Sanger’s Conversations with a Hen: A Highly Modern Drama

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birth control, drama, feminism, fiction, hen, Lexington Herald, margaret sanger, play, sanger

Well, really the title and description go more like this: An Egg Rebuked Her: A Highly Modern Drama on a Gripping Subject From the Intense Pen of Helen Bullitt Lowry.  And, a message from all of us here at the Project, we sincerely thank Helen Bullitt Lowry for the smiles you have given us from reading this play.

“Pullet 707?”

It is not often that we come upon a piece of fiction related to Sanger at all and all the more rare when it is this weird.   We spend our time sifting through hundreds of Sanger’s speeches and articles.  But on March 18, 1917, the Lexington Herald published a short, 3 scene play by Lowry depicting none other than Margaret Sanger on her quest to inform women that their lives are meant for more than simply propagation.  In this case, however, the women Sanger is trying to reach are represented by a single hen, Pullet 707.  Sanger meets Pullet 707, specifically a White Leghorn pullet, on the poultry division of Experiment Station Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, where she has stopped to speak.  Sanger is distressed, for Pullet 707 refuses to break her egg-laying streak, one egg per day for 68 days, for the birth control Cause.  Although she seems to understand Sanger’s Cause, Pullet 707 is still, by the end of the play, unwilling to upset her natural flow and pride of her keepers’ affection for the sake of the Cause.

Sanger appears here as a straight woman, distressed by the hen’s refusal to practice birth control:

But the Cause! The Cause! Think of the women of the slums! Consider the life of the woman with six children. Don’t you realize that she is nothing but a slave? And hens like you are fastening the shackles all the tighter with your criminal laying. Sixty-eight eggs without stopping for a single day! And to think I have suffered a hunger strike all in vain! Won’t you have one of my pamphlets and read what is your duty to down-trodden women?

While the play itself is lighthearted, I am positive that Sanger would not have appreciated its message.  In essence, Lowry seems to be generalizing women as hens, whose only purpose is to lay eggs and be eaten.  Lowry asserts that the Cause as being lost, believing instead that the every-day woman would think it unnatural to control when they have children and how many they have.  She also views the every-day man, portrayed by the two Professors who supervise the hens’ egg laying, as totally in charge of the “hens” they care for.  Sanger is truly brokenhearted at the end of the last scene when Pullet 707 continues her egg-laying streak rather than commit to Sanger’s Cause.

Mrs. S.-“With your record which was brought all the way to Lexington to protest, you could be a great influence on all pullets

Pullet 707.- “Oh. Don’t you think that woman’s place is in the home? I do.

Mrs. S.- “Let me speak to you as a sister. Let us, as sisters, go forth and scatter our propaganda abroad, daring prison and hunger strikes. Let us die for a pamphlet.

Although this play denounced Sanger and her teachings, I find it satisfying to know that Lowry’s “predictions” have been proved false almost 100 years later. Today, it is the “every-day” women that Lowry characterized as hens who are fighting for their right for birth control and refusing to be thought of as egg-laying machines.  While the article sought to ridicule the movement, I think we can all agree that women are not chickens and want to control their reproduction.

To see a PDF of the entire article, click here

The International Woman

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Baird, birth control, Eisenstadt, Griswold, inspire change, international women's day, margaret sanger, olympics, sarah burke, Sochi, supreme court, women

Although we at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project like to believe that women are important every day of the year, it is on March 8^th that it is socially acceptable to tell this to the world with multiple exclamation points!!!  And so, we wish to say to you, in underlined, bold, capital letters, HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY!!!

Each International Women’s Day is different.  I like to believe that it is because each of us has grown in our own special way since last March 8^th, but more literally it is because every International Women’s Day has its own theme declared by the United Nations.  While each one is empowering, the themes give women and men alike a time to reflect on ways in which to make the world around them a better place.  2012 urged Empowerment to Rural Women and ending poverty and hunger, while 2013 called for an end to violence against women.  2014’s theme, however, is especially close to our hearts in that the United Nations urges us this year to Inspire Change.

At the 2009 Winter X Games, Burke of Whistler, British Columbia, poses with her gold medal after winning the women’s skiing superpipe at Buttermilk Mountain in Aspen, Colo.

While a slightly general topic, inspiring change means something different to everyone with a dream.  Remembering the Sochi Winter Olympics, Sarah Burke comes to mind as a woman who devoted her whole life to change.  She successfully lobbied the International Olympic Committee into adding the ski halfpipe event for men and women to the 2014 winter games schedule.  Though she passed away due to an accidental fall during a practice, Burke, a four-time Winter X Games gold medalist, was considered a shoe-in for a medal at Sochi.  Although gone from our physical lives, Burke will always be remembered in her dedication to advocating her passion.

