The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (7 page)

Ellis, though, was her chief mentor. He helped Sanger focus her anger and take a more strategic approach to her crusades. Contraception was a fine cause, he said, but Sanger would have better luck if she viewed it in simple terms with a single goal rather than as part of a broad assault on capitalism, marriage, and organized religion. Sanger at times had seemed focused primarily on making noise and upsetting her enemies. Her mission lacked clarity. Ellis educated her on the science of contraception and the economic peril of population growth. He encouraged her to read about eugenics, including accounts of scientific breeding practiced by the American Oneida Community, and showed her a book by George Drysdale called
The Elements of Social Science
, which argued that only contraception had the potential to increase the amount of love in the world. Drysdale may have been the first modern thinker to state that science had the power to make the world a sexier place, and Sanger became an eager disciple.

Sanger already had the drive and determination to change the way men and women lived, but now, for the first time, she had a plan. At first she had seen contraception primarily as a way to help women control the size of their families. Now she was beginning to believe that if sex were something disconnected from childbirth, women might be liberated in ways they’d never imagined. Marriage would change. Human dynamics would change. The meaning of family would change. Career and educational opportunities for women would change. With that, she had found her mission and distilled it to its essence.

While Sanger was in Europe, her husband was arrested by Anthony Comstock, a special agent for the postal service, for distributing pamphlets about birth control.

In the years immediately following the Civil War, Comstock had made it his mission to fight smut in America, almost single-handedly creating a strict set of anti-obscenity laws. As a teenager,
Comstock had masturbated so obsessively
that he thought it might drive him to suicide. When he got a little older, he concluded that it wasn’t his fault; it was filthy books and postcards that nearly drove him to degeneracy. With the backing of influential businessmen, Comstock was appointed special agent for the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Committee for the Suppression of Vice. While leading raids and snatching up sex devices, pornographic pictures, and contraceptives, Comstock became famous for guarding America from pornography and disease. In 1873, he persuaded Congress to pass a bill banning the use of mail for transporting “
any obscene, lewd, lascivious
or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character.” After that, every state in the union enacted its own anti-obscenity laws, many of which made it illegal to sell or disseminate information on contraception. To help enforce the federal law, Comstock was appointed a special obscenity agent of the United States Post Office. Soon after, he was authorized to carry a gun.

Comstock was bald, bull-necked, and barrel-chested, with thick muttonchop sideburns running along the sides of his broad face. He called himself
a “weeder in God’s garden,”
but he looked a lot more like a dangerous hunter, and he never had trouble finding prey. Comstock and his agents began arresting publishers, bookstore owners, and photographers—often after setting them up by posing as buyers of their wares. Comstock was relentless. He went on to make hundreds of arrests and seize 200,000 obscene pictures and 64,000 contraceptive devices and instruments of sexual pleasure. At least fifteen women accused of immorality committed suicide rather than face the charges.

The Comstock Law defined immorality so broadly that it could have included anything, so it was no surprise that it was deemed to ban not only the sale of contraception but also the transmission of information regarding contraception. The only real surprise is that the law would continue to influence policy and keep women from getting birth control for as long as it did.

Soon after her arrival in England, Sanger wrote to her husband saying that she considered their twelve-year marriage over. She asked for a divorce. But Bill did not feel the same way. “
You are all the world to me
,” he insisted in one letter.

If she showed little remorse toward leaving her husband, her feelings about her children were different. She expressed worry about them in her diary. Seven-year-old Grant and five-year-old Peggy were staying temporarily in Greenwich Village under the care of Caroline Pratt, a progressive educator, and her companion, Helen Marot, a labor organizer. Peggy was confused and upset by her mother’s departure and cried every time her father had to leave after a visit to Pratt and Marot’s home, Bill wrote in letters to Margaret. Eventually, Bill brought Peggy home and asked one of the girl’s aunts to move in and do the cooking. Grant wrote letters to his mother, stoically telling her not to worry about him, while
Stuart, alone at boarding school
, asked his mother to send a photograph he could look at in her absence. With the outbreak of war in Europe, the mail had become unreliable. “How lonely it all is,” Sanger wrote. “Could any prison be more isolated . . . than wandering around the world separated from the little ones you love . . . ?” But in other letters and diaries she made clear that she cherished this time free of familial responsibility to “
reflect, meditate and dream
.”

In the fall of 1915 Sanger’s husband was convicted on obscenity charges, with the judge saying he had not only violated “the laws of man, but the law of God as well, in your scheme to prevent motherhood.” Offered a $150 fine or a thirty-day prison sentence, William Sanger chose prison. Only then did Margaret finally agree to return home. Soon after her arrival in New York, her five-year-old daughter Peggy developed pneumonia and died at Mount Sinai Hospital, cradled in her mother’s arms. The Sanger family would never be the same. Grant blamed his mother, saying Peggy would never have become so sick if their mother had been present. Bill Sanger sculpted a plaster cast of his daughter that he would keep in broken pieces for years. Margaret suffered sleepless nights, and when sleep did come she was
haunted by nightmares
. In one dream, she heard roofs crashing around her and began worrying about her daughter, only to realize she’d been neglecting the girl and didn’t know where she had gone. For years after she would be tormented by dreams of babies, and sleep would remain a problem for the rest of her life.

