IT WAS MID-AUGUST, WITH HEAT waves swooping over the country, almost as if undulating, and the Nineteenth Amendment still had one more state to go.
Carrie Chapman Catt arrived without fanfare in Nashville, as Tennessee would be the next to decide on the Amendment and the final vote needed for ratification. Catt, however, was not there to take a starring role in the campaign, as might be expected of someone so eminent in the suffrage movement; rather, she would work behind the scenes where, in this case, she believed she could act more effectively. For the most part, she would send telegrams to prominent politicians of both parties, pleading with them to make public announcements of their support for woman suffrage. She was a hard woman to say no to.
Warren G. Harding, one of the Republican prospects going into the convention, replied promptly to Catt’s request, writing that “if any of the Republican members should ask my opinion as to their course I would cordially recommend immediate favorable action.” Harding’s fellow Ohioan, James M. Cox, who would end up being his opponent in November, expressed “confidence that the Legislature will act favorably, which will greatly please the national Democratic Party.”
With support like this, and even more from politicians almost as influential as the presidential candidates, it appeared almost impossible that women would continue to be barred from America’s polling places. But anti-suffragist forces were not yet willing to concede. In early August, they too gathered in Nashville for one last stand. Most of them were men, as might be expected, but not all. “Many women also went to Nashville to oppose their own enfranchisement,” writes feminist historian Doris Weatherford, “among them officers of the Southern Women’s Rejection League, and of antisuffrage associations from Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Ohio.” In the case of these ladies, their “devotion to states’ rights proved greater than their commitment to women’s rights”; that, at least, was the company line, briefly recited to all reporters who wondered about their negative position.
Whether or not it was true, the anti-suffrage forces were so upset about what had happened around the country earlier in the year, when by January 27 the universal vote for women was but nine states short of passage, “that they filed suits in a number of states against the legislatures’ ratification. Inventing points of law that had never been considered in the cases of the first eighteen amendments to the Constitution, they went to court.”
The cases made no sense. The legislative actions in the states named in the suits had been conducted in strict accordance with procedures for altering the nation’s founding document. Yet, somehow, one of the suits managed to sneak itself all the way up to the docket of the United States Supreme Court. It did not stay there long. The court ruled dismissively, several of the justices joining millions of other Americans in wondering why they were wasting their time on a matter whose guidelines had been so rigorously enforced and whose outcome was so patently obvious. At that point, supporters seemed to believe, the battle had been won; they could relax.
They were wrong. More struggles remained, none so great as the one in the Tennessee Legislature in mid-August 1920. Although initially seen as a state solidly behind the women’s cause, when the votes were counted, to the shock of all except lobbyists who had exchanged untold amounts of cash for support, the total was forty-eight in favor of the Nineteenth Amendment, forty-eight against.
The state house exploded in anger, the tumult stilled only after the Speaker of the House pounded the gavel so many times, the head might well have flown off. A few minutes later, with the house still noisier than usual, the call was sounded for a second vote. In the gallery—standing room only, mostly women, mostly desirous of the vote—people let out long, audible sighs; those who had seats took them again after having sprung to their feet but were fearful of an even worse outcome. Would an aye, just a single aye decide to change his vote to a nay? How could a cause that made so much sense, that threatened no one, that would alter the functioning of the Constitution not a whit, possibly have become so controversial?
The legislators below the women in the gallery visibly tensed.
One did so more than anyone else. According to Doris Weatherford, it was at this point that “conscience struck 24-year-old Harry Burn,” who had been elected to the state legislature at the age of 22. He had promised his political bosses, who were against ratification, that he would support their position only if his vote were needed to deny the amendment the first time the roll was called. Afterward, he would follow the counsel of his mother, who wrote him a letter, urging him to
Vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt. I notice some of the speeches against. They were very bitter. I have been watching to see how you stood, but have noticed nothing yet. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put “Rat” in Ratification.
It was, of course, those who opposed ratification who were the rats, in Mrs. Burn’s view, but never mind her slogan; her intent could not have been more clear.
As the second vote began, Burn decided to be a good boy. He would change his mind. He would help Mrs. Catt. The result was even more uproar in the House, but this time it signaled happiness more than confusion. “After Burn switched his vote to the affirmative, antisuffragists charged that he had been bribed,” but so much blacker was the pot than the kettle that the statement played as a punch line more than an accusation. Perhaps Burn had been bribed, but if so it was by sentiment, not dollars. The New York Times reported on the jubilation when the official vote was announced: forty-nine in favor of the amendment, forty-seven opposed.
