National Women’s History Museum – soon to be a reality?

On May 7, the House or Representative passed HR 863 to establish a bipartisan commission on the creation of the first national women’s history museum by a vote of 383:33. But the project is mired in controversy as some Conservative pundits seem to have made the idea of a woman’s history museum a referendum on Margaret Sanger and the reproductive rights movement.  Additional critiques have called the museum’s content biased and the argued that it should not receive federal funding.

The bipartisan bill was co-sponsored by Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and does not discuss the content of the potential museum nor does it authorize federal funding. The bill simply establishes a bipartisan commission to study the possible creation of a privately funded museum in Washington, DC. The commission would have eighteen months to submit recommendations to Congress after which the passage of a second bill would be needed in order to move forward with the project.

A handful of Conservative pundits have suggested that the proposed museum has an “overwhelming bias” focused on the Left, particularly objecting to the inclusion of Margaret Sanger and her ground-breaking work in support of reproductive rights and birth control. Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-MN) opposed the museum because:

I believe ultimately this museum — that will be built on the National Mall on federal land — will enshrine the radical feminist movement that stands against the pro-life movement, the pro-family movement and the pro-traditional marriage movement,

and Penny Nance, the president and CEO of Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, echoed Bachman’s opposition, arguing:

Although history is black and white, the exhibits will be determined by human beings with biases. So far, this museum project, via its attached website and board, has clearly reflected the views of women on the left while ignoring the other half of American women

 

As historians, if there is one thing we know, it is that history, as long as it involves human beings, will never be “black and white.” Bias can be a real problem, however, even a cursory review of the website of the nonprofit group currently raising funds for the proposed museum makes it clear that this is not the case. The site includes a balanced representation of many kinds of women including online exhibits on Motherhood, Women in Sports, Women in the Military, Women in Early Film, the Progressive Movement and several other categories providing basic information for the general public and students and educators on the role of women in American history and daily life. Rather than being featured prominently, we found only three references to Sanger–a biographical entry, a mention of her name on Katharine Dexter McCormick’s page, and in a page on the birth control movement that appears in an online exhibit on Women in the Progressive Era.

The time for a National Women’s History Museum is long overdue. That Margaret Sanger should be featured is without question. We can only hope that historical significance, not politics will be the driving force behind the inclusion of people, events, and movements as the museum goes forward.

For more information:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/07/michele-bachmann-womens-history-museum_n_5283194.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/women-museum-american-story-article-1.1786673

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Address at the Hotel Brevoort, January 17, 1916

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

The complete Hotel Brevoort Speech:

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

New York Times on the Hotel Brevoort Speech:

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

History of the Hotel Brevoort:

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

Happy Fourth of July: Sanger Speaks on Glasgow Green

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Glasgow, Guy Aldred, Harold Cox, margaret sanger, Marie Stopes, Married Love, sanger

The Fourth of July calls to mind fireworks, apple pie, cookouts, and the stars and stripes flying everywhere. It hardly makes us think of rallies and lectures, but on July 4, 1920, Margaret Sanger found herself in Glasgow, Scotland, speaking to a mass rally of shipyard workers on Glasgow Green, and later that night to a socialist group.

Marie Stopes in her laboratory, 1904.

Sanger began her visit in London, delivering a series of lectures. She noted in her Autobiography that the Neo-Malthusian League had invited her to lecture there because they had few lecturers of their own who could speak to an audience of women. Sanger also noted that, since her exile to England in 1915 after she was indicted for Woman Rebel, public opinion in Britain on birth control had improved. Marie Stopes, a paleontologist, had discussed her book, Married Love, with Sanger in 1915; the book dealt with how knowledge about birth control affected marital happiness and success. First published in 1918 and dedicated “to young husbands and all those who are betrothed in love,” the book gained a fairly wide circulation in the post-World War I years. Sanger also noted that Harold Cox, a Liberal MP, had pointed out that the groups who most loudly condemned birth control, especially doctors and Anglican clergymen, had some of the lowest birth rates in the country. As a result of this raised awareness of and desire for birth control, Sanger was also able to speak in Brighton and Cambridge.

