Brownsville Clinic Open 99 Years Ago

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anniversaries, Brooklyn, Brownsville clinic, Censorship

Today is the 99th anniversary of the day Margaret Sanger opened this nation’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. We thought this was a good opportunity to revisit that event from Sanger’s own reminiscences. In an article entitled, “Why I Went to Jail,” published in February 1960, she recalled,

Clinic exterior at 46 Amboy Street

Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne and Yiddish interpreter Fania Mindell counseling clients.

“It was a crisp, bright morning on October 16, 1916, in Brooklyn, N.Y., that I opened the doors of the first birth-control clinic in the United States. I believed then, and do today, that this was an event of social significance in the lives of American womanhood. ” She wrote. “Three years before, as a professional nurse, I had gone with a doctor on a call in New York’s lower East Side. I had watched a frail mother die from a self-induced abortion. The doctor previously had refused to give her contraceptive information. The mother was one of a thousand such cases; in New   York alone there were over 100,000 abortions a year. That night I knew I could not go on merely nursing, allowing mothers to suffer and die. . . . It was the beginning of my birth-control crusade.”
Sanger’s biggest concern was whether the women would come to clinic. She need not have worried. As she described it,

Sanger and Fania Mindell

“Halfway to the corner they stood in line, shawled, hatless, their red hands          clasping the chapped smaller ones of their children. All day long and far into the evening, in ever-increasing numbers they came, over 100 the opening day. Jews and Christians, Protestants and Roman Catholics alike made their confessions to us. . . .Every day the little waiting room was crowded. The women came in pairs, with friends, married daughters, some with nursing babies clasped in their arms. Women from the far end of Long Island, the press having spread the word, from Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. They came to learn the ‘secret’ which was possessed by the rich and denied the poor.”
She continued, “My sister and I lectured to eight women at a time on the basic techniques of contraception, referring them to a druggist to purchase the necessary equipment. Records were meticulously kept. It was vital to have complete case histories if our work was to have scientific value. We also gave many of the women copies of What Every Girl Should Know, a brief booklet I had written earlier.”

The stories of the women were indeed tragic. “One woman told of her 15 children. Six were living. ‘I’m 37 years old. Look at me! I might be 50!’ Then there was a reluctantly pregnant Jewish woman who, after bringing eight children to birth, had two abortions and heaven knows how many miscarriages. Worn out, not only from housework but from making hats in a sweatshop, nervous beyond words, she cried morbidly, ‘If you don’t help me, I’m going to chop up a glass and swallow it.’ I comforted her the best I could, but there was nothing I would do to interrupt her pregnancy. We believed in birth control, not abortion.”

But the clinic was not always a tragic scene. Sanger recalled how they were cheered by neighbors. “The grocer’s wife on the corner dropped in to wish us luck, and the jolly old German baker whose wife gave out handbills to everybody passing the door sent us doughnuts. Then Mrs. Rabinowitz would call to us, ‘If I bring some hot tea now, will you stop the people coming?’ The postman delivering his 50 to 100 letters daily had his little pleasantry, ‘Farewell ladies; hope I find you here tomorrow.’”
He was right—their time was growing short. Sanger wrote, “On the ninth day, a well-dressed, hard-faced woman pushed her way past the humble applicants, gave her name, flaunted a $2 bill, payment for What Every Girl Should Know, and demanded immediate attention. My colleague had a hunch she might be a detective, and pinned the bill on the wall and wrote: ‘Received from Mrs. ——— of the Police Department, as her contribution.’” The following afternoon, according to Sanger, on Oct. 26, “the policewoman again pushed her way through the group of patiently waiting women and, striding into my room, snapped peremptorily, ‘You, Margaret Sanger, are under arrest.’”

Sanger was arrested, tried, convicted and spent 30 days in the queens County Penitentiary. But she went on to lead a crusade to make birth control legal, safe, effective, inexpensive and available to all women regardless of race, religion or ethnicity. Can we still be struggling to ensure women’s reproductive rights 99 years later?

Poor Women, Big Families

Tags

activism reproductive rights, Children, family limitations, Poverty

The International Aspects of Birth Control – Volume 1 – edited by Margaret Sanger, contains multiple articles from activists around the world about the struggle in their country for Birth Control rights.

