There’s Something About Margaret…

After having spent so much time reading Margaret Sanger’s letters, speeches, and other documents, one of the things I find most interesting is reading descriptions of her in the news.  We don’t have a lot of film or audio recordings, and even when we can see those, they seem stiff and formal. In the press, as well as in interviews we get a different sense of the way that Sanger carried herself and her cause. We know that there was something about her, something that people responded to in a way that was remarkable.

One thing that comes across clearly in many of the descriptions, was that Sanger was a one cause woman.  As the Los Angeles Times reported in 1936:

We read in history books about men and women with a cause. Up until last Tuesday we’ve never seen one individual without several causes all mixed up and confused.

Calling Sanger “a mere slip of a red-haired woman of unfathomable years,” (she was 57 years old), the Times described her as “every inch as gracious and cultured a lady as we’ve seen for months.”

Her name was Margaret Sanger and undoubtedly you all know what her cause is. To see her, to talk with her, and to understand her ardor and persistence in her cause is a real experience. Nothing but her cause interests her at all; she must go on-and when the history of our age is written, we believe there’ll be a big thick chapter about titian-haired Margaret.

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For more from the article quoted, see “Beau Peep Whispers,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 19, 1936;

Unerasing Women from History: the Global Wikipedia Write-In

Left to Right: Lucien March, F. A. E. Crew, C. C. Little, E. F. Zinn, H.P. Fairchild, C. Gini, Sir Bernard Mallet, J. S. Huxley, R. Pearl, A. M. Carr-Saunders, B. Dunlop, and J.W. Glover. From the Proceedings of the World Population Conference, ed. M. Sanger (1927).

Two days before the opening of the World Population Conference, held in Geneva on August 29 through September 3, 1927, Sir Bernard Mallet, the conference secretary, crossed off Margaret Sanger’s name off the printer’s proof of the  conference program.  He also crossed off the names of all the women workers, ignoring the months of effort that Sanger and her staff had put into the meeting. Sanger had worked for over a year, fundraising, organizing, drafting programs and locating participants, to bring together scientists from all over the globe to discuss the effects of overpopulation. Apparently Mallet feared that if European scientists  knew that the meeting was organized by women they might not come. Sanger felt let down by the scientists that she had worked with for over a year, but decided that getting the conference off was more important than getting credit for it. Her secretaries resigned in protest, but Sanger was able to convince all of them save suffragist Edith How-Martyn to return. How-Martyn wrote that she knew that Sanger’s tactic of ignoring the slight was right, and would result in Sanger being “even with the ‘distinguished scientists’ yet and send them back to their flies and mice having been taught how unwise it is to deal unjustly or to scorn a beloved woman.” (MS, Autobiography, 385)  Once the meeting was over, Sanger edited the conference proceedings. She organized many more international conferences, and never had to hide her participation again.

Few efforts to erase women from history are as blatant as this, more often they are errors of omission, where women’s deeds and lives are not featured. In the age of the Internet, most of us are confident that we have access to most of what we want to find. Wikipedia, often held up as an example of crowd-sourced knowledge building, has over four million entries in English alone, dwarfing traditional encyclopedias.  If your topic is not included there, it must not be relevant or important, right? But when we look at how well Wikipedia covers women’s issues what do we find? Not much, especially when you focus on the contributions of women around the world.  Studies have shown that the way that  Wikipedia vets its articles and the type of people who do most of the editing create a system that under-represents women, especially non-Western women. (See the Rewriting Wikipedia Project for details.)

To address this, the Postcolonial Digital Humanities group has called for a Global Women Wikipedia Write-In on April 26, 2013, 1-3pm EST.  As they note in their announcement:

Why “global women”? If you’ve ever tried doing a Wikipedia search for important women theorists around the world, you might be surprised to note how short the entries are, particularly on their work and their ideas (for example: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Vandana Shiva, and Sara Ahmed). Many important women of color, such as Oyeronke Oyewumi and Frieda Ekotto, lack entries or stubs in Wikipedia. Additionally, coverage of international events involving women is brief or nonexistent (for example: the 1929 Aba Women’s Riots in Nigeria; Domitila Barrios de Chúngara; and Angkatan Wanita Sedar or “Force of Awakened Women,” an important feminist group in Malaysian history).

Just a quick look at some of the nations portrayed in Volume 4 of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, shows a grim picture:

Sripati Chandrasekhar, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, Margaret Sanger and Abraham Stone (1952).

