Read The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution Online
Authors: Jonathan Eig
“I love being swayed by emotions,” she wrote in her journal in 1914, “just like a tree is rocked to and fro by various breezes—but
stands firmly by its roots
.” Sanger wanted women to have more autonomy in the bedroom and in society. She wanted them to see sex as something vital to their senses of identity and self-expression. She became the most outspoken advocate of sexual pleasure the country had ever seen.
“It was as if she had been more or less arbitrarily chosen by the powers that be to voice a new gospel of not only sex knowledge in regard to conception, but sex knowledge about copulation and its intrinsic importance,” Mabel Dodge said. “She was the first person I ever knew who was openly
an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh
.”
While undergoing this education in radical thought, Sanger worked for Lillian Wald’s Visiting Nurse Service, a group of nurses sent out by the Henry Street Settlement House to care for poverty-stricken women and, often, help the women through childbirth. She
found the conditions “almost beyond belief
.” She wrote: “I seemed to be breathing a different air, to be in another world and country.” At the time, more than six hundred thousand people crowded
below Fourteenth Street east of Broadway
. There was New Israel, Little Italy, Hell’s Kitchen, and the “Bloody Sixth” ward, all of them teeming with poor immigrants. In 1910, in one fairly typical tenement at 94 Orchard Street, sixty-six people occupied eight apartments of about
460 square feet each
. Between 1890 and 1910, Manhattan’s
population had increased 62 percent
, to about 2.3 million from 1.4 million. Russian Jews and Italians led this massive wave of immigration. Sanger was astonished by the poverty and misery: children sick, dirty, and underfed; tuberculosis rampant; and women seemingly unaware of how their own bodies worked and the risks of repeated pregnancies and venereal disease.
“
Poor pale faced wretched wives
,” she wrote to a friend. “Men beat them they cringe before their blows but pick up the baby—dirty, & ill-kempt & return to serve him.” She watched women die because their bodies could not hold up against the strain of producing so many babies in such poor conditions, or because they used primitive birth-control devices that caused infection, or because butchers posing as abortionists botched their jobs.
In the 1920s, the state health department of New York distributed circulars warning women that pregnancies occurring too close together were dangerous, predisposing mothers to tuberculosis. But the same department barred women from receiving information about how to prevent pregnancy. Doctors estimated that
one-third of all pregnancies
in the United States at the time ended in abortion. Sanger saw poor women resorting to “turpentine water, rolling down stairs, and . . .
inserting slippery-elm sticks
, or knitting needles or shoe hooks in the uterus” to end their pregnancies, and that helped her find a focus for her fury.
She told the story of one woman’s death that hit her especially hard. The woman’s name was Sadie Sachs. Her doctor had warned her that another pregnancy might be fatal, but the doctor’s only advice to prevent it was for Sachs to sleep on the roof, away from her husband. She got pregnant again and died after an attempted abortion. Sanger said it was this death more than any other that compelled her to resolve that women should have the right to contraception. “I would strike out,” she wrote. “I would scream from the housetops. I would tell the world what was going on. . . .
I would be heard
. No matter what it should cost. I would be heard.” In 1913, she wrote a twelve-part series of articles about sex and reproduction for
The Call
, a radical newspaper. The articles carried the most straightforward headline she could conjure: “W
HAT
E
VERY
G
IRL
S
HOULD
K
NOW
.”
While Sanger battled on behalf of women struggling to raise more children than they could handle, she was strangely indifferent toward her own children. She had become pregnant about six months after her wedding. Suffering at the time from tuberculosis, she found that pregnancy aggravated her symptoms, and she was forced to spend most of the pregnancy at the well-known Trudeau Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York. After the birth of her first son, Stuart, in 1903, Sanger
lapsed into severe depression
. It would be five years before her second son, Grant, was born. Twelve months later came a daughter named Margaret. Afraid her children would contract tuberculosis from her, she hired nurses and nannies to supervise their care. She was easily annoyed by the petty rivalries of her children, her biographer Ellen Chesler wrote, and kept them at a “predictable distance.” When her son Grant was ten years old and away at boarding school, he wrote to ask if he should return home for Thanksgiving, as most of his classmates were preparing to do. Sanger wrote back that, yes, he should come home;
the maid would be there
to cook him dinner.
