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.

Rebels of Post Avenue

Tags

birth control, edward mylius, history, margaret sanger, mary ware dennett, national birth control league, otto bobsien, robert parker, sanger, Woman Rebel

Margaret Sanger, c. 1915 (Courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection)

As we move into the year 2014, we also come across a slew of new anniversaries to celebrate, and a look at the history of Margaret Sanger is no exception.  1914, the month of March to be exact, marks the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Woman Rebel, a radical feminist monthly published by Margaret Sanger publicizing what would be called “birth control” in just a few months.  The journal published the first use of the term “birth control,” a term that Sanger built into one of the most significant reform movements in the 20^th century.

This apartment building replaced Sanger’s original apartment in 1920.

The humble beginnings of Woman Rebel took place in New York City during January of 2014.  After leaving her husband, William Sanger, to paint in Paris, Margaret Sanger rented a “dingy” apartment at 34 Post Avenue in Upper Manhattan and moved in with her and the children.  From there, she and a group of anarchists developed the Woman Rebel and the early arguments of the birth control movement.  Who were these mysterious, unnamed men who helped Sanger get started?  Although often referred to as “secretaries,” Edward Mylius, Robert Parker, and Otto Bobsien were not only part of Sanger’s inner circle, but played an integral role in the creation of Woman Rebel.

Scarce documentation survives about these three men.  Edward Mylius was a British citizen who fled to the United States after publishing an libelous, anarchist paper in Paris “declaring that the King of England had once contracted a morganatic marriage” (My Fight).  He wrote one credited article in Woman Rebel (“Freedom in America, Union Square, April 4, 1914,” Woman Rebel, Apr. 1914, 11), but was dedicated to the feminist monthly.

A failed playwright, Robert Parker often served as Sanger’s ghost writer and editor.  Although Margaret Sanger claimed she invented the term “birth control”, it was actually Parker who suggested the term after connecting the importance of control with their goal of contraception.

“Margaret invited these men to her apartment for an emergency conference.  They decided that the first thing she needed was a catchier name for contraception than the delicate ‘preventative means.’  They considered ‘conscious generation,’ ‘Neo-Malthusianism,’ and several others.  Robert Parker offered the final suggestion.  He was a polio victim who was studying Yoga, in which control is an essential feature, hoping that control might help him with his partly paralyzed hand.  It occurred to him that control might apply to birth as well.  ‘Birth control,’ he mused.  ‘Birth Control … I think I like it.’  They all liked it.  As they put on their hats and left, they agreed that birth control was the best name for the movement.” – Margaret Sanger, Madeline Gray, p. 72

The name obviously stuck, as we use it a century after its coinage.

The first to use the term “birth control” in print was actually Otto Bobsien.  Bobsien joined the National Birth Control League, formed in 1915 after Sanger fled the U.S.  He used Sanger’s list of subscribers and friends of Woman Rebel for the new league, and Sanger felt betrayed, especially when its president, Mary Ware Dennett, refused to support her case when she returned.

It is not surprising that Sanger kept her helpers in the background.  The birth control movement was considered a special cause of women and Sanger would build it into her life’s work.  But these were the people that Sanger trusted most, and turned to when she needed help getting her paper off the ground.  Although the monthly had only seven issues, Woman Rebel helped express her beliefs and distribute them to a larger audience than her speeches alone.  Now exposed to new ideas and people, Sanger felt better equipped to continue on her path to social awareness.

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For a digital collection of the Woman Rebel issues and documents surrounding its publication and suppression, see http://wyatt.elasticbeanstalk.com/mep/MS/docs/ms-table.html.

Impetus for a Movement: Sanger’s “Impressions of the East Side”

Tags

Children, Lower East Side, Poverty, women

Over a hundred years ago, Margaret Sanger published a two-part article on the living conditions in the Lower East Side for the New York Call. “Impressions of the East Side,” was published on September 3 and September 10, 1911. This is the earliest article in which she discussed the plight of poor men and women, unable to control the size of their families.

In 1911 Sanger worked as a visiting nurse on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a bustling, overcrowded slum that was home to generations of immigrants, mostly Italian and Eastern European at the time she was there. While she and her husband William Sanger had also become interest in Socialist Party organizing at the local level, Margaret Sanger was more interested in the plights of women and children, and made that her special focus.

When you walk through the streets of the much talked about East Side you come away with the feeling that you have seen all of it you wish to see. When you pass through Cherry street and emerge from its depths with fish scales and fruit stains on your clothing, you feel quite satisfied with the glimpse you have had of it, and with both hands up exclaim “Never again!”

But the East Side thus seen from the outside is nothing compared to the living hell within its walls. To eat with its people, to sleep with them, to buy where they buy, to listen to their quarrels, gossip, tales of sorrow, sickness and fears, is to see them as they are in their daily life.

“Little mothers” or children caring for their younger siblings were a common sight.

Along with other visitors to the Lower East Side tenements, Sanger was appalled by the conditions of living, especially for the children. It was common for children as young as ten to work in sweatshops, and for those younger to be unattended or left in the care of an older sibling while both their parents worked long hours at factory jobs in order to scrape together enough to pay their bills.

Again, one of the terrible sights which meets your gaze is the army of little pale-faced children which come into the streets at night to play. Accustomed to seeing the children, although ragged and filthy at least browned by the sun, playing about in the day time, your attention is attracted to these white and drawn faces and you inquire about them. You are told that these little children, anywhere around 10 years of age, are products of the sweatshops. There they work all day, sometimes in cellars, picking over old rags, and sometimes in “shops” carrying huge bundles from place to place.

The very thought is nauseous, that where there are thousands of able-bodied men willing and glad to work, these little pale-faced girls with shoulders already bent, should spend their childhood days struggling for an existence. The parents of these little ones are loathe to send them to work, but each added baby makes it harder for them to fight off starvation, and anything which offers relief from worry and debt is acceptable to even the most loving parents. And as they watch these little toilers join hands with the other children and sing “Sweet Land of Liberty” the hope springs up in their breasts that perhaps some “luck” will come to them, and the children be able to go to school again.

While Socialist organizers sought to help immigrant laborers seize political power, Sanger’s reform efforts were more localized. She saw that giving the impoverished working woman the ability to decided when and whether she wanted any more children was the first step towards emancipation, because as long as she could not control the size of her family, women would never have the time to avail themselves of education, suffrage, or any other reforms.

To read more of Sanger’s views of the East side, see Impressions of the East Side, Part I, Sept. 3, 1911 and Impressions on the East Side, Part II, Sept. 10, 1911, in our digital edition.

Birth of a Movement: the Case of Sadie Sachs

Tags

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.