war, scientists tried writing for newspapers and magazines, attempting to explain the value of their work, but most of them weren’t any good at it. The number of scientists writing for a popular audience fell, while the number of journalists specializing in science writing rose. And so did the prominence and prevalence of stories about science.
Science didn’t become the explanation for everything by happenstance. In 1920, a chemist named Edwin E. Slosson founded a wire service, the Science Service. Initially financed by the newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps, the Science Service was later sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Research Council. Its purpose was to promote scientific research by feeding stories to newspapers and magazines, which, at a moment when Time was becoming a news aggregator, was a good plan, with eager takers. The Science Service, Slosson said, would not “indulge in propaganda unless it be propagandas to urge the value of research and the usefulness of science.” By 1930, it reached a fifth of the American reading public.35
As science writing grew, it established certain conventions of reporting and prose; certain sorts of stories took shape. An emerging specialty of science journalism was the hair-raising account of a disease that threatens to destroy the human race. Littledale brought that genre into writing about parenting. In her hands, the conquest-of-disease story came to define writing about parenting.36 Disease stories made good copy. They also sold advertising, especially for hygiene products, like Listerine (first sold over the counter in 1914), Lysol (marketed, in 1918, as an anti-flu measure), Cellophane (1923), and Kleenex (1924, sold as a towel for removing makeup until a consumer survey revealed that people were using it to blow their noses).37 As George Hecht and Clara Savage Littledale knew very well, these were excellent products to sell to parents.
The germ theory of disease dates, more or less, to the 1870s. Pasteur developed a rabies vaccine in 1885, launching a global battle against infectious illness, a battle whose tremendous success would do so much to lengthen the average life.38 In the 1910s, “germ” became a household word, and ordinary people learned to blame germs, not God, for catastrophes like the influenza epidemic of 1918—which killed more people than had died in the war. By the 1920s, scientists had developed a vaccine for diphtheria; other vaccines, like the one for polio, would take decades, but hopes ran high. In The Conquest of Disease, professor of sanitary science Thurman B. Rice predicted that the eradication of sickness itself was merely a matter of time.39
The master of the conquest-of-disease story was a bacteriologist turned journalist named Paul de Kruif. De Kruif had taught at the University of Michigan and worked for the U.S. Sanitary Corps, attempting to isolate the gangrene bacillus. After the war, he turned to writing. In 1925, his collaboration with Sinclair Lewis led to the publication of Arrowsmith, a novel about a young doctor fighting an outbreak of bubonic plague—the first medical thriller. The scientist, the New Republic noted in its review of the novel, now “sits in the seat of the mighty.” De Kruif coauthored the novel and received 25 percent of the royalties. In 1926, while Hecht and Littledale were at work developing their parenting magazine, de Kruif turned to nonfiction, publishing Microbe Hunters, a book of profiles of scientists, starting with Leeuwenhoek, who can see tiny things the rest of us can’t, things that are trying to kill us.40 The book, de Kruif wrote, is “the tale of the bold and persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death. . . . It is the plain history of their tireless peerings into this new fantastic world.”41
The coming plague was Paul de Kruif’s bread and butter. Very many of his stories were written for mothers. In 1929, he issued a warning in the lead article in Ladies’ Home Journal: “In American milk today there lurks a terrible, wasting fever, that may keep you in bed for a couple of weeks, that may fasten itself on you for one, or for two, or even for seven years—that might culminate by killing you.” What was this drea
d malady? Undulant fever. “At least 50,000 people are sick with it at this very moment,” their ailment virtually unknown to “their baffled doctors,” de Kruif wrote.42 The article, titled “Before You Drink a Glass of Milk,” scared a lot of mothers and sold a lot of magazines. Boasting of its success, the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal explained, “Nobody had ever heard of undulant fever before.”43
To sell a magazine about raising children, you have to convince parents that they need that magazine. They need it because, at parenting, they are amateurs. And they need it because their children are in danger. To sell that magazine every four weeks, those children need to be in danger every single month.
For a lesson in the anatomy of a panic, Hecht and Littledale didn’t have far to look. The year Paul de Kruif sounded the alarm about undulant fever, Americans fell into a frenzy over yet another disease no one had ever heard of before. “ ‘Parrot Disease’ Baffles Experts,” reported the Washington Post, on page 3 of a paper that went to press the night of January 8, 1930, thrilling readers with a medical mystery that would capture the nation’s attention with the prospect of a parrot fever pandemic. Reports, cabled and wired and radioed across land and sea, were printed in the daily paper or broadcast, within minutes, on the radio: tallies, theories, postmortems, more to fear.44 Before it was over, an admiral in the U.S. Navy would order sailors at sea to cast their pet parrots into the ocean.45 There was talk of the mass extermination of all the birds in the Bronx Zoo. People abandoned their pet parrots on the streets. Every sneeze seemed a symptom. The story grew and grew. Almost as soon as it started, the panic was reclassified as a false alarm. But that sold papers, too. “U.S. Alarm over Parrot Disease Not Warranted,” reported the Chicago Daily Tribune on January 15, 1930.46 E. B. White filed a piece for the New Yorker, calling parrot fever merely “the latest and most amusing example of the national hypochondria.”47 He figured that the country was suffering from nothing so much as a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.48 The first American doctor to believe he had seen psittacosis had read about the disease in a Baltimore paper, probably the Baltimore American, which included a glossy Sunday supplement called the American Weekly, edited by Morrill Goddard. “Nobody heard the word ‘psittacosis’ until the American Weekly printed a page,” Goddard boasted.49