Women screamed frantically. Scores threw their arms around the necks of those nearest them and danced, so far as it was possible to do so, in the mass of humanity. Hundreds of suffrage banners were waved wildly, and many removed the yellow flowers they had been wearing and threw them upward to meet a similar shower from the galleries.
There were few tears of joy shed by the suffragists. Some wiped their eyes, but on the whole, they considered it no time for weeping. Their happiness was far beyond that stage.
This time the Speaker of the House did not even attempt to wield his gavel. It might not have been heard anyhow.
Burn waited patiently until the large hall was at least relatively still again, then told the Speaker he would like to make a statement for the official journal of the hearing. It was “a point of personal privilege,” he explained, and he had the right to express just such a sentiment. The House became even quieter. The war was over, but the final strategic thrust was about to be revealed. Burn coughed, cleared his throat, took his time. “I changed my vote in favor of ratification because I believe in full suffrage as a right; I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify; I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
From the gallery came an eruption every bit as loud and tearful—if differently motivated—as the first one.
From those aghast at the notion of woman’s suffrage, one of the leaders of whom was a fellow named Seth Walker, came what movement historian Eleanor Flexner has called a display of opéra bouffe.
Unable, despite threats and bribery, to bring the bill up for reconsideration, thirty-eight members of the losing minority crossed the state line into Alabama to try and prevent a quorum until the majority had somehow been undermined. Their hosts in Decatur [Alabama] had even wired those planning the move: “Send them on. We will be proud to entertain Seth Walker and his opponents of suffrage as long as they wish to remain and it will not cost them a penny.”
The action was promptly ruled illegal.
STRANGELY, THERE WERE NO MASS celebrations by newly enfranchised women, no demonstrations from coast to coast. To Alice Paul, a leading strategist of the Nineteenth Amendment, went the honor of sewing the thirty-sixth and final star on the National Woman’s Party suffrage banner, as half a dozen of her supporters looked on, but that appears to have been the extent of triumphant display. There was certainly nothing like the gathering of eight thousand women who marched through Washington on the day before President Wilson’s inauguration in 1913. Some of the protesters carried placards, others shouted out slogans; all seemed exuberant and determined. And they were in the streets, of all places, not in the kitchens! The policemen assigned to duty along the route simply could not condone what they saw. Because they “had no experience with such unladylike behavior,” we are told, “they failed to protect the women from assault. A portion of the parade route turned into a mob scene so serious that it ultimately cost the police chief his job. Public sympathy swelled for women who were willing to take such risks for rights.”
But history does not record anything on a grand scale (assuming eight thousand women can be considered a grand scale) after the Tennessee decision. A small parade here, some small parties there and there, a few speeches at various civic occasions—but there seems to have been nothing more exuberant. Perhaps women, and the men who supported them, were fearful that their foes would turn to the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn the Nineteenth Amendment. And, in fact, they did; the Amendment was not finally institutionalized until 1922, when the Court made a final ruling in its favor. Perhaps, believing that women had been entitled to the vote since Margaret Brent insisted on it in 1638, they believed congratulatory displays were gratuitous. Or perhaps they were simply weary from an incomprehensibly long ordeal.
Carrie Chapman Catt summed it up. Since the 1848 Seneca Falls call for the vote, she counted: 480 campaigns in state legislature; 56 statewide referenda to male voters; 47 attempts to add suffrage planks during revisions of state constitutions; 277 campaigns at state party conventions and 30 at national conventions; and 19 biannual campaigns in 19 different Congresses. Literally thousands of times, men cast their votes on whether or not women should vote. Literally millions of women and men gave their entire lives to the cause and went to their graves with freedom unwon. No peaceful political change ever has required so much from so many for so long. None but a mighty army could have won.
But even a mighty army, by 1920, would have been exhausted, satisfied more than celebratory.
Another reason that at least some supporters of suffrage did not feel like marching through the streets victoriously was that they were still enraged at the tactics of their opponents, who had done everything they could to undermine the woman’s vote by undermining both law and justice.
Catt was among those who could not rid herself of fury. In Tennessee, she had watched in something close to horror as the Speaker of the House called for an adjournment at the precise moment when the woman’s vote seemed a certainty. The reason was obvious. The anti-suffragists needed time to collect the money for even more bribes than they had already paid out, and Catt could not help but watch these frantic, last-minute transactions as they were conducted in the open, legislative business as usual.