Glasgow Green today.

Guy Aldred (1886-1963), a socialist and communist printer, had met Sanger in 1914, and he arranged a three-week tour in Scotland. It began on July 4, on Glasgow Green, where Sanger spoke to “nearly two thousand shipyard workers in caps and baggy corduroys” who “stood close together listening in utter, dead stillness without cough or whisper.”

Later that evening, Sanger spoke to a gathered group of socialists with Aldred acting as chairman. One unnamed “old-timer” said that he had been attending Sunday night lectures regularly for over a decade, but this was the first time that he had convinced his wife to attend with him; he was not the only one to do so:

the women have crowded the men out of this hall.

Sanger in 1920.

Sanger recognized that part of the reason behind the high attendance rate was the socialists’ readiness “to fight the ancient battle of Marx against Malthus,” since Marx thought that a family with fewer children was less likely to be concerned about the revolution than one with many children to feed and support. Sanger says that she combated this view by knowing that socialists had the freedom of women as a part of their platform, and by pointing out that women could have the sort of freedom they desired right here and now through birth control.

In fact, a few months earlier, on May 16, Sanger had an article published in Lloyd’s Sunday News called “Women Enslaved by Maternity,” which discussed the benefits of birth control for the working class in Britain. While the second part of the article dealt with the health benefits, the first argument that Sanger presented for making birth control a national issue in Britain was an economic one.

Organised labour is very strong in Britain, and has a programme which should achieve success if birth control is included in its scope. But the labour movement cannot possibly attain the state of society which it is aiming at while those within it continue to bring hordes of human beings into the world which no system that man has so far devised can assimilate. On the other hand, if the workers will begin at once to bring forth only those children which are wanted by the women and can be maintained by the father’s labour, the working class of this country may realise their dreams of a better state of society within a generation, and be the first among the nation to attain their goal.

A few days later, on July 7th, Sanger wrote to Juliet Barrett Rublee, a close friend and fellow birth control advocate. Although Sanger doesn’t specifically discuss the July 4 meetings, she mentions that

meetings here overcrowded oh Juliet never was there such a cause — Poor pale faced wretched wives — men beat them they cringe before their blows but pick up the baby — dirty, & illkempt & return to serve him. ‘It’s the biby I’m thinking of’ She says to explain why she has to endure his blows–

The remainder of Sanger’s trip took her to Dunfermline and the surrounding area, before she traveled on to Ireland to research her own genealogy, and then to Germany to research contraception methods being practiced there.

For more on Sanger’s 1920 trip to Europe, see her Autobiography. For the benefits of birth control for the British working class, see MS, “Women Enslaved by Maternity,” Lloyd’s Sunday News, London, May 16, 1920.

Unerasing Women from History: the Global Wikipedia Write-In

Left to Right: Lucien March, F. A. E. Crew, C. C. Little, E. F. Zinn, H.P. Fairchild, C. Gini, Sir Bernard Mallet, J. S. Huxley, R. Pearl, A. M. Carr-Saunders, B. Dunlop, and J.W. Glover. From the Proceedings of the World Population Conference, ed. M. Sanger (1927).

Two days before the opening of the World Population Conference, held in Geneva on August 29 through September 3, 1927, Sir Bernard Mallet, the conference secretary, crossed off Margaret Sanger’s name off the printer’s proof of the  conference program.  He also crossed off the names of all the women workers, ignoring the months of effort that Sanger and her staff had put into the meeting. Sanger had worked for over a year, fundraising, organizing, drafting programs and locating participants, to bring together scientists from all over the globe to discuss the effects of overpopulation. Apparently Mallet feared that if European scientists  knew that the meeting was organized by women they might not come. Sanger felt let down by the scientists that she had worked with for over a year, but decided that getting the conference off was more important than getting credit for it. Her secretaries resigned in protest, but Sanger was able to convince all of them save suffragist Edith How-Martyn to return. How-Martyn wrote that she knew that Sanger’s tactic of ignoring the slight was right, and would result in Sanger being “even with the ‘distinguished scientists’ yet and send them back to their flies and mice having been taught how unwise it is to deal unjustly or to scorn a beloved woman.” (MS, Autobiography, 385)  Once the meeting was over, Sanger edited the conference proceedings. She organized many more international conferences, and never had to hide her participation again.

