S(anger) Goes Postal in “The Woman Rebel”

Tags

birth control, margaret sanger, planned parenthood, Woman Rebel

Margaret Sanger, ca. 1916.

“To me it was outrageous that information regarding motherhood, which was so generally called sacred, should be classed with pornography,” Sanger recalled in her 1938 autobiography. The anger displayed in this quotation is the focus of an article by Emily Winderman, a doctoral candidate at the University of Georgia, recently published in the Rhetoric & Public Affairs Journal. The article analyzes Sanger’s use of anger as a public emotion in The Woman Rebel.

As Winderman notes, several Sanger scholars have dismissed The Woman Rebel, which turned 100 this year, because of its angry tone. Even scholars who seem more sympathetic to the emotional tone of The Woman Rebel have encouraged those interested in the publication to look past the anger to see its value.

Winderman begins her article by analyzing the use of anger as a “public” emotion. She notes that it has historically been included in the repertoire of public emotions and that it can act as a moralizing emotion, but she also notes that women who dared to demonstrate anger were often diagnosed as “hysterical” and as lacking in sound judgment. Anger has the ability to unite and motivate people who feel strongly about similar injustices, but for those who do not experience an injustice, anger about it seems alienating and inappropriate.

A snippet from the March 1914 issue.

Next, Winderman turns to the role of The Woman Rebel in challenging the accepted virtue of “Republican Motherhood” and the cult of domesticity: the idea that upper- and middle-class Anglo-Saxon women would rear sons who were both moral and politically-minded. This virtue was unavailable to lower-class and non-white women. Comstock’s morality laws – the same laws under which Sanger was prosecuted for attempting to mail The Woman Rebel – were designed, he said, “to protect the morals of the youth and inexperienced.” These morals were the same morals that would be instilled by proper republican mothers.

Winderman then turns to The Woman Rebel itself, studying it through the lens she has laid out previously. Sanger recast the relationship between mothers and the body politic as a parasitic relationship, in which political institutions supported themselves on the backs of unwilling poor mothers. Then, The Woman Rebel calls for women to

recreate the revolutionary spirit of your class, the ardor of which you yourselves have enchained in thousands of cases.

By inverting this traditional relationship, Winderman argues, Sanger creates a space where poor women can feel legitimate moral outrage at their treatment.

Rhetorical devices such as metaphors like the one just described and anaphora (“the repetition of the same word or phrase in several successive clauses”) helped to build anger and a sense of solidarity among the working women who were the target audience of The Woman Rebel. Another technique to instill anger and solidarity was the clear demarcation of enemies, including the state, the church, and wealthy suffragettes, who were privileged with knowledge of contraception. Collective identity was also forged through a set of rallying precepts such as:

REBEL WOMEN WANTED: WHO deny the right of the State to deprive women of such knowledge as would enable them to take upon themselves voluntary motherhood…

Finally, the letters from the public which were published in The Woman Rebel substantiated this common sense of anger and moral outrage.

Speaking on the eve of her trial, Sanger told her audience:

They tell me that The Woman Rebel was badly written; that it was crude; that it was emotional, and hysterical; that it mixed issues; that it was defiant, and too radical. Well, to all of these indictments I plead guilty.

In her conclusion, Winderman notes the role that anger played throughout Sanger’s career and in the history of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which has used the phrase “Be Brave and Angry” throughout its history.

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For a complete set of the Woman Rebel, see “Margaret Sanger and the Woman Rebel,” a digital edition created in 1997; for searchable versions of Sanger’s Woman Rebel articles, see The Speeches and Articles of Margaret Sanger. For Sanger’s complete speech, see “Hotel Brevoot Speech,” Jan. 17, 1916.

Emily Winderman, “S(anger) Goes Postal in The Woman Rebel: Angry Rhetoric as a Collectivizing Moral Emotion,”Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2014, pp. 381-420. (Link–must have Project Muse access)

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.

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.

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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/

Rebels of Post Avenue

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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.

The Origins of the Woman Rebel

Tags

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Comstock Law, margaret sanger, sanger, Woman Rebel

The first page of the first issue of Woman Rebel.

Much of my time at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project has been spent thinking about 1914. It was a busy year for Sanger, not least due to her work on the Woman Rebel. Its slogan, “No Gods, No Masters,” first appeared in print, on “eight pages on cheap paper, copied from the French style, mailed first class in the city and expressed outside,” in March of 1914. Sanger defined a woman’s duty:

To look the world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention.