She was watching, thought Catt, money being put to its worst possible use, the purchase and alteration of a man’s integrity. She had never seen anything like it before. A couple of days after ratification, unable to remain silent any longer, and irate at others who had also seen the the corruption without speaking out against it, she took to a podium in Nashville and kept it until she had made headlines:
Never in the history of politics has there been such a nefarious lobby as labored to block the ratification in Nashville. … Strange men and groups of men sprang up, men we had never met before in the battle. Who were they? We were told, this is the railroad lobby, these are the manufacturers’ lobbyists, this is the remnant of the old whiskey ring. Even tricksters from the U.S. Revenue Service were there operating against us, until the President of the United States called them off. … They appropriated our telegrams, tapped our telephones, listened outside our windows and transoms. They attacked our private and public lives.
Still, even if everything Catt had stated was true—and there was no reason to doubt her—the opposition had failed. The Nineteenth Amendment, by the narrowest of margins, had been accepted on August 18, 1920, and in a few months women were finally going to enter the voting booth. With Prohibition having become law in January, 1920 is the only year in American history in which two amendments were added to the United States Constitution.
AT LAST, FEMALES HAD SOME control over the lawmakers who would represent them. Now it was up to 41-year-old Margaret Sanger, she believed, to take the next steps in a campaign long since begun, to give women control over their own bodies. It would be a shorter struggle, but even more vituperative.
A nurse by training, Sanger coined, or at least was the first person to make common usage of, the term “birth control”; she was the nation’s first prominent advocate for it; she opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States; and she would go on to found Planned Parenthood. Few movements are the labor of a single person; but, to an uncommon degree, the freedom that women have today in the procreative process is due to Sanger’s perseverance a century ago.
Born in 1879, Sanger was the daughter of Michael Hennessey Higgins, a stonecutter who specialized in angels and saints for tombstones. It was precise and tiring work; but unfortunately for Mrs. Higgins, her husband still had a great deal of virility left at the end of the day, enough to impregnate her the astonishing total of eighteen times in twenty-two years. Eleven of the children grew to adulthood. Their mother, however, died at fifty, exhausted from having created so much life, and was presumably laid to rest under an example of her husband’s handiwork.
Little Margaret had paid careful attention to her mother’s unceasing labors, a life that had alternated between pain and enervation, and although she never spoke or wrote publicly about the subject, it is hard to believe that the mother’s suffering was not the spark of the daughter’s vocation.
Described as “fine, clean and honest” when she was a young tomboy, Sanger appears in her later photos to be rather a prim lady, even timid. She was anything but. Her courage, thought to be an inheritance from her father, was evident from childhood, when, having decided she was plagued by too many fears, she set out to conquer them.
The cause of one fear was darkness, and she met it by forcing herself to go to sleep without a candle. At first she stayed awake most of the night, on the alert for menacing creatures who themselves feared the day. But weeks passed, and outside of some unidentified noises from outside and the random sounds of her house settling, she heard nothing to alarm her. She saw nothing to alarm her. In time, she dozed peacefully.
She was also afraid of heights, which her brothers delighted in pointing out. After enduring all the taunting she could, she joined her siblings in jumping from the barn rafters to the hayloft below, a distance of thirty feet. She shook so much she could hardly breathe before her first few attempts; but soon the leap became, as was the candle-less bedroom, more of a habit than it was a test of courage.
“Then,” according to biographer Emily Taft Douglas, “she faced her worst test, an ordeal that [Sanger] thought important enough to repeat at some length in her two autobiographical accounts.”
Douglas continues:
In Corning, [New York], the Erie Railroad crossed the Chemung River on a narrow iron span which men used as a short cut. Margaret’s father had once helped her across by lifting her over the wide gaps, but the experience had terrified her. For that very reason, and in spite of the fact that it was forbidden, she decided that she must cross the bridge alone.
Halfway over she heard the dreaded hum of an oncoming train, and she stumbled. Perhaps that saved her life. She fell between the iron ties, over which she instinctively curled her arms. Unable to pull herself up again, she dangled there over the deep, rapid river. In a moment, the cars rushed down upon her and the wheels crashed over her head. Numbed and helpless, she hung there as the train thundered across the bridge. Providentially, a fisherman below saw the child and rescued her. He gave her two smacks on the rear, faced her toward home and went back down to his line.
Her fears now under control, she was prepared for any threats and opposition she would face as an adult. As it turned out, she would probably face more than any other woman of her time.
WHEN SANGER WAS IN HER early thirties, the standard line about birth control in the ghetto of Manhattan’s Lower East Side was: “Have Jake sleep on the roof tonight.” It was a joke that always brought a smile, or at least a nod of agreement from the women fanning themselves at their apartment windows or on the fire escapes. Sanger didn’t think it was funny. She began to address the public on a woman’s right to manage her natural “resources,” and so fervent was she that she offered herself as a speaker to any women’s group that would have her, asking for no compensation. Few accepted, afraid of repercussions from the law. Sanger was reduced to begging for forums and, little by little, found them. They were seldom large, never attracted the press; but she was beginning to spread the word.
