One Hundredth Anniversary of the Brownsville Clinic—A Media Opportunity

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Brownsville clinic, Ethel Byrnes, Fania Mindell

On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United

Sanger in 1917 (courtesy of the Library of Congress.

States. The Brownsville clinic violated Section 1142 of the New York State Penal Code. This state law, similar to the federal Comstock Law, criminalized the distribution of materials on contraception due to their obscene nature. But Sanger’s violation of the state’s anti-obscenity statute was no mistake; it was a deliberate decision meant to capture the media’s attention and push the obscure topic of birth control into public debate.

At 46 Amboy Street, Sanger’s clinic was located in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn—a densely populated, impoverished area. The men and women who lived in Brownsville were primarily working class immigrants, a socioeconomic group that, in Sanger’s eyes, was most in need of access to birth control. To advertise the clinic’s services, Sanger produced trilingual leaflets written in English, Yiddish, and Italian. They read: “Mothers! Can you afford to have a large family? Do you want any more children? If not, why do you have them? Do not kill, Do not take life, but Prevent. Safe, Harmless Information can be obtained of trained Nurses at 46 Amboy Street…All Moth
ers Welcome” (“Flyer for 46 Amboy Street Birth Control Clinic,” Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, N.Y., n.d.)

Fania Mindell (right) and Sanger at Clinic, October 1916

 

Her efforts were successful. On its opening day, 140 women visited the clinic. For the nine days it remained open, the clinic had a total of 450 visitors, and many of the women seen offered testimonials. One mother shared, “This is the kind of place we have been wanting all the time. I have had seven children, two are dead, and my husband is a sick man. Do you know how I got bread for them? By getting down on my knees and scrubbing floors for the baker; that’s what I did when we couldn’t pay the bill. Seven children…that’s enough for any woman.” Another simply commented, “It is so much easier to talk to a woman than a man” (Sanger, “A Day with Margaret Sanger in her Birth Control Clinic,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 October 1916, 4).

The popularity of the Brownsville clinic came despite Sanger’s inability to secure a doctor. With no physician willing to provide contraceptive services, the social activist operated the clinic with her sister Ethel Byrne, a registered nurse, and the help of Fania Mindell, a friend and translator. Traffic and testimonials were not enough to keep the doors of the Brownsville clinic open though. On October 26, 1916 New York police shut down the country’s first birth control clinic before it had even been open for two weeks.

During the arrest of Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell, the three women resisted, creating a scene to publicly expose their violation of the law. In the trials that followed, Sanger obtained the platform she had been seeking. Her sister Ethel Byrne, convicted and sentenced to thirty days imprisonment in January 1917, immediately began a hunger strike—the dramatic protest attracting crowds of reporters. Sanger, commenting on her sister’s behavior, explained, “These unfortunate women go to their graves unnoticed and their agonies and deaths unknown. Mrs. Byrne feels that one more death laid at the door of the government of this state is of little consequence.” Byrne lasted five days before prison staff force-fed her through a tube, but the media her protest attracted was invaluable to their cause (Sanger, “Stirring Appeal Written by Birth Control Advocates,” Wilkes Barre Times-Leader, 27 January 1917, 13).

Following Byrne’s hunger strike, Sanger employed her trial as another media opportunity. During her hearing, she attempted to break the link many people saw between birth control and morality. As an alternative, Sanger advocated for the association between birth control and socioeconomic and medical issues. She called upon twenty-five Brownsville women as witnesses to garner support for her convictions. Her former patients elicited sympathy as they shared tragic accounts of failed abortions, miscarriages, and an endless series of childbirths.

Movie recreation of Sanger’s arrest at Brownsville Clinic (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

On February 2, 1917, Sanger was offered a suspended sentence if she would promise to abide by the law. The activist declined, proclaiming, “With me it is not a question of personal imprisonment or personal disadvantage. I am today and have always been more concerned with changing the law and the sweeping away of the law, regardless of what I have to undergo to have it done,” later reiterating to the court, “I cannot respect the law as it exists today.” As a result, Sanger was convicted and sentenced to thirty days of imprisonment at the Queens County Penitentiary—yet another media boon (Sanger qtd. in “Sanger on Trial: The Brownsville Clinic Testimony,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Newsletter, Fall 2000 and Sanger, “Liberty Scorned by Mrs. Sanger,” New York Tribune, 6 February 1917, 9).

