“The World Center for Women’s Archives: A Look Back at a Novel Idea.”In Honor of International Women’s Day

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feminism, history, margaret sanger

To celebrate International Women’s Day, the Sanger Papers want to remind everyone that the struggle to acknowledge the contributions of women is unfortunately not new. In that spirit, we thought we’d look back at an article  published in our newsletter  in 1994.

“We have worked intensively on this project; forming the organization first, raising money, collecting archives and, perhaps even more important, trying to make the United States archive minded….We have opened the minds of people all over the country to the necessity of collecting and preserving archives – especially about women.” (Sanger Papers, Library of Congress) While this sentiment accurately reflects the goals of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project (and most women’s archives and editing projects), the statement was actually made on September 16, 1940 by Inez Hayes Irwin describing the struggles of the World Center for Women’s Archives (WCWA). Historian Mary Ritter Beard had founded the WCWA out of frustration over the difficulty she encountered in trying to locate women’s papers. Beard realized that before historians could examine or interpret women’s contributions to civilization and incorporate their accomplishments into their books and curricula, they needed to examine primary source material on women’s lives. But such material was not easy to find.

Mary Ritter Beard

Beard’s quest to collect and preserve the documentary evidence of women’s history began in earnest when, in 1935, she was approached by Hungarian-born pacifist-feminist Rosika Schwimmer with the idea of establishing a center to document women’s roles in the peace movement. Beard quickly expanded the idea to establish an archive and education center for the study of women. The World Center for Women’s Archives (WCWA) had its first organizational board meeting in New York on October 15, 1935. In addition to appointing a board of directors (chaired by Inez Hayes Irwin) as its main decision-making body, the inaugural meeting invited well-known women sponsors to serve in an advisory capacity. With endorsements from prominent women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins, and support from Fannie Hurst, Mary Ware Dennett, Georgia O’Keefe, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, Mary Van Kleeck, Juliet Barrett Rublee, Alice Paul and Margaret Sanger, among others, the WCWA was officially launched on December 15, 1937, at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City.

“NO DOCUMENTS, NO HISTORY,” was the motto (coined by French historian Fustel de Coulanges) of the WCWA, reflecting Beard’s conviction that women’s history requires the preservation of women’s sources. “What documents, then, have women? What history?” she asked, for without these records “women may be blotted from the story and the thought about history as completely as if they had never lived….But what do the women of today know about the women of yesterday to whom they are so closely linked for better or for worse? What are the women of tomorrow to know about the women of today?” (WCWA Pamphlet, ca. 1939, Sanger Papers, Library of Congress) The creation of the WCWA was to be the answer for those concerned with preserving the history and achievements of women. Its purpose was: “To make a systematic search for undeposited source materials dealing with women’s lives and activities….To reproduce important materials, already deposited elsewhere, by means of microfilming and other modern processes…” (WCWA Brochure, International Organization Records, Sophia Smith Collection)

Inez Haynes Irwin

In the four years of its existence, the WCWA helped highlight the richness and depth preserved in the records of women’s history. Its preliminary work in soliciting women to donate, deposit, or pledge their papers and records to an archives proved to be invaluable. Materials which were promised to the WCWA included the records of the National League of Women Voters, the National Consumer League, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Association of Women Lawyers. Among the women who pledged their personal papers to the Center were Ida Tarbell, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Judge Florence Allen. Among the collections in the Center’s possession at the time of its dissolution were those of Lillian Wald, Kate C. Hurd-Mead, Catherine Beecher, and an impressive collection of records, maps, and charts belonging to Amelia Earhart.

Although predominantly reflecting the achievements of notable white American women, the WCWA also collected materials concerning the women’s movement in Germany and the history of Japanese women from the mythological age through 1935. Prefiguring the emergence of the new social history and feminist history, the founders defined the WCWA’s collection mission broadly, asserting that women’s history would be found not only in the written record, but also in oral histories, objects and artifacts. They mounted an exhibit of Native American women’s pottery that included a pictorial history and ancient medicine aprons which told the lore of herb women. From its offices in New York and Washington, the Center also compiled and distributed lists of secondary sources essential to the study of women, served as a clearinghouse for information about women at other institutions, and furnished information for a series of radio talks on women in American society.

Yet despite the wide publicity and initial support from prominent individuals, the WCWA was unable to build a permanent future for itself. By the end of the decade, the war in Europe preoccupied the WCWA’s sponsors, overshadowing their interest in documenting the lives of women. Faced with a lack of funding, weakened by disagreements among its leadership and Beard’s resignation in 1940, the Center was forced to close its doors on September 16, 1940. Though the Center failed, Inez Hayes Irwin sent a hopeful message to the Center’s sponsors: “When the quiet days of peace and reconstruction come, we are sure there will be many such organizations as we have worked so hard to form and perhaps ultimately the big central one that was our dream.” (Irwin to Sanger, 9/16/1940, Sanger Papers, Library of Congress)

After the Center’s closing, the collections gathered by the WCWA were either returned to their owners or entrusted to other repositories. Yet the WCWA left a lasting impact as several colleges and universities began collecting source material for the study of women, and individual women became aware of the importance of taking steps to preserve the records of their lives. Although Margaret Sanger never donated her letters to the WCWA, less than two years after it was disbanded, she began to transfer the first large collection of her papers to the Library of Congress; in 1949, encouraged by her close friend Dorothy Brush, Sanger donated her other papers to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. Ironically, Mary Beard destroyed the majority of her own personal papers.

