Esther Katz Wins the Lyman H. Butterfield Award!

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Esther Katz

At the recent annual meeting of the Association for Documentary Editing and Society for Textual Scholarship, held in Lincoln, Nebraska, Sanger Project Editor and Director Esther Katz was awarded the Lyman H. Butterfield Award, given annually by the Association since 1985 “to an individual, project, or institution for recent contributions in the areas of documentary publication, teaching, and service.”

The award was presented last month by Elaine W. Pascu, last year’s recipient, On June 19, 2015. Her comments follow:

Tonight’s recipient is a very experienced practitioner of documentary editing, with a career beginning in 1975. Ten years later, she established one of the principle projects in documenting women’s history. She collected, published, and indexed 83 reels of microfilm on her internationally prominent figure.The fourth and final volume of the selected Edition, now at the press, highlights her subject’s international presence.

She has also been a leader in digital editions taking part in the Model Editions Partnership in the 1990s. She is now at work on a Digital edition of her controversial figures speeches and articles from 1911 to 1959 that will be freely available to the public.

She is a leader in mentoring and training new professionals in the field. She has taught at the Institute for Editing Historical Documents on multiple occasions and has for many years taught a graduate course in Archival Management and Historical Editing. A recent course focused on Digital Historical Editions. The project has also offered summer internships for undergraduates.

She is a past president of ADE and has served on various committees and as a member of the ADE Council.

As acknowledged in one letter of support, few have had to face the kind of relentless attacks on their subject that she has. She had made a lasting and profound contribution “in helping to undermine historical misinformation and distortion.”  With her work, she is “setting a foundation of historical accuracy and integrity in an area beset by myth and manipulation.” “Through an avid pursuit and presentation of the documentary record from archives and private collections around the world and through impeccable scholarship she is ‘setting the record straight.’”

I am proud to announce that for enhancing historical understanding through superb editorial scholarship and for meritorious service to the Association for Documentary Editing , the recipient of this year’s Lyman H. Butterfield Award is the Editor and Director of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Esther Katz.

The award is granted in memory of Lyman Henry Butterfield, whose editing prestigious career included contributions to The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, the editing of the Adams Family Papers, and publishing The Letters of Benjamin Rush.

 

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The Sanger Paper Project Celebrates Women’s History Month

We are pleased to announce that the Margaret Sanger Papers Project’s website has been primped and updated just in time for Women’s History Month! Thanks to the hard work of our former editorial assistant Angela Wu (NYU 2013), and a University of Michigan intern, Sabarish Raghupathy, the site has a new look that we hope will take us through to the project’s completion. We invite you to explore the site and let us know how you like it.

This March is a very special Women’s History Month, as it also marks the 100th anniversary of the birth control movement. Margaret Sanger’s Woman Rebel, a fiery socialist and feminist journal covered many topics, but is best known for coining the phrase “birth control” and advocating for legalizing contraception. In the first issue Sanger laid out the Woman Rebel’s aims, including:

It will also be the aim of the WOMAN REBEL to advocate the prevention of conception and to impart such knowledge in the columns of this paper. (“The Aim,” Mar. 1914, p. 1)

Margaret Sanger also asked a question still pertinent today in “The Prevention of Conception,” also included in the first issue:

Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception?

Sanger went on to explain why she was fighting for the working-class woman to get this information, claiming:

The women of the upper middle-class have all available knowledge and implements to prevent conception. The woman of the lower-middle class is struggling for this knowledge. She tries various methods of prevention, and after a few years of experience plus medical advice succeeds in discovering some method, suitable to her individual self. The woman of the people is the only one left in ignorance of this information.

The Woman Rebel was just the beginning of Sanger’s life-long campaign to make birth control available to every woman.  One hundred years after the Woman Rebel screeched its way into the public consciousness, the victories that Margaret Sanger fought so hard for are being challenged once again.

We see it most in a war over how Margaret Sanger should be portrayed, with ahistorical treatments commonly found on blogs and other websites. The Sanger Project’s goal is to make her own words accessible to the broadest possible audience. Margaret Sanger was a complex historical figure, and whether you like or loathe her, her efforts shaped the 20th century by empowering women to  take control of their reproductive lives and to devise a plan to fit childbearing in along with other life goals.

What better way is there than to spend Women’s History Month learning about a true Woman Rebel, Margaret Sanger? Our first three volumes are out and available.