Still, this tragedy did not compel her to pay more attention to the care of her surviving children. Instead, Sanger went back to work, determined to achieve something important and ready to wage war if necessary. She began by posing for publicity photos, wearing a wide Quaker collar with her hair pinned neatly and her young son by her side, looking like a respectable young mother. It was about this time she began using the term “birth control” instead of contraception, a brilliant piece of marketing strategy. Sanger wanted to separate sex from reproduction, but there was more to her movement than that. At first, she considered referring to her cause as “voluntary parenthood” or “voluntary motherhood,” but those terms didn’t quite ring true. “
Then we got a little nearer
,” she said, “when ‘family control’ and ‘race control’ and ‘birth rate control’ were suggested. Finally it came to me out of the blue—‘Birth Control!’”

There was no sexual connotation involved, no declaration of independence, no threat. These were not fighting words. These were words, like her Quaker collar, designed to make people more comfortable. No one could object to “birth,” of course. Without birth there could be no life. But for Sanger, the key word was “control.” If women truly got to control when and how often they gave birth, if they got to control their own bodies, they would hold a kind of power never before imagined. Without control, women were destined to be wives and mothers and nothing more. But the word “control” also sent the message to Sanger’s supporters in the eugenics movement that she had their mission in mind, too—that this was not only about personal choice but also about determining who should and should not be giving birth.

In 1916, Sanger opened her first birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where she, her sister Ethel, and a team of nurses distributed condoms and Mizpah pessaries (flexible rubber caps that were commonly sold in drug stores as a “womb support” but in reality functioned similarly to a diaphragm or cervical cap). The pamphlets advertising the clinic, printed in English, Yiddish, and Italian, read:

MOTHERS!

Can you afford to have a large family?

Do you want any more children?

If not, why do you have them?

DO NOT KILL, DO NOT TAKE LIFE, BUT PREVENT

Safe, Harmless Information can be obtained at

46 AMBOY STREET.

Given that the clinic operated in direct violation of New York State law, no one was surprised when police raided the place ten days after it opened, confiscating contraceptive devices and arresting Sanger. She served thirty days in the Queens County Penitentiary, charged with the illegal distribution of birth-control products. Arguing that she was a political prisoner, not a real criminal, she refused to be fingerprinted. Before her release, a pair of prison guards named Murray and Foley tried to force her to submit to fingerprinting, but Sanger, who must have been outweighed by a three to one margin, fought them off. The
New York Tribune
reported that she emerged from jail to greet her supporters with
“wrists reddened as though they had been rubbed vigorously.” Another newspaper slyly added, “Nobody outside the Corrections Department knows what scars Murray and Foley are nursing.”

The timing of all her publicity was excellent. Even people not concerned with women’s rights or free sex were beginning to suggest that birth control might work for the greater good of society. In 1798, an obscure English clergyman named T. R. Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” arguing that most of the world’s suffering was caused by mankind’s “
constant tendency
. . . to increase beyond the means of subsistence.” Charles Darwin believed that humans were becoming more fertile over time, and Margaret Sanger’s lover, Havelock Ellis, extrapolated that man’s sex drive had accelerated now that he was less preoccupied with the physical struggle for survival. The rise of cities and the Industrial Revolution, not to mention the Catholic Church’s strictures, contributed to growing family sizes. And while birth rates grew, death rates fell thanks to advances in science and medicine. For the first two to five million years of human history, the world’s population never topped ten million, and population growth was scarcely above zero. Birth and death rates were almost equal. But when humans began to farm and raise animals, they began living longer. By 1658, the world population had reached five hundred million. By the year 1800, it had topped one billion. And by 1900, the number was approaching two billion.

In the United States, where land was abundant, population control was not a pressing economic problem. But it was becoming a pressing social problem. Children from large families were more likely to be forced to leave school and go to work. Families with a dozen or more children often clustered into three or four rooms until, inevitably, some of the children died or became delinquents and moved out to live on the streets, where they often turned to crime. Thousands of men and women with syphilis went on reproducing infected children. One such inflicted woman wrote to Sanger:

I am today the mother of six living children, and have had two miscarriages. My oldest son is now twelve years old and he has been helpless from his birth. The rest of my children are very pale and I have to take them to the doctor quite often. One of my daughters has her left eye blind. I have tried to keep myself away from my husband since my last baby was born, but it causes quarrels, and once he left me saying
I wasn’t doing my duty as a wife
.

By the 1920s, Sanger had many new allies. More than 4.7 million American men, many of them from working-class or immigrant families, served in the military during World War I, where they learned about venereal disease and condoms from their fellow soldiers and from prostitutes. Condoms were easy to find in Europe and were sold unofficially in many government-operated American canteens. When the war ended, venereal disease became a big enough crisis that many Americans began to think of sex as a matter of public health worthy of scientific and social research. The U.S. government began spending millions on public health campaigns to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Health officials got help from a judge in the New York Court of Appeals who upheld Sanger’s conviction for violating vice laws but established for the first time that doctors could prescribe contraception for women’s health.