Dreamers of a New Day (17 page)

Goldman influenced the young Margaret Sanger, who in 1913 also
sought Dave’s advice in Paris. From a working-class Irish Catholic family in New York, Sanger was only sixteen when her mother died after bearing eleven children. A resolve not to follow in her footsteps, and contact with poor women as a visiting obstetrics nurse on the Lower East Side, persuaded Sanger that birth control was a priority. In 1912 she wrote a series of articles on sex for the socialist paper the
Call
, under the heading ‘What Every Mother Should Know’; when these were censored under the Comstock Law, the column appeared blank, with the defiant heading ‘What Every Girl Should Know’ followed by the word ‘Nothing’.
²⁶
Influenced by the anarcho-syndicalist group Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in 1914 Sanger started her revolutionary magazine
Woman Rebel
which proclaimed sexual liberation along with the total transformation of society. In the June issue Sanger introduced the term ‘birth control’ as a counterpart to the IWW’s slogan, ‘workers’ control’.
²⁷
Arraigned under the Comstock Law for the contents of the magazine, Sanger defiantly produced the pamphlet
Family Limitation
which gave instructions on contraception and birth control methods and that October, before her trial, she fled to Europe. Feminists, socialists, anarcho-syndicalists and anarchists, including Mary Ware Dennett, Kate Richards O’Hare, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Emma Goldman, rallied to Sanger’s support.

Left to right: Margaret Sanger in court with her sister Ethel
Bryne, 1916 (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)

In her 1915 article ‘Comstockery in America’ in the
International Socialist Review
, Sanger put forward a class-based argument for birth control, declaring that her
Woman Rebel
had not seen it as a ‘panacea’ for all social wrongs but ‘as the most important immediate step which should be taken toward the economic emancipation of the workers’. At the same time she made a gendered case for the rights of working-class women:

The fewer children she had to cook, wash and toil for, the more leisure she would have to read, think and develop. That freedom demands leisure, and her first freedom must be in her right of herself over her own body; the right to say what she will do with it in marriage and out of it; the right to become a mother, or not, as she desires and sees fit to do; that all these rights swing around the pivot of the means to prevent conception, and every woman had the right to have this knowledge if she wished it.
²⁸

During her stay in Europe, Sanger studied the history of birth control campaigning, and in her article she paid tribute to Moses Harman as well as to the British Neo-Malthusians, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant. She also connected to networks of sexual radicals and birth controllers, meeting Edward Carpenter, the East London anarchist Rose Witcop, and her free-love partner Guy Aldred, as well as Marie Stopes. A particularly close friendship developed between Sanger and Stella Browne, the socialist and feminist who had insisted in the
Freewoman
in 1912 that ‘our right to refuse maternity is . . . an inalienable right. Our wills are ours, our persons are ours’.
²⁹
When Sanger left Britain for Paris in September 1915, Browne wrote: ‘I simply won’t believe that I shall never see you again. We are going to meet again some day and in the meanwhile I’ll do what I can, though it won’t be as much as I should like to do . . . It has been one of the
biggest
and one of the
dearest
things in my life to have met you and known you.’
³⁰
However, the most crucial meeting for Sanger was with the sex psychologist Havelock Ellis. Ellis fell in love with the vibrant young American, and his intellectual outlook tempered her anarcho-syndicalist views. He argued she should concentrate on birth control and criticized her faith in direct action.

Ellis was not the only reason for the shift in Sanger’s thinking when she returned home. During World War One, the political atmosphere in the US changed dramatically. After America joined the allies in 1917 it was no longer just a matter of the mail being censored under the Comstock Law: thousands of American leftists were being given long prison sentences for opposing the war. The generally repressive climate persisted in the Red Scare of the post-war era; direct action tactics met with harsh reprisals. Several birth control activists served time in US prisons: Agnes Smedley, the socialist and feminist supporter of Indian nationalism, went to jail on charges of espionage and distributing birth control literature; as did Kitty Marion, a British suffragette who propagandized about contraception to her fellow prisoners. In 1919, after serving time in prison, in bad health and without the radical networks through which she had been able to distribute her magazine the
Birth Control Review
, Sanger modified
Family Limitation
by cutting out her recommendation of birth control as a method of direct social action, and eliminating references to abortion.
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She also shifted to the position that birth control information should be given by doctors and nurses. In October 1919 the Supreme Court upheld Sanger’s conviction, but agreed that physicians and druggists would not be prosecuted.

In 1922 Sanger developed an alternative framework for her approach to birth control, equating it with modernity rather than with workers’ control over production. In her book
The New Motherhood
she challenged the masculine bias in sexual morality, and called on women to regard birth control and maternity as part of a wider self-determination which challenged established attitudes and conventions. While still acknowledging the need for a working-class movement,
The New Motherhood
was presented as part of a wider human cause: ‘American womanhood is blasting its way through the debris of crumbling moral and religious systems towards freedom’.
³²
Sanger gained an international reputation with her ideas of self-determination and self-fulfilment, though when she was about to go to India in 1924, Agnes Smedley cautioned her that ‘it is better not to stress the woman freedom viewpoint until you have a foothold’.
³³
Smedley, who was familiar with educated Indian attitudes, was aware that the benefits to ‘the race’ and the improvement of children were more acceptable to Indian Neo-Malthusians.

