Hospital Practice

ISSN: 2154-8331 (Print) 2377-1003 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ihop20

Margaret Sanger's Crusade—What Every Woman Should Know Elmer Bendiner To cite this article: Elmer Bendiner (1992) Margaret Sanger's Crusade—What Every Woman Should Know, Hospital Practice, 27:3, 179-200, DOI: 10.1080/21548331.1992.11705388 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21548331.1992.11705388

Published online: 17 May 2016.

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Margaret Sanger's CrusadeWhat Every Won1an Should Know "I think, dearest Uncle," wrote Queen Victoria to Leopold I, King of the Belgians, "that you cannot really wish me to be the 'mamma [sic] d'une nombreuse famille,' for I think you will see the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all .... Men never think, or at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very

often." The Queen of Great Britain and Ireland might find women's "destiny" of ever-recurrent pregnancies to be "hard" and vexingly compounded by the ability of husbands to endure their wives' agony with cheerful resignation, but for the poor, the succession of children at a nearly annual rate often meant illness, hunger, and death. This was evident wherever the burgeoning Industrial Revolution fashioned slums in the cities and misery on the farms, whether in England or America. In the hardscrabble towns of western New York State, women paid the same price as did those in London or Paris or Shanghai. Out of the glass factory town of Corning, N.Y., in the valley of the Chemung River, came Margaret Higgins, who was to become Margaret Sanger, a crusading nurse who founded the birthcontrol movement in the United States and whose efforts led to the creation of Planned Parenthood as we know it today. She did much to make childbirth an option for a woman and man, not merely the inevitable consequence of a couple's sexual activ-

ity. To rally support for this contraceptive revolution, she traveled the world, sharing with the foremost radicals of her time the joys and pains of battle for a righteous cause. Like them, she fought on picket lines, demonstrated, and endured incarceration and national obloquy. And she lived to enjoy great triumphs, although battles yet remain to be won. In her career, Margaret Sanger worked with women in teeming tenements, met with heads of state, and mingled with the rich and famous. Indeed, she herself became both rich and celebrated-for a sensational life-style as well as for her heroic leadership

of the crusade to educate the world about contraception. A man who loved her dearly called her "a darling mixture of saint and ragamuffin." He once sent an ardent love letter to her addressed simply as "Saint Margaret, New York." (It reached her.) Years later, to comfort him for the loss of a friend, she wrote: "That is why I am so happy in a cause .... All the world of human beings is a passing show. They come and go-but the ideal of human freedom grows ever closer around one's heart and comforts and consoles and delights." Her joy in a whooping good fight came possibly from her father, Michael Hennessy Higgins.

Margaret Sanger is shown leaving Brooklyn Court of Special Sessions after arraignment in January 1917. In a police raid on her first birth control clinic, estal> lished the previous fall, Sanger and her volunteers were arrested and herded into the paddy wagon. The charge against Sanger: maintaining a public nuisance. Hospital Practice March 15. 1992

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She always treasured the words he used to say to his 11 children as, one by one, they departed the parental home to live on their own: "Leave the world better because you, my child, have dwelt in it." Michael Higgins was Irish-born but lived in Canada when the U.S. Civil War broke out. When he was 13, he ran away from home to join the Union Army but had to mark time until he was 15 before he could be accepted, and then only as a drummer. He grew up to be a sculptor of tombstones who dipped into medicine, anatomy, and even phrenology to help his depictions of heroes, angels, and saints. although he himself was a militant atheist. He had married Anne Purcell, whose descent was as impeccably Irish as his own. Margaret later recalled her mother's slimness, her uncommon beauty, as well as her racking cough that signaled the presence of tuberculosis, the scourge of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For her sake, Michael Higgins built a house deep in the woods, where he thought the pure air might help Anne's "congestion of the lungs." The family fortunes followed the timeworn way of the artist described by Higgins himself: "Chicken today and feathers tomorrow." The time of the chicken seldom came. Still, Higgins managed to entertain his fellow freethinkers, rebels, and reformers when they were in Corning. Among these was Henry George, the "single-taxer" who advocated property taxes as the only justifiable source of government revenue. Henry George was bad enough, but Higgins very nearly ruined his and his family's hope for prosperity when he invited Colonel Robert Ingersoll, "the 180

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great agnostic," to point out the "superstitions" of conventional religion to all who would come to the pine woods on the Higgins property. His fellow Roman Catholics drew the shades when Higgins and the ''Antichrist," Ingersoll, walked down the street. It was Ingersoll's sermon in the woods that caused the parish priest to chase Margaret out of the queue where she waited for the annual Christmas gift distributed by the church. He called her a child of the devil, which might be expected to leave its mark on a sensitive girl. Margaret, the sixth child of 11, grew up taking care of the younger siblings as they arrived regularly as clockwork. In what must have been something of a record for that time and place. only one of the Higginses died in childhood. He was a four-yearold, named proudly by his father Henry George McGlynn Higgins. Anne was inconsolable and all the more distraught because she had no picture of the son who was forever lost to her. To alleviate that loss, Michael Higgins went secretly to the cemetery on the night after the boy's funeral. There, Margaret held a lantern aloft while her father opened the grave and the casket to make a plaster cast of the dead boy's face, from which he would carve a bust to comfort Anne and keep green the memory of her lost son. They moved into the town of Corning when it was clear that Anne's cough needed more than pine-scented air. Mary. the oldest of the Higgins girls, was now away from home most of the time, working for a rich family in Corning. Nan, the second oldest, had gone to New York City in the hope of finding a daytime job that would keep her in room and board and that would pay enough extras to allow her to go

