Put What Where? (20 page)

America in the 1920s might have been more open than ever before to discussions about sex, but contraception was a different matter.

It was banned, and a tough fight lay in store for anyone who wanted to change that. Step forward Margaret Sanger, women’s-rights mercenary (if not quite martyr). Sanger seems to have had a simple ethos: if you are fighting for women, why not use men as munitions?

A short spot of profile-raising incarceration helped her case. In 1917 she was jailed for distributing contraceptive pessaries to immigrant women from a makeshift clinic in Brooklyn. She staged her arrest deliberately to challenge the state’s obscenity laws – the legacy of Anthony Comstock, who had died two years earlier, after repeated confrontations with Sanger that won her publicity and support. She was offered a suspended sentence if she promised to uphold the law, but refused and got 30 days’ jail. She publicly vowed to go on hunger strike, as her activist sister, Ethel, had done. Once transferred to a more comfortable jail, however, she changed her mind.
Years later, when Hollywood considered a movie of her life, Sanger tried to persuade Ethel to let her rewrite the story so that she, not Ethel, was the hunger-strike heroine.

Sanger was obviously the driven, ambitious sort. But why contraception? The answer lies in her early years. She was born Margaret Louise Higgins into a poor family in 1879. Her mother died at 50, her health wrecked by bearing eleven babies. The young woman’s destiny was firmly set in 1913 when, working as a nurse on New York City’s Lower East Side, Sanger watched a young patient die from the complications of an illegal abortion. She decided to devote herself to the single-minded pursuit of sexual and reproductive freedom for women. She married at 23 and had three children, but her contraceptive passion became an obsession.

She left her first marriage, to William Sanger, when he began to fail in business. Instead, she committed herself temporarily to free love. Then she married the ageing millionaire J. Noah Slee, the inventor of 3-In-One oil, whom she wooed away from his wife and wed for his money. And what better use for a sugar-daddy than to improve the lot of women worldwide? Slee agreed to use his business to help her to smuggle contraceptives from Europe and also financed her campaigns. When he lost most of his fortune in the Depression, Sanger no longer felt obliged to spend time with him. Her sexual networking did not stop there. One of her many affairs during and after this 22-year marriage was with the writer, H.G. Wells. They shared political
beliefs – Wells lobbied for the rational, scientific control of the world’s population and helped Sanger get her voice heard at the League of Nations. Handy. She also had an affair with Havelock Ellis and learnt from him how the new popularity of sex manuals might be harnessed for her political ends. Her seductive abilities were helped in no small amount by her looks: she was immensely attractive, small and lithe, with pretty amber-flecked green eyes. H.G. Wells said she had a quick Irish wit, high spirits and radiant common sense – and was ‘genuinely pagan’.

With the help of best-selling manuals, she became the Martha Stewart of marital fornication. Through the 1910s and 1920s she wrote popular books, such as
What Every Girl Should Know
and
Happiness in Marriage
, in which she attacked the idea that sex would wear you out: ‘Love stimulates the whole glandular system, releases into the body a fresh supply of energy, breaks through the old inhibiting and hindering fears, sweeps aside narrow prim and priggish ideas of life’s values, brings new spring to the step, fresh colour to the cheeks, depth and spark to the eye. Love taps an unsuspected and inexhaustible supply of energy which the young lover may convert into ambition and achievement. This is why all the world loves a lover and that is why men and women must learn to remain in love, even though married.’ Her soaring prose was highly inspiring – even if that last bit of advice seems a mite hypocritical.

She also published a widely read feminist journal,
The Woman Rebel
, held international conferences,
and lectured extensively in Asia and Europe. Her ideas do often seem rather mixed up though, a strange blend of anarchy, free love and the worst sort of Victorian bigotry.
In What Every Girl Should Know
, for example, she warns young readers that: ‘A girl can waste her creative powers by brooding over a love affair to the extent of exhausting her system, with the results not unlike the effects of masturbation and debauchery.’ Worse, she declares: The aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.’

Sanger’s birth-control movement stalled during the decades of the Depression and the Second World War. Without public funding or a new besotted millionaire to help, the cost and complexity of her mission proved almost insurmountable. The postwar years saw the baby boom, when newly wedded wives dutifully answered the call to be fruitful and interest in contraception proved low. Sanger became increasingly irritable and conservative. She did not help her case by supporting a eugenic drive for genetic hygiene: she backed the idea of offering bribes to people with untreatable, disabling genetic conditions to encourage them to volunteer to be sterilized. She also wanted tough laws to stop the ‘diseased or feebleminded’ entering America. In 1950, long after people had witnessed how the logic of Nazi ideas had led inexorably to the concentration
camps, Sanger was calling for government genetic programmes to bribe married couples with ‘defective heredity’ to be sterilized.

