Again the Question: Was Margaret Sanger a Racist.

Here is Politifact’s  response to the latest charge by Ben Carson.

http://www.politifact.com/new-hampshire/statements/2015/oct/05/ben-carson/did-margaret-sanger-believe-african-americans-shou/

When Social Reformers Fall in Love: Milly Witcop and Rudolf Rocker

You might have heard of her sister, the anarchist Rose Witcop (also spelled Witkop). You might have heard of her life-long companion, another famous anarchist, Rudolf Rocker. Perhaps you’ve heard of her son, the artist Fermin Rocker. Most likely though, you’ve never heard of her, or of the Rocker family for that matter.

Born to a Jewish Ukrainian-Russian family, Milly Witcop was sent to London when she was seventeen. There she worked in a sweatshop in order to pay for her parents’ and sisters’ passage to England. The hard work and her eventual involvement in a bakers’ strike led to her involvement with the Jewish anarchist newspaper Arbayter Fraynd (Worker’s Friend).

Born to a German family four years before Milly’s birth, Rudolf Rocker experienced hardship early on with his father’s death in 1877 and his mother’s death ten years later. He ended up in a Catholic orphanage as a teenager. After running away to become a typographer, Rocker read works by Marx, Lasall, Bebel and Bakunin. Rocker became a member of the Union of Independent Socialists and founded a local section in Mainz, which mostly distributed anarchist literature smuggled in from Belgium or the Netherlands. While speaking at a Labor Union meeting, Rocker barely escaped after police came in to break it up. Eventually, Rocker found himself in London, where he met Milly Witcop in 1895.

Though they were in love, they never married. This was a problem when, in 1897, Witcop and Rocker traveled to the United States. America refused to let them in because their union wasn’t made legal.  Rocker said,  “our bond is one of free agreement between my wife and myself. It is a purely private matter that only concerns ourselves, and it needs no confirmation from the law.” Witop added: “Love is always free. When love ceases to be free it is prostitution.”* The scandal hit the newspapers in America, and the couple received some criticism for their “sinful,” unmarried lifestyle.

December 1906 edition of Germinal

Back in London, Rocker and Witcop co-edited the Arbeyter Fraynd. In March 1900, the two also started publishing the newspaper Germinal. It was a theoretical paper, applying anarchist thought to the analysis of literature and philosophy.

When WWI broke out, both Witcop and Rocker remained pacifists and didn’t agree with either side of the war. Instead of joining any patriotic movements, the couple opened a soup kitchen to help alleviate the impoverishment that came with the war. After publishing a controversial statement about the war, Rocker was arrested and interned as an enemy alien. Witcop continued her anti-war activities until she was also arrested years later.

In March 1918, Rocker was taken to the Netherlands under an agreement to exchange prisoners through the Red Cross. After her imprisonment, Milly met up with Rocker and their son (famous painter, Fermin Rocker) in the Netherlands.

Milly and Rudolf, in a Berlin park, in the late 20s. (see here)

In November 1918, the couple moved to Berlin were they became members of the Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD). Because the organization was male-dominated, Milly, with the help of others, founded the Women’s Union in Berlin in 1920. She believed that working class women were not only exploited by capitalism as were proletariat men, but were also exploited by their male counterparts. She therefore reasoned that women should fight for their rights against a patriarchal society in the same way that the working class must fight against capitalism.

After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Witcop and Rocker fled Germany for the United States. In a letter to Margaret Sanger, Edith How-Martyn wrote about a dinner she had with the Rockers and others who fled Germany.

She wrote of the gathering:

Rudolf and Milly at a conference about 1927

I found myself in a nest of anarchists, Emma Goldman, the Rockers from Berlin (Milly Rocker being Rose Witcop’s sister). They having escaped from Berlin the day after the Reichstag was burnt. Doris–a Russian, Polly another sister of Rose’s, a young German girl communist. You can imagine the talk…Hirschfeld, Helen Stocker, Adele Schreider have all escaped from Germany. Hodann is in prison. Ruben Wolf, supposed to be in prison – Rocker said at least 100,000 have been thrown into prison. The amazing and, to Goldman and Rocker, disappointing thing is that the communists and social democrats have put up no resistance.

