Advances in Male Birth Control

Until very recently, birth control has been mainly been a woman’s prerogative and responsibility. This was in no small part due to the work of Margaret Sanger and her colleagues, who dedicated their live to making birth control available to women. While many couples approach family planning together, methods such as the pill, the IUD, or the diaphragm don’t require male participation to be effective. Condoms are a example of a popular birth control method that men are responsible for; another is the “pulling-out” method. Vasectomies have been popular since the 1970s as a permanent birth control method for men, especially among men who have already reached their desired number of children.

Groundbreaking research coming from India suggests that a new form of male birth control is on the horizon. Called the RISUG (which is an acronym for “Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance”) this method blocks the vas defern by injecting a small tube that also serves as a spermicide.  It is similar to a vasectomy in many ways, but is fully reversible.

This is a huge step in reproductive health, because if the RISUG is safe and effective, it will allow men and women to more fully share the responsibilities of family planning. Yet women have fought hard to gain control their fertility, and it is important to keep in mind that a male-based birth control method many undo some of the gains women like Margaret Sanger have made. An effective, long-term and reversible male contraception may point the way towards more progressive relationships where both men and women share the obligations and responsibilities of birth control. Yet women must remain vigilant to ensure that this new technology does not get used against them, which in the current political climate is an increasing threat. Insurance coverage will clearly have a large influence in how this new contraception influences the choices that couples make.

Margaret Sanger was thinking through these concerns nearly a hundred years ago, in her book “Women and the New Race”. But in 1920, the stakes were much greater, because birth control was completely illegal in the United States. She acknowledged that, “It is persistently urged however, that since sex expression is the act of two, the responsibility of controlling the results should not be placed on women alone” but argued that given the contemporary social climate, this would not be possible, and insisted that women take full control over their bodies:

“In an ideal society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the man as well as the woman. The hard, inescapable fact which encounter today is that man has not only refused any such responsibility, but has individually and collectively sought to prevent women from obtaining knowledge by which she could assume this responsibility. She is still in the position of a dependent today because her mate has refused to consider her as an individual apart from his needs.”

What do you think? Clearly our society and the technology we use have come a long way since Margaret wrote these words. Are we completely beyond these concerns? Or should we still be heeding her warnings?

 

Why The Woman Rebel?

Because I believe that deep down in woman’s nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt.

Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.

Because I believe that woman’s freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against these things which enslave her.

Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously.

Because I believe she must consciously disturb and destroy and be fearless in its accomplishment.

Because I believe in freedom, created through individual action.

Because I believe in the offspring of the immigrant, the great majority of whom make up the unorganized working class to-day.

Because I believe that this immigrant with a vision, an ideal of a new world where liberty, freedom, kindness, plenty hold sway, who had courage to leave the certain old for the uncertain new to face a strange new people, new habits, a strange language, for this vision, this ideal, certainly has brought to this country a wholesome spirit of unrest which this generation of Americans has lost through a few generations of prosperity and respectability.

Because I believe that on the courage, vision and idealism of the immigrant and the offspring does the industrial revolution depend.

Because I believe that through the efforts of the industrial revolution will woman’s freedom emerge.

Because I believe that not until wage slavery is abolished can either woman’s or man’s freedom be fully attained.

Because I have six months’ time to devote to arousing this slumbered spirit in the working woman, and if within this time I shall have succeeded in arousing my own laggard self I shall have succeeded sufficiently to continue this paper until all the slumbered spirits have awakened to its assistance or its destruction.

- Margaret Sanger, “Why The Woman Rebel?,” Mar 1914.

 

Japan: Sanger’s Run-In with the Ambassador

It can be helpful to count the owners of the New York Times among your personal friends. Margaret Sanger did! Thanks to her friendship with Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, daughter and wife of New York Times publishers, Sanger’s gripes about her indignation at the hands of a rude diplomat nearly became international news!