to a secretarial school at night. Maggie Higgins at 15 was to go to school and run the Higgins household as well, since her mother, worn out by tuberculosis and the strains of 18 pregnancies and 11 births, had little energy left for chores or the responsibilities of family. Margaret had the energy and the skill for the needs of her siblings, but not much patience for the tiresome nit-picking of teachers. At 17. she flared in rebellion at her teacher's sarcasm, walked out of class, and told her family she could not and would not go back to school. She would get a job instead. Her older sisters, Mary and Nan, foresaw for her a sure doom of eternal drudgery unless she went to school. After considerable searching, they found a private school in the Catskills designed to prepare students for Cornell University. Claverack College was properly genteel, very inexpensive (which reassured her family), and coeducational (which pleased Maggie). Mary undertook to pay the tuition; Nan would pay for Maggie's books. Maggie herself would pay for her room and board by working for the school. Claverack College, situated about three miles from the Hudson River, constituted a community in itself. There were some 500 students, with the girls' dorm at one end of the long schoolhouse and the boys' at the other. A boy might call on a girl for a discreet chat in the recreation hall under the watchful eye of a teacher on chaperone duty. Maggie and a boy named Corey Alberson succeeded in evading such supervision by meeting in a barn out of view from the schoolhouse. Maggie and Corey called their adventures a "trial marriage."

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Aside from enjoying the high emotions of youthful crushes, Maggie learned to speak up at assemblies, over catcalls from the boys, about women's rights or the political career of William Jennings Bryan, for example. All of this came to an end when she was summoned home to take care of her mother, who suffered not only from long-standing and steadily worsening tuberculosis but from cancer of the cervix as well. To understand her mother's illnesses, she borrowed textbooks from the family's doctor and was inspired to study medicine. Maggie was 19 when her mother died at 49. That death seemed to Maggie to be a terribly hard fate, for which she tended to blame her father's inability to restrain himself. Brooding about her own incompetence in caring for her mother's terminal illness. Margaret Higgins continued to dream of medicine as a career, although the only practical first step in that direction seemed to be nursing. Even so, she preferred such a job to teaching or typing, the only other employment open to a respectable woman. The mother of one of Maggie's Claverack friends knew a member of the board of directors of White Plains (N.Y) Hospital-which, responding to a pull of directorial strings, accepted Maggie as a nurse-probationer. She willingly endured the scut work and dangers of nursing. often bearing the full responsibility of night duty on the wards at White Plains. To round off their probation, the students rotated through a brief stint at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital, on the corner of Park Avenue and 41st Street in Manhattan. The atmosphere for a sprightly nurse-probationer was more relaxed than at White Plains Hospi-

tal, which wielded a maternal hand over the young women on its staff. At a hospital party one evening, a doctor introduced her to a young architect who was designing a house for him. Maggie went back on duty that night. When she came down the next morning, architect and artist Bill Sanger was patiently waiting for her. He asked for a date and went on to ask for more. His wooing was ardent and devoted, his sensitivities exquisite, his humor whimsical. She was torn between marriage and a nursing career-a conflict that became all the more acute when, in 1902, she was admitted to a three-year training school, from which she would emerge a full-fledged nurse. Still, she hesitated between Bill and the profession. Bill, realizing that only the boldest move would carry the day, procured a marriage license, lined up two witnesses and a minister, hired a horse and buggy, and drove from Manhattan to White Plains to pick Maggie up for their date. In grand style, he galloped up the circular driveway to the hospital's front porch where Maggie waited. But the horse would not stop. It hauled the buggy and Bill around and around the drive as if they were on a carousel. At last, Bill scribbled a note about the cantankerous horse and threw it to Maggie as he passed. Maggie scribbled back an answer saying that it made no difference anyway, since an emergency at the hospital made it necessary to call off their date. They agreed to reschedule it for the following day, when Bill appeared behind a more tractable horse and carried out his plan. Maggie fumed at Bill's high-handedness but married him anyway, then returned to the hospital and slammed the door in his face. That night, she wrote

A crusader who described herself as "happy in a cause," Margaret Sanger founded the birth control movement in the United States. At the peak of her celebrity in that cause, a letter addressed only "Saint Margaret, New York" succeeded in reaching her.

to her sister Mary, "I am very sorry to have had this thing occur, but yet I am very happy." Although the wedding resembled a seriocomic kidnapping (embarrassing, perhaps, to read in a biography of a great woman rebel) the marriage was happy. at least at the start. When troubles came, it was Maggie who would ride the storm and Bill who would suffer in abject devotion. Their first home was an inexpensive but comfortable apartment on West 119th Street, within reach of the intellectual buzz of lower Manhattan that Maggie found exciting. Early in the first year of their marriage, Maggie became happily pregnant, but a recurrence of tuberculosis, which was first suspected in her adolescence, sent her to Dr. Edward Trudeau's famed sanatorium at Saranac Lake, N.Y., from which she escaped to loving care on 119th Street. In November 1903, after a long Hospital Practice March 15, 1992

