When Margaret Sanger coordinated the first national birth control conference in the fall of 1921, she chose New York’s Plaza Hotel as her launching pad. Perched on Fifth Avenue at the southeast corner of Central Park, the nineteen stories of the Plaza—the most expensive construction of its kind when it opened in 1907—take a commanding view of uptown Manhattan. The First American Birth Control Conference brought reformers and eugenicists, politicians and socialites together at the landmark hotel to inaugurate the American Birth Control League. Sanger had been working relentlessly to build a movement and declined to join one of the several existing birth control organizations—she preferred to launch her own, with herself at the head. Over a six-month period earlier that year, she gave no less than forty-six public lectures; by the conference opening, she had amassed a contact list of over thirty-one thousand supporters. The opulent setting and prominent sponsors like Winston Churchill, then a member of British Parliament, and novelist Theodore Dreiser underscored that the days of storefront tenement clinics were long behind her.20
At the Plaza Hotel, Sanger opened the conference and announced the aim of the new American Birth Control League: to give the instinct of sex the same detailed attention civilized societies paid to the instinct of hunger.21 Women’s sexual pleasure was of profound importance to Sanger, a truly radical notion for her time. But she also saw sex as the seed of social ills. She explained to her audience that the crux of birth control was its ability to modernize sex and reproduction:
We see the healthy and fit elements of the nation carrying the burden of the unfit.… We have erected palatial residences for the unfit, the insane, for the feebleminded,—for those who should never have been born, to say nothing of their being permitted to carry on the next generation. Now the time has come when we must all join together in stopping at its source misery, ignorance, delinquency and crime. This is the program of the Birth Control movement.22
The league resolved that children should be “conceived in love” and “born of the mother’s conscious desire.” They should be “only begotten under conditions which render possible the heritage of health,” and the league endorsed both contraception and sterilization as necessary methods to prevent the reproduction of the unfit. From the very beginning, Sanger united voluntary motherhood and eugenics into the same white feminist agenda. Her vision of individual women’s liberation was intertwined with the act of social cleansing. Birth control would free women from unwanted births while simultaneously freeing civilization from “delinquency, defect and dependence.”23
The closing event of the conference took the league’s missive out of the rarefied Central Park air, down to the people in midtown Manhattan’s theater district. Sanger, a massively popular figure in the early 1920s, and her fellow league organizers, held a public birth control meeting at the recently opened Town Hall venue on West Forty-Third Street. The meeting drew tremendous interest—large enough that the police, at the urging of the Catholic archbishop of New York, shut it down just before it was to begin. The police captain ordered the doors padlocked, with a full-capacity audience of fifteen hundred people captured inside. Sanger arrived at a locked building while thousands more milled about in the streets. The police were forced to open the doors to free the trapped audience, and Sanger and others made their way inside and toward the looming stage. She hesitated, trying to figure out how best to address the crowd.
The decision was made for her. A strong man hoisted her onstage, thrust a bouquet of long-stem roses into her arms, and directed all eyes toward Sanger. The dynamic Margaret Sanger was made for just this kind of public speech, but she was arrested as soon as she took the podium, as was another scheduled speaker. The New York World reported that a lively crowd of three thousand singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of No Liberty” followed the two prisoners down Forty-Third Street to the police station on Broadway, where they were quickly released.24
The man who lifted Sanger up to the stage was the writer Lothrop Stoddard, the nation’s most visible eugenicist and white supremacist. Stoddard belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, inspired Nazi conceptions of the inferior “under-man,” and as late as 1939 praised Nazis for “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”25 By this point, Sanger had deliberately intertwined her movement for contraception with the eugenics movement, and that meant aligning herself with men like Stoddard. Stoddard himself served on the organizing committee of the conference, as well as on the board of the new league; Sanger also worked with two other notorious eugenicists, Henry Pratt Fairchild and Harry Laughlin. All three were globally influential white nationalists who embraced eugenics as a means to whiten the US population. Sanger’s campaign for women’s sexual freedom was underpinned by—not merely coincident with—her belief in eugenics.
The rediscovery of Austrian monk Gregor Mendel’s experiments with the laws of heredity in 1900 and the subsequent development of genetics had paved the way to the modern eugenics movement. Heredity was no longer understood to be the result of experiences and environment. Increasingly, the new model of the gene framed heredity as fixed and unchangeable, and suggested that hundreds and thousands of traits and behaviors had genetic origins. Sanger and other eugenicists saw mental and physical disability, degeneracy, alcoholism, and poverty as conditions printed on the gene. The idea of innate, immutable hereditary material that transmitted disability and disease from one generation to the next, unaltered, led eugenicists to seize women’s fertility as the best lever for steering the direction of humanity. They feared that letting the genetically “unfit” reproduce was to let them copy themselves manifold into the future, like error-ridden newspapers rolling off the printing press.