    In late 1955, Sanger was visiting Japan for the 5th International Conference of Planned Parenthood, and was the official guest of Senator Shidzue Ishimoto Kato, one of the first women elected to the Japanese Diet.  The highlight of the conference was to be a meeting between Sanger and the Emperor of Japan. Protocol required that the American Ambassador to Japan, John M. Allison, facilitate the meeting.  Mrs. Sulzberger, in a memo to her husband Arthur, recounted a conversation she had with Sanger, saying that “Sanger made several calls to arrange for an appointment and each time was told that the Ambassador was too busy to see her.”

Infuriated, Senator Kato made the appointment herself, and when the two birth control advocates went to the Embassy, “the Ambassador received them in a very rude and ill-tempered way and said he couldn’t be bothered getting all dressed up just to present her to the Emperor, and that the wife of every Congressman who came to Japan was demanding this.”  Mrs. Sulzberger explained that, “naturally, Mrs. Sanger was very embarrassed and the Japanese Senator quite furious.”

Nevertheless, Sanger felt like she got the best of the Ambassador when, a few days later, she was invited to the Emperor’s Garden Party and met  the Emperor and Empress right away. The Imperial Family expressed their interest in her work, and best of all, “the American Ambassador was there and Mrs. Sanger said he looked thoroughly uncomfortable and she hoped he was properly embarrassed.”

Mr. Sulzberger followed up on the memo from his wife by forwarding it to the New York Times correspondent based in Japan, asking his opinion of the matter. The correspondent pointed out
while this unpleasant encounter may have resulted from the meeting of two very strong personalities, there were also delicate political issues at play: “Mr. Allison sought to dodge presenting Mrs. Sanger to the Emperor because, by doing so, he would appear in Japanese eyes as giving official American endorsement to the cause for which Mrs. Sanger stands — namely, birth control.”

In the end, it seems the Sulzbergers decided not to publish anything about Sanger’s encounter with Ambassador Allison. But the incident suggests how deeply overlapping the personal and the political were in the life of this pioneering individual!

[The letters mentioned in this post are from the Kitty Marion Papers, New York Public Library.]

 

Sanger and Mike Wallace

To commemorate the death last week of hard-hitting journalist Mike Wallace, I would like to recall his controversial 1957 interview with a frail 78-year old Margaret Sanger, as described in the Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, # 38, Winter 2004/5, in an article by our associate editor, Peter C. Engelman. The 39 year-old Wallace invited Sanger to appear on his ABC program, Mike Wallace Interview on June 3, 1957, but she was reluctant to be interviewed because she had heard “things” about the program. She finally agreed to appear, when Wallace cancelled the program, bowing to the demand of his sponsor, Philip Morris, which was being pressured by the Catholic Church. Angered by these threats and Wallace’s response, Sanger reacted by tentatively scheduling an interview with a Wallace’s old show Night Beat. Wallace responded by quickly signing Sanger to a contract for the interview.

“Good evening,” Wallace began his live program at 10pm on Saturday night, September 21, 1957, opposite the formidable Western program,Gunsmoke, “what you’re about to witness is an unrehearsed, uncensored interview on the issue of Birth Control. It will be a free discussion of an adult topic, the topic that we feel merits public examination. My name is Mike Wallace, the cigarette is Philip Morris.” On a bare, darkened set with cigarette smoke curling, sat Wallace under one spotlight, as he introduced Margaret Sanger, sitting opposite under another spotlight, as as a crusader who opened the first birth control clinic, went to jail eight times, suffered long separations from her children, a break-up of her first marriage, and “constant harrowing social abuse” for her allegiance to the cause of birth control.

Sanger looked all of her 78 years, the poor lighting and smoky haze accentuating her withered appearance. Weakened by heart problems over the past decade and a host of other ailments, Sanger also seemed uncomfortable, fidgety, unsure where to look at times. But the interview started off well. She handled Wallace’s first question, about the origins of her crusade, with relative ease. “I saw women,,” she told him, “who asked to have some means whereby they wouldn’t have to have another pregnancy too early, after the last child, the last abortion, which many of them had. Certainly there are numerous things [...] that really made you feel that you had to do something.” She cited her mother’s premature death after bearing eleven children as a motivating force.

