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

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.

______________

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.

Birth Control Breaks into the South

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birth control, margaret sanger, north carolina, sanger, south

Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger.

One of the most contentious questions surrounding Margaret Sanger is whether or not she was racist, and it sometimes seems that people only know who she is because of claims that she was a racist/Nazi/eugenicist. It is a question that we here at the Sanger Papers have addressed repeatedly on this blog (that’s three separate links, and here’s a few more, including an analysis of a recent scholarly article also explaining that Margaret Sanger was not a Nazi racist).

Sanger’s first foray into the South provides another perspective on her views of race, particularly as a counterpoint to the speech that she gave to a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey. That speech, which Sanger herself called “one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing,” not least because “I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria,” is frequently pointed to by those who would continue to insist that Sanger was a racist who advocated sterilization for African American women. Unfortunately, no transcript for the speech survives.

Elizabeth City, North Carolina, was a shipping center that also manufactured lumber and cotton. In 1919, African Americans made up approximately 37% of the city’s population. William Oscar Saunders, the editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, was responsible for organizing the first speech, the only one that Sanger expected to give, was noted for his opposition to both racism and antisemitism, as well as his support for birth control. It seems unlikely that he would have invited Sanger to speak on birth control had he felt that she was a racist.

For the speech that Sanger gave on November 2, 1919, a much better record survives in the form of an article written by Sanger — and it is both telling and fascinating. The planned lecture, entitled “Woman’s Place in the Twentieth Century,” was given to about eight hundred people. The Elizabeth City Independent reported that it was “the first public meeting for the discussion of birth control ever held in the south.” Considering this, Sanger was necessarily nervous about how she and her message would be received:

I had the feeling that it would be hard to break the ice for the birth control movement in a city in which not even a suffragist had delivered a public lecture.

Fortunately, Sanger was pleasantly surprised; the experience

was in every way a gratifying surprise to me… To my delight…I found that people, both white and black, in Elizabeth City, N.C., were so eager to know about birth control that every possible moment of my time was given to speaking.

This single scheduled lecture proved such a success that a whole series of unplanned talks followed. First, immediately following the lecture, Sanger addressed a group of women only, “of all classes and conditions,” followed by a question-and-answer session of elderly women who were so appreciative that the birth control movement would prevent their daughters from suffering what they had suffered in having such large families.

That evening, Sanger gave “a public address for negroes in a negro church [Corner Stone Baptist Church]…followed the next day by a short talk on ‘Education’ at the negro normal school, and in the afternoon a lecture for negro women only on methods of birth control.” As a result of all of these lectures, a group formed a committee to begin the process of establishing a birth control clinic for the mill workers. All this happened, as Sanger recalled, “between noon on Sunday and three o’clock Monday afternoon.”

For a city that had not even had anyone give a public talk about voting rights for women, it is amazing that Sanger was able to speak to so many people, from all different walks of life. She noted that

Never have I met with more sympathy, more serious attention, more complete understanding than in my addresses to the white and black people of this Southern mill town. Each element in the audience seemed to look at the question from its own standpoint. All in all, these audiences were a striking demonstration of birth control’s universal message of freedom and betterment… If Elizabeth City is an index of the South, it is ready, waiting, crying for the message of birth control.

“The Joy in the Fullness of Life”: Peggy Sanger

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Emma Goldman, margaret sanger, Peggy Sanger, sanger

Peggy Sanger on the beach in Massachusetts with the cat, Truro, summer 1913.

Margaret Sanger longed for a daughter after the birth of her two sons. She wrote in her Autobiography, “I yearned especially for a daughter, and twenty months later my wish came true.” Peggy, who was born on May 31, 1910, “was so satisfactory a baby” that Margaret was not disappointed when the doctor told her that, due to her illness, she could not have any more children. Peggy contracted polio in 1913 but survived, although her left leg was permanently affected.