She turned her attentions abroad. In 1952 she founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation, an umbrella for national associations that remain hard at work today promoting contraception around the world, pressing for women to be granted the fundamental right to control their own bodies. And in her last years, she finally saw progress. A year before she died, the Supreme Court made birth control legal for married couples. When, in September 1966, she died in a Tucson nursing home aged 86, President Lyndon Johnson was beginning to incorporate family planning into America’s social-welfare programmes.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, attitudes in the main continued their steady shuffle towards our present liberal ideas – give or take the odd reactionary writer and barking theorist.

At this point we should salute Dr Helena Wright for helping to bring the clitoris out from under its bushel, finally giving men a clear target for which to aim. Pay attention, chaps: in her 1930 book,
The Sex Factor in Marriage
, she stressed, ‘The only purpose of the clitoris is to provide sensation; a full understanding of its capabilities and place in the sex-act is therefore of supreme importance.’ For those who failed to heed the message first time round, she stressed in
More about the Sex Factor in Marriage
(1947): ‘Since the clitoris is the essential organ of sexual sensation in women, and that rhythmic friction is the only stimulus to which it can react, orgasm failure at the outset of sexual experience is unavoidable if the clitoris is not discovered and correctly stimulated.’

Wright probably inherited her direct sexual approach from her father, a Polish immigrant who
became a wealthy British businessman and openly took a new mistress for a year, every year, in order to ensure that the woman never became a threat to his family. In spite of this precaution, Wright’s parents divorced when she was a teenager. As an adult, Helena also had an open marriage and enjoyed affairs with younger men. Between the two world wars, she worked in China as a medical missionary, then returned to Britain with a new medical mission – to show her patients where female pleasure lay: ‘Women in general take an endless interest in their faces, study them in the mirror and know all their details by heart; but their usual attitude toward their far more important sexual equipment is one of fear and ludicrously complete ignorance,’ she wrote in the
Sex Factor in Marriage.
Wright even broached the idea of stimulating a woman through something other than intercourse, thus helping to bust the taboo of masturbation: ‘An orgasm induced by the husband’s hand, and entirely by way of clitoris sensation, may be a kind and gentle way of introducing a timid and perhaps frightened girl to a happy sex life.’

Her ideas were not all quite so sane. For example, she advised her disciple, Lady Elizabeth Longford, that by douching she could ensure she gave birth to an equal number of sons and daughters. If she wanted a boy, she should use an alkaline douche 30 minutes before intercourse because, Wright claimed, male sperm prefer an alkaline environment. Modern science disagrees. But overall Wright’s influence was benign and lasting. Her
Sex
,
an Outline for Young People
, first published in 1932 as
What Is Sex?
, was still being revised in 1963 and remained on sale in the 1970s.

Not everyone agreed with her pleasure principle. The self-appointed ‘medical psychologist’ Estelle Cole told her readers that they should ignore the clitoris entirely. In her 1938 book,
Education
, she pushed the nonsensical Freudian idea that proper, emotionally mature women who understood their role in life didn’t have silly little clitoral orgasms – they had
vaginal
orgasms, which were big, healthy and clever. Cole wrote: ‘A frigid woman is interested in the sensations derived from the stimulation of the clitoris; the vaginal sensations, so necessary for normal and satisfactory intercourse are absent. She has probably been a masturbator and may be unable to rid herself of the habit.’ The answer? Get yourself a man, girl.

Leslie Weatherhead was just as much of a reactionary – and, like Cole, was on a Canute-like campaign to curb the rising tide of Onanism. Weatherhead, a British Methodist minister, claimed that while masturbation was not physically damaging, it could cause psychological harm. But he had a cure (naturally). He was interested in spiritualism, psychic research and hypnotism, and urged patients to use mind-power to master their masturbation. ‘Quite recently I have had the joy of curing – apparently completely – a boy who masturbated several times daily for eight years and a girl in whom the practice had been a daily one for nearly 15 years,’ he declared. The words ‘apparently completely’ suggest
that even Weatherhead was not convinced.

His mind-power methods ranged from the psychological, urging patients to recognize self-love as ‘the misuse on selfish levels of an instinctive energy’, to the religious: ‘Simply soak the mind with thoughts of Christ.’ If those didn’t work, there were physical alternatives: circumcision or, less radically, avoiding heavy meals late at night. He also suggested that sufferers sleep with coverings that were ‘as light as possible’ so as not to heat the lower parts, in a bed that was ‘not too soft’. Feather beds, he warned, were wickedness incarnate. His attitude may have been creakingly old fashioned, but Weatherhead’s ideas still found a popular market. His
Mastery of Sex through Psychology and Religion
was first published in 1931 and by 1946 had sold 70,000 copies in 15 editions.