Birth Control and Eugenics: Uneasy Bedfellows?

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document, eugenics, Historical Legacy, history, margaret sanger, New York Historical Society, reproductive rights

Margaret Sanger blurb in New York Historical Society Exhibit

Recently on a visit to the New York Historical Society (NYHS), we noticed a small exhibit in the front hall on the history of reform movements in New York that featured Margaret Sanger. The blurb read: “Though best known for her role in promoting women’s access to legal birth control (for which she was indicted for obscenity in 1914) Margaret Sanger was also a proponent of eugenics, suggesting that the fertility of the “unfit” ought to be restricted.” At the Sanger Papers we spend our time going over the entirety of Sanger’s life, so it strikes us as curious (and particularly presentist) that this stage of her career has come to define her so extensively.

In the wake of media attention following the 1917 Brownsville Clinic trial, Margaret Sanger broadened her arguments for birth control in an effort to appeal to a wider audience that included wealthy women, doctors and academics. Sanger added eugenic and public health reasons to support birth control, which essentially overshadowed her earlier feminist and socialist rationales. These conservative arguments had far more widely spread support. Eugenics, in particular, was a respectable scientific field,  widely advocated by leading intellectuals, scientists and politicians. Students were taught eugenics in college courses; state fairs had booths educating visitors on “racial hygiene,” and proponents of eugenics populated the faculty of schools like Yale, Stanford and Harvard. Sanger believed that if she could secure the support of the eugenics movement, she could win legitimacy and gain prestige for the birth control movement. Sanger, like many others of her time, was swayed by the arguments of eugenics, though she did not adopt them wholesale. Her 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization, offers the most detailed explication of her views on eugenics, and shows where she differed with so-called positive eugenics. Her efforts to win the acceptance of the eugenics movement did not succeed, as Sanger and the birth control movement remained at the fringe of the mainstream eugenics movement.

The differences between Sanger and the birth control movement and the academics who lead the eugenics movement have been summarized by the Eugenics Archive site, in part:

Margaret Sanger and leaders of the birth control movement, predominantly women, believed that people should be empowered, by education, to make choices to limit their own reproduction. In a society that frowned on open discussion of sexuality and where physicians knew little about the biology of reproduction, Sanger advocated that mothers be given access to the scientific information needed to thoughtfully plan conception.

Davenport and other eugenic leaders, predominantly men, believed that the state should be empowered, by statute, to control reproduction by whole classes of people they deemed genetically inferior. Eugenicists focused on segregating the “feebly inherited” in mental institutions, ultimately seeking the legal remedy of compulsory sterilization. (They also employed immigration restriction to limit the growth of certain population groups.)

Evidence of the distrust and antipathy that some eugenicists felt for Sanger and her colleagues can be seen in the following excerpts from a 1928 letter from Paul Popenoe to Madison Grant, in which Popenoe bemoans the possibility of an alliance with Sanger’s American Birth Control League. The original can be found in the Charles B. Davenport Papers, at the American Philosophical Society Library.

“Dear Mr. Grant,

I have been considerably disquieted by the letter you showed me yesterday, suggesting a working alliance between the American Eugenics Society and the American Birth Control League. In my judgement we have everything to lose nothing to gain to such an arrangement.

[The American Birth Control League] is controlled by a group that has be brought up on agitation and emotional appeal instead of on research and education… With this group, we would take on a large quantity of ready-made enemies which it has accumulated, and we would gain allies who, while believing that they are eugenics, really have no conception of what eugenics is and are actually opposed to it.

[At a recent international birth control conference] two members of our advisory council … put through a resolution at the final meeting, urging that people whose children gave promise of being of exceptional value to the race should have as many children, properly spaced, as they felt that they feasibly could. This is eugenics. It is not the policy of the American Birth Control League leaders, who in the next issue of their monthly magazine came out with an editorial denouncing this resolution as contrary to all the principles and sentiments of their organization.

If it is desirable for us to make a campaign in favor of contraception, we are abundantly able to do so on our own account, without enrolling a lot of sob sisters, grand stand players, and anarchists to help us. We had a lunatic fringe in the eugenics movement in the early days; we have been trying for 20 years to get rid of it and have finally done so. Let’s not take on another fringe of any kind as an ornament.