“Her standard lecture in these days,” writes biographer Ellen Chesler, “embraced a panoply of arguments for birth control—from the health, welfare, and personal rights of women and children, to the eugenic inheritance of the society, to global peace and prosperity.”
Sanger also began writing a series of articles on birth control for the socialist publication New York Call. “What Every Girl Should Know” was the name of her column, and there were readers who did not want their girls to know any of it. But only one of those readers canceled her subscription. Others, however, were pleased by Sanger’s remarkably direct language on so important and forbidden a subject, finding her work “indicative of a higher, purer morality than whole libraries full of hypocritical cant about modesty.”
Eventually, though, sentiment against Sanger began to build, finally reaching the point at which the Call had to act. Sanger’s column was simply too controversial, even for a socialist paper, a paper opposed to virtually everything for which the government and conventional society stood. In what turned out to be her final piece, she “insisted that existing economic and social arrangements fundamentally compromised and degraded women by forcing them to rely on men for support. She set forth a rudimentary but nonetheless radical argument demanding economic and social freedom for women so as to permit greater autonomy in choosing a mate and bearing children.”
Postal authorities disputed the argument, or at least Sanger’s right to make it through the United States mail. As Nathan Miller informs us about the publication’s last issue, “The editors printed the column’s head, ‘What Every Girl Should Know,’ and under it, ‘NOTHING! By Order of the Post Office Department.’”
Sanger was upset at first, but soon saw her termination by the Call as an opportunity. She had had too many disputes with her editors about content and language, and was tired of reining herself in, which to her was a breach of trust with her readers. She wanted even more direct expression, an even higher, purer morality. In 1914, she began to publish an eight-page monthly newsletter entirely on her own called The Woman Rebel. It contained such passages as the following: “The marriage bed is the most degenerating influence of the social order, as to life in all of its forms—biological, psychological, sociological—for man, woman and child. … Let this institution, then, be anathema to all thinking minds.”
In another article, even more provocative, she attacked the views of the Roman Catholic Church, something simply not done in those days, regardless of one’s faith.
The Western Watchman (Catholic) says, according to The Menace: “We say, a young girl’s business is to get a husband. Having got a husband, it is her business to beget children. Under ordinary conditions of health a young wife ought to have a child in her arms or on her bosom all the time. When she is not nursing a child she should be carrying one. This will give her plenty to do, and she will have no time for political meetings or movements.”
How do the women like that program for a life vocation? According to this authority a woman is to look upon herself merely as a vehicle for the breeding of children. … This editor would not even give her the protection that is bestowed upon cattle (when he says) “when she is not nursing a child she should be carrying one.” The home of such a couple, instead of being a place of comfort and refinement with food for mind and the amenities of social life, is to be a rabbit warren, a sty filled with anemic, underdeveloped children, … and so continue until she drops into the grave the victim of man’s distorted and perverted sense of duty. Out upon such a theory! For the protection of the female sex, let her be taught how to defend herself against such teachings as these.
It is obvious that Sanger is recalling, and denouncing, her father’s heedless lust for her mother.
Friends of Sanger warned her that various legal authorities were watching The Woman Rebel, and may have been preparing to pounce. At which point this most notable of woman rebels, long used to the fearlessness she had developed in childhood, forced the law to take action. She wrote two front-page editorials for the Rebel, one of them under the pseudonym Herbert A. Thorpe. The column expressed its support, posthumously, for three anarchists who, experimenting with bombs in the basement of a Manhattan home, ended up destroying both the home and themselves in the process.
The second editorial was called “In Defense of Assassination,” a position she took in general terms only, eschewing any references to specific incidents or victims. The piece was, in part, an open letter to Anthony Comstock, a United States postal inspector and, as the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a surprisingly powerful figure in the struggle against public sexuality. We do not know Sanger’s true feelings about the killing of prominent persons; she had published the article specifically to provoke, to make Comstock and the postmaster general try to suppress The Woman Rebel. And if what she had published so far did not spur either of the two men to act, she had decided, she would write an article in support of arson!
She did not have to go that far. Action was finally taken. Late in August 1914, she was presented with three subpoenas, two for publishing sexually explicit material and the third for advocating assassination, charging that it was incitement to murder and riot.
