The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (21 page)

At the time, Searle was paying about
one-third of Pincus’s $15,000 annual salary
when the median family income in the United States was $5,000, Mickey Mantle earned $17,500 to play centerfield for the New York Yankees, and President Eisenhower received a salary of $100,000.

Pincus may have been hedging his bets, but Sanger and McCormick were not. They were increasingly desperate to see him succeed.

Sanger was “
weary & depressed
,” as she wrote to her friend Juliet Barrett Rublee, with little time for family and friends. “I feel pepless—no energy—no desire to do anything,” she continued.

Despite decades of work toward the cause of family planning, her abrasive nature had left her without strong support from the very organization she had helped to found. She was often forced to make personal fundraising appeals and to dip into her own bank account to fund projects that Planned Parenthood would not fully cover. “God knows how far I can go spending for Bc [birth control] & Conferences,”
she wrote to the same friend
.

Sanger was getting sicker by the day as heart disease sapped her strength. She had suffered her first attack in 1949, shortly after her seventieth birthday. Afterward, fatigue forced her to cancel appearances. In January 1952, when she made her television debut, her Catholic debate opponents scarcely let her get a word in, and Sanger looked like an aging prize fighter as she absorbed blow after blow without hitting back. “I am so discouraged at my own reflexes—& lack of ‘come back,’ ” she wrote, “that I have almost decided
not to do any public speaking ever again
.” She relied on Demerol, a highly addictive painkiller, to relieve severe chest pain. Her doctors
urged her to retire
, but she gave them a one-word response: “
Preposterous
!”

Friends noticed that she seemed more irritable than usual, perhaps a result of the mix of painkillers, sleep medicine, and the champagne
to which she had become accustomed
. “I doubt very much you are at all aware in your concentration on the work, of how you brushed your good friends off and made them feel completely unwanted,” Dorothy Hamilton Brush,
Cleveland-born socialite
and Sanger’s longtime friend, wrote to her in 1953.

When she couldn’t sleep, Sanger read
The Second Sex
, the new book by Simone de Beauvoir, which would become one of the founding texts of feminism, weaving together history, biology, economics, and philosophy in an exploration of the power of sexuality. De Beauvoir’s book attempted to explain why women had accepted a secondary role to men in society from the age of hunters and gatherers to World War II. She argued that men and women would both be better off if women won their emancipation, writing: “It is
when the slavery of half of humanity
is abolished and with it the whole hypocritical system it implies that the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its authentic meaning and the human couple will discover its true form.” It was no surprise that Sanger enjoyed the book, especially given de Beauvoir’s descriptions of “the servitude of maternity,” “woman’s absurd fertility,” and heterosexual love as “a mortal danger.” De Beauvoir in her personal life did not hate men, but she did hate the institutions forced on women by a male-dominated society. Even conjugal love, she wrote, is “a complex mixture of attachment, resentment, hatred, rules, resignation, laziness and hypocrisy.”

Sanger didn’t say if she agreed on all counts, but wrote: “It is an amazing study of woman—it must have taken her most of
a life time to study & write
.” The part she may have liked best was de Beauvoir’s call to action. “What a curse to be a woman!” de Beauvoir wrote. But the greater curse, she went on to say, was to accept the curse without a struggle. It was every woman’s duty to fight.

That had never been a problem for Sanger before, but now her time and energy were growing more limited. And rather than retire, as her doctor had urged, she took on greater responsibility, becoming the sole president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the organization working to spread birth-control work around the world. She remained frustrated that the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, focused primarily on birth-control education and clinical services, wasn’t doing more to back Pincus’s work. She was convinced that the scientist was on the brink of a major breakthrough. As she told the doctors and social workers attending the Fourth International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Stockholm in the summer of 1953, the time had come to “
put all our energies into research
for a simple cheap contraceptive, one which will perhaps immunize temporarily against pregnancy. I believe that will be the safest method and the one which in the long run will be the best.” She went on, playing to the eugenics supporters in her audience, to say that the next priority should be to “do something definite about the breeding and multiplication of diseased families . . . mental defectives, morons, unhealthy, diseased people.”

Sanger’s comments were controversial, but not scandalous. In 1952, there were 1,401 officially reported sterilizations of so-called “mental defectives” in the United States. There were no doubt many more that went undocumented. Some states did not report the sterilization of prison inmates or the mentally ill, and other cases went unreported
when individuals volunteered for sterilization
. At the time of Sanger’s speech, some advocates were calling for more compulsory sterilization; some called for a campaign to encourage more voluntary sterilization; and others opposed it for any reason other than individual matters of health. Sanger and others within the Planned Parenthood movement used the occasion of the 1953 conference to call for more research and education to bring about, as one speaker said, “a more general acceptance and intelligent use of sterilization . . . to benefit
both the individual and the community
.”

Sanger and Planned Parenthood had always had an uneasy alliance with the eugenicists. In the 1920s, college professors taught courses on eugenics and students constructed state fair booths to teach visitors about “racial hygiene.” The movement’s leading spokesman, Charles B. Davenport, had opened the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, which became the movement’s center. Some of the support for the movement came from social workers, health officials, doctors, and nurses who saw the tragic consequences of inherited disease, while others were compelled by racism and elitism to develop a biological program that would reduce the size of immigrant and racial groups they deemed less desirable. It was no great surprise that Sanger, who learned about eugenics from Havelock Ellis, would find it attractive. “
More children from the fit
, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control,” read a 1919 editorial in Sanger’s
Birth Control Review
. She believed women should be empowered to control and limit their own reproduction. She also argued the government would not have to resort to welfare for the poor if society used the same efficient reproductive techniques as “modern stockbreeders” to improve the health of the populace. Parents, she said in a speech, should have to apply for the right to have children
just as immigrants applied for visas
.