While transcribing the 1925 book edited by Margaret Sanger titled The Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences: International Aspects of Birth Control I couldn’t help but be surprised by the amount of opposition faced by the original pioneers for Birth Control. Mrs. H. G. Hill, the president of the Alameda County Birth Control League in 1924, sums up the resistance when she wrote that, “There still exists in the minds of the masses a great deal of prejudice,  misunderstanding and indifference in regard to our work.” As all civil rights movements have shown us, sometimes the ignorance of the public proves to be the hardest obstacle to overcome. In response, Margaret Sanger was avid about publishing articles, pamphlets, and giving lectures.

For example, not everyone understood the need to limit big families. It was preached in Christian churches, which dominated the culture’s popular view, that “children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” Similar verses were used against the fight for Birth Control to prove that the movement was anti-God and anti-morals.

Jean H. Baker’s Biography of Margaret Sanger

Sanger was under no illusion that poor women with big families were always blessed. In Jean H. Baker’s autobiography of Sanger, she talks about how Sanger’s mother “had given birth to eleven children in twenty-two years and suffered seven miscarriages. She had been pregnant eighteen times in thirty years of marriage.” A few years after her last child was born, Sanger’s mother died of tuberculosis.

My mother died at 48,” wrote Sanger in sentences that needed no further explanation to make her point. “My father lived to be 80.’

Despite the toll pregnancy and miscarriages took on women, popular view still held that children were blessings and to prevent one would be to prevent the other. One of the best responses to such a claim comes from Maria Kirstine Dorothea Jensen, known better as Thit Jensen. Jensen was a Danish writer in the early twentieth century who fought for women’s rights and founded an Organization for Sexual Awareness in Denmark. In one of her articles she wrote about a physician who openly bashed the idea of women with the freedom to chose when to have children:

When I first lectured about Birth Control, it happened that a physician for women interfered – I think he was afraid it might spoil his practice, if there were not to be so many sick and half-killed women, when they finished child-bearing in a reasonable time. He had the nerve to go on to my platform and try to take over my audience – of course, he didn’t know me, he talked the most perfect hymn of cheap sentimentality about the poor good mother – the darling mother who gave birth to her sixteenth child and happily took it to her heart and it was wonderful.

And of course, you know an audience; he appealed to their childishness and they applauded him. I could not stand that, exactly at my start, so I got onto the platform and told him just what I happened to know:

‘In your clinic, this very noon, a poor woman died after having borne her ninth child. She had been your patient through several years; you had told her that if she were to bear another child, she would die. You didn’t tell her how to avoid it, you only sent her home to her husband, knowing that the law forbade her not to live with him. She became pregnant, and she died, promptly, as you told her. But…who killed her? You, who had the knowledge, or she who knew nothing. And, tell me please, if she had been a rich woman, belonging to society, and your patient, would she ever have had to die from nine small children? Certainly not, because then she would never have had so many.’

The audience exploded, being poor people most of them.

He never answered a word.

The audience’s opinion changed rather quickly when they heard the truth; women were dying unnecessarily from their excessive pregnancies, particularly women who were poor and didn’t understand their options. Ignorant claims about traditional families and the public’s lack of knowledge kept women like Margaret Sanger and Thit Jensen fighting, lecturing and publishing for as long as they did.

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For full article written by Jensen see:

http://beta.birthcontrol-international.org/items/show/14

For full Alameda County Birth Control League article see:

http://beta.birthcontrol-international.org/items/show/196

More Mapping Margaret Sanger

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Maps, speeches

Sanger traveled by train on her 1916 national tour. (Library of Congress)

We always knew that Margaret Sanger was a busy woman, but now we are beginning to see just how active she was.  We had first started thinking about the idea in 2012, when we started the “Margaret Sanger Slept Here” series of blog posts, which aimed to show the breadth of her travels and highlight some of the more interesting places where she stayed.  Robin Pokorski blogged about a map she created of Margaret Sanger’s New York that highlighted the places she lived, spoke, and worked.