But what was the best method to ensure that the unfit couldn’t reproduce, thereby poisoning the gene pool? Segregation was one approach. “Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period,” Sanger advised. Yet segregation was not a foolproof method, especially among the degenerate. Wily women could easily escape their decades-long confinement, giving rise to “an endless progeny of defect.” Sterilization was, therefore, preferable to segregation, and throughout her lifetime Sanger advocated that the state should take charge of the fertility of the “incurably defective… either by force or persuasion.” Indiana had passed the nation’s first eugenic law in 1907, granting the state government the right to forcibly sterilize the unfit, including “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.” Over thirty states soon followed and sterilized between sixty thousand and seventy thousand women by the late 1930s. As late as 1950, when much of the nation had begun to recoil from eugenics in the wake of Nazi Germany’s genocidal efforts at population cleansing, Sanger recommended that unfit women who agreed to be sterilized should receive state pensions of $75 per month on account of their contributions to society.26
But sterilization, too, had its shortcomings. Surgical operations were costly and lengthy; Sanger suspected sterilization was merely a “superficial deterren[t] when applied to the constantly growing stream of the unfit.” Contraceptives like condoms, pessaries, and douching solutions were much easier to distribute, preventing more births among the “diseased and incompetent masses” in the first place. She positioned birth control as the prime method to eliminate people she referred to as “biological and racial mistakes.”27
Sanger’s approach to eugenics had key differences from that of seething racists like Stoddard, scientist Charles Davenport, and other white male leaders of the campaign for so-called better breeding. Like all social movements, eugenics comprised a network of distinct and often competing methods and goals. Conservative male eugenics leaders had two objectives, only the first of which Sanger shared: to reduce births among women they declared genetically unworthy, and to increase births among “fit” women. Conservative eugenicists railed against feminism and birth control, for they wanted women like Sa
nger pregnant and at home, building the white race. By the turn of the century, middle-class white women were beginning to obtain college educations and start careers in large numbers. The “New Woman” smoked cigarettes, rode bicycles, and maintained a public life in town, thus they were less interested in raising half a dozen or more children at home. Sanger herself is a good example of this shift: she had three children; her mother had borne eleven.
Social conservatives were furious with the feminist New Women uptown who seemingly shirked the social responsibility of counterbalancing the large immigrant families downtown. Sociologist Edward Ross coined the term “race suicide” in 1901, condemning native-born middle-class women’s declining birth rate, in relation to immigrant women’s increasing birth rate, as the coming death of the white race. Teddy Roosevelt spread fears of race suicide from his presidential bully pulpit, and the term spread like wildfire. To promote more white middle-class births, eugenicists held “Better Baby” and “Fitter Family” contests at state and county fairs across the country in the 1910s through the 1930s. In 1913 alone, the Better Babies Bureau examined over 150,000 children.28 Contests awarded medals to families with good looks, high IQs, numerous children, and robust bank accounts.
Sanger agreed with conservative eugenicists that the high birth rate among the unfit was “the greatest present menace to civilization.” But she objected to the second goal of the conservative approach, or what she called “orthodox eugenics,” which encouraged wealthier women to birth more children. For her, a “cradle competition” in which wealthy women tried to out-reproduce the poor dangerously advocated that wealthier women match their rate of childbearing with “the most irresponsible elements in the community.” Too many births, she insisted, drained mothers and their numerous children of health and vitality.29 She had an almost nineteenth-century view that the body is possessed of finite force that gets diluted with each pregnancy. If wealthier women reproduced at the rate of the poor, she felt, they would end up birthing the unfit.
Sanger countered that birth control would in fact prove a valuable tool of eugenics. She and other feminists argued that the goal of eugenics was to use the achievements of science and technology to improve women’s health and create and sustain a nation of better “quality.” Across the English-speaking world, historians Susanne Klausen and Alison Bashford have argued, feminist birth controllers joined “hand in glove with eugenicists to popularize the notion of rational family planning.” Control was at the heart of their movement: contraception meant “to direct, to regulate, to counteract,” Sanger explained. Animals no more, the middle class could “civilize” sex itself, transforming basic instinct into a tool of women’s liberation and scientific progress. “We must perfect these bodies,” she enjoined, not weaken them, through regulating the birth rate.30 Eugenic feminism sought not only to curtail the reproduction of the poor—it also hoped to optimize the women of the middle and upper classes.