Sincerely,

Paul Popenoe

In 1928, at the height of the popularity of the eugenics movement, this letter makes clear how peripheral Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement were to eugenics, and how much at odds she was with many of its central tenants. Fast forward to 2012, where the dominant interpretation of Sanger’s work is her critical role in the eugenics movement.  It is rather ironic that her legacy today has been yoked to a discredited ideological movement that hardly accepted her at the time.

So why did the NYHS accept a portrayal of Sanger that depicts her eugenics period as definitive of her life time of advocacy? In today’s popular discourse, Sanger’s historical legacy has been appropriated by opponents of reproductive rights and used as an easy target to defame and discredit the work that has continued in the almost 50 years since Sanger’s death. Embellishing her role within the eugenics movement is a key feature of this agenda. With a single sentence, the NYHS lent its institutional authority to legitimizing this problematic interpretation.  When we asked them, via Twitter, about their curatorial choices, they responded that their exhibit “reveals history’s complexity”. Certainly, history is complex; yet this exhibition piece reveals more about the complexity of the present than that of the past.

Margaret Sanger’s Views on Abortion

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Abortion, document, margret sanger, reproductive rights

Sanger’s Flyer for the first Birth Control Clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. “Do not kill, do not take a life, but Prevent”

Margaret Sanger was a pioneer of women’s reproductive rights, dedicating her life to opening family planning clinics around the world and making knowledge about birth control easily available. When Sanger began her life as an activist, the political struggle over women’s rights was very different than it is today. The Comstock Laws that Sanger was arrested for violating illegalized merely sending information regarding birth control in the mail! With that in mind, it comes as little surprise that Sanger’s views do not fit easily into today’s debate about women’s reproductive rights. Sanger was ambivalent, to say the least, about  most important issue in recent years : access to abortions.

In Sanger’s opinion, abortion was an evil practice that would become obsolete once birth control was practiced and understood by women and families throughout the world. In 1932, Sanger wrote: “Although abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.” Although she strongly condemned the practice, she felt even more strongly that “it is  a woman’s duty and right to have for herself the right to say when she shall and shall not have children.”  Women’s right to control their reproduction took precedent over any moral or religious position. Unlike many today, Sanger trusted women to make the best decision for themselves:

“The only weapon that women have and the most uncivilized weapon that they have to use if they will not submit to having children every year or every year and a half, the weapon they use is abortion. . . . What does this mean? It means it is a very bad sign if women have to indulge in it, and it means they are absolutely determined that they cannot continue bringing children into the world that they cannot clothe, feed, and shelter. It is woman’s instinct, and she knows herself when she should and should not give birth to children, and it is just as natural to trust that instinct and to let her be the one to say and much more natural than it is to leave it to some unknown God for her to judge her by.”(MS, “Debate On Birth Control: First Speech,” Dec. 12, 1920 [MSM S76:0923 ].)

If you are interested in reading more about Margaret Sanger’s position on abortion, be sure to read our “interview” with Sanger in the Margaret Sanger Paper Project Newsletter!

Gandhi and Sanger Debate Love, Lust and Birth Control

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document, feminism, Gandhi, history, margaret sanger, reproductive rights

On November 14th India Today published an excerpt from Tohmas Weber’s book Going Native: Gandhi’s Relationship with Western Women. The excerpt, which talks about a meeting between Gandhi and Margaret Sanger was called Love lust and the Mahatma.

We decided to share some excerpts from Margaret Sanger’s journal about this same visit with Gandhi on the blog today. The rest of this document will be available in The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger: Volume Four.

Sanger on meeting Gandhi for the first time:

“We went directly to his place & met him, tho this is his day of silence. He rose to greet me smiling from ear to ear. I put down my bag & gloves & flowers & magazines in order to take both his hands. He has an ↑inward↓ light that shines in his face! that shines through the flesh! that circles around his head & neck like a mist, with white sails of a ship coming thru. It lasted only a few seconds but it is there. When I looked again it was only the shiney appearance of his flesh that I saw, but always the smile & the smile & a hospitable welcome.”

Sanger described the various foods that they ate on this trip at length in her journal entries. At one point she writes:

“[Gandhi] is experimenting with foods trying to find out the most economical foods for the village people & the most nourishment.  The great majority are living a life of starvation when you ask a villager how things are going, he points to his stomach & says ‘Salub stomach too long empty.’

One ‘full meal’ a day is their ambition.”