Sanger consciously rejected the idea of full-time motherhood, making up her mind that her work was too important to compromise, and she never expressed regret over the decision. By the time she became a mother and a full-time activist and began to test the bounds of her own independence, American women had acquired a measure of power over sex and reproduction within marriage, even if it was hardly evident in the tenements in which Sanger spent so much of her time. In fact, the shift in power was so subtle that many women had not yet noticed it. During the nineteenth century, 90 percent of women were married and 95 percent were not employed outside the household. Over the course of the century, though, there was one big change for women: their fertility rate dropped by 50 percent (the average number of children born to a white woman fell from
7.04 in 1800 to 3.56 in 1900
).
Much of history tells us that women of the Victorian era had little control over their lives, but it wasn’t so. Though they had no reliable contraceptives, women were nevertheless making private efforts to reduce the sizes of their families and liberate themselves, at least a little, from the demands of domestic labor. There is, after all, a big difference between raising seven children and raising three or four. How did women do it? Simply: by saying “no” more often to their husbands, or by asking their men to withdraw prior to ejaculation. Men still dominated most of society, but women were wresting away control of the home and, increasingly, of sex. As women asserted more power in the bedroom, they extended their influence outside of their homes as well. They became more active in their churches and began organizing to fight for political and social change, beginning with the right to vote and the drive to prohibit the sale of alcohol. One big factor in the push for the ban of booze: women believed their husbands would be less abusive and less likely to force them to have sex if more men quit drinking.
Abortion rates rose dramatically in the nineteenth century. Women experimented with an array of contraceptive devices, but most of them did more harm than good. Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher conducted one of the few studies of contraception in this era, beginning around 1892, when she was a biology student at the University of Wisconsin, and running until 1920. Mosher chronicled the sex lives of forty-five women and found that twenty-eight of them used contraception. Most of the women in Mosher’s study were affluent, with money and connections to visit doctors or buy what they needed on the black market. Among her respondents, the most popular form of contraception was Lysol, the antiseptic soap, whose formula in those days contained cresol, a phenol compound that often caused inflammation and burning. The second most popular choice was the condom. One of the women said her doctor, warning that she could not withstand another pregnancy, had prescribed a “woman’s shield,” a device that was supposed to form a seal around the cervix and prevent semen from getting through. Unfortunately, caps such as these seldom fit properly. If a cap were too large, a woman might suffer cramping, ulceration, or infection; if it were too small, pregnancy was likely. Some early studies showed failure rates as high as
24 percent for these devices
. Another one of Mosher’s respondents had received an intrauterine device, or IUD, which was one of the newer forms of contraception and one of the most painful and medically dangerous. IUDs in the 1920s were essentially rings made of silkworm gut shaped by silver wire. The rings were bulky and, in the days before antibiotics, sometimes led to fatal infections of the uterus, ovaries, or fallopian tubes. Another option, the douche, had an absurdly high failure rate—as high as 90 percent—and caused frequent infections. Some women used two, three, or even four methods simultaneously, and still they were not safe. The rhythm method—whereby women confined their sexual activity to the time of the month when they were likely to be infertile—was not yet a factor at the time of Mosher’s study because scientists did not fully understand how and when women ovulated. As late as 1930, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
had this advice for doctors: “We do not know of any method of preventing conception that is absolutely dependable
except total abstinence
.”
Impoverished women often had no option other than abortions, the tragic results of which Sanger had witnessed. The first known description of an abortion appeared around 1500
BC
in a medical text describing how a
plant-fiber tampon coated with honey and crushed dates was used to end a pregnancy. Women swallowed lye and gunpowder, placed leeches inside their bodies, poked themselves with knitting needles, threw themselves down stairs, hammered their abdomens with brickbats, and swallowed poisons.
They were willing, in short, to risk serious side effects, arrest, and death rather than remain pregnant.
