The Mansion of Happiness (24 page)

While Clara Savage was dating Harold Littledale, another ambitious New Yorker,
Margaret Sanger, was arguing that a lot of things that couldn’t be discussed ought to be. Sanger, born in New York in 1879, was the sixth of eleven children, one of whom she helped deliver when she was eight years old. Her mother, a poor and devout Irish Roman Catholic, died at the age of fifty; her father, a stonecutter and a socialist, lived to be eighty-four. Sanger always attributed her mother’s ruined health and early death, from tuberculosis, to the exhaustion of bearing and raising children. Sanger suffered from tuberculosis as well. Nevertheless, she trained as a nurse and began caring for poor immigrant women living in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side. They begged her for information about
how to avoid pregnancy. They could see that wealthy women were having fewer babies: How did they manage it? Sanger wrote, “The doomed women implored me to reveal the ‘secret’ rich people had, offering to pay me extra to tell them; many really believed I was holding back information for money.” Sanger had her own idea of what needed to be on a “women’s page.” In 1913, she wrote a twelve-part series on
sex education for the
Call
, the Socialist Party’s daily, titled “What Every Girl Should Know.” Since its discussion of venereal disease violated federal
obscenity laws, Sanger’s final essay, “Some Consequences of Ignorance and Silence,” was suppressed, lead–ing the
Call
to publish an announcement in its place: “ ‘What Every Girl Should Know’—NOTHING.”

Sanger and Savage lived in the same city during these years, but they saw that city through very different lenses. Savage met the same desperately poor and overburdened immigrant women Sanger met, and found herself not only not moved to action but mystified and irritated. She wrote in her diary in February 1914, “Off to Ellis Island where I talked to a Russian family—12 children and a Father—the mother in the hospital for another baby. They were fine but I don’t see why some people have so many and others none.” Both Savage and Sanger went to hear
Charlotte Perkins Gilman speak in New York that winter. “All this talk, for and against and about babies, is by men,” Gilman said in a speech she gave around that time. “One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.”
¹⁶
Sanger was impressed.
¹⁷
Savage was annoyed, writing in her diary, “She has a lovely face but a harsh voice and I didn’t like her especially.” Savage went to see Gilman again that April and liked her even less: “she made me
furious.
I dislike her manner and voice so much.”

In March 1914, Margaret Sanger, now thirty-four years old and a mother of three, began publishing the
Woman Rebel
, an eight-page feminist monthly, urging her readers to “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eye.” In its first issue, Sanger stated her case: “Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception?”
¹⁸
In the
Woman Rebel
, Sanger advocated “birth control,” a term she coined. Six of the monthly’s seven issues were declared unmailable and seized. Indicted for violating obscenity laws, Sanger fled the country, leaving her husband and children behind.
¹⁹

In New York, Savage, now twenty-three and still single, kept writing stories
for the women’s page. Assigned to interview “a little woman whose husband goes to war tomorrow leaving her with a tiny baby, no money and no English!” she reported, “I didn’t realize
how
bad this was till I saw that woman.” But Clara Savage was no more gripped by the plight of the poor or the mission of Margaret Sanger than she had been by
Adelheid Popp or
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Although she took a job as press secretary of the
National Woman Suffrage Association, her political commitment was lukewarm: “Lunched with Ethel at the Club and of course we talked suffrage which is the dearest thing in life to her—but not to me!”

In 1915, Clara Savage became
Good Housekeeping
’s Washington correspondent.
²⁰
Margaret Sanger returned to the United States in October of that year. After Sanger’s five-year-old daughter died of pneumonia, the charges against her were dropped; the prosecution decided that bringing a grieving mother to trial for distributing information about birth control would only aid her cause. She embarked on a national speaking tour. She debated Paul Popenoe in Washington, Popenoe opposing birth control as fervently as Sanger endorsed it.