Their fight for social progress didn’t stop after their escape. In the United States, they continued to write and lecture about anarchist topics. During the Spanish Civil War, they educated Americans about the events going on in Spain. Both Rocker and Witcop continued to write, publish and lecture very late into their lives.

Milly Witcop died first on November 23, 1955. Rudolf Rocker died nearly three years later, on September 10, 1958. Their son, Fermin Rocker, went on to become a well-renowned painter and illustrator.

Milly and Rudolf with their son, Fermin. (photographed by Senya Fléchine: see here)

An older Rocker and Witcop, 1955

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Further Reading:
*Fishman, William J. (1974). Jewish Radicals: From Czarist Stetl to London Ghetto. New York: Pantheon Books.
Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Rudolph Rocker, Milly Witkop-Rocker (Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Oriole Press, 1956).

Non-cited and more Photographs found here.
For the letter between Edith How-Martyn and Margaret Sanger see here.

Working Class Dirt, Smell, and Sweat: Sanger and the Women’s Suffrage Party

Tags

birth control, feminism, women

The first issue of Sanger’s The Women Rebel.

As one of the loudest voices in the early Birth Control Movement and the founder of what is now Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger was arguably one of the 20th century’s most influential champions of women’s rights. Thus, it may come as a surprise to people that she had several issues with the woman’s suffrage movement. Looking at some of Sanger’s earlier publications, one can see why Sanger and other early birth control advocates did not always see eye to eye with the Women’s Suffrage Party.

In her 1911 article “Dirt, Smell and Sweat,” Sanger recounts a meeting of the New York City Woman Suffrage Party. At the time, the organization was seeking a state-wide referendum on women’s suffrage. Anna Ross Weeks, the chairperson of the meeting, spoke of the men who oppose women’s voting because they “would be obliged to bump against the dirty, smelly and sweaty men at the polls.” Mrs. Weeks replied to this objection with the suggestion of removing “the dirty, smelling, sweaty men from the polls.” In response, Sanger writes,

But what about the women who are liable to be just as dirty, smelly and sweaty as their working brothers? Are they, too, to be removed? Dirt is dirt, smell is smell, and sweat is sweat, no matter on whom these unfortunate afflictions happen to be. And if the chairman and her class object to the smell of the workingman, so will they object to the smell of the working woman.

As this quote illustrates, Sanger was distrustful of the Women’s Suffrage Party because they ignored the concerns of working class women far too often. This middle class bias in the suffrage movement existed for years; many suffragists even employed tactics to demonize the poor. For example, in 1894, the suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt spoke about the danger she believed immigrants posed to American wealth:

There is but one way to avert the danger. Cut off the vote of the slums and give it to women.

The women’s suffrage campaign in New Jersey, taken from the Library of Congress.

Poor, black, and immigrant women were consequently alienated from the suffrage movement.

Also, unlike many of the wealthy women in the suffrage movement, working class women had more immediate concerns, such as fair wages and access to birth control. In fact, with the extent to which the working class was plagued by infant and maternal mortality rates, access to birth control became a question of life or death. Even when women and children survived childbirth, the problems did not subside. Many working class families had no choice but to send their children to work, exposing them to hazardous conditions and long hours.

For Sanger, all of these issues were intertwined. She called attention to the class issues inherent in the birth control movement when she wrote,

Both physically and mentally the children of the rich are developed to the highest degree. Schools, colleges, universities are built for them. The children of the working class are developed only that profits may be wrung from them as early in life or as soon as the masters dare to.

Thus, birth control provided working class women with agency over their own bodies within a sexual context, as well as within a system that exploited their labor and the labor of their children. For working class women, gaining that level of agency took precedence over the political freedom that came with voting. Margaret Sanger understood that the stakes were high for these women and she was committed to fighting for them. Ultimately, the Women’s Suffrage Party’s lack of an intersectional approach prevented them from understanding the dirt, smell, and sweat of working class women.

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Further Reading:

• Margaret Sanger, “Amusement,” Apr 1914.
• Margaret Sanger, “Dirt, Smell and Sweat,” 24 Dec 1911.
• Margaret Sanger, “Into the Valley of Death–For What?,” Apr 1914.
• William H. Chafe, William Henry Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the 20th Century, 1992.