Looking at the history of international birth control, there is a lot of work that could be done. While the entry on Margaret Sanger is lengthy and detailed, it has next to nothing on her work for international birth control and planned parenthood.

• The entry on Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, the most influential 20th-century Indian activist for birth control and a president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, is a stub with barely any information.
• There is no entry for Avabai Wadia, another early leader of the family planning movement in India.
• Singapore’s Constance Goh Kok Kee, another early activist in the family planning movement has no entry.

There is very little coverage of pre-World War II birth control organization on a global scale.  Search for the “World Population Conference” and you are directed to the United Nations Population Fund, [note: it has since been edited!] not Sanger’s groundbreaking meeting. There are no entries for the seven International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences held in Paris (1900), Liege (1905), Hague (1910), Dresden (1911), London (1922), New York (1925) and Zurich (1930). Sanger organized the New York and Zurich conferences and published the proceedings. There was no entry for the Birth Control International Information Centre until we created one today (it is under review at this time). The BCIIC, which flourished from the late 1920s until World War II, and was organized by Sanger and others to build a global community movement.

Audience at the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood (Stockholm) shows a mix of men and women in attendance and on the dais.

It does not get much better after World War II. The entry for the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), founded in 1952 and operating for sixty-one years, is extremely short and superficial.   There are no entries for the series of International Conferences on Planned Parenthood held by the IPPF in Bombay (1952), Stockholm (1953), Tokyo (1955), New Delhi (1959), or the regional conferences [we addressed this on Friday]  Most of the entries on national family planning organizations that affiliate with IPPF are missing, and those that do appear are short and perfunctory.

Wikipedia is the go-to source for the younger generation, for students preparing term papers, for the average man or woman confirming a fact or trying to find out information.  The lack of coverage is disturbing and needs to be addressed. Enter the Global Women Wikipedia Write-In.

There are a number of ways you can participate, according to the Rewriting Wikipedia Project:

1. Add to a working list of Wikipedia entries that need editing or improvements. You can comment or edit the list directly.

2. Sign up for a Wikipedia account.

3. Add, Rewrite, and expand needed resources. Check out the Rewriting Wikipedia Project’s resources for writing Wikipedia entries that stick.)

4. Add images to feminist articles. (see the image use policy for Wikipedia)

5. Tweet what you do using the Twitter hashtag #GWWI.

We’ll be participating on Friday, April 26th from 1-3PM, and hopefully, can expand the coverage of one of the twentieth century’s most significant social movements. Join us!

Topic Modeling and the Sanger Papers

Tags

digital history, elizabeth drinker, margaret sanger, martha ballard, text mining, topic modeling

I recently attended the Women’s History in the Digital World conference, sponsored by Bryn Mawr College’s Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. The sessions were packed with great papers and projects, many of which started the wheels turning on different ways that we might use digital research tools to better understand Sanger and her ideas.

In the very first panel I attended, Bridget Baird of Connecticut College and Cameron Blevins of Stanford University, talked about topic modeling, the process of using a computer program to mine digital texts and build sets of words that frequently appear together. Their work compared the diaries of Martha Ballard and the Elizabeth Drinker. The women lived about a century apart and in very different conditions, so there was an expectation that their diaries would describe very different lives. The sample comparisons shown at the panel demonstrated both similarity in word usage and contrasts that reflected differences in social class, location, and time period.

A visualization of gardening terms by month in the Ballard diary.

What topic modeling can offer a historian is an objective snapshot of the content of the collection.  Rather than relying on our own readings of documents to combine them together into subject categories, we look instead to the words that appear together most frequently and then label those words in ways that make sense to us.  In the case of Martha Ballard, one cluster of words (birth deld safe morn receivd calld left cleverly pm labour fine reward arivd infant expected recd shee born patient) clearly related to her profession as a midwife. Others regarding gardening (see image above), fall into predictable seasonal patterns. Still other groupings of words are less easy to label, and some may not at first make any cohesive sense. Yet, we can study the frequencies with which certain groups of words occur.

We cannot rely only on the computer-driven groups to use in analyzing texts.  The next step is to look at the texts that contain repeating word patterns and conduct a close reading to see what we can learn about the topic. Plotting the topic over time enables us to locate trends in how important the topic was to the author, or when we compare them with other authors, we can investigate differences in the ways that two authors valued these topics or the different ways that they expressed themselves.