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and difficult labor, Maggie gave birth to a nine-pound boy, named Stuart. The ordeal of giving birth to so large a baby brought a dangerous flare-up of tuberculosis and drove her back to Saranac Lake for a year. When she was discharged in the spring of 1905, Bill was determined to keep his wife out in the country amid the woods and streams of the Hudson Valley in still semirural Westchester. They stayed in a family hotel in Yonkers while Bill designed and built a house on a parcel ofland they had bought in Hastings-on-Hudson. Both had doted on the house as they built it, but while they were still unpacking, pipes that were not yet properly insulated overheated, and the house went up in flames. For Maggie, the fire signaled the end of a preoccupation with creature comforts. But for Bill, it was the destruction not only of his own creation but of a sweet vision of domesticity. Bill painstakingly restored the house. For Maggie, the freshness of the adventure in marriage and family life had faded. Even so, they moved in, and very shortly afterward, their second son, Grant, was born to be followed 20 months later by the arrival of Peggy. The doctors agreed that for the sake of Maggie's health there had better be no more children. Maggie had already decided that three was enough and that Peggy was a most satisfying little girl to close that chapter in her book. The next chapter would mark the entrance of the Sangers on a wider stage. They moved back into the city, to an apartment on West 135th Street where Bill's mother came to live with them. For Bill, the return to Manhattan meant a political homecoming. He had been a member of the Socialist Party. and in the years before he met 182

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Maggie the camaraderie and shared idealism of the movement had given his life both its meaning and its warmth. Hastings-on-Hudson had been a political exile. although he had been prepared to endure it forever if it meant life with Maggie and their children. But now he was back at what seemed the center of the world, many of his evenings filled with meetings and manifestos. He was part of an inner circle, for he had once carried the party's banner in a campaign for alderman, and had done far better than anyone would have expected. With his mother serving as baby-sitter, Bill began to take Maggie along to party meetings and to share with her the social life that mingled avant-garde notions of life and love with the political utopianism she remembered from her father's early teachings. The Sangers frequently entertained some of the most radical left-wingers. Among them was "Big Bill" Haywood, the veteran of miners' battles and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)-the "Wobblies." Along with Haywood, a huge unkempt man with a booming voice, was the love of his life, one of New York's first women lawyers, Jessie Ashley. Jessie never concealed her upper class origins. which may have helped her in court but were a liability at rallies. With a black silk ribbon fluttering from her spectacles and her Boston Brahmin accent. she spent her considerable talents and her family's money rescuing her comrades from prison, including her rough-cut lover, Bill Haywood. The Sangers moved in circles that included Lincoln Steffens, when he was muckraking in the United States, and John Reed,

when he was concerned with the Mexican Revolution. a decade before they were both to report on the rosy dawn of Soviet communism. There was the fiery orator Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, in the midst of her passage from Catholicism to socialism. and then to what would ultimately be her home in the American Communist Party. There were anarchists-like the gentle Alexander Berkman, who had served 14 years in jail for complicity in an assassination attempt during a steel strike in 1892, and the tougher-minded and toughertongued Emma Goldman. And there was that great salon hostess of the left, Mabel Dodge, whose butlers deferentially ushered into her elegant home at 9th Street and Fifth Avenue men and women fresh from picket lines or assembly lines or railroad boxcars or the smoky cafes and cafeterias of Greenwich Village. It was a time when, in a school devoted to unsullied anarchism. Will Durant taught the fundamentals of liberty and George Bellows held painting classes. Maggie took enthusiastically to a life that was good in its own right and all the better because it shocked the respectable. She played an active part in the 1912 textile workers' strike in Lawrence, Mass .. when she joined in evacuating strikers' children to New York and Philadelphia, where sympathetic families offered to take care of them for the strike's duration. Authorities tried to stop the evacuation and mothers were roughed up in the process, but the children were brought to the station safely and Maggie was proudly photographed with them when the train pulled in at Grand Central. She had had her first taste of fighting for a good cause and in (continues)

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SAN G E R

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the spotlight of national publicity. She thoroughly enjoyed it. Still in her early 30s, with a trim figure, a head of flaming red hair, and flashing deep brown eyes, she had become a rising star at socialist rallies. A party comrade called her the radiant rebel. Still, she clung to her nursing ambitions. A younger sister, Ethel, who had divorced her husband and completed her nursing education, was in a position to refer patients to Maggie for private nursing, particularly obstetric cases. At the same time, Maggie volunteered for the Visiting Nurses Association. whose units were dispatched by the Henry Street Settlement into the air less tenements of the Lower East Side, where families often lived eight or more to a room. Maggie came to know the despair to which the poor are condemned by their fertility. One afternoon in the summer of 1912, she was called to the bedside of Sadie Sachs. a 28-year-old mother of three with life-threatening septicemia caused by a botched attempt at aborting her fourth. It was obvious to Maggie and the doctor that another pregnancy. whether it ended in a birth or an abortion, would probably kill the mother. After the young woman had recovered some three weeks later. the doctor had only one piece of advice to prevent another pregnancy: ''Tell Jake to sleep on the roofT' Alone with Maggie. Sadie Sachs pleaded, "He can't understand. He's only a man. But you do. don't you? Please tell me the secret. and I'll never breathe it to a soul. Please!" Maggie could only pat Sadie's hand until she fell asleep. Three months later. she was summoned again to the

