Poor Women, Big Families

Tags

activism reproductive rights, Children, family limitations, Poverty

The International Aspects of Birth Control – Volume 1 – edited by Margaret Sanger, contains multiple articles from activists around the world about the struggle in their country for Birth Control rights.

While transcribing the 1925 book edited by Margaret Sanger titled The Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conferences: International Aspects of Birth Control I couldn’t help but be surprised by the amount of opposition faced by the original pioneers for Birth Control. Mrs. H. G. Hill, the president of the Alameda County Birth Control League in 1924, sums up the resistance when she wrote that, “There still exists in the minds of the masses a great deal of prejudice,  misunderstanding and indifference in regard to our work.” As all civil rights movements have shown us, sometimes the ignorance of the public proves to be the hardest obstacle to overcome. In response, Margaret Sanger was avid about publishing articles, pamphlets, and giving lectures.

For example, not everyone understood the need to limit big families. It was preached in Christian churches, which dominated the culture’s popular view, that “children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward.” Similar verses were used against the fight for Birth Control to prove that the movement was anti-God and anti-morals.

Jean H. Baker’s Biography of Margaret Sanger

Sanger was under no illusion that poor women with big families were always blessed. In Jean H. Baker’s autobiography of Sanger, she talks about how Sanger’s mother “had given birth to eleven children in twenty-two years and suffered seven miscarriages. She had been pregnant eighteen times in thirty years of marriage.” A few years after her last child was born, Sanger’s mother died of tuberculosis.

My mother died at 48,” wrote Sanger in sentences that needed no further explanation to make her point. “My father lived to be 80.’

Despite the toll pregnancy and miscarriages took on women, popular view still held that children were blessings and to prevent one would be to prevent the other. One of the best responses to such a claim comes from Maria Kirstine Dorothea Jensen, known better as Thit Jensen. Jensen was a Danish writer in the early twentieth century who fought for women’s rights and founded an Organization for Sexual Awareness in Denmark. In one of her articles she wrote about a physician who openly bashed the idea of women with the freedom to chose when to have children:

When I first lectured about Birth Control, it happened that a physician for women interfered – I think he was afraid it might spoil his practice, if there were not to be so many sick and half-killed women, when they finished child-bearing in a reasonable time. He had the nerve to go on to my platform and try to take over my audience – of course, he didn’t know me, he talked the most perfect hymn of cheap sentimentality about the poor good mother – the darling mother who gave birth to her sixteenth child and happily took it to her heart and it was wonderful.

And of course, you know an audience; he appealed to their childishness and they applauded him. I could not stand that, exactly at my start, so I got onto the platform and told him just what I happened to know:

‘In your clinic, this very noon, a poor woman died after having borne her ninth child. She had been your patient through several years; you had told her that if she were to bear another child, she would die. You didn’t tell her how to avoid it, you only sent her home to her husband, knowing that the law forbade her not to live with him. She became pregnant, and she died, promptly, as you told her. But…who killed her? You, who had the knowledge, or she who knew nothing. And, tell me please, if she had been a rich woman, belonging to society, and your patient, would she ever have had to die from nine small children? Certainly not, because then she would never have had so many.’

The audience exploded, being poor people most of them.

He never answered a word.

The audience’s opinion changed rather quickly when they heard the truth; women were dying unnecessarily from their excessive pregnancies, particularly women who were poor and didn’t understand their options. Ignorant claims about traditional families and the public’s lack of knowledge kept women like Margaret Sanger and Thit Jensen fighting, lecturing and publishing for as long as they did.

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For full article written by Jensen see:

http://beta.birthcontrol-international.org/items/show/14

For full Alameda County Birth Control League article see:

http://beta.birthcontrol-international.org/items/show/196

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.