An example from the Ballard study is instructive, as Cameron Blevin discussed in his blog:

. . . topic modeling allows us a glimpse not only into Martha’s tangible world (such as weather or housework topics), but also into her abstract world. One topic in particular leaped out at me:

feel husband unwel warm feeble felt god great fatagud fatagued thro life time year dear rose famely bu good

The most descriptive label I could assign this topic would be EMOTION – a tricky and elusive concept for humans to analyze, much less computers. Yet MALLET did a largely impressive job in identifying when Ballard was discussing her emotional state. How does this topic appear over the course of the diary?

Like the housework topic, there is a broad increase over time. In this chart, the sharp changes are quite revealing. In particular, we see Martha more than double her use of EMOTION words between 1803 and 1804. What exactly was going on in her life at this time? Quite a bit. Her husband was imprisoned for debt and her son was indicted by a grand jury for fraud, causing a cascade effect on Martha’s own life – all of which Ulrich describes as “the family tumults of 1804-1805.” (285) Little wonder that Ballard increasingly invoked “God” or felt “fatagued” during this period.

Adopting topic modeling tools for the Sanger Papers’ Speeches and Articles project will be interesting as we have already spent a lot of time developing and affixing detailed subject terms to the texts in order to provide additional ways to search and display them. When you have over 600 speeches and articles, the vast majority of which discuss birth control, the trick is uncovering subtle differences between and among them. We create detailed index entries for each text in the edition, narrowing the focus in so that our readers can use the subjects to cut through the documents to find the best ones on a specific issue. Topic modeling can offer us some new groupings of documents that we might have overlooked, and it will give us the capacity to analyze Sanger’s rhetoric over time, looking for key changes.

An example might be the belief among women’s historians that Sanger abandoned her feminist rationales for birth control in the late 1910s and early 1920s as she sought support from experts in the fields of medicine, social work and eugenics. This comes from a qualitative reading of Sanger’s writings, not a strict quantitative one. If we can identify a cluster of words as “feminist,” we can then trace how frequently those words appeared in Sanger’s writings and whether the findings match our assumptions.

Will we find clusters of words we can describe with terms like “feminism,” “eugenics,” or “reproductive health”? What words will we find clumped with “abortion” or with “birth control”? Will we be able to trace these clusters over time to see how they change over the course of Sanger’s life? Interesting questions, and ones that we hope to be able to ask our digital edition.

Now just to find a programmer to work with!

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For more information on the work being done on Martha Ballard’s diary and topic modeling, see Cameron Blevins’ blog post.

Girls Night Out (1933 Style)

Tags

Congress, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry D. Hatfield, Senate, Woman's Press Club

On March 20, 1933, Margaret Sanger was one of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s guests of honor at the annual dinner and “stunt party” of the Woman’s National Press Club.  Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become First Lady only a few weeks earlier on March 4, had already broken with tradition by being the first First Lady to hold her own press conferences. Now, according to the Los Angeles Times, she “set a new precedent by accepting an invitation to see herself satirized by the press.”

Among the guests of honor were Ettie R. Garner, the wife of Vice President John Nance Garner, the wives of all Cabinet members (except Anna Wilmarth Thompson Ickes, the wife of Harold Ickes), Senator Hattie Caraway (Ark.), the first woman elected to the Senate, and Representatives Florence B. Kahn (Calif.), Edith Nourse Rogers (Mass.), Virginia Jenckes (Ind.), and Kathryn O’Loughlin McCarthy (Kan.).  Other influential women attending were Grace Abbott, the head of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, Elinor Fatman Morgenthau, the wife of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and, of course, Margaret Sanger.

Among the many skits described, one stands out, it being Women’s History Month, as it was described in the New York Times:

The Senate of the future–all women–was then presented by a few of the newspaper women regularly covering the Capitol, showing a brisk, business-like Senate solving a depression a hundred years hence. They solved unemployment by giving barbecues and Sunday School picnics, buying up the surplus food and feeding it to the hungry people, while the farmers bought things that had to be made in factories and everyone went back to work.

They raised money by raffling off the Commerce Building, ‘at 10 cents a share so nobody would have to pay too much for it.’ They stopped the Far-East war by giving a 1,400 piece jigsaw puzzle to the soldiers. They solved the liquor problem by putting alcoholic beverages in the ‘spinach category,’ forcing children to take whiskey, gin and champagne until they hate it.

Sanger and Senator Henry D. Hatfield, the sponsor of S.4436.