Sachs' flat and watched Sadie die while Jake paced the room. Maggie felt as helpless as he. Margaret Sanger described the incident with Sadie Sachs as pivotal, driving her to what would be her life's obsession. She continued for a while concerning herself with the more general aspects of the coming socialist transformation of the world. Increasingly, however, the theme of her soapbox oratory and her articles in the Socialist Party's paper. the Call, dealt with the burdens of women and of their children. underfed and undernurtured because they came unbidden and unwanted into a world unready to receive them. In time, she became a "regular" at the two-story brownstone on lower Fifth Avenue where Mabel Dodge held court. Margaret delighted the left-wing elite with talk of sex, on which she had done long hours of research, mainly in the public libraries. Dodge noted in her memoir that "Margaret Sanger was a Madonna type of woman" with "a new gospel of not only sex knowledge in regard to conception. but sex knowledge about copulation and its intrinsic importance." Dodge summed up: "She was the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh." Margaret had "set out to rehabilitate sex," according to Dodge, and she did all this with an attitude of utmost serenity, even propriety. Sanger wrote a series for the Call entitled, "What Every Mother Should Know." which proved sufficiently popular to spark a follow-up series under the head: "What Every Girl Should Know." The second series involved her for the first time in an encounter with the Comstock Law, the legislative achievement of Anthony Comstock, a Pennsylvania fun-

damentalist who preached the doctrine: "Whosoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery in his heart." It followed that since adultery was a vice, any reference to sex was vicious. In 1873, Congress gave the Post Office full power to bar all "obscene, lewd, and lascivious" materials from the mails. Comstock and his fundamentalist lobby attached a rider specifically providing a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for anyone, even a physician, who dispensed information on contraception. Margaret Sanger had not mentioned the dread word in the Call but had indicated that her subsequent columns would deal with the dangers of syphilis and gonorrhea. Anthony Comstock, as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, frowned on this, and the Post Office took action. Where Margaret Sanger's column was to have appeared the paper carried a large blank space under a headline: "What Every Girl Should KnowNOTHING!-by order of the Post-Office Department." It was her first of many collisions with Comstockery. Although Margaret enjoyed the life of a rebel with a great cause, her marriage was beginning to show signs of wear. When she was holidaying in Provincetown, Mass., her adoring Bill pleaded with her to "sidestep New York and the radicals for a while and get a healthy point of view not mixed up with sexuality under cover of revolution." To save the marriage and to satisfy Bill's long-frustrated desire to paint in Paris, the Sangers-including Stuart. nine, Grant, five, and Peggy. threesailed for Europe in October 1913. Once in Paris, they settled Hospital Practice March 15. 1992

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on the Boulevard St.-Michelnot far from the Luxembourg Gardens, where Margaret rediscovered the joys of motherhood. Whereas Bill was thrilled at spotting the great Matisse himself on the street, Margaret was more enthusiastic over running into Big Bill Haywood and Jessie Ashley on holiday. She went with them to trade union rallies and sensed the radical ferment that was gripping France in 1913. A Hindu advocate for Indian home rule gave a dinner in Margaret's honor, reawakening the sweet taste of acclaim. French radicals, interested in Margaret's own particular cause. introduced her to chemists who could explain the French techniques of family control, ancient and modern, all unmentionable in the Comstockian United States. These induct-

ed diaphragms and suppositories with recipes for spermicidal unguents, carefully handed down from mother to daughter. She was reminded of Sadie Sachs' burning desire to know the secret. The call to take up the battle again was too strong. On the last day of 1913, Margaret Sanger and her children said goodbye to a forlorn Bill on the pier at Cherbourg. Back in New York, she found an apartment near Dyckman Street at the northern tip of Manhattan, where she put into effect a project conceived during the voyage home. She would give her crusade a voice. It would be a fiery publication called The Woman Rebel, and it would proclaim on the masthead the battle cry: "No Gods, No Masters." Needing at least the semblance

Anthony Comstock, the fundamentalist reformer whose name became both a law of the land and a synonym for censorship, headed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Comstock law was invoked to suppress the publication and distribution of Sanger's articles on birth control and the dangers of syphilis and gonorrhea. A rider mandated a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for anyone, even a physician, who dispensed information on contraception.