Sanger went on to appeal the court’s decision, defending her violation of the law by pointing out its humanitarian purpose. While Sanger’s conviction was upheld, the Brownsville clinic trials led the court to “sufficiently broaden its interpretation of the law to enable physicians to prescribe birth control to women when medically indicated.” This legal shift was the first in a series of changes that would foreshadow systematized, physician-staffed birth control clinics in the U.S. (“Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Brownsville Clinic,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Newsletter, Winter 1991).

Following the 1916 Brownsville clinic and the legal wake it produced, Sanger went on to establish the American Birth Control League in 1921 and the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB) in 1923. The BCCRB, like the Brownsville clinic, was another first for the United States; it was the country’s first legal birth control service provider. One year after opening its doors, the BCCRB was one of the most popular birth control clinics in the country. Fifteen years later, the BCCRB merged with the American Birth Control League. The resultant group was known as the Birth Control Federation of America. In 1942, the Federation changed its name and became known as Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Today, the country’s relationship with birth control—one in which we are just as likely to see a television commercial for birth control pills, vaginal rings, or condoms air as we are for the local car dealership—is dramatically improved. No longer a taboo topic hiding in the shadows, birth control is a part of the public conversation and widely accessible to women of different socioeconomic backgrounds. In 1916, Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell began a century-long process; their actions ignited a series of changes in how the public would regard contraceptives and how the law would increasingly allow for birth control services. One hundred years later, we have these three strong women to thank for the advancement of our country’s relationship with birth control services.

Tracing Sanger’s Steps: The Beginning of Legalized Birth Control

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birth control, history, legal cases, margaret sanger

Throughout the history of the United States, the judicial system has been used as a mechanism for social change. Consider some of the most monumental decisions, from Brown v. the Board of Education to the more recent case of Obergefell v. Hodges. The decisions of these two cases reflected the evolving opinions among the American people, and enabled society to implement the necessary changes. In times when the situation requires a quick solution, the court room provides a benefit over legislation, as it takes less time to reach and implement a decision, then it does to pass new legislation. Therefore, when Margaret Sanger was faced with the restriction of censorship that was the by-product of obscenity laws, she sought a situation that would allow her to speedily remedy the situation. She believed that the repeal of the Comstock laws would allow the birth control movement to continue on past the problem of censorship, and towards legalization. Thus led to the filing her test case, U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries.

 

Sanger and Morris Ernst

 

By the 1930’s, Margaret Sanger had made strides in the fight for women’s access to birth  control, at least on a New York State level. However, her ability to provide both birth control and information about birth control was limited by the presence of the Comstock laws. Passed by congress on March 3, 1873, the Comstock laws were the first legislation to deal with contraceptives explicitly, and they defined contraceptives as obscene, and prohibited their circulation, and information regarding the prevention of conception. The development of this bill was essentially based on morality, as contraceptives were believed to provoke lust. Initially, this bill made it nearly impossible for women to obtain birth control, and despite being rarely enforced during the 1930’s, fear was enough to prevent the circulation of materials. At this point,  Sanger had realized that to open the access to birth control that had been so severely limited by the Comstock laws, she needed to create a case that could challenge its precedent. In June of 1932, she found her opportunity. A package of pessaries was shipped to her from Japan, only to be seized by customs and sent back to Japan. Sanger ingeniously built her test case on this result, asking Dr. Sakae Koyama,  president of the Juzen Hospital in Osaka, to send a second package to the United States, this time to Dr. Hannah Stone. As Sanger expected, the package was again seized

by customs, giving her a situation on which she could build her test case. According to Section 305 of Title III of Revenue Act, Dr. Stone did not have the right to import contraceptives. This test case was well thought out, as Sanger had spent time with her attorney, Morris Ernst, planning for this opportunity. They wanted to challenge the federal law’s ability to inhibit doctors from prescribing their patients contraceptives.