In regards to their conversations about sex and contraception:

“To my question Do you believe there is a difference between sex lust & sex love, his answer was “Yes”–“

“At three promptly we went to the Mahatranas house had our talk on the roof. He sat in the burning sunshine with a white cloth over his head we sat in the shade. The arguments were along the same line as the morning but I am convinced his personal experience at the time of his father’s death was so shocking & self blamed that he can never accept sex as anything good clean or wholesome.”

[Gandhi had been having sex with his wife at the time of his father’s death, this is the personal experience that Sanger refers to.]

We also have a transcript of some of their discussion:

MRS. SANGER: Mr. Gandhi, you and I have the interest of humanity at heart but while both of us have that thing in common, you have greater influence with the masses of humanity. I believe no nation can be free until its women have control over the power that is peculiarly theirs, I mean the power of procreation, that powerful force which allowed to run free has messed up the affairs of the world.

I believe that human nature is good in itself. I believe that men and women are essentially good. I believe that uncontrolled breeding has made the world a pretty sorry mess. I’ve read your books. I know your belief in continence and the importance you place upon it. Your influence stretches far beyond India. Your word means something to women in other countries besides India. Even the opposition at home often quotes you in opposing our legislative campaign for birth control. I have an invitation from the All India Women’s Conference to come to their meeting in December as guest speaker but you see it is really only a pretense to come to see you. The real reason I came is to see if we could not agree upon a fundamental principle and some practical means of helping the women of the world.

Women’s lack of control over fecundity results in over-population, in poverty, misery and war. Should women control this force which has made so much trouble in their lives? Have they a right to control the power of procreation? Do you see any practical solution for this problem which in my humble opinion is the direct cause of much of the chaos in the world today?

MR. GANDHI: I suppose you know that all my life I have been dinning into the ears of women the fact that they are their own mistresses, not only in this but in all matters. I began my work with my own wife. While I have abused my wife in many respects, I have tried to be her teacher also. If today she is somewhat literate it is because I became her teacher. I was not the ideal teacher because I was a brute. The animal passion in me was too strong and I could not become the ideal teacher. My wife I made the orbit of all women. In her I studied all women. I came in contact with many European women in South Africa but I knew practically every Indian woman there. I worked with them. I tried to show them they were not slaves either of their husbands or parents, that they had as much right to resist their husbands as their parents, not only in the political field but in the domestic as well. But the trouble was that some would not resist their husbands. I feel that I speak with some confidence and knowledge because I have worked with and talked with and studied many women.

But the remedy is in the hands of the women themselves. The struggle is difficult for them but I do not blame them. I blame the men. Men have legislated against them. Man has regarded woman as his tool. She has learned to be his tool and in the end found it easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall the descent is easy.

The full transcript is located online in the Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter #23.

The outcome of this meeting is outlined at the end of the India Today article:

“In an article on birth control that appeared in his paper only a few months later, Gandhi reiterated that he would agree to at least consider the rhythm method of birth control, even though he did it reluctantly. Although she had no luck in convincing Gandhi of her position, her lecture tour of India led to the opening of several birth control clinics in the country. When, in 1959, Prime Minister Nehru declared that a large sum of money would go to family planning in India, Margaret Sanger was standing at his side.”

To Be a Woman Rebel

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document, feminism, history, margaret sanger, reproductive rights

By Elizabeth Kleen, from the First Edition of the Woman Rebel.

The project can’t find any record of a woman named Elizabeth Kleen living and writing at the time that this was published. Most of the writers of Woman Rebel articles cannot be traced, which may mean that either Sanger or the handful of people confirmed as helping her with the project could have been using pseudonyms. This suspicion has not been confirmed.

The woman rebel’s minor actions in life, her social and marital arrangements are free, flexible, and original; the things that are unchangeable are her principles, her ideals. With the bondswoman the reverse is the case; her  ideals and principles change constantly, her thoughts and dress rarely. The woman rebel has strong and rooted conceptions, but as for her dinner she has it sometimes in bed, or on the roof or in a boat. She argues from the same fundamental principles, but she does it anywhere; in bed or in a bath or in a balloon. The present-day prevalence of good habits involves a too great emphasis on those virtues which only Custom can ensure and too little emphasis on those virtues which Custom can never ensure – sudden and splendid virtues of inspiration; of noble achievement; of lofty ambition. A working woman can get used to getting up at five o’clock, but how many can get used to being imprisoned for their convictions or shot at for their ideals? How many could be a Voltairine do Clayre, a Louise Michel, an Emma Goldman, or an Elizabeth Flynn?

