1920 (24 page)

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.