29.

MISS DORKINS HAD BEEN READING Married Love, by Marie Stopes, a scandalous book banned by the Catholic church and published in England in 1918, eleven years earlier. The Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene, the (CNCMH), directed by Dr. Eric Clarke and Dr. Clarence Hinks, had it cited on their list of “Objectionable Books.”

Indeed, there were shocking details on how a husband was to arouse his wife’s “passion,” for instance, which Miss Stopes referred to as “flower-wreathed love-making” and “transports of joy.” Miss Dorkins, who still lived with her elderly mother in plain but respectable lodgings off Bond Street near the cathedral, flushed. Miss Stopes alluded to the sensuality of a woman’s breasts, the need to be touched there “once at the crest of the wave of her sex-tide.” Miss Dorkins was not exactly sure what this meant, but sensed the passionate intent. There was more about the “mists of tenderness” and “soft touch of his lips,” which prompted a feeling of unexpected sorrow at her own innocence.

She felt shock when Marie Stopes switched to the cold facts of contraception: pessary caps, available, apparently, in three sizes, No. 1 and No. 2 being in general use by most women — middle-class women, that is. There followed advice on lubricants and spermicides and actual diagrams of those intimate female parts that Miss Dorkins had not even been aware she had — something called the “os” of the cervix and how to fit a cervical cap over it. There was automatic suction, assured Miss Stopes. No wonder the book was on the Pope’s banned list in the Vatican. Marie Stopes had even written incendiary letters urging the use of birth control to Pope Pius XI himself.

Miss Dorkins, who was still a virgin, had been raised on Dr. Mary Wood-Allen’s What A Young Girl Ought To Know, published somewhere around 1887. Dr. Wood-Allen had urged girls like Miss Dorkins to think only “beautiful thoughts” and explained that “evil” ones, that is “sexual” thoughts, poisoned the blood.

It was all so disturbing. Miss Stopes — “Dr.” Stopes — had dared to open a birth control clinic in 1921 in London, specifically for poor working-class women to offset the fertility differential between the classes. Stopes had also read Galton and understood the threat of overpopulation of the poor and ignorant, and was thus in favour of workers limiting their families, no easy task. She also was a proponent of compulsory sterilization of the insane, the feeble-minded, half-castes and the revolutionaries, excepting herself of course. However, in relation to birth control for the poor, the delicate issue of female hygiene had arisen since the “cap” in question had to be pushed deep into the vagina. One but thought of the unsanitary hands of most working-class women (Florrie Hewitt’s fingernails), with no easy access to soap and water, pushing these things inside themselves.

The only birth control technique approved by the Holy Father was the “rhythm method” or celibacy, something that J. S. Woodsworth, a socialist out west in Manitoba, had called “the most abominable doctrine ever taught.” Miss Dorkins had heard whispers in young womanhood that a woman’s “safe” days occurred in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when ovulation was not supposed to take place. Now it seemed a Dr. Kyusaka Ogino, a gynecologist and obstetrician in Japan, and his colleague, Dr. Herman Knaus, had discovered that it was quite the reverse, claiming ovulation actually did take place in the middle of the cycle.

Dr. Withrow, former colleague of Dr. Clarke at the Social Service Clinic, obviously influenced by this Stopes woman, was now setting up a birth control clinic for the poor right here in Toronto, at 12 Dundonald Street; this, despite the opposition of the Catholic clergy. As head of the Ontario Birth Control League (and also secretary for sex education of the National Council of the YMCA) he was rumoured to have distributed 750,000 flyers, of which many were distributed at Convocation Hall in the University of Toronto: “Birth Control Means Better Babies — Do You Believe That A Sick, Worn Out Mother Cannot Have A Healthy Baby?”

The socialists took up the cause. Birth control information was deliberately denied the poor, they claimed, because under capitalism, the wealthy classes needed a large supply of cheap labour from the working class to run their factories, be their domestics, and fight their wars for them. Another socialist, a woman, Mrs. C. Lorimer, had argued vociferously that doctors and clergymen were only anxious about birth control when the workers wanted it, fearing that workers limiting their families could lead to the emancipation of labour. She actually told Dr. J. J. Heagerty of the Department of Health, to “shut his mouth.”

Things came to a crux when Dr. Withrow of Toronto was charged in early 1927 with procuring abortions disguised as “dilatation and curettage” operations. It was disclosed during the trial that he had been banned from the Swiss Cottage Hospital in downtown Toronto due to a number of these suspicious “D and C” operations.

