Sanger (fortification)

“ Most of my Spanish friends hoped I would like a bullfight, although Portet, who thought it barbaric, told me it would probably shock me; every foreigner who saw one simply shut his eyes in horror when some poor old skeleton horse was so gored that its intestines 161fell out and then were pushed back for its re-entry into the arena. ”

“ During my absence in the United States, Sir Bernard had been collecting his European friends. Not only was Italy intent on increasing her population, but the reactionary element of France also had formed a society to combat birth control. We had invited the Italians, Guglielmo Ferrero and Gaetano Salvemini, but Sir Bernard had been induced to accept as a substitute Corrado Gini, who, dark, swarthy, highly egotistical, speaking English painfully, was the perfect mirror of Mussolini’s sentiments, and turned out to be a most tiresome speaker and a general nuisance. ”

“ Sanger disposed of his circus in October 1905, and retired to Park Farm, East End Road, Finchley. He published his autobiography, 'Seventy Years a Showman,' in 1910. He was shot dead at Park Farm by one of his employees, to whom he had shown much kindness, on 28 Nov. 1911. The murderer committed suicide. Sanger was buried with municipal honours by the side of his wife at Margate. ”

“ The twelfth, a boy, was at fifteen years of age implicated in a murder and sent to the industrial school, but escaped from there on a bicycle which he had stolen; at eighteen, he was shot and killed by a woman. The thirteenth child, feeble-minded, is the girl of the study. The fourteenth, a boy was considered by police to be the best member of the family ”

“ Notwithstanding the fact that at one time in Germany, the punishment was that of drowning in a sack containing a serpent, a cat and a dog—in order that the utmost agony might be inflicted—one sovereign alone condemned 20,000 women to death for infanticide, without noticeably reducing the practice. ”

“ The chief of the former department was a club-footed little gentleman, with an abnormal head and a snaky look in his eyes, named Major E. L. Sanger. On our arrival in Elmira, another surgeon, remarkable chiefly for his unaffected simplicity and virgin ignorance of everything appertaining to medicine, played doctor there. But as the prisoners increased in numbers, a more formal and formidable staff was organized, with Sanger at the head.
Sanger was simply a brute, as we found when we learned the whole truth about him from his own people. ”

“ Buckner, you do not expect this young man to be interested in that. He is too young to know about birth control. The old, bald-headed ones are the only ones that are interested in it.”
And late in the afternoon he said, “I am too busy and have too much work to do, so we won’t have any summing up.”
At the concluding session Desk Lieutenant Courtney disclaimed all liability, saying the only order given to Captain Donohue was to take a number of policemen to the meeting and see that the law was not violated; thereafter the Captain had acted on his own responsibility. ”

“ The capital had already been moved to Bordeaux and suspicion and hysteria were in the air. When I went within easy driving distance of Paris for lunch or dinner, I could see the barbed-wire entanglements and gaps where the trees had been taken down for better visibility.
I renewed what contacts I could. But everybody was too busy now with the War to think of such a subject as family limitation, which to the French had never been anything to get excited about because they were too used to it. ”

“ That’s what the laundry workers of France did, and brought the employers to their knees.”
The audience was being held spellbound by this instruction in the fine art of sabotage when some of Gompers’ strong-arm men appeared, and the battle was on. They tramped up on the stage, moved furniture and chairs about, made so much noise Elizabeth’s voice could not be heard, and finally ejected some of her sympathizers. ”

“ Now I learned that the evening after the raid Magistrate McAdoo had been dining with Dr. Karl Reiland, my husband’s pastor. Dr. Reiland, much upset, had remarked upon its outrageousness. Justice McAdoo, aghast and horrified to find that, without reading it, he had signed this warrant, just one of many laid on his desk, had called up the police station without delay, saying that all the twenty-four histories must be put in his safe and kept there until he arrived in the morning. He had perceived instantly that those doctors’ records were going to be a serious embarrassment. ”

“ One bright bugle sounded when 256I learned that the section on venereal disease in What Every Girl Should Know, which had once been banned in the New York Call and for which Fania had been fined, was now, officially but without credit, reprinted and distributed among the soldiers going into cantonments and abroad. At home all felt there was little to do but wait until people came back to their senses; the Review was the only forward step I could take at the time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ A woman wrought to the pitch of killing herself was sick—a community responsibility. She, most of all, required concentrated attention and devotion, and I could not let any such go out of the clinic until her mood had been altered. Building up hope for the future seemed the best deterrent. “Your husband and your children need you. One more won’t make so much difference.” I had to make each promise to go ahead and have this baby and myself promise in return, “You won’t ever have to again. ”