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of institutional support, she created an organization with a name she and her colleagues hit on after an afternoon's debate: The Birth Control League. She and her staff of volunteers drummed up an advance circulation by distributing leaflets at Cooper Union. The first issue of The Woman Rebel, eight pages printed on the cheapest newsprint, appeared in March 1914, with a ringing declaration of a woman's primary duty: "To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an ideal; to speak and act in defiance of convention." She promised her readers, among other things, all the information she could gather on contraception. Almost at once. she received notice from the Post Office that the first issue of The Woman Rebel was barred from the mails under the Comstock law. The New York dailies ridiculed the Post Office action and in the process told the nation of the birth of The Woman Rebel. an unexpected stroke of publicity. In no time. Maggie was receiving congratulatory letters from the world's foremost feminists, including the British suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst and the woman who was to be one of Germany's most celebrated revolutionaries, Rosa Luxembourg. Worried about the dangers facing Maggie, her father came to New York to dissuade her from publishing The Woman Rebel. He was in her apartment one morning in 1914 when two agents from the Department of Justice came in to hand her a copy of an indictment charging her with two counts of publishing lewdness and one of inciting to murder and riot. As she tells the story in her autobiography, Maggie sat the two agents down and held them for a three-hour lecture on "the tragic stories of

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Comstockery furnished grist for the mills of a generation of cartoonists who satirized its prudery with pens dipped in

conscript motherhood." They listened sympathetically, as did her father on the other side of the living room door. When they left, the old rebel hugged his daughter and gave her fight his blessing. Some biographers doubt that federal agents, however tender-hearted, would have sat still for a three-hour lecture by Margaret Sanger, but in any case her father and the rest of her family ended up on her side. Her lawyers, one the renowned Samuel Untermeyer, advised her to plead guilty in the hope of a very light sentence. When they won a six-month postponement of her trial. she spent the time preparing a booklet entitled Family Limitation, which contained an account of the birth-control technology she had picked up in France. She also used the time to diligently search among her radical contacts for a printer heroic enough to print the work. When the trial date came, she again won a week's delay-during which she made

acid. Above, a cartoon published in 1897 is captioned: When Anthony Comstock Shall Have His Way.

plans to jump the bail that had been posted by friends. Radical friends forged a Canadian passport for her in the name of Bertha Watson. Others agreed to care for the children. and she boarded a night train for Canada. From there, she wrote a defiant note to the judge who was to preside over her trial and to the prosecuting attorney, promising to return in a few months when she would be better prepared to defend herself. As a farewell gesture of pure cheek she enclosed with each letter a copy of Family Limitation. She next traveled to London where, untrammeled by children as well as husband, she set out to fit herself for her crusade and reveling in new-found British comrades. (Bill wrote to her passionately, but in the end he resigned himself to the separation.) One of the lodestars of her life was Havelock Ellis, the physician who had become an authority on the varieties of sexual behavior. whose works were

venerated by enlightened youths and detested by Comstockians. She found Ellis a whitehaired, astonishingly shy man of 57, married to a pleasant but seemingly neurotic woman. On the morning after he met Margaret, Havelock Ellis sent her a single rose. addressed to "Dear Rebel." That was the beginning of a lifelong affection, although whether it was the ardent affair some of their letters suggest has been doubted. In any case, Ellis was to provide the scientific underpinnings of Margaret's crusade, and she would remain a lifelong disciple, referring to him in loving raillery as "the king." Havelock Ellis's friendship was a passport into the world of British intellectuals. Soon she was taking tea or dinner with London's top physicians, the leaders of the suffragist movement. the literary elite such as George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, and particularly H. G. Wells, with whom she entered a cheery friendship that in time Hospital Practice March 15, 1992

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ripened into ardor. The stimulating and flattering social and sexual whirl did not greatly interfere with Margaret"s researches at the library of the British Museum or in conferences with the experts to answer her questions on contraceptive methods, social attitudes, statistics on infant and maternal mortality, and the status of the political battle for sexual enlightenment in various countries. Holland, Ellis told her, was the most advanced country in Europe on matters of family planning. He also supplied letters of introduction to people who had already accomplished what Margaret Sanger had dreamed of-the establishment of clinics where women had free and easy access to all the information collected by science and where all questions were not only permitted but answered. The official Dutch blessing on family planning was publicly confirmed when Queen Wilhelmina awarded a medal of honor to a new pessary. It was wartime. To dissolve the perils and confusion of traveling on a false Canadian passport, she wangled a temporary American passport from the embassy in London-still under the name of Bertha Watson, the identity she had assumed when she jumped bail. As the friend of Havelock Ellis, she found no trouble in securing interviews with midwives and doctors, including the developer of a new and greatly improved diaphragm known as the "Dutch cap." On the question of male contraceptives she found little new since the seventeenth century, when, according to unsubstantiated legend, Charles II, the "Merry Monarch" of Great Britain, overwhelmed by his numerous illegitimate progeny, used a sheath prescribed by a "Dr. Con196

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don," a name with a wide variety of spellings. Casanova, who carefully tested the device, called it "un vetement anglais qui met l'fune en repos"-an English coat that puts the spirit at peace. Carrying a phony passport, Margaret Sanger circumvented warring armies and flitted blithely across heavily guarded borders. Her bravado and charm took her to wartime Paris at the moment when Jean Jaures, the socialist leader and defender of Alfred Dreyfus, had just been assassinated. The government had moved its offices to Bordeaux, and Paris was drenched in gloom. To talk of American efforts at birth control would have been impossible. Maggie headed south to Barcelona; she had been invited by a romantic Catalan anarchist leader she had met in London. Havelock Ellis wrote, suggesting that he would have been glad to show her Spain if only she had asked. But by the spring of 1915, she was back in England studying the birth-control clinics set up by Marie Stopes and writing her observations, ultimately published in pamphlet form, on English, French, and Dutch contraception. She exhausted herself talking to huge rallies not only in London but also in Glasgow and wherever she could draw an audience of working-class women with their double burdens of poverty and progeny. Her weekends were spent idyllically, most notably at the Sussex home of Hugh and Janet de Selincourt. Hugh, a novelist, became a lifelong admirer after Maggie told him: "If you like my religion-birth control-we shall be friends." Also on the Sussex scene was a friend of Hugh's, Harold Child, a pipe-smoking journalist and onetime actor, who joined the growing number

