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

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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)

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

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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.

“Bertha Watson” Slept Here: The R.M.S. Virginian

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Allan Line, margaret sanger, RMS Virginian, sanger, Virginian, Woman Rebel

Sanger’s 1915 passport under the pseudonym “Bertha L. Watson.” It was much easier then to get a false passport!

Bertha Watson, you ask? But this blog is about Margaret Sanger! Yes, of course it is – but if you were fleeing an indictment trial for attempting to mail copies of The Woman Rebel, deemed “obscene” literature, wouldn’t you sail under an alias, too?

Sanger’s diary for November 3, 1914, is written on Canadian Pacific Railway Ocean Services stationery, with room to fill in the name of the ship on which she was sailing — the R.M.S. Virginian, in this case. The entry is also headed “Sailing to England as Bertha Watson.” There are entries for the first, second, and fourth days at sea, before the diary resumes on November 13 from Liverpool.

The R.M.S. Virginian, run by the Allan Line, sailed from Liverpool to Quebec. She and her sister ship, the R.M.S. Victorian, were built at the Belfast shipyard of Workman, Clark, & Co. in 1904, and were the first two passenger liners crossing the Atlantic to be powered by steam turbines. Her maiden voyage from Liverpool to St. John, New Brunswick, began on April 6, 1905. On subsequent voyages, she ran the Liverpool to Quebec line for which she had been built.

“Sailing to England as Bertha Watson” — The first page of Sanger’s shipboard diary.

The ship had quite a few adventures outside the normal trans-Atlantic duty. On April 14, 1912, the New York Times reported that a wireless dispatch received by Allan Line officials in New York indicated that the Titanic had struck an iceberg and the Virginian had responded to these distress calls. The Virginian had sailed on Saturday, April 13, from Halifax, so she was too far from the Titanic to get there quickly enough to be of use and thus resumed her normal route upon hearing that the Carpathia was closer and would go to the aid of the Titanic.

In late May, 1914, another shipping disaster affected the Virginian. On the fog-shrouded St. Lawrence River, the Canadian Pacific steamship Empress of Ireland, making a voyage from Quebec to Montreal, was struck on the starboard side by the Norwegian collier Storstad; the Empress of Ireland sank only fourteen minutes after the collision, taking with it 1,012 of the 1,477 passengers and crew. This left the Canadian Pacific ocean services one ship short; the Virginian filled in. This explains the heading on Sanger’s stationery.

The R.M.S. Virginian

Not long after Sanger’s voyage, the ship was taken by the British government for troop transport during World War I; following the war, she was sold to the Swedish American Line, where she was rechristened Drottningholm and began sailing in May 1920 from Göteborg to New York. During World War II, some of the Swedish American Line ships, including Drottningholm, were used by the Red Cross for the exchange of diplomats, civilians, and wounded prisoners of war. Following the war, the ship was again sold, this time to the Home Lines; again rechristened, this time as the Brasil; and again began sailing a new route, this time from Genoa to Rio de Janeiro. In the 1950s, although still owned by the Home Lines, Brasil was managed by the Hamburg-Amerika line, rechristened Homeland, and sailed first the Hamburg-Southampton-Halifax-New York route and then the Genoa-Naples-Barcelona-New York route. In 1955, she was retired and sent to the shipbreakers at Trieste to be scrapped after 50 years of service, a long and full life indeed.

Sanger did not mention the conditions on the ship, which were reportedly very nice, in her diary; instead, she tells a few anecdotes about some of her fellow passengers and reflects on the swirl of events that has brought her to this ship under an assumed name. She did comment on the

cargo cargo – food taken from the producers to supply the fighters.

Among the passengers that Sanger found interesting enough to comment on were:

A certain type of English woman…buoyant, frank, fearless – yet considerate. Her face is fair & lovely – abundant hair coiled at the back of her head. The slight framed, peked faced, youth who startles one by saying he is a cattle dealer – his talk is much of profits & the way of profit makers. He has one good idea – that he will not go to war. Lives in Chester parents keep the Albion Hotel there – five sisters – fifty-eight times across – buys cattle from Argentine.

There was also

a nice chap on board – (capitalist) – been all over – so different from the provincial Englishmen – we talked of labor & its problems – he has a view of philanthropy.

On November 13, the Virginian docked in Liverpool and Sanger

arrived at the Adelphia Hotel 11am. No trouble at Customs as I had only one bag.

Perhaps it’s slightly more difficult to plot the R.M.S. Virginian on our map than the usual Sanger Slept Here post, but the voyage came at a crucial point for Sanger. She was fleeing indictment and attempting to keep up as much of her work as she could while away. On a more personal note, her journals for her time in England in 1914 record how desperately she missed her children as well as the breakup of her marriage to William Sanger. The R.M.S. Virginian’s eventful life was nothing compared to Margaret Sanger’s.

Click here for our map of Sanger’s travels.

For more information, see the November 3, 1914 entry in MS’ diary and a rough-draft transcript of the November 3-7 entries at Editors’ Notes. For more information on the Virginian’s involvement in the Titanic disaster, see “Allan Liner Virginian Now Speeding Toward the Big Ship,” New York Times, 14 April 1914. For the Empress of Ireland disaster, see the PBS Online page about it.