There is no question that Margaret Sanger also had that passionate devotion for her cause of inspiring change.  Sanger risked enormous fines, substantial time in jail, and the separation from her family for extensive periods of time for the chance to give women the information she knew they needed and deserved.  The amount ground Sanger covered is tremendous enough – not only did she travel throughout the United States and Canada, but she also traversed Europe and Asia to reach the most remote pockets of people she could find.  And those people responded to her with open arms and an outpouring of gratitude.

Sanger prepares to speak in front of the Senate, 1934

But Sanger would be nothing if only a world traveler.  Not only did she speak around the world, but she challenged the American government’s laws that blocked her path in the first place.  Sanger testified often before Senate committees about changing the Comstock Law, section 211 of the U.S. Penal Code, which made it so difficult for women to obtain even the smallest amount of information about contraceptives.  After a so many failed efforts to win legislative change, Sanger and her team turned to the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit for a judicial victory.  In U.S. v. One Package Containing 120, more or less, Rubber Pessaries to Prevent Conception (U.S. v. One Package), Sanger and Hannah Stone, one of her clinic physicians, orchestrated a package delivery of a box of pessaries, another word for diaphragms, to be sent from Japan to Hannah Stone.  Sanger and Stone informed the U.S. government about the delivery, and because at this time not even physicians were allowed to receive contraception by mail a lawsuit was created.  Through years of battles, the suit traveled all the way to the Supreme Court, where Sanger and Stone won the right for physicians to receive contraception information and devices through the mail.  Although the Supreme Court decision was not made until 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut to grant the right to privacy to married couples and their contraceptive uses, Sanger was able to see her dream realized before her death a year later.

Sanger’s influence stayed with women long after her death.  In Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) the Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that laws limiting contraceptive use to married couples was discriminatory, and that all people should have equal access to birth control.  From Justice Brennan’s majority ruling: “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”

This International Women’s Day challenges you to do something that inspires change.  Whether it is a small change, like drinking water rather than soda to improve health, or a bigger change, like lobbying for a new Olympic sport or a change in the federal law, each change in the direction of improvement is a change worth working toward.

For more information see:

http://www.internationalwomensday.com/default.asp#.UxDFz-NdXfU

http://sarahburkefoundation.com/

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/

Address at the Hotel Brevoort, January 17, 1916

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1916, birth control, brevoort hotel, Brooklyn, Brownsville clinic, margaret sanger, reproductive rights, speeches, Woman Rebel

There is never an easy path to becoming a national icon, and Margaret Sanger’s was no different.  While many would say that “no press is bad press,” it was probably not in Sanger’s best interests to be jailed just as her birth control movement was taking shape.  While her famous monthly, Woman Rebel, was first published in March of 1914 and was then banned from public mailing, her trial concerning the publication was continuously postponed until January of 1916.  The day before her trial, a large crowd of people was privileged enough to hear Sanger deliver a short but powerful speech at the Hotel Brevoort.

A 1954 photo of the Brevoort Hotel shortly before its demolition.

Once a farm property, the Hotel Brevoort was erected in 1845 across from the Brevoort family mansion.  In business for over 100 years, the hotel was home to many colorful people, including “Congressmen, Senators, Mexican and Turkish heads of state, past U.S. presidents, army generals, and even Prince Arthur”.  Even Mark Twain, who lived nearby the hotel, frequented its barber shop run by long-time barber Henri Grechen.

Sanger gave her speech at a dinner held in her support.  Although the speech was short, it had a powerful impact on the hundreds of people, men and women, who came to show their support for the original Woman Rebel.  It had the air of a proud woman, ready to become a martyr for her cause as a way of extending her voice to those she had not yet reached in her travels.  She praises her supporters, saying that “all our great and modern thinkers have advocated it!  It is an idea that must appeal to any mature intelligence”², placing them on a pedestal of higher society.  Sanger understood that some of her audience members did not fully agree with the method she was using to spread the information of safe birth control, and addressed this in her address:

I know that physicians and scientists have a great technical fund of information–greater than I had on the subject of family limitation – Margaret Sanger, Hotel Brevoort Speech

and goes on to ask her audience members to carry on her work in the way they saw fit.  Not because, I believe, she anticipated never returning from prison or exile, but because she wished, upon her eminent return, that there would still be a movement in the United States fighting for the freedom and safety of women’s bodies.