of bright men she utterly captivated. It had been almost a year since she had left New York. She had never been out of touch with the devoted colleagues she had left behind or with her children. Bill Sanger, too, would send letters that were alternately angry and loving, but now he too was swept, against his will, into Maggie's cause. He had returned to New York largely to see his children when Comstock caught up with him. One afternoon, a man, who turned out to be a police decoy, came to his door asking to buy a copy of Margaret Sanger's Family Limitation. Bill scrounged around the apartment until he found a copy for him. Within days, Anthony Comstock himself came to offer a proposition. Bill Sanger had committed a federal offense in distributing salacious literature, but Comstock would see that he got off with a suspended sentence if he would disclose the whereabouts of his wife and the alias she was using. Otherwise, he would be liable to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Bill exploded in the face of the watchdog of America's morals and thereupon found himself trapped in a legal nightmare. He wrote to Margaret in anger but with a touch of the old gallantry: "The whole affair was not of my making. It is your cause I will be defending, and I would have liked it a damn sight more if you had been here to take up the work from the start, though I would not have liked you to have gone through the humility [sic] of being arrested by Comstock and thrown into a filthy jail." In succeeding letters, he advised her to stay abroad until his trial was over. The cause may not have been Bill's, but in public he acted as if it were. He had (continues)

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SANGER

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prepared a heroic speech, full of what he called "burning thoughts," but the chief judge of the three-judge court cut him off in the first paragraph. "Persons like you who circulate such pamphlets are a menace to society... the judge told him. "There are too many now who believe it is a crime to have children. If some of the women who are going around advocating equal suffrage would go around and advocate that women have children they would do a greater service. Your crime violates not only the laws of the State but the laws of God ... I declare you guilty ... You have a choice of paying a fine of $150 or spending 30 days in jail." Waving his fist. Bill shouted above the roar of the spectators, "I would rather be in jail with my convictions than be free at a loss of my manhood and selfrespect." Anthony Comstock was not in court to hear Bill's oath of defiance. The champion of virtue had come down with influenza, which in time proved fatal-although the law that bore his name continued in effect for decades. From a jail cell in the Tombs in Manhattan, Bill wrote Margaret. urging her to stay away or go to Canada because she risked a far heavier sentence than his. Bill's heroic effort made it impossible for her to remain abroad. She came back in October while Bill was still in jail. Although his letters grew warmer and more flirtatious, hers showed not the slightest sign of reviving a love she had clearly decided to bury. In November. however, a tragedy seemed to wipe out all thought of themselves or of the cause. Peggy Sanger, at five the darling of the family, was sud-

denly stricken with pneumonia. She was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, where her Aunt Ethel worked as a nurse, but nothing could save her. The family came close to falling apart. Bill made a plaster cast of his dead daughter and kept it with him for years. For the rest of her life Margaret would go into deep mourning on the anniversary. Margaret officially informed the court that she had returned, prepared to face trial on the original indictment. Although liberals continued to rally in support of her, the organization known as the National Birth Control League, formed in her absence but clearly inspired by her, declined at first to have anything to do with her defense. She had tainted the cause with illegal tactics, according to the pallid successors of the fiery Margaret. When Margaret Sanger went on a nationwide speaking tour, dollars poured in from working women throughout the country, supplemented by more sizable contributions from the wealthy. All were stirred by the oratory of national celebrities, ranging from Walter Lippmann, then writing for The New Republic, to John Reed, Heywood Broun, and the wealthy socialite Mrs. Thomas Hepburn (mother of Katharine). Before the trial began, the National Birth Control League reversed its original stand and began pleading for funds to aid in Maggie's defense. In some cities, however, public halls were barred to Margaret. and high functionaries in the Roman Catholic Church inveighed against her cause as ungodly. Clarence Darrow offered to defend her gratis, but she had misgivings about legal advice, which she consistently disregarded. Lawyers were interested in safeguarding her interests, whereas

she preferred to be guided by the value of heroic gestures and passionate manifestoes to the movement. The court was willing to drop the case if only she agreed never to violate the law again, odious as it might be. She demanded a trial, but the federal government, seeing little to be gained by giving a platform to the fiery lady with such wellplaced and articulate supporters, quashed the charges. Maggie's next brush with the law came in Portland, Ore., where she had given some members of the IWW permission to sell copies of Family Limitation at a meeting where she was to speak. (Actually, the Wobblies pirated their edition of the book, paying no royalties, but for Margaret Sanger, comradeship laughed at copyrights.) They and Margaret Sanger were arrested; 100 supporters followed them to the city jail, where they all demanded to be jailed. The onenight stay in jail was clean and warm, no one paid a fine, and no one stayed in prison. It was a happy ending to an exercise in solidarity. On her return to New York in October 1916, Maggie opened a fund-raising headquarters at 104 Fifth Avenue, announcing her business as simply "Birth Control." Shortly thereafter, she set up a clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, modeled after the institutions she had so admired in Holland. A clinic, she realized, was vastly more important than meetings, and a test case had to be made affirming the legality of institutions offering birth control to the desperately needy. She and her volunteers posted leaflets all over the neighborhood in English, Yiddish, and Italian, asking mothers: "Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children?" The leaflet ofHospital Practice March 15. 1992

