The “icon” of Gorton’s title is Margaret Sanger, the tarnished heroine of the birth control battle, whose failings and blind spots have become notorious. The lesser known “idealist” is her rival and critic Mary Ware Dennett, seven years older, whose story opens up questions of bodily autonomy and human rights that reach beyond Sanger’s single-minded fight. Interweaving the account of their beliefs and battles, Gorton tracks seismic shifts in American attitudes to sex, feminism, and family life across a 20-year span between, roughly, Sanger’s first clinic shutdown in 1916 and her victory in 1936 in the (inimitably named) case of United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries.
Fired up by her experience of poverty, Sanger came to birth control, at first, as an issue of social justice. For Dennett, who had endured three agonizing births and the loss of one baby, before a luridly reported divorce, it was a feminist problem, part of the larger question of how women could take control of their bodies and lives. By the early 1910s, both women were young mothers active in New York radical circles. Dennett was working for the national suffrage campaign, although increasingly disillusioned by its conservative attitudes, and she found a more congenial, outspoken version of feminism in Heterodoxy, a club of prominent women that included artists, lawyers, social workers, and journalists. Sanger’s interests, meanwhile, were sharpening to a point. Before long, she would break ranks with fellow feminists who did not place what she termed “birth control” at the center of their activism.
In Gorton’s elegant summation, Dennett and Sanger were born “at the beginning of a great silencing.” In the post–Civil War era, evangelical reformers took aim at society’s moral corruption, while demonstrably corrupt political leaders seized on the specter of “vice” to distract from their own self-dealing. This culminated in the Comstock Act, which went into effect in 1873, when Mary was one year old, and effectively banned from circulation all information that anti-vice crusader and postal inspector Anthony Comstock judged pornographic. He knew it when he saw it, and he saw it everywhere.
A frank discussion of women’s health was long overdue, but it was derailed by Comstock into a moral and demographic panic. The birth rate in the United States had halved over the course of the nineteenth century, for multiple reasons, ranging from a campaign among women’s rights activists for “voluntary motherhood” based on abstinence, to social changes that popularized smaller families. But the reduction was most noticeable among white middle- and upper-class families, sparking a widespread obsession with “race suicide.” Through their doctors, and with the utmost discretion, wealthy women could access newer barrier methods like cervical caps and diaphragms. Condoms were expensive and heavily stigmatized for their association with prostitution, and, like withdrawal—another popular and extremely unreliable method of preventing conception—they depended on men’s foresight and restraint. Women who wanted to take matters into their own hands relied on douching or ingesting potions sold under euphemistic names like “Uterine Tonic.” Although Comstock had chilled the formerly robust advertising market for these concoctions, they were still in circulation, and household manuals carried recipes to mix them at home.
Preventing or terminating a pregnancy depended on a basic knowledge of biology, yet there was extraordinary censorship of and widespread ignorance about this. As Sanger found her way to the birth control fight in the early 1910s, the radicals around her framed it as a free speech issue, deeply connected to social class: It was, as Emma Goldman said, a “working woman’s question.” Of course, the issue was not just speech, but sex, and women’s right to it. Gorton amply illustrates how radical this idea was at a time when many people did not believe women experienced sexual pleasure or desire, and the judge could declare at one of Sanger’s trials that women had “no right to copulate with a feeling of security.” Against this puritanism, in the words of wealthy downtown feminist Mabel Dodge, Margaret Sanger was “an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh.”
In late 1914, Sanger was arrested under the Comstock Act, and, facing the possibility of a 40-year sentence, she fled the country. Effectively separated from her husband by this time, she embraced “free love” among a coterie of English radicals. In exile in London, she befriended the influential British birth control advocate Marie Stopes, whose sexually frank 1918 book, Married Love, was a sensation. Spurring on her American rival, Stopes published prolifically and opened a network of clinics. Yet even more fully, she was an unabashed supporter of eugenics, the multitentacled ideology that shadows any discussion of early-twentieth-century birth control activism.