Few efforts to erase women from history are as blatant as this, more often they are errors of omission, where women’s deeds and lives are not featured. In the age of the Internet, most of us are confident that we have access to most of what we want to find. Wikipedia, often held up as an example of crowd-sourced knowledge building, has over four million entries in English alone, dwarfing traditional encyclopedias.  If your topic is not included there, it must not be relevant or important, right? But when we look at how well Wikipedia covers women’s issues what do we find? Not much, especially when you focus on the contributions of women around the world.  Studies have shown that the way that  Wikipedia vets its articles and the type of people who do most of the editing create a system that under-represents women, especially non-Western women. (See the Rewriting Wikipedia Project for details.)

To address this, the Postcolonial Digital Humanities group has called for a Global Women Wikipedia Write-In on April 26, 2013, 1-3pm EST.  As they note in their announcement:

Why “global women”? If you’ve ever tried doing a Wikipedia search for important women theorists around the world, you might be surprised to note how short the entries are, particularly on their work and their ideas (for example: Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldua, Vandana Shiva, and Sara Ahmed). Many important women of color, such as Oyeronke Oyewumi and Frieda Ekotto, lack entries or stubs in Wikipedia. Additionally, coverage of international events involving women is brief or nonexistent (for example: the 1929 Aba Women’s Riots in Nigeria; Domitila Barrios de Chúngara; and Angkatan Wanita Sedar or “Force of Awakened Women,” an important feminist group in Malaysian history).

Just a quick look at some of the nations portrayed in Volume 4 of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, shows a grim picture:

Sripati Chandrasekhar, Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, Margaret Sanger and Abraham Stone (Aug. 1953). (University of Toledo, S. Chandrasekhar Papers).

Looking at the history of international birth control, there is a lot of work that could be done. While the entry on Margaret Sanger is lengthy and detailed, it has next to nothing on her work for international birth control and planned parenthood.

• The entry on Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, the most influential 20th-century Indian activist for birth control and a president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, is a stub with barely any information.
• There is no entry for Avabai Wadia, another early leader of the family planning movement in India.
• Singapore’s Constance Goh Kok Kee, another early activist in the family planning movement has no entry.

There is very little coverage of pre-World War II birth control organization on a global scale.  Search for the “World Population Conference” and you are directed to the United Nations Population Fund, [note: it has since been edited!] not Sanger’s groundbreaking meeting. There are no entries for the seven International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences held in Paris (1900), Liege (1905), Hague (1910), Dresden (1911), London (1922), New York (1925) and Zurich (1930). Sanger organized the New York and Zurich conferences and published the proceedings. There was no entry for the Birth Control International Information Centre until we created one today (it is under review at this time). The BCIIC, which flourished from the late 1920s until World War II, and was organized by Sanger and others to build a global community movement.

Audience at the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood (Stockholm) shows a mix of men and women in attendance and on the dais.

It does not get much better after World War II. The entry for the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), founded in 1952 and operating for sixty-one years, is extremely short and superficial.   There are no entries for the series of International Conferences on Planned Parenthood held by the IPPF in Bombay (1952), Stockholm (1953), Tokyo (1955), New Delhi (1959), or the regional conferences [we addressed this on Friday]  Most of the entries on national family planning organizations that affiliate with IPPF are missing, and those that do appear are short and perfunctory.

Wikipedia is the go-to source for the younger generation, for students preparing term papers, for the average man or woman confirming a fact or trying to find out information.  The lack of coverage is disturbing and needs to be addressed. Enter the Global Women Wikipedia Write-In.