For Sanger, who was in the midst of lobbying Congress to remove birth control from the list of obscene materials that could not be mailed in the United States, the night was likely an entertaining diversion.  The idea of an all-woman Senate must have been tantalizing, as her most recent legislative bill, Senate 4436, had just been killed in the Judiciary Committee at the end of January.  She was undaunted and promised not to give up the fight, telling a New York Herald Tribune reporter:

Of course, I’m glad the bill has had the dignity of a report. . . . It’s the first time in sixty years that it has come before the full Judiciary Committee.  This is a step forward, but I think that under the circumstances, with the economic uncertainty of millions of families, we might have had less quibbling over things that are in the future and that no one knows about.  The present needs have been disregarded. If you only knew the work and struggle we have put in to get as far as we have. . . . I suppose we’ll have to grow old and totter to the grave to get that bill passed.

Sanger never did get her birth control bill passed, either in the House or the Senate. She won the right to mail contraceptives and contraceptive information through a court challenge, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937.

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For more on these events see: “Last-Ditch Fight In Birth Control Contest Nears,” New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 30, 1933, “Press Women Give Annual Frolic,” New York Times, Mar. 21, 1933, “First Lady Satirized by Press,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 21, 1933, and “Mrs. Roosevelt Will Attend as Honor Guest, Stunt Party Given by Woman’s Press Club,” Washington Post, Mar. 19, 1933.

Margaret Sanger and the Case of the Fingerprints

The police may have failed to secure Sanger’s prints in 1917, but she willingly gave them to palm reader Nellie Simmons Meier in 1933.

On March 6, 1917, Margaret Sanger was released from the Queens County Penitentiary after serving a thirty-day sentence for opening an illegal birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  Her release, set for eight in the morning, was delayed until 10:30. As the Washington Post reported  Sanger apologized for keeping a crowd of supporters waiting, “But you see, I was fighting another battle of principle. I was defeating an attempt to take my finger-prints.”

Sanger contended “It is time that the people of this country learn to discriminate between political prisoners who are jailed for a principle and the criminal cutthroat class.” She claimed that the warden had been attempting to persuade her to be fingerprinted since she had arrived, but that she had denied his requests and demanded to be treated as a political prisoner.  At eight o’clock of the morning of her release, she reported that he tried a different tack, sending two keepers named Murray and Foley to attempt to subdue her by force.  Sanger reported that the pair “struggled with me for nearly two hours, I think, to get my finger-prints.” Sanger contended that she resisted all efforts, promising that she would remain in prison for life rather than capitulate.

Sanger on her release, Mar. 6, 1917 (Planned Parenthood of New York City)

Sanger showed evidence of her struggle to reporters on scene, “wrists reddened as though they had been rubbed vigorously.”  She told the New York Times, “I was bruised and exhausted, though they tried to be as gentle as they could.” A New York Tribune reported noted caustically, “Nobody outside the Corrections Department knows what scars Keepers Murray and Foley are nursing.”

Police Commissioner, Burdette Lewis, provided a different version of the story, claiming that the night prior to her release, “Mrs. Sanger was brought to the office and an attempt was made to take her finger-prints, against her desires, without the use of force. They succeeded in getting ‘good enough’ finger-prints to serve for purposes of identification.” Sanger claimed that the keepers tried, but when she resisted, “they abandoned the attempt. I cautioned them that they had no right to lay hands on me.”

Sanger’s supporters swept her away to a breakfast, playing the Marseilleise and hailing her as a heroine for women’s rights. She used her ordeal to focus attention on the birth control cause, crowing:

I’ve served my time and what good has it done the State? Nothing has been changed. My principles haven’t. And the birth control movement is stronger than ever.

Did the Corrections Department get Margaret Sanger’s fingerprints or was she able to fend them off? Her lawyer, Jonah Goldstein, was told that morning that her release was delayed by her refusal to submit to finger-printing, which leads credence to Sanger’s version.  Are her prints, possibly smeared and useless, still held by the state? If I can find evidence one way or the other, I will post it in the comments.

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For news coverage of Margaret Sanger’s release see “Mrs. Sanger Free, Hailed as Heroine,” New York Tribune, Mar. 6, 1917, “Mrs. Sanger is Freed,” Washington Post, Mar. 6, 1917, and “Mrs. Sanger Flays Mrs. Davis’ Plans,” New York Times, Mar. 7, 1917.