Committed to “put women in the record,” Mary Beard and the WCWA sought to do what the Sophia Smith Collection (Women’s History Archive) at Smith College and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College are in fact doing – collecting and preserving the records of American women’s history. At the same time, editing projects such as the Sanger Papers and other women’s editions are working to assemble and disseminate women’s papers through both print and digital technology.

While Beard’s notion of one central archive for women’s records and papers remains the stuff of dreams the possibility of making it a reality is increasingly viable. Technological advances such as digital image storage may provide a way in which one central database can access images of hundreds of thousands of women’s records and papers. As the Sanger Papers project explores these new methods of disseminating the records of Sanger’s life, we are hopeful that it will take us a step closer to making Beard’s dream a reality.

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

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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?

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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. 

Sanger’s Conversations with a Hen: A Highly Modern Drama

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birth control, drama, feminism, fiction, hen, Lexington Herald, margaret sanger, play, sanger

Well, really the title and description go more like this: An Egg Rebuked Her: A Highly Modern Drama on a Gripping Subject From the Intense Pen of Helen Bullitt Lowry.  And, a message from all of us here at the Project, we sincerely thank Helen Bullitt Lowry for the smiles you have given us from reading this play.

“Pullet 707?”

It is not often that we come upon a piece of fiction related to Sanger at all and all the more rare when it is this weird.   We spend our time sifting through hundreds of Sanger’s speeches and articles.  But on March 18, 1917, the Lexington Herald published a short, 3 scene play by Lowry depicting none other than Margaret Sanger on her quest to inform women that their lives are meant for more than simply propagation.  In this case, however, the women Sanger is trying to reach are represented by a single hen, Pullet 707.  Sanger meets Pullet 707, specifically a White Leghorn pullet, on the poultry division of Experiment Station Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, where she has stopped to speak.  Sanger is distressed, for Pullet 707 refuses to break her egg-laying streak, one egg per day for 68 days, for the birth control Cause.  Although she seems to understand Sanger’s Cause, Pullet 707 is still, by the end of the play, unwilling to upset her natural flow and pride of her keepers’ affection for the sake of the Cause.

Sanger appears here as a straight woman, distressed by the hen’s refusal to practice birth control:

But the Cause! The Cause! Think of the women of the slums! Consider the life of the woman with six children. Don’t you realize that she is nothing but a slave? And hens like you are fastening the shackles all the tighter with your criminal laying. Sixty-eight eggs without stopping for a single day! And to think I have suffered a hunger strike all in vain! Won’t you have one of my pamphlets and read what is your duty to down-trodden women?

While the play itself is lighthearted, I am positive that Sanger would not have appreciated its message.  In essence, Lowry seems to be generalizing women as hens, whose only purpose is to lay eggs and be eaten.  Lowry asserts that the Cause as being lost, believing instead that the every-day woman would think it unnatural to control when they have children and how many they have.  She also views the every-day man, portrayed by the two Professors who supervise the hens’ egg laying, as totally in charge of the “hens” they care for.  Sanger is truly brokenhearted at the end of the last scene when Pullet 707 continues her egg-laying streak rather than commit to Sanger’s Cause.

Mrs. S.-“With your record which was brought all the way to Lexington to protest, you could be a great influence on all pullets

Pullet 707.- “Oh. Don’t you think that woman’s place is in the home? I do.

Mrs. S.- “Let me speak to you as a sister. Let us, as sisters, go forth and scatter our propaganda abroad, daring prison and hunger strikes. Let us die for a pamphlet.

Although this play denounced Sanger and her teachings, I find it satisfying to know that Lowry’s “predictions” have been proved false almost 100 years later. Today, it is the “every-day” women that Lowry characterized as hens who are fighting for their right for birth control and refusing to be thought of as egg-laying machines.  While the article sought to ridicule the movement, I think we can all agree that women are not chickens and want to control their reproduction.

To see a PDF of the entire article, click here

Why The Woman Rebel?

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feminism, margaret sanger, Woman Rebel

Because I believe that deep down in woman’s nature lies slumbering the spirit of revolt.

Because I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex conventions, by motherhood and its present necessary child-rearing, by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws and superstitions.

Because I believe that woman’s freedom depends upon awakening that spirit of revolt within her against these things which enslave her.

Because I believe that these things which enslave woman must be fought openly, fearlessly, consciously.

Because I believe she must consciously disturb and destroy and be fearless in its accomplishment.

Because I believe in freedom, created through individual action.

Because I believe in the offspring of the immigrant, the great majority of whom make up the unorganized working class to-day.

Because I believe that this immigrant with a vision, an ideal of a new world where liberty, freedom, kindness, plenty hold sway, who had courage to leave the certain old for the uncertain new to face a strange new people, new habits, a strange language, for this vision, this ideal, certainly has brought to this country a wholesome spirit of unrest which this generation of Americans has lost through a few generations of prosperity and respectability.

Because I believe that on the courage, vision and idealism of the immigrant and the offspring does the industrial revolution depend.

Because I believe that through the efforts of the industrial revolution will woman’s freedom emerge.

Because I believe that not until wage slavery is abolished can either woman’s or man’s freedom be fully attained.

Because I have six months’ time to devote to arousing this slumbered spirit in the working woman, and if within this time I shall have succeeded in arousing my own laggard self I shall have succeeded sufficiently to continue this paper until all the slumbered spirits have awakened to its assistance or its destruction.

– Margaret Sanger, “Why The Woman Rebel?,” Mar 1914.