Who’s who at the Fifth International Conference on Planned Parenthood?

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IPPF, Japan

A few years ago, we obtained scans of a fascinating set of photographs from the family of Abraham Stone. He was  the director of the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau, a vice president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and a close friend of Margaret Sanger. Among the rare images in the collection are photos taken at the Fifth International Planned Parenthood Conference, held October 24-29, 1955 in Tokyo, Japan. Unfortunately, the photos were not captioned, and while we can identify a few of the activists, we do not know who many of them are.

Margaret Sanger is featured in many of the photographs, along with Shidzue Ishimoto Kato, the best-known Japanese birth control activist who Sanger first met in 1922. Accompanying Sanger in many photographs are Dorothy Hamilton Brush and Abraham Stone. Brush was a Cleveland birth control activist and member of the board of the Brush Foundation, and served as the editor of the IPPF’s newsletter.

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Some of the prominent Japanese at the meeting were Hideki Kawasaki, the Japanese Minister of Welfare, and honorary president of the meeting; Dr. Juitsu Kitaoka, who headed the Family Planning Federation of Japan and served as the Secretary-General of the meeting. Shidzue Kato chaired the Japanese Planning Committee, which also included Dr. Yoshio Koya and Dr. Kageyas W. Amano. Dr. Fumiko Amano served as the official hostess.

The conference proceedings also mention the participation of the Family Planning Federation of Japan, who might also have appeared in the photographs. In addition to those already mentioned, others include its president, Dr. Yasumaro Shimojo, Dr. Kan Majima, executive director, Mr. Minoru Tachi, Mr. Kenzo Ikeda, Dr. Masako Fukuda, Dr. Kunizo Hukuda, Dr. Haruo Mizushima, Dr. Ayanori Okasaki, Dr. Shozo Toda, Dr. Masayoshi Yamaguchi, Dr. Takuma Terao, and Mr. Shinichi Mihara.

The Fifth International Conference on Planned Parenthood covered issues including world population problems, and in relation to food shortages, programs for promoting family planning, a symposium on current contraceptive methods, and a session on new biological methods for controlling fertility. This last session included early research by Dr. Gregory Pincus, who a few years later, released the first birth control pill. The conference was well attended and provided a publicity boost in Japan to birth control activists working there.

If you can identify any of the people in the slideshow, please do so in the comments. Thanks!

Birth of a Movement: the Case of Sadie Sachs

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Autobiograpy, Lower East Side, margaret sanger, Sadie Sacks

Grand Street tenements in 1938 (New York City Tenement House Department NYPL)

One of the most dramatic tales from Sanger’s Autobiography  happened one hundred years ago this month.

Then one stifling mid-July day of 1912 I was summoned to a Grand Street tenement. My patient was a small, slight Russian Jewess, about twenty-eight years old, of the special cast of features to which suffering lends a madonna-like expression. The cramped three-room apartment was in a sorry state of turmoil. Jake Sachs, a truck driver scarcely older than his wife, had come home to find the three children crying and her unconscious from the effects of a self-induced abortion. He had called the nearest doctor, who in turn had sent for me. Jake’s earnings were trifling, and most of them had gone to keep the none-too-strong children clean and properly fed. But his wife’s ingenuity has helped them to save a little, and this he was glad to spend on a nurse rather than have her go to a hospital.

Sanger and the doctor worked for three weeks to fight the septicemia Mrs. Sachs suffered under. Sanger noted that Jake Sachs was kind and thoughtful, and clearly loved his wife and children. When they were about to leave, Sanger reported that “as I was preparing to leave the fragile patient to take up her difficult life once more, she finally voiced her fears, ‘Another baby will finish me, I suppose?’ The doctor admitted the possibility, and noted that she must not try “any more such capers,” or she would die.

“I know, doctor,” she replied timidly, “but,” and she hesitated as though it took all her courage to say it, “what can I do to prevent it?”

The doctor was a kindly man, and he had worked hard to save her, bur such incidents had become so familiar to him that he has long since lost whatever delicacy he might once have had. He laughed good-naturedly. “You want to have your cake and eat it too, do you? Well, it can’t be done.” Then picking up his hat and bag to depart he said, “Tell Jake to sleep on the roof.”