And if you have the means, please consider supporting the work of the Margaret Sanger Papers.  We are working to finish up Volume 4, and are mounting and proofreading over 1,000 texts to the Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger.  This digital archive is free to the public and contains one copy of all extant Sanger speeches and short-form publications.

Have a Happy Women’s History Month– and don’t feel the need to stop celebrating when April rolls around!

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For the complete text of the 100 year old “The Aim” and “The Prevention of Conception,” see our digital edition.

Birth Control Breaks into the South

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birth control, margaret sanger, north carolina, sanger, south

Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger.

One of the most contentious questions surrounding Margaret Sanger is whether or not she was racist, and it sometimes seems that people only know who she is because of claims that she was a racist/Nazi/eugenicist. It is a question that we here at the Sanger Papers have addressed repeatedly on this blog (that’s three separate links, and here’s a few more, including an analysis of a recent scholarly article also explaining that Margaret Sanger was not a Nazi racist).

Sanger’s first foray into the South provides another perspective on her views of race, particularly as a counterpoint to the speech that she gave to a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. That speech, which Sanger herself called “one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing,” not least because “I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria,” is frequently pointed to by those who would continue to insist that Sanger was a racist who advocated sterilization for African American women. Unfortunately, no transcript for the speech survives.

Elizabeth City, North Carolina, was a shipping center that also manufactured lumber and cotton. In 1919, African Americans made up approximately 37% of the city’s population. William Oscar Saunders, the editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, was responsible for organizing the first speech, the only one that Sanger expected to give, was noted for his opposition to both racism and antisemitism, as well as his support for birth control. It seems unlikely that he would have invited Sanger to speak on birth control had he felt that she was a racist.

For the speech that Sanger gave on November 2, 1919, a much better record survives in the form of an article written by Sanger — and it is both telling and fascinating. The planned lecture, entitled “Woman’s Place in the Twentieth Century,” was given to about eight hundred people. The Elizabeth City Independent reported that it was “the first public meeting for the discussion of birth control ever held in the south.” Considering this, Sanger was necessarily nervous about how she and her message would be received:

I had the feeling that it would be hard to break the ice for the birth control movement in a city in which not even a suffragist had delivered a public lecture.

Fortunately, Sanger was pleasantly surprised; the experience

was in every way a gratifying surprise to me… To my delight…I found that people, both white and black, in Elizabeth City, N.C., were so eager to know about birth control that every possible moment of my time was given to speaking.

This single scheduled lecture proved such a success that a whole series of unplanned talks followed. First, immediately following the lecture, Sanger addressed a group of women only, “of all classes and conditions,” followed by a question-and-answer session of elderly women who were so appreciative that the birth control movement would prevent their daughters from suffering what they had suffered in having such large families.

That evening, Sanger gave “a public address for negroes in a negro church [Corner Stone Baptist Church]…followed the next day by a short talk on ‘Education’ at the negro normal school, and in the afternoon a lecture for negro women only on methods of birth control.” As a result of all of these lectures, a group formed a committee to begin the process of establishing a birth control clinic for the mill workers. All this happened, as Sanger recalled, “between noon on Sunday and three o’clock Monday afternoon.”

For a city that had not even had anyone give a public talk about voting rights for women, it is amazing that Sanger was able to speak to so many people, from all different walks of life. She noted that

Never have I met with more sympathy, more serious attention, more complete understanding than in my addresses to the white and black people of this Southern mill town. Each element in the audience seemed to look at the question from its own standpoint. All in all, these audiences were a striking demonstration of birth control’s universal message of freedom and betterment… If Elizabeth City is an index of the South, it is ready, waiting, crying for the message of birth control.

Motherhood in Bondage: The Ultimate Horror Story

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birth control, Children, halloween, margaret sanger, Motherhood, Motherhood in Bondage

Deformity. Infection. Torture. Desperation.

Sounds like the tag line to a new gore-filled horror flick, right? Well, maybe. But in this case, I’m talking about the content of Margaret Sanger’s Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of 470 letters received from women (and even some men!) struggling with the burden of childbirth. At a glance, that doesn’t sound too scary, but these texts contain more nightmare material than the entire Friday the 13^th series combined.