Hannah Stone

The presiding judge on the case, Grover C. Moskowitz, heard the case on December 10th, 1935. As there were in facts in question, the case was based on his judicial interpretation of the law. On January 6th, 1939, Judge Moskowitz ruled in the favor of the women’s rights activists. He dismissed the libel charges within the case, and stated that the pessaries that had been confiscated did not come within the scope of the Comstock Laws, as they were intended for a lawful purpose, which was to “cure and prevent disease.” Later, when the case went in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Judge Augustus Hand upheld the decision made by Judge Moskowitz. According to Hand, the language used within the Comstock Laws was uncompromising; however it would be legal for contraceptives to be imported into the United States so long as they were being administered by a health professional for reasons pertaining to the patient’s health. Judge Hand believed that had 19th century Congress been familiar with the data discussing the dangers of multiple pregnancies, they would not have implemented such strict censorship laws on birth control. This 1939 decision is often accredited to being the first step in giving women full legal access to birth control.

Margaret Sanger’s calculated decision to use a court case to challenge the precedent of
the Comstock laws helped her to grant women further access to birth control. As the public’s attitude toward birth control was improving, Sanger utilized it to further her agenda of legalizing birth control. However, the scope for which birth control was legalized was narrow, as it was only permissible in situations relating to women’s health. Margaret Sanger’s reaction to the decision of her case was a mixture of dissatisfaction and caution, as she knew would continue to work towards giving women unrestricted access to birth control. While the One Package Decision was a crucial stepping stone, it left birth control activists with the realization that they still had a tremendous amount of work to do. For as Margaret Sanger once wrote, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.”

Sanger Project Celebrates Black History Month

In celebration of black history Month, we are reprinting portions of an article from our newsletter # 28 dated Fall 2001. It is as relevant today as it was 15 years ago. For the complete article see https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/articles/bc_or_race_control.php.

“Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project”

The Negro Project, instigated in 1939 by Margaret Sanger, was one of the first major undertakings of the new Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA), the product of a merger between the American Birth Control League and Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, and one of the more controversial campaigns of the birth control movement. Developed by white birth control reformers, who consulted with African-Americans for help in promoting the project only well after its inception, the Negro Project and associated campaigns were, nevertheless, widely supported by such black leaders as Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.  Influenced strongly by both the eugenics movement and the progressive welfare programs of the New Deal era, the Negro Project was, from the start, largely indifferent to the needs of the black community and constructed in terms and with perceptions that today smack of racism.

Life Magazine, May 6, 1940, p.66

What it became was not the project Sanger had first envisioned. As she wrote in an initial fund-raising request to Albert Lasker, the wealthy advertising executive just beginning his post-business career in medical philanthropy, she simply hoped to help “a group notoriously underprivileged and handicapped to a large measure by a ‘caste’ system that operates as an added weight upon their efforts to get a fair share of the better things in life. To give them the means of helping themselves is perhaps the richest gift of all. We believe birth control knowledge brought to this group, is the most direct, constructive aid that can be given them to improve their immediate situation.” Sanger viewed the Negro Project as another effort to help African-Americans gain better access to safe contraception and maintain birth control services in their community as she had attempted to do in Harlem a decade earlier when Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau (BCCRB), in cooperation with the New York Urban League, opened a birth control clinic there.  (MS to Lasker, July 10, 1939, Mary Lasker Papers, Columbia University, MS Unfilmed )

By the late 1930s, the birth control activists began to focus on high birth rates and poor quality of life in the South, alerted to alarming Southern poverty by a 1938 U.S. National Resource Committee report which asserted that Southern poverty drained resources from other parts of the country. Starting in the mid-1930s, Sanger sent field workers into the rural South to establish birth control services in poor communities and conduct research on cheaper and more effective contraceptive….The birth control movement also looked to Southern states as the ideal region in which to secure funding under New Deal legislation and to establish birth control services as part of state and federal public health  programs….

Sanger testifying in Congress, 1934

In 1937, North Carolina became the first state to incorporate birth control services into a statewide public health program, followed by six other southern states. However, these successes were clouded by the failure of birth controllers to overcome segregated health services and improve African-Americans’ access to contraceptives. Hazel Moore, a veteran lobbyist and health administrator, ran a birth control project under Sanger’s direction and found that black women in several Virginia counties were very responsive to birth control education. A 1938 trip to Tennessee further convinced Sanger of the desire of African-Americans in that region to control their fertility and the need for specific programs in birth control education aimed at the black community. (Hazel Moore, “Birth Control for the Negro,” 1937, Sophia Smith Collection, Florence Rose Papers.)