Sanger implored women to fight. She wanted them to control their bodies and decide for themselves whether and when to have children. She wanted them to enjoy sex in or out of marriage; to think about their feelings; to be the rulers of their own hearts, minds, and bodies. Sanger believed in free love, the magic of which she heard described in so many Greenwich Village salons. She may also have believed, as the prevailing myths of her day suggested, that tuberculosis was a
disease of both body and soul
, ravaging her physically but also infusing her with a stronger capacity for passion than others. Sanger, even in illness and old age, never ceased to see herself as an attractive woman worthy of love and eager to express her sensuality. When her husband complained about her sexual affairs, she encouraged him to have some of his own. Better balance might help their marriage, she explained. But Bill Sanger was not cut out for casual sex. “
You are a world Lover
,” he wrote his wife. “I am not—I am a single lover. I love too deep & not broad enough.”
The marriage was shattering, but once again Sanger showed few signs of regret. She wanted more women to have the same confidence she had, the same willingness to defy convention and face the world, as she put it, with a “
go-to-hell look
in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention.” Such boldness was too much to ask of most women raising children, especially women raising children in poverty. But it was in this spirit, with the support of radical feminists, socialists, and sexual free thinkers, that Sanger built her grassroots movement. Her revolution was different from those that had come before. Suffragists had been fighting for something women could do independent of or even in opposition to men: vote. But Sanger wanted women to fight for sex, and sex usually involved men.
This would be a more delicate business. Men would not submit to being strong-armed. They would have to be cajoled, engaged, perhaps even wooed, and not everyone would succumb to Sanger’s potent charms.
I
N 1914, SOON
after publication of the first edition of Sanger’s newspaper,
The Woman Rebel
, federal Post Office inspectors issued a warrant for her arrest, charging her with four counts of violating U.S. obscenity laws. If convicted, she would face up to forty years in prison. Sanger, now thirty-four years old and a mother of three, chose not to appear in court. Instead, she jumped bail, left her family, and moved to Europe, where she fell in love with Henry Havelock Ellis, one of the world’s preeminent sexual psychologists.
Ellis was fifty-five, long and lean with a flowing white beard and thick head of white hair framing a strong, handsome face. He had a tendency to sit in silence when he had nothing serious to say, but Sanger loosened him up quickly. She was a sexy slip of a woman, a redheaded fireball of lust and curiosity, and in Europe she was freer than ever to explore her passions. “To see her, one is astounded at her youth, at her prettiness, her gentleness, her mild, soft voice,” wrote Robert Hale of
The New Yorker
in 1925. “One is reminded of Boticelli’s Judith—a gentle spring-like maid who treads the hills as if she danced—but who is attended by a maid upon whose shoulders is
the severed head of Holofernes
.” It was the flame burning within Sanger’s “fragile container,” Hale wrote, that made her so attractive. Ellis swooned over “her devotion to an ideal, her fire, her vitality and beauty.” He would later write that he “had never been so quickly or completely drawn to a woman
in the whole of his life
.”
Ellis had made it his mission to solve the mysteries of sex, collecting histories from men and women in an effort to prove that physical intimacy was natural and varied. He attacked Victorian notions and ridiculed American prudery. Masturbation was good, women were as desirous of sex as men, and marriage needn’t have anything to do with one’s decision to engage in physical intimacy. Going further, he argued that sex was “the chief and central function of life . . .
ever wonderful, ever lovely
.”
Ellis introduced Sanger to more intellectuals, including the science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, who became another of her lovers and would go on to write novels based on their romance. “
It is wonderful enough
that we should take food and drink and turn them into imagination, invention and creative energy,” Wells wrote in
The Secret Places of the Heart
, a novel that reads like a love letter to Sanger, “it is still more wonderful that we should take an animal urging and turn it into a light to discover beauty and an impulse towards the utmost achievements of which we are capable.” In addition to Ellis and Wells, Sanger also met the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the philosopher Bertrand Russell and had an affair with the Spanish anarchist Lorenzo Portet, who was living in exile and teaching at the University of Liverpool.