In honor of its original October 1928 publication, I figured I’d take time this month to read Sanger’s third book release.  I was shocked by how gripping it was! Throughout the 1920’s, Sanger received over 250,000 letters filled with questions and pleas for help from families without access to proper birth control.  Motherhood is a compilation of only a fraction of these letters, showcasing some of the most horrible scenarios imaginable. Locations are unknown, and each letter is kept anonymous, creating a feeling that “this could be anyone.” Watch out, Halloween: your demons and ghosts are no match for the horror found within reality.

The letters are grouped into sixteen chapters based on theme.  Some cover particular age and income groups, while others contain stories of failed attempts at contraception. With chapter titles like “The Struggle of the Unfit” and “The Trap of Maternity,” Sanger means to instill fear. Yet these headings couldn’t prepare me for the misfortune encountered by their numerous authors as they embarked on “a sort of Dantesque pilgrimage through the Inferno of motherhood.” [1]

The first letter of the first chapter, aptly titled “Girl Mothers,” immediately sets the tone of the book. “One month before my thirteenth birthday,” the letter reads, “I became the mother of my first child, and now at the age of thirty I am the mother of eleven children, ten of them living, the youngest now seven years old” [2] The thought of bearing the weight of motherhood at such an age is chilling, and this woman was forced to spend the rest of her young life rearing more children. This quote also suggests child death, a recurring theme in the life of these frequent mothers. I soon learned that many of the women featured in this anthology boasted numbers of children in the double digits, their quality of life declining with each birth.

However, the horror isn’t just in numbers, whether it be age or number of children. Many of the women lament of looking “more dead than alive,” while others complain of hemorrhaging and the development of tumors after multiple childbirths. And the mothers were not the only ones to suffer! A few correspondents share their stories of birth defection, one writing that her daughter was born with three legs and three arms. A living image of horror.

One particularly chilling chapter of the book is “Voices of the Children,” where daughters of large, unhappy homes are doomed to repeat their mothers’ suffering. One unpunctuated and painful quote from letter twelve reads,

When he came back I had three more miscarriages, and two years ago I gave birth to a little girl and four months ago to another little girl and I can’t stand it any longer for I am all dragged out and between washing and sewing and the housework and looking after the children, I have no pleasures. [3]

Occasionally, these women would perform self-abortion, employing drugs or unsterile household items. This doesn’t sound too far off from the plot of a new Saw movie. Most of the authors featured in this compilation came from poverty, and put their own lives in danger just to avoid bringing more children into the world. In a final chapter, Sanger emphasizes the problem with unsympathetic doctors giving no true advice on preventing future pregnancies to suffering mothers.

Each new baby is less welcome than the last. Its chances of surviving the perils of infancy are correspondingly lessened. As the children grow older, the expenses of the family increase and the burden of debt becomes heavier and heavier. [4]

The most terrifying aspect of these letters is the feeling of guilt portrayed by each mother. Though they ask what can be done to prevent more children, they all feel a crushing sense of responsibility towards their inability to provide for their children. The women feel themselves to be “selfish” and “failures,” although their inability to provide is upsetting, they are blaming themselves for things that are to a large degree out of their control.

Did Sanger choose these letters to exploit only extreme scenarios?  Were there ways for these women to avoid their misfortune? Both are entirely possible. This does not distract from its message. Although the book was not initially successful, it has proved to be an effective argument for the need for accessible contraception. The book does tend to get a bit repetitive, but this only pushes the demand for sympathy further.   As one letter emphasizes,

Birth Control is the salvation of the poor and as the working man and his family is in the majority, that makes for a better country to live in. [5]

In a sense, Motherhood in Bondage functions like a book of scary stories – invoking emotions of fear, disgust, and despair. If nothing else, it reads as a cautionary tale about taking birth control for granted.

This book certainly made a lasting impression on me, just in time for the holiday devoted to treachery. If you’re still in need of a last minute Halloween costume, fret not! Pick up a copy of Motherhood in Bondage… I’m sure it will inspire more than a few ideas.

1. Sanger, Margaret. Motherhood in Bondage. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000, 411.
2. Ibid., 6.
3. Ibid.,191.
4. Ibid., 25.
5. Ibid., 57.