As the American Birth Control League took off, it worked on all fronts: clinical services, legislative lobbying, research coordination, and educational outreach. They opened the nation’s first legal birth control clinic, the Clinical Research Bureau, on New York’s Fifth Avenue just west of Union Square in 1923. The office conducted research, provided education, and distributed diaphragms and jelly to married women—items originally smuggled from Holland via a ship docked twelve miles off New York’s coast by Sanger’s Italian neighbor, Vito, and her second husband J. Noah Slee. Two years later, a chemical engineer named Herbert Simonds, who was an occasional lover of Sanger’s, obviated the need for this operation by producing diaphragms in the city.31
Margaret Sanger, seated, surrounded by staff members of the American Birth Control League, ca. 1921. (Courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
In addition to reaching poor women much less able to access contraception via private doctors, Sanger and her organizations continued to hold conferences, publish the Birth Control Review, organize research at the clinics, and train thousands of doctors and nurses. Their work also had policy aims, lobbying for the complete abolition of the Comstock Laws, which since 1873 had made it illegal to circulate contraceptives, abortifacients, erotic material, and sex toys—or any information about them—through the mail. Prior to the lawsuit she filed following her Brooklyn arrest, this ban had included medical information, prohibiting physicians from distributing material about sex and reproduction. Sanger cast her net far and wide to gain support for contraception access. Throughout the end of the 1920s and the decade thereafter, Sanger traveled extensively, both domestically and abroad. Speaking to audiences ranging from the women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, to farmwives in Brattleboro, Vermont, and the secretary of the Commissariat of Public Health in Soviet Russia, Sanger accepted any invitation she thought would advance her cause.32
In 1924, the bureau opened a clinic in the African American neighborhood of Columbus Hill in New York. It had few clients and closed after a few months. For the next decade, Harlem women had to travel downtown for bureau services, and they did so in large numbers—nearly two thousand of the bureau’s seventeen thousand patients made the trip. This posed problems for Sanger and her associates downtown, who catered to white patients’ pervasive racism even as they were determined to bring their services to Black women. Sanger wrote to a potential financial supporter, “If already three or four colored women are in the waiting room of the clinic, we have to distribute them to the upstairs doctors and sometimes postpone the visit of others so it will not look like a colored clinic… other patients are inclined to grumble.” Ever ambitious, Sanger raised the necessary $10,000 for a clinic in Harlem, a neighborhood she was anxious to serve for it had the highest infant mortality rate in the city.33
Yet the long history of medical exploitation of Black people both during and after slavery made Harlem residents suspicious of the clinic’s agenda. Once Sanger eventually accepted the guidance of the Harlem Advisory Board, made up of prominent Black citizens, on how to assure Harlem residents that the clinic was not an experimental research site or a plan for extermination, the Harlem clinic prospered. Sanger also eventually consented to another of the Harlem Advisory Board’s recommendations: that the clinic no longer hire exclusively white staff. These changes represented significant victories for the Advisory Board members, who were relegated to a peripheral role in the operations of the clinic. As board member and nurse Mabel Staupers informed Sanger, “[It’s time] you and your associates discontinue the practice of looking on us as children to be cared for and not to help decide how the caring should be done.”34 Both precedents—failing to see Black allies as equals and widespread mistrust of her agenda—would haunt Sanger’s next major project with Black communities, a project in which she joined forces with Dr. Dorothy Ferebee.
Like Margaret Sanger, Dr. Ferebee broke taboos about openly discussing sexuality, taboos that were all the riskier for Black women to breach given long-standing tropes of Black women’s hypersexuality that helped legitimate slavery and colonialism. Ferebee lectured widely and boldly on children’s health and sexual health. In advance of a 1928 talk at the Women’s Co-operative Civic League in Baltimore, her middle-class hosts balked at her title “Sex Education for the Adolescent”; in the presentation, Ferebee proposed that five-year-olds should receive basic sex education from their parents. She repeatedly endorsed birth control, broached the topic of abortion—something Sanger never publicly supported—and encouraged free discussion of sexuality. Yet when tragedy struck in her own family, she remained publicly silent. While her daughter Dolly was away at college in Plattsburg, New York, she died suddenly; Ferebee’s biographer provides evidence that the cause was likely an illegal abortion, the only kind available in 1949.35 Publicly, Ferebee cited the reason as a severe cold and pneumonia. Perhaps the bourgeois imperative of Black women’s respectability was too strong to break when it came to the reputation of her own beloved daughter.
Ferebee’s sexual health agenda also converged with eugenics, a nearly all-pervasive concern of middle-class reformers both Black and white. In discussions today, the term eugenics is often used as if it were a synonym of race science. The meaning of eugenics, in contemporary usage, is stretched to describe any scientific research that posits the inherent superiority of the white race and the inherent inferiority of all other groups. By this logic, Black eugenics would be nearly impossible. But that’s not how eugenics was understood in the first half of the twentieth century. Eugenic science is a specific type of race science, one that focuses on ranking hereditary quality; it is the practice of treating the biological diversity of the human population as evidence of allegedly valuable or invaluable hereditary material. Unfit was not necessarily a mark of race—it was overwhelmingly used to condemn physical and mental disability, indigence, criminality, and queer sexuality as genetic contagions.36 In the broader eugenics movement, the ranking of families as fit and unfit by elites thus cut across racial lines, even as Black and other communities of color were much more likely to be described wholesale as diseased and debilitated by white eugenicists. Black professionals often endorsed the eugenic belief so common in the interwar years that social progress depended on regulating hereditary quality.
The Trouble with White Women Page 16