Miss Dorkins felt confused and agitated at heart that Ruth Dembner, a nice, upper-class girl out in High Park, had paid Dr. Withrow $75 for an abortion. Of course, the judge in the case had been careful to distinguish between the licentious slum girls brought before the courts, and the lovely, well-bred Ruth. But Ruth, it seemed, had loved fast cars, late-night parties, and alcohol, her father admitted during the trial: “She went her own way; [she was] headstrong.” She had died of peritonitis after getting off the train and collapsing in the snow, haemorrhaging to death.

Dr. Withrow was sentenced to seven years at Kingston Penitentiary, a very shocking thing for someone of his social standing, and for his wife and daughters (one of whom had planned a career in medicine herself, which was now out of the question). Dr. Hincks, Director of the CNCMH, who had once worked with Dr. Withrow in Dr. Charles Clarke’s Clinic, was loyally petitioning for his release.

Miss Dorkins moved on to Dr. Stopes’ Mother England, just published in 1929, which contained many letters written to Dr. Stopes from working-class women over the years, pleas of poverty and sexual ignorance that seemed only too familiar … one but thought of poor Florrie Hewitt on her back on the floor-boards.

I just got to the Door and Callopsed, the Child beining bone almost at once. 13 months after I had a nother girl bone a hour before I could sent for help. 2 year later a boy, and 2 year later a nother boy, this last boy have shutter my nerves....

My husband is so selfish he doesn’t care so long as he gets what he wants. What you suffer makes no difference to him in Fack he is a Rotter.

The letter had lain on the hall table, post-marked 1927, now hidden away in her locked bureau. Dr. Helen MacMurchy had recognized the slant of the handwriting at once, her handwriting, after so many years.

She recalled picking up the envelope. Dr. MacMurchy had been appointed Head of the Child Welfare Department in the federal government in Ottawa in 1920, after resigning her post as Inspector for the Feeble-Minded, but came home regularly to the house she now shared with her sister Bessie on South Drive. Old Dr. MacMurchy had died in a tragic accident, run down by a streetcar outside their old home on Bloor Street, years ago. The new Rosedale house was modern and had all the conveniences including an indoor privy and electric lighting. It stood around the corner from Dr. Clarke’s family home on Roxborough Drive, and near other social dignitaries of Toronto. Dr. MacMurchy had slit open the letter, in the dim light of her bedroom, trembling.

“Dear Minky,” began Marie Stopes, in the old, familiar, outrageous way Helen MacMurchy had once so loved and envied — but that had been in 1909. Marie’s nickname for her had struck her at once as startling, shameful even. It had been eighteen years since the last exchange of letters.

Dr. MacMurchy had felt a stab of pain, intense and real at the recognition. Words and phrases had come flooding back: “…the moment that I knew I loved you! … My darling…”

In the confusion of the moment, Dr. MacMurchy had not yet been able to note that what Marie Stopes wanted was statistical data on birth control in Ontario — information that Dr. MacMurchy, of course, had had no intention of providing this notorious woman. Marie Stopes was now infamous, not just as the author of Married Love (scandalous!) but as the British advocate of birth control for the poor and destitute — working-class women. Marie Stopes had once chained a copy of her book on Roman Catholic birth control methods to the door of Westminster Cathedral and had had the gall, in 1920, to send a letter to Queen Mary requesting help to finance her birth control clinics! Ignored by Her Majesty, of course. But most outrageous of all, Stopes had sent out questionnaires to doctors concerning their sexual and contraceptive knowledge, usurping the prerogative of the medical profession — after all, Dr. Stopes was not a medical doctor. And there was the unfortunate tragic case nearer home of well-meaning but mislead Dr. Withrow, now still imprisoned in 1929 in the Kingston Penitentiary, influenced no doubt by her to set up birth control clinics. Worse, Marie Stopes had made no effort to conceal intimate details of her annulled marriage to Reginald Gates back in 1914, concerning his inability to penetrate her sexual parts; indeed, there had been certain references to his impotent penis in the notorious public court case, unbehoving any decent Christian woman. If only Marie had stuck to her thesis, the reproductive system of cycads — well, what a brilliant young woman she had been, dear genius!

Helen MacMurchy had been, at sixty-five, at the pinnacle of her career. Her white hair was coiled in a somewhat stylish bun, and her sturdy figure, thickened with the years, held her in good stead. She had a clear vision of herself and her status.

She had sat down, trembling, that day, the gravity of the situation dawning on her. She herself had carefully destroyed all of Marie Stopes’s love letters over the years. But she could not be certain that the vain, volatile Marie had done the same: “You see you have ‘got me’, my dear … take you in my arms … kiss. I will love you my dearest for ever and ever.” Oh! The things one wrote in the heat of passion, insane!

Dr. Helen MacMurchy had sat at her bureau, and with deliberation took up her pen. She had known what was required and had no regrets: a complete break in communication with that woman.