As should be clear, Sanger was a hellion as both a writer and a speaker. She wanted people to pay attention to what she had to say and, in her methods to do so, was uncompromising and incendiary.
“In court, however,” as biographer Madeline Gray states, “Margaret was so charming and demure that when she asked for a postponement in order to prepare her defense, the judge readily consented. The case was held over until the fall term, giving her six weeks of grace.”
She was also granted bail a few more times, these postponements of shorter duration, and she used the time not so much to prepare her defense as to stay on the offense. She began a new publication called Family Limitation, as bland a title as she could devise for opinions that continued, as far as her opponents were concerned, to be almost as controversial as arson advocacy. And more physiologically explicit than anything she had written in her previous pamphlets. “Don’t wait to see if you do not menstruate (monthly sickness) but make it your duty to see that you do,” advises Family Limitation.
It also urges a woman to start taking a laxative several days before she expects her period. “If there is the slightest possibility that the male fluid has entered the vagina,” drink hot water with quinine in addition to the laxative. “By taking the above precautions, you will prevent the ovum from making its nest in the lining of the womb.” Following, in the pamphlet, are sections on douches, condoms, and vaginal suppositories. Subjects like this had never appeared in print before, at least not where members of the general public could obtain them. In all likelihood, they were seldom even whispered between husband and wife.
And once she had gotten Family Limitation up and running, and was convinced it had said all it needed to say for the time being, she did something even more shocking, and shockingly unethical. To the dismay of all who believed in her and were grateful for her defiance of authority, and to the special dismay of those who had put up the money for her temporary freedom, she decided to jump bail. It was totally out of character for Sanger, a woman who had always behaved with the utmost responsibility toward friends and supporters.
She later explained, however, that she had seen no choice. She believed, mistakenly, that she faced a maximum of forty-five years in jail if she was found guilty on all the counts against her, and so decided that the better course was to pack her bags and take a train to Canada. She intended to pay back the money she owed over time, she said, but the promise was never put to the test.
As a final gesture of defiance to the man who had been assigned to serve as the judge of her case, as well as to the prosecuting attorney, she wrote to these two officers of the court and told them she was skipping the country under an assumed name so they would never be able to stop her, and, in the hope of raising their blood pressure even higher, enclosed with her letters the most recent issues of Family Limitation.
Sanger’s husband played a minor role in all of this, and in fact played a minor role in her entire life until, a few years thence, she divorced him, relegating him to the most minor role of all. Before departing for England, though, she yielded to his pleas to see her for a final good-bye. At that same time, she deposited her three children with him, showing no signs that she would miss them, and then sailed from Canada to Liverpool on November 3, 1914. From Liverpool she journeyed to London. She expected to be gone a few months. It turned out to be a year, one of the most instructive of her life.
BY THAT TIME, THE GREAT War had broken out; but Sanger, refusing to be intimidated by the violence around her, made a trip from London to the Netherlands, “where,” according to historian J. C. Furnas, “a new system of birth control clinics meant the world’s lowest death rates for mothers and town-born babies. There she met and brought home the Dutch secret weapon—the Mensinga pessary, still a good nonbiochemical contraceptive to protect against regardless husbands.” Another attraction of the Netherlands to Sanger was the work of birth-control pioneer Dr. Johannes Rutgers. She was able to arrange a meeting with him, and both pronounced themselves impressed with the other, with Rutgers calling Family Limitation “a brilliant pamphlet.”
He explained to Sanger that, even with the war raging nearby, the Dutch had been able to enlist the services of forty-eight nurses who fit more than 1,700 women with diaphragms. “However small this operation,” biographer Chesler recounts, “it constituted a substantial health presence in the gynecological and obstetrical fields and was widely credited for the country’s superior maternal and infant mortality statistics.”
The size of the Netherlands’ operation didn’t matter to Sanger; it was the effort expended on the behalf of women’s freedom that impressed her, as well as the encouraging results. But Rutgers insisted to Sanger that the results were encouraging only because those who administered and monitored the birth-control program had had extensive medical training. Sanger took notes. “No other class of men or women,” she wrote, “are so AWARE of the NEED of this knowledge among working people as they.”
Returning to the United States, where criminal charges against her for The Woman Rebel had earlier been dropped, she soon found herself in trouble with the law again. On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in the country, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. On its ninth day of operation, the clinic received a visit from a female police officer. On the tenth day, the woman returned with some male members of the city’s vice squad. They arrested Sanger and Fania Mindell, one of the clinic’s volunteers, and then began disassembling the operation, impounding furnishings, supplies, copies of Family Limitation and other publications, and case histories of the clients who had previously visited the clinic, even though Sanger screamed at the invaders that they were private, that the police had no right to such information without approval.
