Margaret Sanger

“ No revolution has ever been started by evasion. No one wants Margaret Sanger to be a martyr. The point is that every one must see to it that she is not made a martyr. There is no other way out of these issues. You can’t really believe in a thing without knowing that some time you will have to fight for it. Margaret Sanger is taking the stand that her type always takes—just because it is the type that insists on believing hard. ”

“ Margaret Sanger considers it a slur upon the intelligence of American womankind to deny to them the knowledge which has brought freedom, health, happiness, and life itself, to the women of other nations. ”

“ Margaret Sanger
For centuries the world has played a game of “hush” about the one most important fact of marriage. Even today tens of thousands of women are doomed to a life of hopeless, helpless drudgery—and their children are doomed to privation and neglect because the mother simply can not give so many of them the proper care or support.
Words alone can not tell the terrible sacrifice in wasted bodies and blasted lives that has been exacted from women every year. Words alone can not express the untold suffering tens of thousands of women—and children—must endure every year. ”

“ When her brother had organized the first women’s law class, she had been his pupil and later had become the first woman lawyer in New York City. Her peculiarly honest mind was tolerant towards others, but uncompromising towards herself. It was said of her truly that she was always in the forefront when it took courage to be there; always in the background when there was credit to be gained. A Socialist in practice as well as theory, she spent large portions of her income in getting radicals out of jail, and her own legal experience she gave freely in their behalf. ”

“ That is why the little book by Margaret Sanger, whose right to speak with authority on these matters we all recognize, cannot be too widely read. To the few who think, though they may here and there differ on points of detail, it is all as familiar as A. B. C. But to the millions who rule the world it is not familiar, and still less to the handful of superior persons whom the masses elect to supreme positions. Therefore, let this book be read; let it be read by every man and woman who can read. And the sooner it is not only read but acted on, the better for the world. ”

“ Of all the slums I visited in trams, on buses, via the Underground, the one of worst repute at the time was the dockyards section of Rotherhithe. I held a small demonstration clinic there—in a sense the first of its kind in England. The eager women who came, amazingly ignorant of any possible beauty in marriage, were envious of a few in the community who, though the fathers were receiving no higher wages than their own husbands, had had only two or three children and consequently could afford to send them to the trade school. ”

“ His knowledge of the problems of money, population, and economics were of a nature far above the grasp of an ordinary intelligence, yet in his conversation with his wife he always implied she knew the subject as thoroughly as he, and answered her queries as though their minds were together. He was the only Englishman, perhaps the only man, I ever knew to do this.
Unlike Lydia Lopokouva, most women had a strenuous battle trying to prove themselves equal to men; this marriage conflict was inseparable from modern life. ”

“ He was a man of middle height and weight whose alert glance summed you up with an accuracy occasionally disturbing. After our initial encounter he called on me with punctiliousness and formality, and produced an article from a New York magazine which carried the story of the indictment of Margaret Sanger. “This is you?” he questioned with the jumping of all fact which is termed intuition.
Portet, a born teacher, was then instructing youth at the University of Liverpool in Spanish. No human being I ever knew could explain with such infinite pains the details of a subject. ”

“ Remembering Ellen Key, I reached Scandinavia with great hopes for Feminism. But the women who were considered the most intelligent were complacently resting on their laurels. The older ones still reigned supreme and believed that, because they had won their battles of twenty-five years ago, there was nothing left to fight for. The younger group found it hard to rise above the inertia of this overwhelming prestige. Since population was not a problem in Scandinavia, they were interested chiefly in eugenics, and had almost forgotten the aspect of individual suffering. ”

“ At Sunday afternoon labor meetings in London someone was always holding forth. “Here’s a chance for you to talk birth control,” Rose Witcop once urged.
It was an opportunity to reach working people and I agreed, but lunch of that day found me trembling. Henry Sara, a young man but old in the ways of the speaker, noticed I was not eating or drinking and could hardly utter a word. “I say, what’s the idea of all this worry? What you must think about is that everybody there comes merely to hear somebody or anybody. They’ve no notion what you’re going to say. Anything is all right with them. ”

“ Clyde declined to go in, but sat watching in her hat and glasses. Tanya kept on pink panties and a brassiere. The rest of us determined to throw off our inhibitions. Once you did this you were freed from them for the time being; it was the doing that was so hard. Most surprising were the New England schoolteachers, who 456had certainly never before removed their clothes in public. They dashed their long, lean bodies boldly into the water as though to say, “Russia, here we come!” ”

“ Juliet Barrett Rublee had been one of the pioneers, a member of the original Committee of One Hundred, and all the way through the years she has never wavered from my side. No more inspired idealist was ever initiated into a movement. The imagination of this picturesque, romantic wife of a conservative lawyer had been so fired that she dedicated to it her entire devotion, loyalty, partisanship. Others had rallied their own personal friends around the idea, but Juliet’s influence brought in her husband’s associates—the Cravaths, Morrows, Lamonts, Dodges, and Blisses. ”

“ Fourth of July, Sunday, we had a noon meeting on the Glasgow Green. Nearly two thousand shipyard workers in caps and baggy corduroys stood close together listening in utter, dead stillness without cough or whisper. That evening I spoke in a hall under Socialist auspices, Guy Aldred acting as chairman. One old-timer said he had been a party member for eleven years, attending Sunday night lectures regularly, but never before had he been able to induce his wife to come; tonight he could not keep her home. “Look!” he cried in amazement. “The women have crowded the men out of this hall. ”