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fered "Safe. Harmless Information" from "trained Nurses ... A registration fee of 10 cents would give any mother access to the "secrets" of birth control-or as much as Maggie's researches could provide. Ethel. Maggie's younger sister and a trained nurse. came down to help. On a fall day in 1916. some 150 women stood on line along Pitkin Avenue for the clinic's opening. In the days that followed. brief stories on the clinic in Yiddish and Italian papers drew women from the farthest reaches of Long Island. Pennsylvania. New Jersey. and Massachusetts. The forces of Com-

stockery could scarcely tolerate such audacity. They closed in on an afternoon when Maggie was out and only Ethel and a volunteer were in command. A woman decoy came in and bought a copy of What Every Girl Should Know, the article Margaret Sanger had once written in the Call and had republished in pamphlet form. Although the pamphlet bore a price of 10 cents. the decoy insisted on paying two dollars. The next day, the vice squad of the New York City Police Department swooped down. arresting everyone in sight. from Margaret Sanger and her volunteers down to the poor.

Handbills promoting Margaret Sanger's birth control clinic in Brooklyn were distributed to neighborhood women in English, Yiddish, and Italian.

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intimidated clients. Tossed into the police wagon were all of the clinic's files. including names of doctors who had volunteeredseemingly a violation of doctorpatient confidentiality. The cells were filthy, and Maggie spent much of the night fending off roaches and rats. On being bailed out. she painted a vivid picture of appalling conditions in the jail to a crowded press conference. Ethel was charged with dispensing contraceptive information in violation of the Comstock law, the volunteer of selling an indecent book, and Maggie with maintaining a "public nuisance ... Ethel was quickly tried and sentenced to 30 days in the workhouse on Blackwells Island (now Roosevelt Island) in the East River, where she immediately embarked on a hunger strike. Daily bulletins on Ethel's health kept the issue blazing before the nation while Margaret Sanger awaited trial. American aristocrats attended the sessions. The prominent Pennsylvania socialite Mrs. Amos Pinchot influenced her good friend the Governor of New York, Charles S. Whitman, to grant Ethel a pardon. Ethel staggered out of the workhouse into the arms of Maggie and Mrs. Pinchot. Then the big guns of government and the press awaited Margaret Sanger's trial. Her lawyers and the judge promised a painless outcome if only she would acknowledge the law and vow never to break it again. She would have no part in such a deal. Unlike Ethel. Margaret in prison confined her rebelliousness to refusing to be fingerprinted. She served her 30 days, getting to know the sad lot and bitter humor of her fellow inmates. On emerging from the Queens penitentiary. she was whisked off

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to lunch at the Hotel Lafayette, after which she luxuriated in a Turkish bath. In the evening, she attended a dance recital by her longtime supporter. Isadora Duncan. One other decisive confrontation, this time with a monsignor of the Roman Catholic Church, occurred at Town Hall in 1918, when Margaret Sanger was among those scheduled to speak on the question, "Birth Control, Is It Moral?" Many of the panelists had just attended a conference of scientists from around the world on problems of birth control. The public meeting was to wind up the session. When Margaret and her friends arrived, the street before Town Hall was packed. Inside, police were trying to persuade the crowd to leave. When Margaret Sanger asked on whose authority the police were acting. she took down the captain's answer and read it verbatim to the audience: "1. Captain Thomas Donohue, of the 1\venty-sixth Precinct, at the order of Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen. Secretary to Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes. have ordered this meeting closed ... Margaret and her friends. including socialite Juliet Barrett Rublee, were arrested when they tried to speak. When they were ordered to night court. Mrs. Charles Tiffany, Mrs. Dwight Morrow. and Mrs. Otto Kahn offered to take them in one of their limousines, but Margaret led a march on Broadway with hundreds following, singing, "My Country 'Tis of Thee." At the polil~e station, Margaret's fashionable friends followed her in to a parrol wagon that took them to night court. They were released on their own recognizance. When they appeared the following day. the judge took no more than five minutes to dismiss all

Margaret Sanger (left) and her sister Ethel Byrne are shown in court, arrested after a police decoy bought a copy of the pamphlet, What Every Girl Should Know. In separate trials, each received a sentence of 30 days' imprisonment.

charges against the glittering defendants. There was little doubt over who had won that battle. but such confrontations were no longer Margaret Sanger's technique of choice. although she never walked away from such a challenge. Almost imperceptibly. she drifted away from the flamboyant street tactics that she had once found both exciting and tactically profitable. Now her old comrades had given way to new supporters. These were equally enthusiastic but perhaps lacked a bit of the romantic fire. Most of them were older and much richer. The costumes of La Boheme no longer fit. Among the new recruits to Margaret Sanger's charmed circle was J. Noah Slee. a 60-yearold businessman who headed 3in-1 Oil Company. He was married but either disenchanted with his wife or so overwhelmingly enchanted with "Margy... as he called her. that he proposed. They took a pleasure cruise around Asia. careful to bring Grant along to safeguard reputations all round. When they returned to Paris. Margy handed