Wallace, sounding at times more like an interrogator than an interviewer, suggested that maybe Sanger was “driven emotionally toward the birth control movement because of antagonism toward the church” stemming from her troubled upbringing with a Catholic mother and atheist father.

She responded: “No I don’t think I had anything of the kind in mind–I was–I was what I would call a born humanitarian. I don’t like to see people suffer, I don’t like to see cruelty even to this day and in nursing you see a great deal of cruelty and unnecessary suffering. At that time, there was no opposition as far as the church was concerned, any church. It was mainly the law, Federal Laws and State Laws, that one had to–to think of. The church was not in my mind at all.”

On the issue of population control, however, Sanger seemed to have trouble hearing Wallace’s questions and began stumbling over her words, beginning a thought but not having a clear sense of where she was taking it. When Wallace turned again to the Catholic Church, Sanger regained some of her old vigor. Wallace asked her to comment on the official position of the Catholic Church on birth control-–that any contraception is used “unethically and unnaturally” since “the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children.”

SANGER: “It’s very wrong, it’s not normal-–it’s-–it has a wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the normal relationships between men and women.”

WALLACE: “Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. You don’t disagree with that?”

SANGER: “I disagree with that a hundred percent.”

When Wallace asked Sanger what she thought the Church’s motive was in forbidding birth control, Sanger refused to give an answer.

WALLACE: “Have you heard it said, that the reason that the Church is against birth control is because they want more Catholics?”

SANGER: “I’ve read it.”

WALLACE: “Do you believe it?”

SANGER: “Yes. If you read their papers at Boston, that that’s what had happened in Boston in Massachusetts. They had simply outbred the Protestants and they–they-–in Boston in Massachusetts they had control. I read that in their own papers.”

The interview then began to disintegrate as Sanger grew flustered over Wallace’s successful reduction of the topic to a personal debate between Sanger and the Church. She now looked for traps and unfounded accusations, and sounded defensive and unsure of herself. She had prepared some index cards with possible answers to some of his questions, but never referred to them.

Wallace presented the argument that birth control encouraged promiscuity, quoting from a magazine article that claimed it “tends to weaken the moral fibre of the community. Immunity from parenthood encourages promiscuity, particularly when unmarried persons can so easily avail themselves of the devices. Do you doubt that?”

SANGER: “I doubt it.”

When Wallace asked her what her feeling on the issue was, Sanger replied, “My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases is the very finest relationship; it has nothing to do with bearing a child, it’s secondary many, many times and we know that–you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they’re not having babies every year. Yes, I think that’s a celibate attitude [...] It’s an unnatural attitude to take–how do they know? I mean after all, they’re celibates. They don’t love, they don’t know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.”

Wallace then returned to Sanger’s views on the Catholic church, and she again became frustrated and flustered. He then asked her about her own views of divinity and sin.

SANGER: “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world–-that have disease from their parents that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all such a thing just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin–that people can–can commit.”

But when Wallace asked her if she believed infidelity was a sin, Sanger, even more flustered, answered, “Well, I’m not going to specify what I think is a sin. I stated what I think is the worst sin.”

Wallace then asked Sanger about ways to reduce the divorce rate. When she began to discuss marriage counseling services at birth control clinics, he interrupted Her.

WALLACE: “May I–-may I ask you this could it be that women in the United States have become too independent–that they followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for a career?” He was referring to the independent life she maintained during her second marriage to J. Noah Slee.

Sanger claimed she had enjoyed a happy marriage, though she did not discuss birth control as a tool for balancing family life and career. When Wallace implied , that in her own life she chose work over family, Sanger was shocked and could only muster a grandmotherly smile as she showed the camera snapshots of her grandchildren. She then obediently plugged the sponsor with an awkward endorsement of Phillip Morris cigarette. smoking.