The New York Post Office quickly sent her a letter stating:

Dear Madam: In accordance with the advice from the Assistant Attorney General for the Post Office Department, you are informed that the publication entitled “The Woman Rebel”, for March 1914, is unmailable under the provisions of Section 211 of the Criminal Code as amended by the Act of March 4, 1911.

The letter from the postmaster stating that Woman Rebel was unmailable.

The law prohibiting the mailing of the paper was the Comstock Law, a moral law intended to prevent the mailing of “obscene” material. Since she had mentioned that the Woman Rebel planned to discuss birth control and provide advice in future issues. Sanger commented in her Autobiography that, “To me it was outrageous that information regarding motherhood, which was so generally called sacred, should be classed with pornography.”

Nevertheless, Sanger decided to continue publishing and attempting to mail Woman Rebel, and this led to her indictment. When she learned that she was likely to receive the severest sentence possible if found guilty, she fled the country for England in November, where she remained until October of 1915. The trial was eventually scheduled to begin on January 18, 1916, but was postponed several times for various reasons. Ultimately, the case ended a month later, on February 18, when it was dismissed by the United States District Court of New York.

The story of Woman Rebel is only partially illustrated by the events that occurred after its publication, however. Sanger’s Autobiography provides one window on the start of the paper. She says that the idea came to her on the ship back to New York from Paris on New Year’s Eve, the idea “of a magazine to be called the Woman Rebel, dedicated to the interests of working women.” Sanger was conscious that she had to limit the paper to claims on which she could follow through. One of the primary concerns was, of course, money, but moral support was also an issue. The feminists, led by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, provided neither, but the socialists and trade union organizations turned out to be more helpful in terms of support and subscriptions.

Sanger also told the story of Queen Vashti, wife of King Ahasuerus, which appears in the Book of Esther. Ahasuerus had been showing off all the fine decorations and possessions in his palace, and then commanded his wife to appear. She refused, not wanting to be viewed as a possession like the rest of the king’s riches. He cast her aside and married the meek Esther instead. Sanger said:

Often I had thought of Vashti as the first woman rebel in history… I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.

William Sanger’s letters in February of 1914 to Margaret are another interesting source for the planning stages of Woman Rebel. Unfortunately, her letters to him outlining these early stages of preparing the paper do not survive. In a letter written on February 5, he said,

now dear love its great that you are going to start that paper… Now I think we ought to make the paper have an international character — Im going to work Victor Dave to write a short article and the leading women agitation here you know. I can reach Miss Pankhurst going to try & get her too — You ought to have the England exchanges — that is all the English sufferget radical & Red Papers to keep — touch — I shall write at once to get them & will forward as soon as I receive them… perhaps I can act as your Paris correspondant how often will the paper come out.

William Sanger’s letter from February 14, 1914, using the name Woman Rebel to refer to the project.

William did send the promised foreign papers to his wife a few days later, and also discussed the topic with Victor Dave, who thought that the title (presumably Woman Rebel) was “a good name.” He mentioned that he was still trying to convince Victor Dave to write an article, and would call on Mrs. Pankhurst, if she was in Paris, and try to convince her to write something as well. He also wonders if Margaret has considered “better paper and better printing.”

About a week later, William Sanger provided some extremely detailed advice on the Woman Rebel, which was by this point known by that name:

I am particularly anxious that you get the Exchanges in all the English Radical & Revolutionary papers, that is you to send on the Woman Rebel & they will exchange theirs. This will keep you in touch with the movement in England, the same [?] for France & Germany… I have given the question of the weekly issue of the paper a great deal of thought… the work on getting out a weekly paper now would be too much for you. Why not a semi monthly — this would insure the cooperation of regular correspondents who would be willing to contribute. This will give the paper some class. Especially if the contributors came from England, France, Germany… I would like to see the paper have distinction — if you name is to be associated with it… I will be glad to see it rise than flare up so to speak but a paper that fills a want & fills it well. Perhaps a monthly with good illustrations good paper something on the order of The Forerunner.

It does seem as though William hoped to get some of his own “good illustrations” published in his wife’s paper! He certainly had quite a catalog of opinions about the paper; Margaret Sanger expressed very different ideas in her Autobiography:

I was solely responsible for the magazine financially, legally, and morally; I was editor, manager, circulation department, bookkeeper, and I paid the printer’s bill.

For more information, see Margaret Sanger’s Autobiography, especially chapter nine, “The Woman Rebel.” Also see William Sanger’s letters to Margaret Sanger, February 5, 8, 14, and 14, 1914.