Slee an ultimatum: She would have to be forever free to go anywhere and with anyone she pleased. Her apartment in their home would be private with the door locked if she so desired. If he wanted a date he could reach her by telephone. Slee signed the pledge and proceeded to free himself by means of a French divorce, charging that his wife had refused to come to France and cohabit with him. The court was sympathetic-and he had sweetened the deal with a very large settlement. Margaret's final divorce from Bill was simpler; she asked only for permission to continue using the name Margaret Sanger. Bill wrote back: "Certainly you can. I am proud to have been married to a woman who carried that name so high ... Although her new husband built her a stately English manor house on the Hudson called Willow Lake and a desert palace in Tucson. his most valuable gift to her was his wholehearted acceptance of her cause as a part of herself. In helping the movement, he went so far as to smuggle forbidden diaphragms into Hospital Practice March 15. 1992

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one of his 3-in-1 oil factories. (They were needed for doctors working at the Margaret Sanger Clinical Research Bureau.) He backed her two great international conferences-in New York in 1925 and in Geneva in 1927. The New York conference, explicitly on birth control, was an unmitigated success. In Geneva, a conference on population ended by barring birth control from the agenda as well as the name of Margaret Sanger from any official mention, although she had been the one to initiate, organize, and attract most of the scientists to the program. Fascist influences were already suggesting war as the cure to population problems, and the Roman Catholic Church bridled as ever at the name Margaret Sanger. To save the conference, she allowed her name to be dropped from attendance rolls. Nevertheless. the majority of the delegates gave her an ovation when she appeared. Occasionally, there would be a revival of the old harassment: a decoy at a clinic or a meeting. perhaps, followed by a raid and a trial. But the ploy was now threadbare. Journalists and judges were tiringofit. and Comstockery was dying. Margaret Sanger now took to lobbying for a bill she drew up with the help of doctors, scientists, and health workers. Called "The Doctor's Bill, .. it would allow the mails to carry information on birth control if it were sent from a doctor to a patient. As the bill proceeded painfully slowly from committee to committee and from vote to vote. Margaret Sanger followed each twist and turn with unrelenting energy. The campaign dragged on into the 1930s. when Father Charles E. Coughlin. recognized as a radio voice of fascism. denounced the bill as "a surrender to the ideals of paganism ... It came close to victory in 1934 but 200

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Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada asked to have it once more referred to committee, where it languished and died. Margaret Sanger tried to drown the memory of that defeat on a boat ride to Nassau. She traveled to the Soviet Union, and was not impressed with the progress ofbirth control there because the greatest emphasis seemed to be on abortion. She hoped to spread the gospel in India but found Gandhi firm in his contempt for sex as a lowly "animal passion," unfortunately necessary for reproduction. The progress of the 1930s began to crumble as war approached. Japan, German~ and Italy blasted the movementand even Boston thought it somehow treasonable. Moreover, Margaret's friends were ailing. Havelock Ellis died in 1939 and Noah Slee was plainly aging. However, he was content that for a time at least he had his wife to himself since Margaret could no longer cross blazing frontiers as she had in World War I. In 1943 he died. Both her sons, Stuart and Grant. had become physicians and served in the Medical Corps. After the war, when she was in her 60s, she fanned the birth control movement into new life. She traveled to Japan three times and saw her work hailed as decisive in cutting the birth rate by half, although General Douglas MacArthur tried to keep her out of that country. In India, Nehru's support helped to erase the memory of Gandhi's opposition. She worked and worried through all the many organizational name changes and restructuring that metamorphosed Birth Control Leagues to Planned Parenthood Federations. originally of America and ultimately of the world. With anginal pains worsened

by work and travel, dependent on painkillers to ease the agony, she died in a Tucson nursing home on September 14, 1966. She was 83 years old. Dr. Stuart Sanger, her oldest son. now 89, still answers the telephone cheerfully from his home not far from that nursing home. Whatever may have been the inevitable troubles in the childhood of the first-born son of a lifelong rebel, any anguish seems to have faded from his mind. All that is left is a cheerful recollection of his mother. Her youngest son, Grant. died in 1989, but his son. Alexander, has a grandchild's view that must be more joyous than that of any relative closer to the whirlwind known to the world as Margaret Sanger. "She was a lovely grandmother," he says. He recalls how she played badminton and baseball and gin rummy with him. how she splashed paint all over the place when, as an old but wonderfully alive grandmother, she did her watercolors. But he also remembers how his father found it "painful" to talk about his life with her or, more often. without her. "There were too many memories of a boy away at boarding school for much of his childhood. waiting forlornly at railroad stations to meet a mother who often would not arrive," he says. Grant's boyhood had been a casualty in his mother's crusade, but. says Alexander. her sons never stopped believing in her. Exemplifying that profound belief in Margaret Sanger's life and work is Alexander Sanger himself. He sits in an office surrounded by Margaret Sanger memorabilia, all appropriate to his job. for he is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Planned Parenthood of New York City. Inc. ELMER BENDINER