The men who led the eugenics movement went further, arguing that the state should be empowered to control the reproduction of whole groups of people they deemed inferior or unworthy of the right to reproduce. They saw a danger not only in the growth of poor and unhealthy families but also in mixing of races and nationalities. In her ambition to get help from the eugenicists, Sanger may have overreached, or she may in fact have been a true believer. By the end of the 1930s, eugenics faded from public view, but Sanger had not given up on the movement’s remaining supporters. In a 1950 letter to McCormick she wrote, “I believe that now, immediately there should be a national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out
were the government not feeding them
.” Even after World War II, when the Nazis attempted to eradicate entire races and religions using sterilization and mass murder to accomplish their goals, Sanger held firm. “Parenthood,” she said repeatedly, “should be considered
a privilege, not a right
.” Sanger and McCormick were both elitists, to be sure, and they grew more elitist as they got older and wealthier, but there’s little reason to believe either one of them was racist. Sanger never joined the eugenicists who argued that rich, educated, white people should be encouraged to have
more
children. Nor did she single out any race when she identified people who she felt ought to be having fewer children. She wanted women to have fewer children, or to have the best odds of having healthy children when they wanted them. Race never seemed to be the driving factor in her deliberations.

Regardless of her motives, Sanger’s loyalty to the eugenicists presented a dilemma, because a birth-control pill was not really what the eugenicists wanted or needed. As some of the eugenicists were savvy enough to point out, a birth-control pill, no matter how inexpensive, would probably appeal most to well-educated and wealthy women. These were precisely the women that eugenicists wanted to see having
more
children, not fewer.

Sanger had begun her crusade as an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, but in cozying up to the eugenicists she had effectively converted it, as the historian David M. Kennedy wrote, “from a radical program of social disruption to a
conservative program of social control
.” By the 1950s Sanger seemed to recognize the problem of being so closely linked with the eugenicists, but it was too late. If she wasn’t quite married to them, she’d been in bed with them so long that there was no way to call it off. Over the course of her long career she had done a great deal—perhaps more than anyone in the twentieth century—to change attitudes surrounding family, women, and sex, but most of the change had occurred among the middle and upper classes. Women with education and economic standing were more likely to stand up for themselves and discuss family planning with their husbands than women from the lower classes, as the sociologist Lee Rainwater wrote in 1965 after conducting more than four hundred interviews on the subject. The poor, meanwhile, were not much better off than they had been at the start of the century, when Sanger had been canvassing New York’s Lower East Side and tenement women had been forced to rely so heavily on abortions to control the growth of their families.

In the end, it wasn’t simply the eugenicists who had led Sanger away from her original goal of helping the poor; sex was a factor, too. If her goal had been simply to help the poor, she might have stuck to education. But she had wanted to liberate sex for women of every class. She had wanted sex to become a greater source of pleasure and personal fulfillment. She had wanted to see it deepen the bonds between men and women. She had wanted to curb the world’s population growth. She had wanted it all. Indeed, she still wanted it all, and she still held out hope. It was all riding on Pincus’s pill.

Sanger was seventy-four. The average lifespan for an American woman at the time was seventy-two years. Her age and poor health gave her good reason to contemplate her legacy and unfinished business. But in the fall of 1953 she had yet another reason to reflect on her triumphs, miscalculations, and unfinished work: A young journalist named Lawrence Lader had begun writing her biography. The attention thrilled her.

“You must always be in love,” Sanger told the author, who was forty years her junior. “Life is meaningless unless you are in love.” She insisted he stay close to her constantly as they worked, spending all day and all evening together and drinking terrific amounts of champagne. There was
nothing physical between them
, but to Lader it felt every bit like a courtship.

Lader was so charmed he sent Sanger chapters to review as he finished them. “
I am not happy in past memories
,” she wrote him in October 1953 as she worked her way through his manuscript, striking through lines she didn’t care for and inking notes in the margins. Lader, clearly smitten, let her make the changes. “In my revised opening I did use the . . . comparison with Joan of Arc and am realizing how smart Joan was to attribute her driving impulses to a thing as simple as voices,” Lader wrote in a letter to Sanger. “But how does one put over the radiance, the
inexhaustible flame of your own driving force
?”

Lader’s book, published by Doubleday in 1955, was almost entirely without criticism, and at times it was so admiring as to be embarrassing. Even so, as she read it and edited it, Sanger saw her life in summary. It was like reading one’s own obituary, only longer and more intense. She compared Lader to “a dog with a bone, digging and digging into the past, and into the psychic experience of ones [
sic
] life that really
could make you quite ill
.”

The book’s final chapter made clear how this crusader’s story would end: “Only one objective, one theme like an enormous orchestral crescendo, dominates Margaret Sanger’s work today—the search for the birth-control ‘pill,’ ” Lader wrote. “The discovery of the ‘pill’—the climactic dream of her life—will undoubtedly prove one of the revolutionary events of the century. . . . Although Mrs. Sanger has played no technical role in the development of the ‘pill,’ she has been
its prophet, its driving force
.” Lader went on to write that the pill might arrive within the next year or two, with testing to confirm its safety taking an additional three to five years. In other words, it was coming soon—soon enough, perhaps, that the fading warrior might yet be around to see it happen.