As she watched the pillaging of her life’s work, she lost her temper in a manner that she had never done before in front of others. It was Mrs. Whitehurst, the female police officer from the previous day, who actually arrested Sanger. “The little woman [Sanger] was at first taken aback,” reported a Brooklyn newspaper, “but in an instant she was in a towering rage. ‘You dirty thing,’ she shrieked [at Whitehurst]. ‘You are not a woman. You are a dog.’ ‘Tell that to the judge in the morning,’ calmly responded Mrs. Whitehurst. ‘No. I’ll tell it to you, now. You dog, and you have two ears to hear me too!’”
Although she was absent from the clinic at the time of the arrests, Margaret’s sister, Ethel Byrne, a registered nurse at New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital, who devoted many of her spare hours to assisting Margaret, was later taken into custody.
Despite being the third person arrested, it was Byrne whose trial came up first on the court calendar, and in January 1917 she was accused of trying “to do away with the Jews” by setting up shop in a Jewish neighborhood and providing both the information and implements for family planning. Observers in the courtroom knew Byrne would be found guilty of something, but were stunned by the actual charge—which was, in plain and horrifying language, genocide. Not for dispensing birth-control advice, but for doing so in the wrong part of town, a neighborhood that Byrne might not even have known was predominantly Jewish. It made no difference. Thirty days in jail, on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island).
But Sanger and Byrne, disappointed by the verdict while at the same time encouraged by the favorable publicity they were receiving in newspapers covering the trial, decided on a course to guarantee even more publicity. Byrne would go on a hunger strike. After dining one night on large portions of turkey and ice cream, Byrne went to bed and awoke determined to eat no more, to “die, if need be, for my sex.”
After four days without Byrne’s accepting so much as a drop of sustenance, and the newspapers savaging the authorities for allowing this to happen over so trivial a matter as a thirty-day jail term, the New York City Corrections Commissioner announced that, for the first time in American penal history, a prisoner would be force-fed through a tube inserted into her esophagus. “[T]he national wire services literally went wild,” Chesler writes. “Even the normally sensation-shy New York Times carried the story on its front page for four days in a row, alternating with reports from prison officials that Mrs. Byrne’s response was ‘passive’ to her thrice-daily feeding of a mixture of milk, brandy, and eggs, with overstated claims from Sanger that her sister could not resist because she was extremely weak and near death.”
A group called the National Birth Control League, made up primarily of women whose pedigrees were impressive or whose marriages had elevated their social standing, formed a Committee of 100, which was able to end the nonsense at the women’s facility on Blackwell’s Island by negotiating a pardon for Byrne—but only if she promised never to break the law, any law, again. Speaking for her sister, who could by this time barely utter a sound, Margaret turned down the offer. But only until a few more days had passed, by which time Ethel Byrne really was near death. At that point, Margaret accepted the pardon on her sister’s behalf and her sister began to feed herself, just like in the old days, without an esophageal tube. Margaret’s insistence on the hunger strike, and its duration, called into question her character, even among many who continued to count themselves among her supporters.
NEXT CAME THE TRIALS FOR Sanger and Mindell, the two women arrested at the clinic. Mindell, accused of selling What Every Girl Should Know to customers, was found guilty of obscenity and fined $50, which was paid by Gertrude Pinchot, a member of the National Birth Control League. That quickly, Mindell was free.
Now it was Sanger’s turn—and that of the tabloid press. The courthouse that day in January 1917 was mobbed with reporters, raucous and edgy and certain of scoops. Front pages in New York and even some other cities had been cleared; journalists would have all the space they wanted to tell of Sanger’s duel with the prosecution. Also in attendance were people who believed that Sanger was doing the Lord’s work, and their opposition, those who were certain she was the bride of Satan. The atmosphere in the room was incendiary, awaiting only a flame to light the fuse. Sanger alone, it seemed, was peaceful, at rest in the eye of the storm. “Regardless of the outcome,” she had previously said, “I shall continue my work, supported by thousands of men and women throughout the country.”
Of course, Sanger had already admitted her guilt on the same charge that resulted in Byrne’s imprisonment; she, too, was apparently genocidal. But the charge upon which Sanger would actually be tried was whether she had gone “beyond verbal instruction to actually fit her clients with cervical devices. To the prosecutor this seemed an even more heinous crime.”
But he could never establish Sanger’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Which is another way of saying that he could never find a woman willing to testify either that she had been fitted with a birth-control apparatus or had witnessed someone else being fitted. The beneficiaries of Sanger’s services, grateful for what they had received and eager for more of her services when necessary, were not about to turn on her.