There are a number of ways you can participate, according to the Rewriting Wikipedia Project:

1. Add to a working list of Wikipedia entries that need editing or improvements. You can comment or edit the list directly.

2. Sign up for a Wikipedia account.

3. Add, Rewrite, and expand needed resources. Check out the Rewriting Wikipedia Project’s resources for writing Wikipedia entries that stick.)

4. Add images to feminist articles. (see the image use policy for Wikipedia)

5. Tweet what you do using the Twitter hashtag #GWWI.

We’ll be participating on Friday, April 26th from 1-3PM, and hopefully, can expand the coverage of one of the twentieth century’s most significant social movements. Join us!

Girls Night Out (1933 Style)

Tags

Congress, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry D. Hatfield, Senate, Woman's Press Club

On March 20, 1933, Margaret Sanger was one of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s guests of honor at the annual dinner and “stunt party” of the Woman’s National Press Club.  Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become First Lady only a few weeks earlier on March 4, had already broken with tradition by being the first First Lady to hold her own press conferences. Now, according to the Los Angeles Times, she “set a new precedent by accepting an invitation to see herself satirized by the press.”

Among the guests of honor were Ettie R. Garner, the wife of Vice President John Nance Garner, the wives of all Cabinet members (except Anna Wilmarth Thompson Ickes, the wife of Harold Ickes), Senator Hattie Caraway (Ark.), the first woman elected to the Senate, and Representatives Florence B. Kahn (Calif.), Edith Nourse Rogers (Mass.), Virginia Jenckes (Ind.), and Kathryn O’Loughlin McCarthy (Kan.).  Other influential women attending were Grace Abbott, the head of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, Elinor Fatman Morgenthau, the wife of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and, of course, Margaret Sanger.

Among the many skits described, one stands out, it being Women’s History Month, as it was described in the New York Times:

The Senate of the future–all women–was then presented by a few of the newspaper women regularly covering the Capitol, showing a brisk, business-like Senate solving a depression a hundred years hence. They solved unemployment by giving barbecues and Sunday School picnics, buying up the surplus food and feeding it to the hungry people, while the farmers bought things that had to be made in factories and everyone went back to work.

They raised money by raffling off the Commerce Building, ‘at 10 cents a share so nobody would have to pay too much for it.’ They stopped the Far-East war by giving a 1,400 piece jigsaw puzzle to the soldiers. They solved the liquor problem by putting alcoholic beverages in the ‘spinach category,’ forcing children to take whiskey, gin and champagne until they hate it.

Sanger and Senator Henry D. Hatfield, the sponsor of S.4436.

For Sanger, who was in the midst of lobbying Congress to remove birth control from the list of obscene materials that could not be mailed in the United States, the night was likely an entertaining diversion.  The idea of an all-woman Senate must have been tantalizing, as her most recent legislative bill, Senate 4436, had just been killed in the Judiciary Committee at the end of January.  She was undaunted and promised not to give up the fight, telling a New York Herald Tribune reporter:

Of course, I’m glad the bill has had the dignity of a report. . . . It’s the first time in sixty years that it has come before the full Judiciary Committee.  This is a step forward, but I think that under the circumstances, with the economic uncertainty of millions of families, we might have had less quibbling over things that are in the future and that no one knows about.  The present needs have been disregarded. If you only knew the work and struggle we have put in to get as far as we have. . . . I suppose we’ll have to grow old and totter to the grave to get that bill passed.

Sanger never did get her birth control bill passed, either in the House or the Senate. She won the right to mail contraceptives and contraceptive information through a court challenge, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937.

__________________

For more on these events see: “Last-Ditch Fight In Birth Control Contest Nears,” New York Herald Tribune, Jan. 30, 1933, “Press Women Give Annual Frolic,” New York Times, Mar. 21, 1933, “First Lady Satirized by Press,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 21, 1933, and “Mrs. Roosevelt Will Attend as Honor Guest, Stunt Party Given by Woman’s Press Club,” Washington Post, Mar. 19, 1933.