The Early Birth Control Movement and Consent: Marriage Means Yes?

Tags

feminism, reproductive rights

The Fight for Birth Control, one of Sanger’s many pamphlets, was published in 1916.

During my time at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, I have had the pleasure of reading a variety of texts written by or about Margaret Sanger. Often, the most surprising aspect of reading these texts is the underlying ideology that is revealed. Louis Althusser teaches us that an ideology is a way of thinking that permeates our society so completely, that it simply becomes “the way it is.” By championing for access to birth control, Sanger certainly challenged the ideology that having more children than one can handle is an inevitable part of life. However, looking back from our contemporary vantage point, it is clear that Sanger was at the very beginning of a fight against multiple harmful ideologies, some of which persisted even after Sanger’s death.

One of these ideologies is revealed in the language that Sanger and her contemporaries use to discuss birth control and marriage: the assumption that a woman must submit to her husband’s sexual desires. This topic is rarely discussed in a straightforward manner, but some documents attempt to grapple with it in some form.  For example, Sanger “and other early advocates made it clear that men could not be trusted when it came to contraception and were, generally, unwilling to sacrifice any degree of pleasure.” In fact, in a pamphlet entitled Dutch Methods of Birth Control, Sanger even goes as far as to publish a description by a Dutch writer about how to slip a condom on to one’s drunk husband  in the event that one is forced to have sex with him:

When the husband is drunk, and his wife, fearing that a miserable child will be born, has not other preventative at hand, she can perhaps apply the French Letter as if caressing him, when he does not know what he is doing. At all events, she should always take care that one or two French Letters be ready for use.

To a contemporary reader, the implications of this passage can be alarming, as there seems to be no concept of consent. After my initial reading of this passage, it looked as though Sanger and her contemporaries focused on helping women gain agency over their bodies because they saw this approach as being more fruitful than holding men accountable for their actions. To some extent, women felt the need to arm themselves against their husbands. To better understand this, I looked into the etymology of consent on the Oxford English Dictionary. The first reference to sexual consent appears in the early 1800s, with regards to the age of consent, or the age at which people can agree to marriage and sexual intercourse. What is striking about this discovery is the way in which consent was inherently linked to marriage. Thus, the ideology that marriage was a 24/7 consent pass does not come as a surprise.

This protester’s sign shows us that we have come a long way in terms of consent.

In the United States, marital rape was exempted from rape laws until the mid-1970s because of the belief that men were entitled to have sex with their wives whenever they wanted. This marital rape exemption was not eradicated from every state until 1993. To this day, a number of states have more lenient penalties for marital rape. 

With this in mind, we can see that Sanger was battling centuries of patriarchal ideology when she said that “no woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.” Although the language of sexual consent did not exist in Sanger’s time as it does now, Sanger certainly broached the topic in her own way. She often spoke of the importance of open communication in order to maintain a healthy and happy marriage, especially when it came to sex. In “What Margaret Sanger Thinks About Marriage,” she writes:

For marriage built on the shifting sands of fear, shame and ignorance can never lead to happiness, yet if contracted with a frank recognition of the central importance of the beauty of sex in life, alike in its physiological, psychological and spiritual aspects, happiness becomes a glowing possibility. This is a buried treasure to be unearthed by true lovers. It may be imbedded in the rich soil of mutual respect and consideration.

Thus, although Sanger did not talk about consent in the same way that we do now, she preached the importance of mutual respect and understanding, which are ultimately the foundation for consent as we understand it today.

Paired with Sanger’s insistence in a woman’s right to her own body, this emphasis on healthy relationships allowed us to reach a point where yes means yes and no means no, regardless of the circumstances.

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Further reading:

• Margaret Sanger, “A Parents’ Problem or Woman’s?,” March 1919
• Margaret Sanger, “Introduction to Dutch Methods of Birth Control,” Mar./Apr. 1915. 
• Margaret Sanger, “What Margaret Sanger Thinks About Marriage,” Mar. 1928.
  
• Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter, “The Lowly Condom–Sanger’s Missed Opportunity?,” 1997
• Jill Elaine Hasday, “Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape,” Oct. 2000.
• Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 1970. 