I glanced quickly at Mrs. Sachs. Even through my sudden tears I could see stamped on her face an expression of absolute despair. We simply looked at each other, saying no word until the door had closed behind the doctor. Then she lifted her thin, blue-veined hands and clasped them beseechingly. “He can’t understand. He’s only a man. But you do, don’t you? Please tell me the secret, and I’ll never breathe it to a soul. Please!“

Lower East Side tenement conditions in 1910. (Lewis W. Hine/NYPl)

In her memoir, Sanger insisted that she did not know what to tell Sachs, and that in her ignorance she could offer no help.  Three months later, the telephone rang and once again Jake Sachs begged her to come to see to his wife.  But this time it was different. Sadie Sachs was comatose and died within ten minutes. Sanger walked the city streets, trying but failing to get the images out of her head, images of the poor, the sick, the hungry and those that died. She stayed awake until dawn, and

It was the dawn of a new day in my life also. The doubt and questioning, the experimenting and trying were now to be put behind me. I knew I could not go back merely to keeping people alive. I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the root of the evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were vast as the sky.

Were Jake and Sadie Sachs real people? Did Sanger change their names in order to protect their privacy? Did the story really happen as Sanger wrote it, or was it fiction or a conglomeration of experiences she encountered in her years as a visiting nurse in the Lower East Side? There is no way to be sure.

What is certain is that Sanger was late in telling the story, especially if it was such a pivotal experience in her life. The first appearance of the story came in 1916, during Sanger’s cross-country speaking tour. In “Woman and Birth Control,” one of her stump speeches, she related the story, noting the Grand Street address but leaving out the names. She indicated that it had happened “three years ago,” in 1913, rather than in 1912. In her 1931 autobiography, My Fight for Birth Control, Sanger spelled the family name Sacks, rather than Sachs, but provided more information about the family. Jake was 32 years old, and their children were ages 5, 3, and 1.

We could not locate the Sachs family in the 1910 census, on Grand Street or anywhere else in Manhattan. But we did locate Jacob and Sarah Sacks, who in 1910 lived on 105 Attorney Street in the Lower East Side, only a few blocks from Grand Street. Both were from Russia, they had three children, Joseph (5), Harry (3), and Dora, who was one and a half. The family does not appear in the 1920 census, with or without Sadie.

Who’s who at the Brownsville birth control clinic trial?

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Brownsville clinic, identify, photographs, trials

This iconic photo shown above features Margaret Sanger, surrounded by colleagues and supporters, emerging from the Brooklyn Court of Special Sessions during the Brownsville Clinic trials of Margaret Sanger, Fania Mindell and Ethel Higgins Byrne on January 7, 1917. The trial received widespread media attention as it heard arguments about the legality of the first birth control clinic ever opened in America.  The clinic, which Margaret Sanger opened at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, was raided and closed after being open only nine days. Featured in this photo along with Sanger are some of the progressive women of the era.

We have been only able to identify a few of the people pictured. Can you help us identify the rest? Please leave suggestions in the comment section below!

Directly behind Sanger (#3) at the edge of the photo, Fania Mindell (#1) stares into the camera. Mindell was a recent Jewish Russian immigrant who was very involved in the Brownsville Clinic and was arrested along with Sanger Oct. 16, 1916 for distributing “obscene literature” that informed women about contraception. The conviction was reversed on appeal. A publication about her husband, author and actor Ralph Roeder, would describe Mindell as having “more energy and vehemence and animation than any four people put together.”

In the middle of the photograph surrounded by her children (#7,12-15), Rose Halpern (#8), holds a sixteen-month old baby. A Lithuanian immigrant, she was a Brownsville resident and early patient at the clinic who organized other mothers to come out in a show of support for Sanger and her colleagues. According to a New York Times article covering the trial, “There was also a poorly clad woman with six children ranging in age from sixteen months to ten years, who said she was Mrs. Rose Halpern of 375 Bradford Street, Brooklyn, and that she had come as a “demonstration” of the need of information on birth control among the poor. Her husband was a garment worker and made only $17 a week to support this large family, she said.”

The woman standing behind Rose Halpern with her eyes closed under her hat is probably Ethel Byrne (#16), Sanger’s sister, who was also arrested in the Brownsville Clinic and later imprisoned in Blackwell’s Island workhouse. Following the example of the English suffragettes, she went on a hunger strike, fasting for five days before being force-fed through a tube by the prison staff. She was released from prison after eleven days and granted pardon after Sanger negotiated with New York governor Charles Whitman.

The woman standing in the middle of the crowd facing Sanger with flowers on her hat is Bella Zilberman (#6) of 919 Avenue O, Brooklyn, a social activist, peace advocate, and supporter of Sanger. A New York Tribune piece from the trial mentions her criticizing the judges decision to jail Sanger and her colleagues, and supporting Sanger’s theories about family limitation.

We have found another version of this image online at www.corbisimages.com that shows even more spectators.