In 1939 Sanger teamed with Mary Woodward Reinhardt, secretary of the newly formed BCFA, to secure a large donor to fund an educational campaign to teach African-American women in the South about contraception. Sanger, Reinhardt and Sanger’s secretary, Florence Rose, drafted a report on “Birth Control and the Negro,” skillfully using language that appealed both to eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and progressives committed to shepherding African-Americans into middle-class culture. The report stated that “[N]egroes present the great problem of the South,” as they are the group with “the greatest economic, health and social problems,” and outlined a practical birth control program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and that “still breed carelessly and disastrously,” a line borrowed from a June 1932 Birth Control Review article by W.E.B. DuBois. Armed with this paper, Reinhardt initiated contact between Sanger and Albert Lasker (soon to be Reinhardt’s husband), who pledged $20,000 starting in Nov. 1939. (“Birth Control and the Negro,” July 1939, Lasker Papers)

However, once funding was secured, the project slipped from Sanger’s hands. She had proposed that the money go to train “an up and doing modern minister, colored, and an up and doing modern colored medical man” at her New York clinic who would then tour “as many Southern cities and organizations and churches and medical societies as they can get before” and “preach and preach and preach!” She believed that after a year of such “educational agitation” the Federation could support a “practical campaign for supplying mothers with contraceptives.” Before going in and establishing clinics, Sanger thought it critical to gain the support and involvement of the African-American community (not just its leaders) and establish a foundation of trust. Her proposal derived from the work of activists in the field, discussions with black leaders and her experience with the New York clinics. Sanger understood the concerns of some within the black community about having Northern whites intervene in the most intimate aspect of their lives. “I do not believe” she warned, “that this project should be directed or run by white medical men. The Federation should direct it with the guidance and assistance of the colored group & perhaps, particularly and specifically formed for the purpose.” To succeed, she wrote, “It takes a very strong heart and an individual well entrenched in the community. . . .” (MS to Gamble, Nov. 26, 1939, and MS to Robert Seibels, Feb. 12, 1940 [MSM S17:514, 891].)

Sanger reiterated the need for black ministers to head up the project in a letter to Clarence Gamble in Dec. 1939, arguing that: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” This passage has been repeatedly extracted by Sanger’s detractors as evidence that she led a calculated effort to reduce the black population against their will. From African-American activist Angela Davis on the left to conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza on the right, this statement alone has condemned Sanger to a perpetual waltz with Hitler and the KKK….The argument that Sanger co-opted black clergy and community leaders to exterminate their own race not only gives Sanger unwarranted credit as a remarkably cunning manipulator, but also suggests that African-Americans were passive receptors of birth control reform, incapable of making their own decisions about family size; and that black leaders were ignorant and gullible.

In the end, Sanger’s plan for an educational campaign to precede the demonstration project lost out to the white medical and public relations men running the new Federation. They were particularly swayed by Robert Seibels (1890-1955), chairman of the Committee on Maternal Welfare of the South Carolina Medical Association, who was chosen by the BCFA to direct a Negro demonstration project in that state. Seibels distrusted Sanger and her loyal crew of field workers, calling them “dried-up female fanatics” who had the gall to tell doctors what to do. (Robert E. Seibels to Frederick C. Holden, Jan. 28, 1939, Sophia Smith Collection, Records of PPFA.) He saw no need for prerequisite education and propaganda and advised incorporating birth control services for blacks into a general public health program. The BCFA then dismissed the notion of building a community-based, black-staffed demonstration clinic that could become permanent, and instead set in motion a plan that closely resembled the vaccination and VD caravans that swept in and out of the region.

Lasker’s money was used to set up demonstration projects between 1940 and 1942 in several rural South Carolina counties, under Seibels’s direction, and in urban Nashville, TN under the auspices of the Nashville City Health Department. In South Carolina, the BCFA hired two African-American nurses to make house calls and meet with women in groups at schools and community centers to encourage them to visit a clinic, but contraceptives were dispensed by white doctors only. In Nashville, demonstration clinics were opened at the Bethlehem Center, a black settlement house, and later at Fisk University, and black nurses were eventually employed with some success there as well.