On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened the United States’ first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn. In a poor tenement neighborhood, she rented a storefront from a landlord named Rabinowitz, who lowered the rent when she told him what she was going to use the space for. She wrote a letter to the Brooklyn district attorney, informing him of her plan. Then she posted handbills in English, Italian, and Yiddish:

On the day the clinic opened, Jewish and Italian women pushing prams and with toddlers in tow lined up around the corner, Sanger recalled, “some shawled, some hatless, their red hands clasping the cold, chapped, smaller ones of their children.” They paid ten cents to register. Then Sanger or Byrne met with seven or eight at once to show them how to use
pessaries.

Nine days later, an undercover policewoman came, posing as a mother of two who couldn’t afford any more children. Mindell sold her a copy of “What Every Girl Should Know.” Byrne discussed contraception with her. The next day, the police arrived, confiscated the examination table, shut down the clinic, and arrested Sanger.

Mindell was convicted on obscenity charges
;
her conviction was eventually overturned. Byrne and Sanger were charged with violating a section of the New York State Penal Code, under which it was illegal to distribute “any recipe, drug, or medicine for the prevention of conception.” (The fear was that contraception promotes promiscuity.) Byrne’s lawyer argued that the penal code was unconstitutional because it infringed on a woman’s right to the “pursuit of happiness.” She was found guilty. Sentenced to thirty days, she went on a hunger strike and nearly died. An editorial in the
New York Tribune
begged the governor to issue a pardon, threatening him with the judgment of history: “It will be hard to make the youth of 1967 believe that in 1917 a woman was imprisoned for doing what Mrs. Byrne did.”

At Sanger’s trial, during which the judge waved a cervical cap from the bench, Sanger hoped to argue that the law preventing the distribution of contraception was unconstitutional: exposing women, against their will, to the danger of dying
in childbirth violated a woman’s right to life. The judge allowed that doctors could prescribe contraception—which is what made it possible, subsequently, for Sanger to open more clinics—but ruled that no woman has “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception”: if a woman isn’t willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn’t have sex. Sanger went to Queens County Penitentiary. She was sentenced to thirty days.
²¹

The month after Sanger was released from prison, she published, in the
Birth Control Review
, an essay by Popenoe, whose point was that “birth control as at present practiced in the United States is the reverse of eugenic.”
²²
Hard-line eugenicists like Popenoe almost always objected to birth control; but the more eugenicists objected to her agenda, the more vigorously Sanger courted their support.

Meanwhile, eugenicists kept worrying about race suicide, exactly because college-educated women like Clara Savage were working instead of marrying and having babies or, almost as bad, were marrying and having babies but not having enough of them, or not raising them well enough. Eugenicists therefore insisted that Anglo-Saxon parents needed not birth control
but parental education, urgently: the unfit races, with their teeming hordes of dark-eyed children, seemed to know how to take care of babies, instinctively, like animals, but fit parents, with their small families, were woefully ignorant. Social services that helped poor mothers were interfering with the workings of natural selection. What were fit women to do?

In the
Journal of Heredity
, in 1916, Popenoe published an influential monograph by
Mary L. Read, the educational director of the National Association for Mothercraft Education. Read confessed herself baffled: “It is one of the riddles of history why, when the life and welfare of children are of such vital concern to the family and the race, society has never taken the trouble to see to it that the woman in whose charge these precious baby lives rested were highly trained and fittingly prepared for their responsibility.” A well-bred and genetically fit woman who hadn’t been taught how to take care of babies, “however pretty and even charming,” Read warned, would raise “sickly, peevish, stupid children.” If providing social services to the poor couldn’t be stopped, then, at a bare minimum, fit parents needed their own social services; they needed parental education.
²³

