1920 (23 page)

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.