The Federation immediately claimed that the Negro Project had exceeded its expectations and even persuaded Life Magazine to carry a photo spread of the demonstration clinics in South Carolina May1940. But relatively few women, (only about 3,000) visited the demonstration clinics to receive contraceptive instruction. And among those that did, the dropout rates were high as many women would not return to white doctors for follow-up exams, though the black nurses in both Nashville and South Carolina met with greater success. In 1942 the Federation ended funding for the demonstration clinics claiming to have developed “workable procedures” for providing contraception to African-Americans in both rural and urban communities; but no other clinics appear to have opened as a result of the Project. (“Better Health for 13,000,000,” PPFA Report, April 16, 1943, Rose Papers; John Overton, “A Birth Control Service Among Urban Negroes,” Human Fertility, Aug. 1942, 97-101; Life Magazine, May 6, 1940, pp. 64-68.)

However, the “Division of Negro Service,” a department created at the BCFA initially to oversee the Negro Project, did implement some of the educational goals Sanger outlined. Under the direction of Florence Rose, with money raised by Sanger, and inspired by an advisory council of eminent black leaders, educators and health professionals, the Division undertook significant education projects from 1940-1943. Rose flooded every black organization in the country with planned parenthood literature, set up exhibits, instigated local and national press coverage and hired a black woman doctor, Mae McCarroll, to teach birth control techniques to black doctors and lobby medical groups. Though still stinging from the rejection of her earlier proposal for the Negro Project, Sanger wrote enthusiastically to Albert Lasker in July of 1942 about what she now framed as a pioneering effort: “I believe that the Negro question is coming definitely to the fore in America, not only because of the war, but in anticipation of the place the Negro will occupy after the peace. I think it is magnificent that we are in on the ground floor, helping Negroes to control their birth rate, to reduce their high infant and maternal death rate, to maintain better standards of health and living for those already born, and to create better opportunities for those who will be born. In other words, we’re giving Negroes an opportunity to help themselves, and to rise to their own heights through education and the principles of a democracy.” (MS to Lasker, July 9, 1942, MSM S21:404)

But the BCFA (which changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942) forced Florence Rose to leave in 1943 &, a result of her inability to follow new bureaucratic procedures and her allegiance to Sanger, who was immersed in her own clashes with Federation staff. With Rose’s departure, the Division of Negro Service floundered and soon shut down. The Federation delegated “Negro” work to other departments and eventually passed off remnants of the program to state affiliates.

Arguments persist about whether or not the Negro Project was purely a racist endeavor (search for “Sanger” “Negro Project” and “racism” on the Internet and be prepared for the onslaught). Certainly the patriarchal racism of the time that guided many of the social policies in Washington and the practices of philanthropic and charitable organizations working to “lift up” African-Americans, dictated both the Federation’s and Sanger’s approach to blacks and birth control. The public rationale for the Project was rooted in economics, tax-payer burden, and the social threats posed by what was perceived to be an exploding black underclass, rather than the health and sexual liberation of black women (though it should be notes that the birth control movement largely ignored the issue of women’s —black or white— sexual autonomy in the interwar years). And there is no doubt that a good number of medical professionals involved in the birth control movement exhibited strong racist sentiments, some of them arguing for and even carrying out compulsory sterilization on black women considered to be of low intelligence and therefore not capable of choosing not to control their fertility, as well as on those deemed morally or behaviorally deviant. But there is no evidence that Sanger or even the Federation coerced or intended to coerce black women into using birth control. The fundamental belief, underscored at every meeting, mentioned in much of the behind-the-scenes correspondence, and evident in all the printed material put out by the Division of Negro Service, was that uncontrolled fertility presented the greatest burden to the poor, and Southern blacks were among the poorest Americans. In fact, the Negro Project did not differ very much from the earlier birth control campaigns in the rural South designed to test simpler methods on poor, uneducated and mostly white agricultural communities. Following these other efforts in the South, it would have been more racist, in Sanger’s mind, to ignore African-Americans in the South than to fail at trying to raise the health and economic standards of their communities.

Anniversary of Spanish-language publication of Family Limitation

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birth control, Censorship, Family Limitation, margaret sanger

To celebrate the publication of a Spanish-language translation Margaret Sanger’s  Family Limitation’s in Merida, Mexico, her grandson Alexander Sanger wrote the following new introduction:La brújula del hogar

Introduction to Family Limitation – La Brujula del Hogar
By Alexander Sanger

La brújula del hogar

“In the summer and fall of 1914, my grandmother, Margaret Sanger, nascent birth control advocate and a public health nurse in New York, wrote a pamphlet entitled, Family Limitation, in which she described various methods of contraception which she recommended to enable couples to plan, space and limit their children. It was this pamphlet that was translated into Spanish as La Brujula del Hogar and published in Merida in 1922.
My grandmother, a mother of three, knew what she was talking about, not just because she had only three children, but because she had been working in the poorest slums of New York City, taking care of mothers who had children they did not want and could not afford. She often talked of one patient, Sadie Sachs, who in 1912 went to a back alley abortionist and almost died in the attempt. My grandmother nursed her back to health. When the doctor made his final visit, Sadie Sachs asked what she could do to not have any more children. The doctor responded,”“So you want to have your cake and eat it too. The answer is, tell Jake (her husband) to sleep on the roof.’”