Can you help us figure out who any of the others are? Do you recognize any of the faces?
[A hint: According to a New York Tribune article, the group of women who escorted Sanger included: Gertrude Minturn (Mrs. Amos) Pinchot, Marion B. (Mrs. Frank) Cothren, Charlotte Wyeth (Mrs. Louis) Delafield, Martha Bensley (Mrs. Robert) Bruere, Rose Pastor (Mrs. J.G.) Stokes, Jane (Mrs. Ira) Eastman, Mrs. John H. Williams, Miss Jessie Ashely, Miss Elizabeth McCalmont, Hannah Dunlop (Mrs. William L.) Colt, Mrs. Nora Blatch De Forest, and Miss Helen Todd.]

For more information, check out more images from this day at www.corbisphotos.com.

“Why Don’t They”: Sanger’s Suggestion to Collier’s Magazine

Sometimes while searching through the Sanger Papers, or any archive for that matter, you find something that makes you laugh out loud. Without context, certain documents just seem absurd! For example, take the following letter that we found:

October 25, 1956

Collier’s Magazine

Dear Sirs,

“Why Don’t They” make plates of materials that can be eaten like ice cream cones instead of bread. It would save washing plates and could be non-fattening.

Sincerely,

Margaret S. Slee

When we found this letter we could make neither heads nor tails of it! We had a good laugh at old Mrs. Sanger’s expense, imagining her dictating her idea to a confused but obedient secretary. It is telling that she signed her name as Margaret Slee, her married name which she used primarily for private affairs. Clearly these ice cream cones plates were not to be associated with the birth control movement!

With a little bit of internet research, we were able to shed light on the mystery. From 1888 to 1956 Collier’s Magazine ran a feature called “Why Don’t They” where readers mailed in their suggestions for improvements and technological inventions they would like to see created. Some other notable suggestions included:

EQUIP typewriters with a key that, when depressed, automatically underscores as you type? This would save the typist the time and energy it takes to backspace and undersscore. —Shirley Shupe, Ogden, Utah.

HAVE a master lock on the car driver ‘s door which will lock the other doors too? This will prevent children from unlocking doors from the inside, and make it easier to lock up the automobile when leaving.—Mrs. David Hagerman, Whitney Point, N.Y.

MANUFACTURE cigarettes which would produce various colors of smoke when lighted—just to break the monotony?— Fredric A. Honold, Manitowoc, Wis.

Some of these ideas predicted developments, such as the underscore key and the master lock, that we enjoy today. Can you imagine living without such conveniences? Colored cigarette smoke remains wishful thinking.

Some ideas, like Sanger’s ice cream cone plates, never made it into the magazine. But that doesn’t mean that they cannot be realized. We found that Italian entrepreneur Tiziano Vicentini recently invented edible plates!  In addition to being slightly absurd, this archival find suggests what an playful imagination Margaret Sanger had, even in the last decade of her life.

Pants on Fire!

Tags

factchecking, Herman Cain, Racism

PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times website designed to tell truth from lies in always rancorous American politics, tackled the by now familiar accusation that Margaret Sanger sought to exterminate African-Americans.  They investigated the claim made by Georgia-based Republican presidential aspirant Herman Cain in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation:

“When Margaret Sanger – check my history – started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.”

Poltifact did check–turning to ” scholarship, Cain’s camp, anti-abortion groups,  Sanger’s biographer, and multiple experts on Cain’s claim,” and awarded Cain their lowest ranking: “Pants on Fire!” Writer and researcher Willoughby Mariano noted:

Sanger welcomed some of the movement’s more notorious leaders onto the board of a predecessor to Planned Parenthood. She also endorsed paying pensions to women of low intelligence who agreed to be sterilized.

But we found no evidence that Sanger advocated – privately or publicly – for anything even resembling the “genocide” of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior.

Every academic PolitiFact Georgia consulted said that Cain’s claim is wrong.

and:

For Sanger to launch a genocidal plot behind their backs and leave no true evidence in her numerous writings would require powers just shy of witchcraft.

Really, calling the Negro Project a genocidal plot defies common sense. Why would Sanger try to destroy a race of people by giving them access to the very thing she thought could make life better?

Planned Parenthood’s early objective was not to “help kill black babies before they came into the world.”

Sanger failed to rise above the ethnic and racial paternalism of her time, but that’s a far cry from being genocidal.

Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card. We rate it Pants on Fire.

For the complete post, see http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2011/apr/08/herman-cain/cain-claims-planned-parenthood-founded-planned-gen/