With the help of interns Yvonne Garrett and Tori Sciancalepore, who helped design the project, and Jackie Collens, Kaitlin Hackbarth, Madeline Moran, Allie Strickland, Vidhi Vakharia, and Laura Filion, who continued inputting data, we used Google Fusion tables to create a geographic representations of Sanger’s public appearances. We began by using an existing Microsoft Access database used to track documents in the digital edition. We excluded articles, which had no place associated with them, and focused on speeches, press statements, and interviews. We exported relevant records into a spreadsheet and imported that into a Google Fusion Table.  We added a field for Location, and a URL. Yvonne and Tori went through the speeches and other public statements, adding places to the table when possible. We tried to get specific addresses when possible, but in some cases had to just input a city name. The URL entered matched the item in the Fusion Table to that speech in the digital edition.

A sample of the spreadsheet that underlies the map.

Once all the documents were added, we decided to go back and enter all the events that we knew of, whether or not we had a copy of the speech that was given. We keep an extensive Chronology, also in Microsoft Access, which has almost 5,000 entries, culled from clippings, correspondence and other research. We did not want to dump this database into the Fusion table because it would duplicate the records we already had in the Fusion table, an it has many entries that don’t have a location associated with them. Also, many of our chronology entries just indicate what Sanger was in, but have no other details. So we began entering only those entries that discussed specific events. These come from correspondence and diary entries, as well as discussions of Sanger’s doings in the press, the Birth Control Review, and other journals, and from scrapbooks. This work is still continuing but we are starting to see the results.

We wanted users to be able to distinguish between the speeches that they could read–in the Speeches and Articles Digital Edition–and those that were just map points. We added the field “Pin Color” to the spreadsheet, selecting the ever imaginative green dots for speeches that we have, and red ones for those that we do not.

When a reader clicks on a dot, it opens up a label which provides the title of the speech, the date, the location, and our notes. If we have the speech you can click through to see it.

As it is filling in, the map provides a interesting sense of the range of Sanger’s travels. You can see that her northern-most speech was in Stockholm, while the most southerly was in Singapore.  As you might expect, the United States is liberally dotted with entries, with emphasis on the Northeast and Midwest, where birth control organizing was most advanced. We can see her three-month tour or India, and her groundbreaking tour of Japan, Korea, and China in 1922. We can also see that she never spoke in the Southern Hemisphere.

The breadth of Sanger’s travels. (Click on image to go to the Fusion Map)

What also makes this map special is that it is interactive.  You can zoom in and out, and by using filters, you can determine which entries are mapped.  By focusing in on Manhattan, for example, we see exactly where Sanger spoke in the city.

Here are Sanger’s Manhattan speeches (Click on the image to get to the Fusion Map)

By limiting the map to the dates April through August 1916, we can see her first national speaking tour taking shape.

Sanger traveled to the West Coast and back in 1916. (Click on the image to get to the Fusion Map)

Sanger disembarking in California in 1937. (American Airlines)

As we continue to vicariously travel the globe, adding Margaret Sanger’s travels to the map, we hope that you will find it a useful resource.

If you know of any Sanger speeches in your neighborhood, and they are not on the map– please let us know by sending a clipping or other report to the Project.

Go to the MAP!

 

 

Excavating a Footnote: Unpacking Margaret Sanger’s Views on Charity and the Unfit

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Allen M. Hornbuth, charity, Edwin Black, eugenics, Gregory J. Dober, Judith Lynn Newman

Complete with Comic Sans font sign

Here at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, we’re no strangers to misquotes, misinterpretations, and all sorts of other misinformation about Sanger. It often originates from anti-abortion proponents deliberately attempting to discredit Sanger and, by extension, Planned Parenthood.

Just do a search through Twitter for Margaret Sanger, and you’ll likely find one particularly sloppy Photoshopped picture of her speaking to a group of KKK members. Deliberate misinformation is common–but it is also fairly easy to misunderstand or overly simplify Sanger’s intentions by relying highly interpretive secondary sources.

Recently brought to our attention was a book containing a section on eugenics that mentions Sanger—titled Against Their Will:The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America by Allen M. Hornblum, Judith Lynn Newman, and Gregory J. Dober (2013).  You would not expect to find Margaret Sanger mentioned in this sad history, but she does turn up in the overview of the eugenics movement that opens the book.