In the United States during the 1910s, eugenics organizations increasingly dominated the national conversation, thanks in part to the deep pockets of industrialists like the Carnegies and Rockefellers, who keenly promoted research into “improving” the race. While Sanger was still in exile, Mary Ware Dennett and others founded the National Birth Control League, which prioritized economic and eugenic arguments for contraception. When Sanger returned in late 1915 to face her trial, the league refused to support her. For the time being, she was too personally controversial to find a welcome in the eugenics movement. Her rage was deepened by anguish at the death of her five-year-old daughter, Peggy, from pneumonia, after many months of separation.
Sanger was imprisoned for 30 days, serving a quieter sentence than her sister Ethel Byrne, who assisted her in the clinic and went on a hunger strike during her jail term, becoming the first prisoner in the United States to be force-fed. By contrast, Sanger decided it was time to clean up her image. On her release, she abandoned her more radical, feminist claims for birth control and instead sought the support of doctors and leading figures in the eugenics movement; America’s entry into World War I and the accompanying nationwide crackdown on left-wing causes and groups no doubt influenced her decision. Meanwhile, the rampant wartime rise in sexually transmitted infections prompted the government to push an abstinence-heavy sexual health agenda among teenagers—not in itself helpful to the cause, perhaps, but another way in which formerly taboo issues were nudging into the cultural mainstream.
After the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920, Dennett hoped the women’s vote might sway senators in Washington to support birth control. Under the auspices of her new Voluntary Parenthood League, she spent several years slogging away to pass a bill that would strike the word “contraception” from the list of material classified as obscene under the Comstock Act. She believed that this “clean repeal” offered the simplest solution to the Gordian knot of morality, bias, and fear around birth control, but she struggled to find senators willing to support it. At the same time, she continued her own small-scale assault on Comstock, by distributing a sex-education pamphlet she had written for her teenage sons and published in 1918. Frank, informative, and notably insistent on the pleasure of sex for both men and women, the pamphlet would eventually land her in very public legal trouble.
She was not alone. The buoyant economy of the roaring twenties swept an extremist moral puritanism into power, embodied in Prohibition, major immigration restriction bills, and a vociferous embrace among white voters and politicians of the darkest eugenics policies. In the hope of defeating her most entrenched foe, the Catholic Church (whom she mocked in the Birth Control Review as a “dictatorship of celibates”), Sanger embraced eugenics, even as the movement grew increasingly (to use a term of art) weird. The head of the movement in the early twentieth century was obsessed with what he called protoplasm, a kind of life force, of which the “Nordic” strain was the best. In 1926, when Sanger infamously gave a lecture to the women’s auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey, she recalled it as one of her “weirdest experiences” in a prolific and largely indiscriminate lecturing career.
This became clearer still in the Depression, when eugenicists fanned the flames of panic over the specter of “relief babies”—children supposedly conceived to capitalize on welfare handouts. Contraceptives suddenly didn’t seem controlling enough. Men like Paul Popenoe, the founder of marriage counseling in the United States and a raving eugenic loon, looked overseas at Hitler’s sterilization programs and worried that the United States was being left behind. Sanger, meanwhile, flirted in her speeches with the idea of segregating social undesirables and refusing immigration to “idiots” and “morons.” In 1933, the American Eugenics Society endorsed birth control as Sanger had arrived at it: under the authority of doctors, who knew what was best for individuals and for society.
Her lawyer, Morris Ernst of the ACLU, went on to defend Marie Stopes and James Joyce against the overreach of Comstock. Then, in 1936, he and Sanger mounted a successful defense of her efforts to import a new diaphragm design from Japan. The court ruling in Sanger’s favor followed the letter of a federal amendment she had attempted to pass some years earlier, by giving doctors—and doctors alone—the freedom to dispense contraception.
Sanger’s embrace of a paternalistic medical establishment had broad ramifications for women seeking birth control and abortion, which linger to this day. For all her missteps, Mary Ware Dennett kept her focus on women. Her approach to activism—whether the cause was suffrage, pacifism, sex education, Twilight Sleep, or birth control—was often stubborn and self-defeating, but it recognized an essential interconnectedness in women’s lives, between their intimate experiences and their public actions. She hailed contraception as one of the inventions that make the difference “between feeding and dining,” between endurance and enjoyment, between surviving and living. Our arguments for contraception and abortion today, for women’s free choice over their own bodies, could do worse than pick up that refrain again.
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