“Three months later, Sadie Sachs was pregnant again, went to a back alley abortionist and died in my grandmother’s arms.”

“My grandmother said, ‘Enough.’”

“She went to Europe to research contraceptive methods and put all her knowledge of methods available in the United States and in Europe into Family Limitation.”

“In the United States at that time, both the Federal Government and the states had Comstock Laws, which prohibited the dissemination of birth control information and supplies. The laws also criminalized advocating the legality of birth control.”

“In March of 1914, my grandmother announced in the first issue of her monthly newspaper, The Woman Rebel, her intention to ‘advocate the prevention of conception’ and ‘impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper.’ She never actually imparted any contraceptive information in The Woman Rebel, but nonetheless the authorities confiscated the newspaper. In it she first used the phrase ‘birth control.’  My grandmother kept printing the paper and the government kept confiscating it, and finally indicted her on obscenity charges, since birth control under the Comstock laws was considered ‘obscene.’”

“The indictment made headlines, spreading birth control far beyond the limited readership of her paper and agitating women and men to support her cause.”

“She decided to ‘give them (the government) something to really indict me on,’ she wrote to her muckraker friend, Upton Sinclair. She printed 100,000 copies of Family Limitation. It was immediately translated into multiple languages, including in 1919 and again in 1922 into Spanish. Her willingness to put women’s rights and health above the law launched the United States birth control movement, and soon the worldwide movement.”

“What my grandmother saw in the slums of New York and on her visits to Mexico (she made at least a half dozen), was enormous inequality between the classes. In New York and in poorer areas of the United States, the rich and poor often lived near each other but had vastly different incomes, access to health care and numbers of children, both born and surviving. There were scandalously high infant and maternal mortality rates. If women used contraception, it was a traditional method, often ineffective if not dangerous, and when it failed, the women often resorted to unsafe abortion. There were Sadie Saches in Mexico as well as New York, and my grandmother vowed to put an end to it. In her campaign she was repeatedly imprisoned but she never wavered.”

“Imprisonment also seemed likely for the translators, printers and publishers of La Brujula del Hogar in 1922. The pamphlet fell into the hands of birth control opponents in Merida, the Knights of Columbus, who drew up a petition seeking the prosecution of the publishers. Newspapers took both sides, cartoonists got busy, public became aroused and Birth Control became the most discussed topic of the hour. The first edition of the pamphlet, all 5,000 copies, was exhausted in one day, and a second edition of 10,000 copies was immediately re-printed.”

“The Knights of Columbus petition was forwarded on from the District Attorney, Arturo Cisneros Canto, to the Governor of Yucatan, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who at once remitted instructions to refuse it. Incidentally, Carrillo, a Socialist, was one of 14 children. In compliance, District Attorney Canto issued a statement published in the March 14 Diario Official, which was reprinted in Meridá newspapers, which said, in part:”

“The Attorney General’s Office cannot shape its manner of proceedings to the narrow-minded and antiquated criteria of morality, the result of deep-rooted religious prejudices, which crops out in your petition. The Executive of the State wishes to have it made clear that forever have gone the prosecutions, which have no other cause than moral fanaticism, which filled with horror the vast period of clerical domination of the Middle Ages. As long as the present socialist government directs public destiny, the Attorney General’s office will not undertake any prosecutions for futile ideas of morality, since prosecutions in the name of morality have at all times been the most odious pretext of which religion made use so as to destroy its enemies.”

“My grandmother touted the Yucatan government’s support of birth control, noting that Arturo Cisneros Canto’s statement’“is a remarkable document and one that might be recommended to the attention of police departments in some American cities–especially in New York, where a meeting for the discussion of the morality of birth control was broken up not six months ago.’”