In the end, the government dropped the charges against Sanger.  The death of her daughter, Peggy, just a few weeks before her trial date led prosecutors to believe that jailing Sanger would brand her as martyr, and decided to avoid the bad press that came with prosecuting a grieving mother.  By not being jailed, Sanger was able to start a birth control clinic in October of 1916 in Brooklyn, the first of its kind in the United States.  Sanger was jailed for 30 days for opening the clinic, but her jailing led to a court ruling in the reformation of the law that prohibited the dispensing of contraceptive information, and restricted it to allow professional doctors to become legal distributers.  This culminated in Sanger opening the first legal birth control clinic in 1923 at 104, 5^th Avenue, and the beginning of mass distribution of information to women in need of a family planning strategy.

——–

The complete Hotel Brevoort Speech:

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=128167.xml

New York Times on the Hotel Brevoort Speech:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F50D10FD3B5B17738DDDA10994D9405B868DF1D3

History of the Hotel Brevoort:

http://westviewnews.org/2012/07/brevoort-in-the-village/

Rebels of Post Avenue

Tags

birth control, edward mylius, history, margaret sanger, mary ware dennett, national birth control league, otto bobsien, robert parker, sanger, Woman Rebel

Margaret Sanger, c. 1915 (Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection)

As we move into the year 2014, we also come across a slew of new anniversaries to celebrate, and a look at the history of Margaret Sanger is no exception.  1914, the month of March to be exact, marks the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Woman Rebel, a radical feminist monthly published by Margaret Sanger publicizing what would be called “birth control” in just a few months.  The journal published the first use of the term “birth control,” a term that Sanger built into one of the most significant reform movements in the 20^th century.

This apartment building replaced Sanger’s original apartment in 1920.

The humble beginnings of Woman Rebel took place in New York City during January of 2014.  After leaving her husband, William Sanger, to paint in Paris, Margaret Sanger rented a “dingy” apartment at 34 Post Avenue in Upper Manhattan and moved in with her and the children.  From there, she and a group of anarchists developed the Woman Rebel and the early arguments of the birth control movement.  Who were these mysterious, unnamed men who helped Sanger get started?  Although often referred to as “secretaries,” Edward Mylius, Robert Parker, and Otto Bobsien were not only part of Sanger’s inner circle, but played an integral role in the creation of Woman Rebel.

Scarce documentation survives about these three men.  Edward Mylius was a British citizen who fled to the United States after publishing an libelous, anarchist paper in Paris “declaring that the King of England had once contracted a morganatic marriage” (My Fight).  He wrote one credited article in Woman Rebel (“Freedom in America, Union Square, April 4, 1914,” Woman Rebel, Apr. 1914, 11), but was dedicated to the feminist monthly.

A failed playwright, Robert Parker often served as Sanger’s ghost writer and editor.  Although Margaret Sanger claimed she invented the term “birth control”, it was actually Parker who suggested the term after connecting the importance of control with their goal of contraception.

“Margaret invited these men to her apartment for an emergency conference.  They decided that the first thing she needed was a catchier name for contraception than the delicate ‘preventative means.’  They considered ‘conscious generation,’ ‘Neo-Malthusianism,’ and several others.  Robert Parker offered the final suggestion.  He was a polio victim who was studying Yoga, in which control is an essential feature, hoping that control might help him with his partly paralyzed hand.  It occurred to him that control might apply to birth as well.  ‘Birth control,’ he mused.  ‘Birth Control … I think I like it.’  They all liked it.  As they put on their hats and left, they agreed that birth control was the best name for the movement.” – Margaret Sanger, Madeline Gray, p. 72

The name obviously stuck, as we use it a century after its coinage.

The first to use the term “birth control” in print was actually Otto Bobsien.  Bobsien joined the National Birth Control League, formed in 1915 after Sanger fled the U.S.  He used Sanger’s list of subscribers and friends of Woman Rebel for the new league, and Sanger felt betrayed, especially when its president, Mary Ware Dennett, refused to support her case when she returned.

It is not surprising that Sanger kept her helpers in the background.  The birth control movement was considered a special cause of women and Sanger would build it into her life’s work.  But these were the people that Sanger trusted most, and turned to when she needed help getting her paper off the ground.  Although the monthly had only seven issues, Woman Rebel helped express her beliefs and distribute them to a larger audience than her speeches alone.  Now exposed to new ideas and people, Sanger felt better equipped to continue on her path to social awareness.

______________

For a digital collection of the Woman Rebel issues and documents surrounding its publication and suppression, see http://wyatt.elasticbeanstalk.com/mep/MS/docs/ms-table.html.