“ Reynal’s condition grew steadily worse. One morning at daybreak when the patient was almost in a coma Dr. Schmid sent for the priest to administer extreme unction, and said to me, “You’d better get Miss Fitzgerald and tell her there’s very little hope.”
She knelt by his bed, “Gene,” she called to him, “Gene, we’re going to be married—right now.”
Reynal was as near death as a man could be, but her voice reached into his subconscious and summoned him back. Another nurse and I, 55hastily called upon to act as bridesmaids, stood in starched and rustling white beside the bed. ”

“ Elizabeth stood on the platform, dramatically beautiful with her black hair and deep blue eyes, her cream-white complexion set off 80by the flaming scarf she always wore about her throat. Nothing if not outspoken, she started by saying it was folly for the strikers to give up their bread and butter by walking out. They could achieve their ends more quickly if they threw hypothetical sabots into the machinery. “If a shirt comes in from a man who wears size fifteen, send him back an eighteen. ”

“ Olive, in her commonly dark mood, was encouraged more by the work being done for women in birth control than by anything else. She herself, who had had but one child, which had died, realized its significance. The last time I saw her she put both arms around me and said, “We may never meet again, but your endeavor is the bright star shining through the black clouds of war.”
She was not able to go back to South Africa until the War was over. One morning, not long afterwards, she was found dead in her bed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I reminded her. “A hunger strike is not necessary, and if you once start you’ll have to keep it up.” She insisted that she was ready to die if need be; she had made her will and arranged for the disposition of her two children—the hunger strike was to go on. The writ was refused and she was remanded to the Workhouse. On her way there she told the women with whom she shared the patrol wagon the salient facts of birth control.
When Commissioner of Correction Burdette G. Lewis was asked to comment on Ethel’s decision he scoffed. “Others have threatened hunger strikes. It means nothing.” ”

“ I was so continually on the brink of prison because of my general activities that it seemed unjustifiable to court extra trouble. Information on methods I gave only when privately requested for it. Margaret Sanger's difficulties with the postal authorities over her publication of The Woman Rebel, and the arrest of William Sanger for giving his wife's pamphlet on methods of birth-control to a Comstock agent, made me aware that the time had come when I must either stop lecturing on the subject or do it practical justice. ”

“ During the War it was astonishing how many men, in and out of uniform, mistook Birth Control for British Control. “We don’t want no British Control here!” they exclaimed. Kitty would correct them, “Birth Control,” and someone would call, “Oh, that’s worse!”
Who bought the Review? This question was invariably asked, and the answer was—radicals, the curious, girls about to be married, mothers, fathers, social workers, ministers, physicians, reformers, revolutionaries, foreigners. ”

“ Warden Joseph McCann, who met me, was a jovial young Irishman who had risen from the police ranks. “Have you had any lunch?” he asked. The cause of his solicitude emerged when he inquired anxiously whether I intended to go on a hunger strike. Remembering my morning cup of coffee, I replied, “Not unless your food is too bad.” He introduced Mrs. Sullivan, the motherly matron.
I answered the usual interrogatory about where I was born, how old I was, etc., etc. When the clerk came to “What religion?” I replied, “Humanity.” ”

“ The women taken prisoners in war are frequently married into the tribe that captured them, but never to the captors, who stand in the relation of brothers to them, and by whom they are protected from insult. A warrior who has taken a female prisoner usually makes an exchange with another who has had the same fortune, each being thus accommodated without infringing upon custom. If a man has seized more than he can dispose of in that way, he generally gives them to any man who will accept them. ”

“ In the Königstadt there is a drinking saloon where, besides the wife of the host, there are two young girls who exceed all compeers in shamelessness and depravity. The elder betrays secondary syphilis in her voice; the younger has such noble features, is of such beauty, and is altogether of such prepossessing appearance, that the infamy of her conduct is incredible. In the evening these girls and the host are generally drunk. At one or two in the morning the place is a perfect hell, the whole company, guests, host, and girls, being mad with liquor. ”

“ I really wanted this, so that birth control would be defined once and for all as either obscene or not obscene.
Mr. Untermyer took down one of his ponderous books and read over the section in question. Again he said, “The evidence is that you have violated the law. We don’t separate the spirit from the letter. It is all there. It seems to me that pleading guilty would let you out of your troubles without loss of dignity. You should consider yourself fortunate at the suggested outcome. You can gain nothing by trial. ”

“ 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. ”