“The Yucatan’s socialist experiment was short-lived. In 1924 Governor Carrillo Puerto was assassinated, and support for feminist and socialist reforms there evaporated. But, as historian Dan La Botz noted, ‘revolutionary Yucatan set the long-term agenda of the Mexican women’s movement, and many of its demands are still being fought for.’”

Margaret Sanger and India’s Philosophers

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Gandhi, India, Tagore

Previously on the Sanger Papers blog, we’ve talked about Sanger’s relationship with Gandhi. If you haven’t read Sanger and Gandhi: A Complex Relationship, or any of our other blogs about Sanger’s trips to India, then you might be surprised to hear Sanger and Gandhi didn’t always agree. While both social reformers wanted the best for India, Gandhi believed self-control and abstinence was the only way to fix India’s poverty and over-population. Sanger as you know, understood that most people weren’t as self disciplined as Gandhi. She saw some serious problems in that way of thinking:

Mr. Gandhi advises the women of India to ‘resist’ or in extreme cases to ‘leave’ their husbands in order to control the size of their families rather than resort to birth control methods…Mr. Gandhi is strangely illogical in his demand that women ‘resist’ the sexual advances of their husbands to avoid frequent pregnancies. A woman might resist 364 days of the year and give in on the three hundred and sixty fifth only to become pregnant. If this practice of resisting the husband every day in the year but one, continued, the woman could have a child every year during her child bearing period.

Sanger understood that women couldn’t just leave their husbands, not without the threat of starvation, poverty, and social rejection. Also, as we better understand today, men are just as capable of controlling their sexual needs as women. It is not the job of women to keep lustful men at bay.

Tagore, Rabindranath

Sanger wasn’t alone in India with her convictions. She found a different philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, who agreed with her.

Tagore was a renowned poet for his time, particularly in the United States and England. He was awarded the Nobel Prize, despite the fact that that his disagreements with Gandhi brought on some unpopularity. He wrote many genres of literature and involved himself in music and painting. He denounced the British rule in India, opposed imperialism, believed in the power of education for the people, worked to spread artistic inspiration, and was a supporter of Sanger’s Birth Control movement.

In a radio talk given in 1935, Sanger quoted Tagore:

Your great philosopher-poet, Rabindranath Tagore, has wisely said, ‘In a hunger-stricken country like India it is a cruel crime thoughtlessly to bring more children into existence than can properly be taken care of, causing endless suffering to them and imposing a degrading condition upon the whole family.'(11/30/1935)

Tagore and Sanger continued to exchange letters after Sanger visited him on her tour of India. She also wrote and asked him for a statement on birth control to be published in the Birth Control Review. His statement was published in the December 1925 issue. Tagore sent Margaret Sanger a subscription to the Visvabharati Quarterly, a literary journal produced by Tagore’s Visva-Bharati University, founded in 1921 as a meeting-place between modern Western ideas and the ancient and traditional culture of Asia.* Tagore and Sanger’s vision for a better India and a better world stayed strong.

In a letter from Tagore to Sanger, he wrote:

I am of the opinion that the Birth Control movement is a great movement not only because it will save women from enforced and undesirable maternity, but because it will help the cause of peace by lessening the number of su[rp]lus population of a country, scrambling for food and space outside its own rightful limits. In a hunger stricken country like India it is a cruel crime thoughtlessly to bring more children to existence than could prop[erly] be taken care of, causing endless sufferings to them and imposing a degrading condition upon the whole family…. (Tagore to MS 09/30/1925 [C03:639])

Poverty is a vast and complicated matter which can’t be solved only with the legalization of birth control. But Gandhi’s belief that resisting sex to prevent starvation and over population was too idealistic. At the very least, birth control would alleviate financial pressures of families with little means. The issue of poverty put aside, at least Tagore understood that birth control can “save women from enforced and undesired maternity.” Because, as we like to quote here at the Sanger Papers, “no woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”

Gandhi never fully supported Sanger and Tagore in their push for Birth Control, but the three reformers respected each other. While there were disagreements, there’s no doubt each one was dedicated to helping the people of India.

Gandhi and Tagore

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Further reading:
*Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man: London, 1995. 220-223.
For the radio talk by Sanger see here.
For more about Sanger on Gandhi see here.
For more about Gandhi and birth control, see our Sanger digital edition here.