Although Sanger attracted the most attention, hers was not the only political trajectory in America. Antoinette Konikow was still campaigning and providing information on birth control, which she linked to
a broader Marxist programme. In Massachusetts from 1919 Blanche Ames’s Family Welfare Foundation connected birth control to the welfare of mothers and children, while the former arts and crafts enthusiast Mary Ware Dennett set up the Voluntary Parenthood League in the same year. Dennett held that both parents should decide about contraception, and used civil liberties arguments to defend their right to knowledge. She was suspicious of state-led population policies, opposed eugenics and believed information should be given not only by the medical profession.
³⁴

In 1915, dissatisfied with the existing works on sex hygiene, Mary Ware Dennett had written an essay for her two teenage sons. Published in the
Medical Review of Reviews
in 1918, it was then circulated as a pamphlet,
The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People
. Dennett gave a clear account of sexual intercourse, menstruation and birth control and was affirmative about sexual pleasure. ‘Sex union is the very greatest physical pleasure to be had in all human experience, and it helps very much to increase all other kinds of pleasure also.’
³⁵
In 1929 the cautious and respectable Dennett was tried for sending her pamphlet through the mail. The judge asked the carefully screened jury (anyone who had read Havelock Ellis having been excluded) to consider the ‘probable reasonable effect’ of ‘The Sex Side of Life’ upon the ‘decency, purity and chastity’ of ‘the family which is the common nursery of mankind, the foundation rock upon which the state reposes’.
³⁶
The jury’s verdict of guilty provoked a storm of protest, indicating that public opinion was changing. Comstockery was being forced on to the defensive, though it fought a resolute rearguard action. Time would be on the side of the moderate demand for information about sex, but to reformers in both Britain and the US during the 1920s, obscurantism seemed powerful indeed.

In Britain, the legislative context was somewhat different from the American one. There was no equivalent to Comstock, and birth control ideas were being disseminated to the middle and working classes by the Neo-Malthusian New Generation League. Nonetheless the obscenity laws could be invoked. In 1922 the anarchists Rose Witcop and Guy Aldred deliberately tested the legal situation by publishing Sanger’s
Family Limitation
. It was duly seized in their London home that December, and they were charged with distributing obscene literature. As working-class anarchists living in a free union, Aldred and Witcop were vulnerable and marginal. Despite support from Dora and Bertrand Russell and the Neo-Malthusians,
Family Limitation
was declared obscene. Dora Russell
recalled in her autobiography,
The Tamarisk Tree
, that a lawyer explained this was probably because of a diagram which showed a pessary being placed in a vagina. The obscenity lay in the possibility that the finger was not the woman’s own. An amazed Dora Russell remarked, ‘Not having a sufficiently “dirty mind” this had simply not occurred to me.’
³⁷

In the foreground, left to right: Stella Browne,
Dora Russell and Bertrand Russell, 1923

In 1924 Rose Witcop published
Family Limitation
again, in defiance of the ruling, but she was an exception. On the whole left-wing birth controllers in Britain eschewed the direct-action tactics of the Americans, in favour of a campaigning approach within the labour movement. When, towards the end of 1922, Nurse E. S. Daniels from the Neo-Malthusian League was sacked from her job as a health visitor in Edmonton, North London, for giving advice on birth control, a campaign was mounted in her defence, mainly through the socialist press and women’s labour meetings. In January 1923 Stella Browne wrote to the socialist magazine the
New Leader
insisting that birth control advice should be available in all maternity and child welfare centres. Dora Russell followed up with a letter on the Aldred-Witcop case for good measure, while the feminist
Evelyn Sharp, a friend of Edward Carpenter, told readers that opposition to birth control was a form of class prejudice.
³⁸

Throughout the 1920s Browne and Russell took the issue into labour women’s organizations all over the country. Labour Party women voted over and over again at their own ‘women’s conferences’ for birth control advice to be made legal in welfare centres, only to be defeated at the Labour Party conferences. The Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald insisted that birth control was a private, not a political, issue and the women’s organizer, Marion Phillips, who appeared ‘massive and terrifying’ to a young Dora Russell, fiercely defended the Labour line: ‘Sex should not be dragged into politics. You will split the Party from top to bottom.’
³⁹
To socialist feminists like Russell, sex was already part of politics – but the Labour leadership were aware of their dependence on a strong Catholic lobby, and refused to budge on birth control. The eventual outcome would be a compromise. The Ministry of Health issued a memorandum in 1930 saying that information could be given to married women on medical grounds, if having another child would harm the woman’s health.
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