And the members of the jury, constantly sizing her up at the defense table, found it difficult to believe her guilty of anything. Once again, as was the case when she previously appeared in the courtroom, Sanger adopted a demeanor that was dignified, respectful, even meek at times. She was quiet, attentive, and, at least so far as anyone could hear, referred to no one, either in or out of uniform, as a dog.
Also working in her favor, ironically, was the youth, inexperience, and ineptitude of her counsel. The young man, a public defender who seemed never to have tried a case before, and to be only vaguely familiar with courtroom procedures, was caught off guard time after time by the opposition, unable to serve his client’s interests not because he was unprepared, but because his manner was timid, his inexperience obvious, and his notes a heap of disorganization. He stuttered when he spoke, gulped almost audibly.
The prosecution, on the other hand, having finally gotten its opportunity to put Sanger away, was so well staffed, so fortified with detail, and so loudly, overbearingly repetitive in its presentation that it seemed to be harassing the defense counsel more than merely reciting evidence. It constantly interrupted the young man, denounced him. He could not help blushing. It was David versus Goliath, except that this time David didn’t have a slingshot.
That, at least, was how it seemed to many members of the press, and they managed to work that viewpoint into each day’s coverage.
The judge, however, did not read the papers and would not have been influenced if he had. Obviously more severe than Byrne’s judge, he gave Sanger the choice of paying a $5,000 fine or serving thirty days in the workhouse. Sanger showed no displeasure. She calmly chose the latter and, realizing that the publicity value of a hunger strike had been exhausted by her sister’s effort, she decided to eat all the meals served to her behind bars. In fact, she decided not to make a fuss of any sort. Almost. She not only played the role of model prisoner for a month, but afterward claimed to have enjoyed the opportunity “to rest and be alone, and told her supporters in a published letter that their ‘loving thoughts pouring in to her’ protected her from sadness.”
She performed her prison activities without complaint. They included mopping the floors and reading to her fellow inmates, many of whom were illiterate and gathered around her attentively during their free time. Despite the complaints of the matron in charge of her corridor, some of Sanger’s reading came from an issue of Family Limitation that a supporter had smuggled into her cell. Taking advantage of the fortuitous circumstance, she lectured virtually the entire cellblock on birth control and related matters, wanting them to be better able to govern their bodies when they were free again. The matron fumed. She could be excused for wondering how a woman could be found guilty of a crime outside of a state institution, and then commit the same crime with impunity once within its walls.
But was it really a crime now? Or was it just chit-chat among some gals who had nothing better to do, or the kind of talk one might hear among the regulars at a tavern after their second rounds—and thus was no more subject to regulation by authorities than, say, obscene language? Which, of course, in the view of authorities, was the definition of Sanger’s kind of conversation. Still, for a change, she was able to provide birth-control advice without breaking the law. She was delighted with the opportunity, and no less so with the irony. She was breaking the law. The law was providing the venue. No less was it providing the audience. The judge had outwitted himself, and fumed no less than the matron when he learned what was going on in the cellblock.
Finally Sanger’s month was over and, as she was freed, a group of supporters representing a variety of social classes greeted her outside the gate of Blackwell’s Island prison. The moment they saw her, they began to sing the French “national anthem,” the Marseillaise, a tune to which Allied troops frequently marched in Europe. As Chesler points out, however, it “made a curious refrain of welcome for a woman of Socialist and pacifist convictions.” When the singing stopped, the hugging began, and Sanger was swallowed up in the crowd of well-wishers.
A FEW YEARS LATER, IN 1920, came what was in a sense the most important twelve months in Margaret Sanger’s life, even though her name was absent from the press. It was, rather, a year of preparation for the project to which all of her life so far had been leading, the work to which the rest of her life would be devoted.
By night, she worked alone, sketching floor plans, compiling lists of supplies and services, using the notes she had taken in the Netherlands to help her decide on the number of employees she would need, what training would be required of them, and what their precise duties would be. She had had no legal training, but she skimmed law books, trying to decide what limits would be placed on her vision by the police. She was determined to miss no details. She might not be able to stay within the law, but that was the law’s fault, not hers. Still, she would observe its boundaries as closely as possible.
During the day, she and her colleagues undertook a project no less important, searching the streets of Brooklyn for a place to house an enterprise more ambitious than a mere birth-control clinic. They had very specific needs: size of building, size of rooms, space for overstuffed chairs and other comfortable furniture in the waiting room, sufficient storage space, a welcoming atmosphere. When they found an office that was conveniently located and large enough for them to refurbish to suit their needs, they signed a lease and eagerly went to work.