“ Surely, she should be allowed to develop all her potentialities. Feminists were trying to free her from the new economic ideology but were doing nothing to free her from her biological subservience to man, which was the true cause of her enslavement.
Before gathering friends around me for that help which I must have in stirring women to sedition, before asking them to believe, I had to chart my own course. Should I bring the cause to the attention of the people by headlines and front pages? Should I follow my own compulsion regardless of extreme consequences? ”

“ My mother used to say a decent woman only had her name in the papers three times during her life—when she was born, when she married, and when she died. Although by nature I shrank from publicity, the kind of work I had undertaken did not allow me to shirk it—but I was frightened to death. Hoping that practice would give me greater confidence, I used to climb to the roof of the Lexington Avenue hotel where I was staying and recite, my voice going 193out over the house tops and echoing timidly among the chimney pots. ”

“ But since I could find no doctor I had to do without. Ethel, a registered nurse, had a readiness to share in helping the movement, though she did not belong to it in the same sense as I. Then, as long as I had to violate the law anyhow, I concluded I might as well violate it on a grand scale by including poverty as a reason for giving contraceptive information. I did not see why the hardships and worries of a working man’s wife might not be just as detrimental as any disease. ”

“ Some women were alone, some were in pairs, some with their neighbors, some with their married daughters. Some did not dare talk this over with their husbands, and some had been urged on by them. At seven in the evening they were still coming, and men also, occasionally bringing their timid, embarrassed wives, or once in a while by themselves to say they would stay home to take care of the children if their wives could come. A hundred women and forty men passed through the doors, but we could not begin to finish the line ”

“ To my horror he replied, “We will never give over the control of our numbers to the women themselves. What, let them control the future of the human race? With abortions it is in our hands; we make the decisions, and they must come to us.”
That was not the tone of this doctor alone but also that of most of his confrères.
Thinking that Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld might know about the formula, Havelock had given me a letter to him, and I presented it at the Institute of Sex Psychology, where abnormalities were being studied and treated. ”

“ The audience was laughing at Sir Vepa’s judicial sternness. I, on the other hand, was rather depressed. As we were leaving I said to him, “I wish you had let me reply to them.”
His expression held surprise: “I’ve been answering them and battling with these same people for twenty-five years. They only come to confuse. They are enemies of the cause and I give them no quarter!”
That settled the situation in Madras.
Since I was no more than an hour by motor from Adyar, the former home of Annie Besant, who had been such an influence in the movement, I made a pilgrimage there. ”

“ He talked of the sacredness of motherhood, the home, and the State of Georgia. “We don’t need birth control in Georgia. We’ve had to give up two Congressmen now because we don’t have enough people. If New York wants to wipe out her population, she can. We need ours.... I can take care of all the children God sent me. I believe God sent them to me because they have souls. Poodle dogs and jackasses don’t have souls. ”

“ I knew some who, at the age of sixty, curled theirs in baby ringlets; doubtless something within them wanted never 382to grow up. Women who had gone into the underground movement in Russia took the shears to theirs so that nothing should divert the attention to feminine appeal. I was not enough of a Feminist to sacrifice mine, but I had once come to the conclusion that the triumph of life would be to push it straight back from my forehead and tie it in a knot behind, because that was how people thought I looked. ”

“ Capable and cool-headed Anne had replied, “Very well, we’ll write this down and I’ll read it to the audience. ‘I, Captain Thomas Donohue, of the Twenty-sixth Precinct, at the order of Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, Secretary to Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, have ordered this meeting closed.’”
The listeners had sat petrified while she had read them this strange admission. No hissing or booing then. They had just sat. It was one thing to have the hall shut by a mistaken or misguided police captain; a very different thing to have it done by a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. ”

“ Beauty!” she cried sharply. The fear in her voice brought the dogs lunging downstairs with fangs bared and hackles bristling. They leaped at the backs of the uninvited guests.
Father came in a few hours later. The door was swinging wide, the snow was blowing in. Torn scraps of clothing, spots of blood were about, and mother was unconscious on the floor. He poured whiskey down her throat. “It was only good whiskey that brought you to,” he often said afterwards, recalling his alarm. He used the same remedy to pull her through the ensuing six weeks of pneumonia. ”

“ Amid scrambling and confusion coolies swarmed aboard for luggage. A delegation of about fifty welcomed us, including Edith How-Martyn, who had been sounding out popular and religious sentiment, and Dr. A. P. Pillay, editor of the magazine, Marriage Hygiene, the man most active in eugenics and birth control in India.
I had written to Gandhi and a reply from him greeted me at the boat, “Do by all means come whenever you can, and you shall stay 466with me, if you would not mind what must appear to you to be our extreme simplicity; we have no masters and no servants here.” ”

“ In the darkest days of Victorianism, this young physician had included the New Woman in his interpretation of Malthus. Both he and his brother Charles, also a physician, had been in love with Alice Vickery, who had chosen the latter and borne him a son, the present C.V.
Alice Vickery was as great in her day as Mary Wollstonecraft in hers. After a tremendous struggle, which included getting her degree in Dublin and her training in Paris, she had proved her right to enter the medical profession, and had become the first woman doctor in England. ”

“ Murphy swore that they were true—to Juliet’s wholehearted disgust. Her faith in human nature had been betrayed; she did not see why he preferred to keep his job rather than his self-respect. Magistrate Hatting seemed anxious to make everybody comfortable—Juliet, the Catholics, the police, and the public—and to convey the impression nobody was really to blame.
Since the wife of a prominent lawyer had become involved, people in high places in New York had an obligation to protect their own. Publicity had been great before ”