Its only coverage is a short, but fairly harsh mention of Sanger that appears to quote her:

Margaret Sanger, the great social activist and birth control proponent, was even more strident in her denunciation of society’s unfit elements, ‘vigorously oppos[ing] charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden’ and arguing that ‘it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help’ so the eugenically fit would face less of a challenge from ‘the unfit.’ She often compared the poor and the great mass of dispossessed to ‘human waste’ and ‘weeds’ needing to be ‘exterminated.’

Now, it’s true that Margaret Sanger believed in eugenics, though she despised the eugenics of the Nazis and other extremists. But I found these quotes unlikely words of Sanger, so I dug through the notes to find the source. Sure enough, the quotes come from a secondary source—Edwin Black’s War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003). Black did read primary sources–chiefly Sanger’s 1922 The Pivot of Civilization, and determined that Sanger was so anti-charity that she encouraged leaving those in need to die.

But in reading Pivot myself, it seems far more likely that Sanger criticized charity for its approach–treating the problem rather than preventing it. Black quoted Sanger, who said that “organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease,” the disease being the “constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents” (Pivot of Civilization, 109). Her purpose here does not seem to be the end of charity towards the poor and mentally ill. But the larger point of the chapter was that it was perhaps more kind to—through the use of birth control—prevent the birth of people who would grow up poor and dependent on the state, rather than offering them meager charity after they were born. Sanger’s views on philanthropy can be summed up neatly:

The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth. (Pivot of Civilization, 116).

As for the ugly terms attributed to Sanger, the story is more complex. For Sanger, the unfit referred to the mentally ill, physically disabled and otherwise “unfit.” The context of her discussion of them as “human waste”  was in terms of the cost to society of supporting those who
could not support themselves.

The term “human weeds” comes from botanist Luther Burbank,

“America . . . is like a garden in which the gardener pays no attention to the weeds. Our criminals are our weeds, and weeds breed fast and are intensely hardy. They must be eliminated. Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce. All over the country to-day we have enormous insane asylums and similar institutions where we nourish the unfit and criminal instead of exterminating them. Nature eliminates the weeds, but we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce.”-Burbank, quoted by Sanger in “Is Race Suicide Possible?” (1925)

In her 1923 article “A Better Race Through Birth Control,” Sanger herself points out the dangers of

The object of civilization is to obtain the highest and most splendid culture of which humanity is capable. But such attainment is unthinkable if we continue to breed from the present race stock that yields us our largest amount of progeny. Some method must be devised to eliminate the degenerate and the defective; for these act constantly to impede progress and ever increasingly drag down the human race.–A Better Race Through Birth Control” (Nov. 1923)

but the method Sanger suggested was birth control:

Give the women of the poorer classes a chance also to limit and control their families, and it will be found that in very many cases the material is equally good. The difference is that, like plants crowded too close together on poor soil, there is no chance to develop and the whole families are left impoverished in mind and body. Give room for each [to] grow and all may become fine and healthy American citizens.–“A Better Race Through Birth Control” (Nov. 1923)

Sanger’s writings were certainly eugenic and not always particularly kind towards those she referred to as “unfit”. However, that she called for the end of philanthropy, thought “it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help”, and was a supporter of “extermination” of the poor and disabled are definitely Black’s interpretation of her work and not quotes from Sanger. The authors of Against Their Will—rather than using Sanger’s words—make assumptions based on a secondary source, one with an interpretation of Sanger that not everyone agrees with. Don’t believe me? I highly encourage you to create your own analysis by skipping the secondary sources, and reading Sanger’s writings for yourself.

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For a more comprehensive look at Sanger’s complicated relationship with eugenics, search the Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger.

The Origins of the Woman Rebel

Tags

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Comstock Law, margaret sanger, sanger, Woman Rebel

The first page of the first issue of Woman Rebel.

Much of my time at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project has been spent thinking about 1914. It was a busy year for Sanger, not least due to her work on the Woman Rebel. Its slogan, “No Gods, No Masters,” first appeared in print, on “eight pages on cheap paper, copied from the French style, mailed first class in the city and expressed outside,” in March of 1914. Sanger defined a woman’s duty:

To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention.

The New York Post Office quickly sent her a letter stating:

Dear Madam: In accordance with the advice from the Assistant Attorney General for the Post Office Department, you are informed that the publication entitled “The Woman Rebel”, for March 1914, is unmailable under the provisions of Section 211 of the Criminal Code as amended by the Act of March 4, 1911.