The Blue Eagle Vs. The Stork

On January 16, 1934, the Pottstown Mercury reported, “Before a banner which depicted the blue eagle’s lightning bolt warring with numerous storks, Margaret Sanger today launched the first ‘American conference on birth control and national recovery.’” From reading other newspaper articles about speeches that Sanger gave in the 1930s, it seems that this banner became the symbol of the birth control movement. Unfortunately, in searching through all of our photographs from the 1930s here at the Sanger Papers and in the archives of the Library of Congress, I was unsuccessful in finding a picture of the actual banner anywhere. However, the journalists did a pretty good job describing it in detail, and from their descriptions we can still discuss the profound symbolism inherent in this banner.

Most of us are probably familiar with the stork fable¬¬—it is one of the most popular myths about the origin of children in the world. The fable is also well known throughout Europe and the Americas, and even reached some countries in the Far East (like the Phillipines). The origins of the myth can be traced back to the Ancient Mediterranean. Greek mythology portrays the stork as a model of parental devotion, the epitome of filial values. The Greek law called Pelargonia, from the Ancient Greek word pelargos for stork, required citizens to take care of their aging parents. Perhaps for this reason, the Greeks also held that killing a stork could be punished with death. The Romans dedicated the stork to the goddess Juno, the goddess of fertility and protector of women. Women who were barren prayed to her. The Hebrew word for stork, chasida, means “kind” or “merciful” one, apparently because of the positive attributes associated with the stork. This word has been in the Hebrew language since biblical times, thus attesting to the ancient roots of the stork legend.

Supposed filial virtues of the stork Unknown (1831). Descriptive Scenes for Children. Boston: N.S. and S.G. Simpkins. p. 3. OCLC 31373438 – via The Internet Archive.

In discussing the origin for the German word for stork, Grimm states that it reaches back to heathen times, concluding that the choice of meanings of the stem words is either “luck bringer” or “child bringer.” German folklore held that storks found babies in caves or marshes and brought them to households in a basket on their backs or held in their beaks. The baby would either be delivered directly to the mother or dropped down the chimney. Households would notify when they wanted children by placing sweets for the stork on the window sill. This version of the fable has spread all over the world, and, of course, became popular in America as well.

Der Klapperstorch (The Stork), a painting by Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885)

The blue eagle has a lot of symbolism of its own. The Blue Eagle was a symbol used in the United States by companies to show compliance with the National Industrial Recovery Act, and was proclaimed the symbol of industrial recovery on July 20, 1933, by Hugh S. Johnson, the head of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). In most NRA posters, the bird holds a gear, symbolizing industry, in its right talon, and bolts of lightning in its left talon, symbolizing power.

NRA Blue Eagle

So, the stork, as we have seen, was the nearly universal symbol of childbirth and motherhood, and the blue eagle the icon of industrial/economic recovery in the wake of the Great Depression. The juxtaposition of these two images on the same banner is incredibly significant and very characteristic Margaret Sanger. Sanger famously theorized that most, if not all, of the world’s problems—food shortages, job shortages, even war– can be traced back to overpopulation. She believed that a widespread adoption of birth control would effectively decrease the world’s population and solve many of these issues. Therefore, her banner containing a blue eagle and its lightning bolt fighting off storks represents her belief that economic recovery can only be attained if we fight off the storks– if we can prevent pregnancy and put an end to overpopulation.

In her speech at the conference, Sanger explained the connection between these two birds:

“While the N.R.A. strives through its many codes to increase employment and thus to raise the purchasing power of the people in general, it does not provide for lightening the burden of the parents by reducing the number of mouths that each wage-earner must feed or which the public must feed for him. While the N. R. A. has ↑as↓ its emblem the blue eagle, I am afraid that the six million pauperized children have as their emblem a stork that has the blues.”  (America Needs a Code for Babies, Mar. 27, 1934 – link to digital http://sangerpapers.org/sanger/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=101807.xml)

For Sanger’s opening address at the conference, see “Address of Welcome to the American Conference on Birth Control and National Recovery ,” 15 Jan 1934 (link http://sangerpapers.org/sanger/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=157134.xml)