In 1918, Savage went to Europe as
Good Housekeeping
’s foreign editor; she wanted to cover politics, but she was stymied. When peace came, she quit. In 1920, at the age of twenty-nine, she married
Harold Littledale, who went on to become an editor at the
New York Times.
The next year, Sanger founded the
American Birth Control League. Sanger fielded letters from women all over the country, begging her for information about contraception. One wrote from Kentucky, “I have Ben married 4 years the 5 december and I have all Redy given Birth to 3 children and all 3 of my children ar Boys and I am all most Broken down and am only 24 yers old. . . . mrs sanger I do want you to write me an Return mail what to do to keep from Bring these Little one to this awfel world.”
²⁴

The Progressive-era debate about parenthood contained within it debates about who had too many children, who had too few, who had a right to write about it, and how. In 1922, at the age of thirty-one, Clara Savage Littledale gave birth to a daughter. Motherhood does not appear to have been all she had hoped for. In 1924, she wrote a short, bitter piece for the
New Republic
about her experience sharing a room in a maternity ward with a woman whose baby had been stillborn. We never learn the woman’s name; Littledale calls her “41A.” Weirdly, the story, called “Sublimation,” which takes the form of a conversation overheard during a visit from 41A’s
husband, has a lot in common with “Hills Like White Elephants,” a short story Hemingway published three years later, in
Men Without Women.
The couple never mentions the dead baby, but everything they say is about the dead baby.

Parenthood came late to Clara Savage Littledale, but for the rest of her life, she wrote about almost nothing else.

Straight after
George Hecht met Littledale, he hired her, and then, together, they planned their venture:
Children: A Magazine for Parents.
Paul Popenoe and
Lillian Gilbreth served on its advisory board. The first issue came out in 1926.
Margaret Sanger wanted to help poor women have smaller families; Hecht and Littledale wanted to help wealthy women raise better babies. The magazine’s argument amounted to this: parents’ job was to prolong their children’s infancy, to baby their babies, because “prolonged infancy makes, through a better preparation for life, a better use of the extended life span which we enjoy today, thanks to modern science.” Actually, it went further: childhood was more than a stage of life. It was a right. “If the constitution of the United States were being redrawn to reflect the spirit of the twentieth century,” one contributor put it, “along with the ‘right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ might be included a future ‘right to childhood,’ emphasizing the need of every human being to a protected span of years.”
²⁶

Littledale had a decided editorial vision. She weeded out submissions she hated—gossipy, Victorian-sounding drivel, mainly: “My particular detestation are manuscripts that begin, ‘As Mrs. Jones was having tea in the garden with Mrs. Smith the question of Johnny’s nail-biting came up.’ ”
²⁷
She reached out to fathers. In 1927, the year Littledale worked through her second pregnancy, she ran Taylorite articles like “Can a Tired Businessman
Be a Good Father?,” which argued for what later came to be called “quality time” (“An hour can be made more significant than a day”).
²⁸
Most of all, she solicited contributions from people without either journalistic experience or academic expertise—“Mammas and papas are encouraged to contribute articles and they do”—chiefly to point out what rank amateurs they were.
²⁹

In 1927, Littledale published “Confessions of an Amateur Mother,” the lament of
Stella Crossley, a wealthy, well-educated woman who has not the least idea how to take care of her newborn. The article sounds a lot like Littledale’s diary. “Why is it that for the women of my type—professional women—motherhood, as a rule, comes so hard?” Crossley asked. Why is it that “we, for whom it should have been comparatively easy, seem to have greater difficulties with our infants than do the uneducated women, the foreign women, the wives of the great mass of toilers?” There are “motherhood clinics aplenty in the districts of the ‘poor’ women,” Crossley complained. “Why not for me?”
³⁰

Littledale loved this sort of piece, and she printed dozens like it. Meanwhile, Sanger was collecting stories, too. In 1928, she brought out
Motherhood in Bondage
, an anthology of letters she had received from poor women all over the country. “I am the mother of nineteen children, the baby only twenty months old,” one woman wrote. “I am forty-three years old and I had rather die than give birth to another child.” The expert advice these women wanted was where to get contraception, which, despite Sanger’s lobbying efforts, remained illegal. A doctor didn’t even have the right to discuss it with patients.