Let us all in life pay a little more attention to the possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. It is only the rebel woman, when she gets out of the habits imposed on her by bourgeois convention, who can do some deed of terrible virtue.

Yet there is one emphatic caution to be given to the woman who would defy the conventions. If the working woman does this, let her do it without a rag of excuse, without reason or justification to anyone. Let her be herself and live for her ideal and her convictions not for the approval or the applause of fashionable feminism. if she does it, however, for some secondary reason, from vanity or worldly ambition, she may become a beggar in more senses than one.

What Every Girl Should Know

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document, feminism, history, margaret sanger, reproductive rights

“To the working girls of the world this little book is lovingly dedicated.”

– Dedication Page, What Every Girl Should Know

Some of the information in Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know, first published in 1913 as a column in the socialist newspaper, The Call is outdated. For instance, Sanger’s belief that masturbation, “gives the individual unlimited opportunity for indulgence, and consequently drains and exhausts the system of the vitality necessary for full development” [Page 39] and that sex can do the same thing if not approached mindfully (“A girl can waste her creative powers by brooding over a love affair to the extent of exhausting her system, with results not unlike the effects of masturbation and debauchery” [Page 46]) doesn’t really stand up to to knowledge that modern science has about our bodies and how they work.

Lady Gaga may not have gotten this memo (“I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they’re going to take my creativity from me through my vagina.” – Lady Gaga, 2010) but most people can agree that these ideas are a bit outdated.

(Image from the New York Call, printed in response to a temporary suppression of Sanger’s What Every Girl Should Know by the US Postal Authorities.)

Despite the advances we’ve made in the 97 years since this was published, however, much of Sanger’s writing in this pamphlet still rings true today. For instance…

“The mother is the logical person to teach the child as soon as questions arise, for it is to the mother that the child goes for information before he enters the schoolroom. If, therefore, the mother answers his questions truthfully and simply and satisfies his curiosity, she will find that the subject of sex ceases to be an isolated subject, and becomes a natural part of the child’s general learning.” [Page 8]

In response to a social worker who feared that giving girls and women accurate truths about sex (and STIs especially) would cause them to fear sex so much that they avoid marriage: “To which I replied that my object in telling young girls the truth is for the definite purpose of preventing them from entering into sexual relations whether in marriage or out of it, without thinking and knowing.” [Page 9]

“It is not my intention to thrust upon anyone a special code of morals, or to inflict upon the readers my own ideas of morality. I only presume to present the facts for you to accept according to your understanding.” [Page 10]

“The girl who scoffs at the idea of the Chinese women binding up their feet, is doubtless ignorant of the knowledge that to bind up their own thoracic and pelvic structures, i.e., the chest and abdominal portions of her body, in tight corsets  is doing greater harm to her health and injury to her development than the binding of the feet could possibly do. [Havelock] Ellis brings forth a few words on this subject which shows the the habit of binding the feet of the Chinese women is based on the same idea as the European woman has when she deforms her waist – they are both done for sexual attractiveness.” [Page 13 – 14]

“The women of wealth set certain standards for themselves and their class, but separate and distinct standards for the women of the working class. It is about time the reformers and philanthropists do something other than deal with the symptoms of the great social unrest.” [Page 17]

“No sexual attraction or impulse is the foundation of the beautiful emotion of love. Upon this is built respect, self-control, sympathy, unity of purpose, many common tastes and desires, building up and up until this real love unites two individuals as one being, one life. Then it becomes the strongest and purest emotion of which the human soul is capable.” [Page 42]

“Fortunately this condition of affairs is changing and the knowledge of the human body, which for ages has been most carefully locked within the medical libraries, is fast taking up its abode in the homes of the people — where it belongs.” [Pages 63- 64]

“It is said that in Japan or China, the duty of the physician is to keep his patients in good health, receiving payments only when they are well. Certainly this sounds like civilization.” [Page 64]

“In conclusion I cannot refrain from saying that women must come to recognize there is some function of womanhood other than being a child-bearing machine. Too long have they allowed themselves to become this, bowing to the yoke of motherhood from puberty to the grave. ” [Page 90]

All quotes pulled from 1920 reprint.
To read the whole pamphlet online, click here!