Without any professional assistance, the women remodeled and redecorated, cleaned and painted, keeping the windows open to air out their stuffy new home, even though the air that drifted into it was hot and seldom provided a breeze. They filled the shelves and bookcases with all manner of printed material, including a complete collection of Family Limitation issues. In the cupboards, some of which they had to build themselves, were a variety of contraceptive devices; diagrams to demonstrate the proper means of insertion were attached to the walls. The search for the proper personnel began in earnest. The number of volunteers was overwhelming.
The group behind the facility, founded by Margaret Sanger, was the American Birth Control League. It would eventually be known as Planned Parenthood.
SANGER WAS A CONTROVERSIAL FIGURE, not only for her own time but for all time. It was more than just her deliberately provocative writings, more than just her support of anarchists like the notorious Emma Goldman and her part-time lover Alexander Berkman, the latter of whom tried to kill robber baron Henry Clay Frick during the notorious Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel strike of 1892. She proudly regarded both as friends, even though Goldman would never speak publicly about birth control. Unlike Sanger, she found the topic too controversial, too likely to attract the authorities, and, in her case, too much of an invitation for deportation hearings. It was, almost surely, the only topic about which Goldman felt such reticence.
But even more inflammatory was the fact that Sanger’s study of the various means of birth control led her, in time, to embrace the eugenics movement. She and her fellow supporters
sought to prevent the propagation of the genetically “unfit,” meaning the mentally retarded and chronically criminal. Influenced by these ideas, many states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws that fell mainly on the impoverished and racial minorities. Upholding a Tennessee law, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking for eight members of the Supreme Court, supported sterilization in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell with the declaration that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
There was, and remains, a certain logic in trying to dissuade the genetically unfit from reproducing themselves, especially in large numbers and, as Justice Holmes said, over too many generations. But it is the most delicate of issues, and must be addressed with forethought aplenty and much care and gentleness. The young educator Harry H. Laughlin, however, found the matter more simple than I have stated. It was, to Laughlin, simply “[t]o purify the breeding stock of the [human] race at all costs.” And then there was the physician W. Duncan McKim, whose book Heredity and Human Progress found that those of impure breeding stock were guilty of a capital offense. McKim, in what he deemed to be an expression of tenderness of his own variety, suggested that “the surest, the simplest, the kindest, the most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of the high privilege, is a gentle, painless death.”
It did Sanger no good to be publicly associated with people like this.
YET HER CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE freedom of women to enjoy sex without risk of motherhood, combined with the Nineteenth Amendment, brought a sense of empowerment to half of the American population that had never known such a feeling before. Especially to poor women, those who had never had access to, or even knowledge of, birth control previously, Margaret Sanger became something of a saint.
The office of the American Birth Control League opened to the public in 1921. The first women to enter did so warily. A few others trailed behind, just as wary, looking around for policemen or other government officials. These officials had decided, though, that although they could shut down the place temporarily, it would soon open again. It would close but then open, close and open—eventually, the law would come down on the side of the women; and their efforts, which would be time-consuming and expensive, would be for naught.
Before long, the initial entrants on that first day were followed by dozens more, a floodtide of feminine humanity desperate for services available to them for the first time ever. Among them, at the top of the social ladder, were members of the National Birth Control League, the Committee of 100. They were joined by garment-makers and seamstresses, housewives and store clerks, government employees and secretaries, spinsters and schoolteachers, maids and washerwomen, and even a few men, many of them immigrants, accompanying their wives or girlfriends, providing support, all of them amazed that a place like this existed and was willing to change their lives free of charge.
Sanger did not work at the office that first day. Rather, she stood at the door and watched, a proud witness to what she had done so much to create. She was surprised at the number of people who had turned out, surprised at their courage as they sat or stood in lines before virtually every desk in the office from opening to closing. There were no arrests, not a law officer anywhere in sight, not even Mrs. Whitehurst.
In one way or another, all who had availed themselves of the American Birth Control League’s counsel and merchandise expressed their gratitude to Sanger as they left, for so heavy a burden finally lifted. She nodded, smiled—more in relief, it seemed to many, than gratitude. “The real hope of the world,” she had said on one occasion, “lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses.”
She had done just that; and as a result her own business, small and controversial when it started, would grow unceasingly in its size and impact on society as the years went by. Eventually, the cause to which Sanger, Mindell, and Byrne had devoted their lives would prove well worth their commitment. One day a crime; a later day the cultural norm.