In her Autobiography, Sanger shares several tales of Peggy’s childhood. On Cape Cod during the summer of 1913, their veranda

faced the Bay, and when the tide was high the water came up and lapped at the piles on which the cottage was built. Stuart, Grant, and Peggy used to sit on the steps and dabble their toes. At low tide they had two miles of beach on which to skip and run; it was a wonderful place to play, and all summer we had sunrise breakfasts, sunset picnics.

The Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris today.

Later that year, during the family’s trip to Europe, they sublet an apartment on the Boulevard St. Michel across from the Luxembourg Gardens, “where Grant and Peggy could play” — and what a playground that would be!

After returning to America with the children, Sanger began to publish The Woman Rebel, which naturally drew attention from the press. At one point, when Sanger was talking with a group of reporters,

Peggy, who had never seen a derby before, took possession of their hats and sticks, and in the hall a little parade of children formed, marching up and down in front of the door. One of the gentlemen was so furious that I hid Peggy in the kitchen away from his wrath.

In 1947, Sanger was named the “Ideal American Mother” by the League of American Womanhood, and it is easy to see why when one considers the amount of concern she had for her children. Even caught up in all the drama surrounding her publication of The Woman Rebel, she could not postpone certain things, “the most important among them being to provide for the children’s future… temporarily, I sent the younger two to the Catskills and Stuart to a camp in Maine,” while she made provisions for their schooling for the next year on Long Island.

A undated 1914 letter from Grant Sanger to his mother; he gave Peggy a ‘great big hug’ on Margaret’s behalf.

This happiness was all too suddenly brought to a close; Peggy Sanger died of pneumonia and infant paralysis on November 6, 1915. Sanger wrote in her Autobiography of a persistent feeling of dread while she was away, of fear that

something was wrong with Peggy. Night after night her voice startled me from deep sleep and left me in a state of agitation until I received the next letter containing news that all was going well. I tried to dismiss this fear and would have it partially submerged, but always the same troubled voice rang in my ears, ‘Mother, mother are you coming back?’

All of her problems related to The Woman Rebel and the impending trial were “suddenly swept aside by a crisis of a more intimate nature, a tragedy about which I find myself still unable to write, though so many years have passed.” Her Autobiography was first published in 1938, 23 years after Peggy’s untimely death.

An undated photo of the three Sanger children — Grant, Peggy, and Stuart.

She wrote poignantly that

the joy in the fullness of life went out of it then and has never quite returned. Deep in the hidden realm of my consciousness my little girl has continued to live, and in that strange, mysterious place where reality and imagination meet, she has grown up to womanhood. There she leads an ideal existence untouched by harsh actuality and disillusion. Men and women from all classes, from nearly ever city in America, poured upon me their sympathy. Money for my trial came beyond my understanding… women wrote of children dead a quarter of a century for whom they were still secretly mourning, and sent me pictures and locks of hair of their own dead babies. I had never fully realized until then that the loss of a child remains unforgotten to every mother during her lifetime.

In a letter dated December 7, 1915, just a month after Peggy’s death, Sanger’s friend, Emma Goldman, wrote,

I really think it is impardonable on your part to blame yourself for the death of Peggy. I am sure that it is due only to your depressed state of mind as I cannot imagine anyone with your intelligence to hold herself responsible for something that could not possibly have been in your power… Please, dear, don’t think me heartless. I feel deeply with your loss but I also feel that you owe it to yourself and the work you have before you to collect your strength. After all dear, it is a thing which has passed and cannot be redeemed whereas you need your vitality.

Although the letter from Sanger to which this letter is a response has not been found, it is clear that Sanger blamed herself for Peggy’s death and deeply mourned the loss of her daughter.

Peggy continued to be mentioned in Margaret Sanger’s journals. Peggy’s birthday is noted, and on the anniversary of her death in 1938, Sanger wrote, “Peggy’s anniversary into Life!” In 1944, concerned about Stuart and anxious to hear positive news, she wrote,

Ive always said since Peggys death that life could not hold me long if another of my children went before I do — I still feel that way.

The Origins of the Woman Rebel

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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.