Mapping Margaret Sanger

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birth control, Brooklyn, Brownsville, Carnegie Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Google Maps, Mapping, Maps, margaret sanger, New York, New York City, sanger

I’m not a New Yorker. I’d never even visited New York City before beginning my internship here in May. (Don’t worry, I see why everyone loves it so much, and I’m certain that I’ll be back in the not-too-distant future!) The subway system confused me for the first week or so, but I was grateful that the grid layout of the streets made sense. Slowly, I’ve figured out how to get from Point A to Point B with minimal hassle.

The Google Map of Sanger in New York City.

Walking home one day from my internship, I wondered how Sanger experienced New York. She spent some of the most important years of her career living in this city, after all, when she wasn’t traveling to spread her message. As soon as I began plotting relevant locations on a map, I realized that Sanger ranged far and wide across New York City in her quest for legal, accessible birth control. The same woman who made public appearances and gave lectures at such places as Carnegie Hall, The Plaza, and the Waldorf-Astoria sought out the bleakest neighborhood of Brooklyn to open her first birth control clinic. She finally settled on Brownsville, which she described in her Autobiography as

particularly dingy and squalid. Block after block, street after street, as far as we could see in every direction stretched the same endless lines of cramped, unpainted houses that crouched together as though for warmth, bursting with excess of wretched humanity.

I tried to include as many places as possible where Sanger lived or worked, the offices of organizations that she was associated with, and locations where she gave important speeches. I also made sure to include the important New York City landmarks — Carnegie Hall, The Plaza, the Waldorf-Astoria, and others — where Sanger gave speeches or held meetings. However, I do not pretend that this is a complete listing of every address we know of that Sanger was associated with! I have included 49 addresses.

Apart from the obvious places of interest, such as Sanger’s residences and the Brownsville clinic, a few places with which Sanger was associated were particularly interesting to me. One of these, the Gamut Club, located at 69 W. 46th Street, was founded in 1913 by actress and feminist Mary Shaw. The club held weekly Tuesday dinner meetings with guest speakers. Sanger spoke in February 1920 and was introduced by Mary Shaw; she spoke again on March 26, 1924, together with Dorothy Bocker, on the question of “Should All Women Be Mothers?” One of the primary activities of the Gamut Club was its production and sponsorship of plays dealing with feminist topics, including both original short plays by Mary Shaw, such as the radical “Parrot Cage,” as well as popular plays that were centered on women, like George Bernard Shaw’s controversial play Mrs. Warren’s Profession.

Several important events for Sanger took place at the American Woman’s Association club house, at 353 W. 57th Street. The American Woman’s Association was founded in 1921 by Anne Morgan, daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan. Miss Morgan called the AWA ”a training school for leadership, a mental exchange” where women ”can hear what other women are doing.” The cornerstone of the club house, on 57th Street, was laid in 1928, and the building was completed in 1929. It had 1,250 rooms for women, in addition to a swimming pool, gym, meeting rooms, a restaurant, music rooms, and terraces. In 1941, bankruptcy forced the club house to close; the building was converted into the Henry Hudson Hotel, which rented rooms to both men and women. The AWA passed out of existence by 1980. On November 12, 1931, the organization awarded Sanger its Medal of Achievement; Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the event. Less than a year later, on April 20, 1932, the AWA held a testimonial dinner in Sanger’s honor, at which H. G. Wells called her “the greatest revolutionary bacteriologist the world has ever known.”

Margaret Sanger Square, at the corner of Mott and Bleecker Streets.

There are a few options for accessing this information. First, I created a map using Google Maps. This shows each location and, if you click on a blue place-marker, a short blurb about what happened there. A Google Doc spreadsheet provides the address, year(s), what type of event took place there, and the same short blurb. This would be useful to look at just Sanger’s residences or just places she gave lectures. I also used MyHistro to create a timeline; this website allowed me to add images (although unfortunately not all events have images) and allows you to view the events in chronological order.

You can view the map here, the Google Doc spreadsheet here, and the timeline at MyHistro here. I’d welcome and appreciate any feedback or contributions!

For more information on the Gamut Club, see P. Cobrin, From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway: The Emergence of Women on the New York Stage, 1880-1927 (Associated University Presses, 2009), pp. 62-92. For more on the American Woman’s Association club house, see C. Gray, “Streetscapes/The Henry Hudson Hotel, 353 W. 57th Street; From Women’s Clubhouse to WNET to $75 a Night,” New York Times, Jan. 4, 1998.