In the days and weeks after the interview, Sanger’s friends and supporters uniformly attacked Wallace and his interview technique, but Sanger knew she had missed a rare opportunity to promote birth control to a wide audience. She wrote her niece, “I had a good time at those moments of his confusion! He was, of course, speaking for the R. C.’s as instructed. It was sad I did not get in anything about world wide Birth Control work.” To a friend, she noted that though Wallace “got a few replies that knocked him pale in the face. I had a good time, even though the time was wasted as far as Birth Control was concerned. The questions he asked were old stuff to me. I’d almost forgotten how I used to answer them.” (MS to Olive Byrne Richard and to Ellen Watumull, Oct. 9, 1957 Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collections (MSM), Reel 52, frames 540, 950.)

In December 1957, after Wallace sent Sanger an engraved cigarette box as a Christmas gift, she replied, “It is certainly a good reminder of a most amusing evening. . . . I have had so many letters, phone calls, and personal talks about the Mike Wallace interview. Some of my admirers hope to get a chance to ‘kill’ you one day, because you caused them to spend their valuable time listening to ‘crazy’ questions about the Roman Catholic religion and not a word about the world-wide spread of birth control practice and education. I have a letter from a listener who writes she is convinced that ‘Mike Wallace is a Roman Catholic.’ So it goes.” (MS to Wallace, Dec. 19, 1957 [MSM S53:121].)

If Sanger had been younger and in better health, she would no doubt have been less flustered by Wallace’s questions, and not thrown off by his interview style. But given her age and condition, perhaps this was an early example of so-called “gothcha” journalism. More likely it was Mike Wallace being Mike Wallace. When asked about the interview in 2004, Wallace called Sanger a “genuine pioneer,” and did not recall her being flustered or nervous, but rather “sure of her ground.” It is perhaps more a testimony to Sanger’s own history and reputation that he thought her tough enough to take on!

 

Every Day is International Women’s Day

Sanger arriving in Japan in 1955.

Here at the Sanger Papers, every day is International Women’s Day! We are deep into our research on Sanger’s many international activities for ‘Round the World for Birth Control, 1920-1966, the fourth and final volume of The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger. Here’s just an overview of some of her international accomplishments.

Almost from the start, Sanger perceived birth control as a global issue that affected all women. Her first trip abroad for birth control was in 1914, when she fled prosecution for publishing The Woman Rebel and Family Limitation. During her almost year-long stay, she learned about the Dutch diaphragm and visited the birth control clinics that provided them to women. She then proceeded to made a number of trips for birth control, including a ground-breaking trip to Japan in 1922, a 1934 tour of the Soviet Union, and India in 1935-36.

Sanger helped form the Birth Control International Information Centre with her British colleague Edith How-Martyn, who did much of the leg work for Sanger’sin the late 1920s and 1930s. She organized the first World Population Conference in Geneva in 1927, international birth control conferences in New York in 1925 and in Zurich in 1930, where she met leading birth control figures from around the world.  After World War II, she took a leading role in the reestablishment of the international planned parenthood movement.

Sanger and Nehru at the 1959 conference.

Sanger’s best known international accomplishment is the International Planned Parenthood Federation was officially formed in 1952, which is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary later this year. At the founding meeting in Bombay (Mumbai), Sanger was named its first president, serving until 1959. Already 73 years old when she took on the IPPF, Sanger was, as German associate Lotte Fink recalled, “the outstanding figure from abroad at the Conference. She still can keep large audiences spellbound. Her energy while being in the chair or addressing the Indian people over the radio or discussing any point or organizational importance in incredible.” Her last major public appearance was at the 1959 International Conference on Planned Parenthood, in New Delhi. Sanger had not been expected to attend because of illness, but determined to be present. Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, the president of the Family Planning Association of India recalled the excitement of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru when she told him that Sanger had indeed arrived. “On hearing my news, he ran up the steps like a schoolboy, put his arms around Margaret in greeting, and gently led her into the hall where the great gathering was waiting for him. It was a most touching and unforgettable scene: the Prime Minister ignoring all formality, Mrs. Sanger glowing with pride, and the huge audience standing up, cheering and applauding.”

For Margaret Sanger, every day was International Women’s Day. From the 1920s through the 1950s she balanced the responsibilities of leading the American movement while spurring the organization of birth control and family planning leagues around the world. Her vision, that every women should be able to own and control her body, was one that extended far beyond the borders of the United States.