The letter from the postmaster stating that Woman Rebel was unmailable.

The law prohibiting the mailing of the paper was the Comstock Law, a moral law intended to prevent the mailing of “obscene” material. Since she had mentioned that the Woman Rebel planned to discuss birth control and provide advice in future issues. Sanger commented in her Autobiography that, “To me it was outrageous that information regarding motherhood, which was so generally called sacred, should be classed with pornography.”

Nevertheless, Sanger decided to continue publishing and attempting to mail Woman Rebel, and this led to her indictment. When she learned that she was likely to receive the severest sentence possible if found guilty, she fled the country for England in November, where she remained until October of 1915. The trial was eventually scheduled to begin on January 18, 1916, but was postponed several times for various reasons. Ultimately, the case ended a month later, on February 18, when it was dismissed by the United States District Court of New York.

The story of Woman Rebel is only partially illustrated by the events that occurred after its publication, however. Sanger’s Autobiography provides one window on the start of the paper. She says that the idea came to her on the ship back to New York from Paris on New Year’s Eve, the idea “of a magazine to be called the Woman Rebel, dedicated to the interests of working women.” Sanger was conscious that she had to limit the paper to claims on which she could follow through. One of the primary concerns was, of course, money, but moral support was also an issue. The feminists, led by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, provided neither, but the socialists and trade union organizations turned out to be more helpful in terms of support and subscriptions.

Sanger also told the story of Queen Vashti, wife of King Ahasuerus, which appears in the Book of Esther. Ahasuerus had been showing off all the fine decorations and possessions in his palace, and then commanded his wife to appear. She refused, not wanting to be viewed as a possession like the rest of the king’s riches. He cast her aside and married the meek Esther instead. Sanger said:

Often I had thought of Vashti as the first woman rebel in history… I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.

William Sanger’s letters in February of 1914 to Margaret are another interesting source for the planning stages of Woman Rebel. Unfortunately, her letters to him outlining these early stages of preparing the paper do not survive. In a letter written on February 5, he said,

now dear love its great that you are going to start that paper… Now I think we ought to make the paper have an international character — Im going to work Victor Dave to write a short article and the leading women agitation here you know. I can reach Miss Pankhurst going to try & get her too — You ought to have the England exchanges — that is all the English sufferget radical & Red Papers to keep — touch — I shall write at once to get them & will forward as soon as I receive them… perhaps I can act as your Paris correspondant how often will the paper come out.

William Sanger’s letter from February 14, 1914, using the name Woman Rebel to refer to the project.

William did send the promised foreign papers to his wife a few days later, and also discussed the topic with Victor Dave, who thought that the title (presumably Woman Rebel) was “a good name.” He mentioned that he was still trying to convince Victor Dave to write an article, and would call on Mrs. Pankhurst, if she was in Paris, and try to convince her to write something as well. He also wonders if Margaret has considered “better paper and better printing.”

About a week later, William Sanger provided some extremely detailed advice on the Woman Rebel, which was by this point known by that name:

I am particularly anxious that you get the Exchanges in all the English Radical & Revolutionary papers, that is you to send on the Woman Rebel & they will exchange theirs. This will keep you in touch with the movement in England, the same [?] for France & Germany… I have given the question of the weekly issue of the paper a great deal of thought… the work on getting out a weekly paper now would be too much for you. Why not a semi monthly — this would insure the cooperation of regular correspondents who would be willing to contribute. This will give the paper some class. Especially if the contributors came from England, France, Germany… I would like to see the paper have distinction — if you name is to be associated with it… I will be glad to see it rise than flare up so to speak but a paper that fills a want & fills it well. Perhaps a monthly with good illustrations good paper something on the order of The Forerunner.

It does seem as though William hoped to get some of his own “good illustrations” published in his wife’s paper! He certainly had quite a catalog of opinions about the paper; Margaret Sanger expressed very different ideas in her Autobiography:

I was solely responsible for the magazine financially, legally, and morally; I was editor, manager, circulation department, bookkeeper, and I paid the printer’s bill.

For more information, see Margaret Sanger’s Autobiography, especially chapter nine, “The Woman Rebel.” Also see William Sanger’s letters to Margaret Sanger, February 5, 8, 14, and 14, 1914.