Fifties (46 page)

Like the first book, it was a sensation. The first printing was 25,000 copies. Within ten days the publishers were in their sixth printing, for a total of 185,000. It would eventually sell some 250,000 copies. Again, the initial reception was essentially positive: Some of the magazine reporting was thoughtful. Then the firestorm began again: “It is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America,” Billy Graham pronounced. The worst thing about the report, Van Dusen said, was not Kinsey’s facts, if they were indeed trustworthy, but that they revealed “a prevailing degradation in American morality approximating the worst decadence of the Roman Empire. The most disturbing thing is the absence of a spontaneous ethical revulsion from the premises of the study and the inability on the part of the readers to put their fingers on the falsity of its premises. For the presuppositions of the Kinsey Report are strictly animalistic ...” Again Kinsey was disheartened:
“I am still uncertain what the basic reason for the bitter attack on us may be. The attack is evidently much more intense with this publication of the Female. Their arguments become absurd when they attempt to find specific flaws in the book and basically I think they are attacking on general principles.”

The new book was the final straw for the Rockefeller Foundation. In November 1953, Kinsey’s supporters there made passionate presentations on his behalf. His work, they argued, was among the most important the foundation was sponsoring. They put in a request for $80,000. An unsympathetic Rusk rejected it. It was a shattering moment. Kinsey wrote a note to Rusk pleading with him to come out to Bloomington and see what they were doing and telling of how well things looked for the future. Later, in another letter to Rusk, he noted, “To have fifteen years of accumulated data in this area fail to reach publication would constitute an indictment of the Institute, its sponsors, and all others who have contributed time and material resources to the work.” Rusk was unmoved by his pleas. Instead, the Rockefeller Foundation made a grant of $520,000 to Union Theological Seminary. Kinsey was devastated. “Damn that Rusk!” he would say from time to time.

Kinsey merely redoubled his efforts. If he had been a workaholic before, now there was a manic quality to his work. His friends began to worry about his health. His friend Edgar Anderson warned him that the institute needed him for another decade, not just another year or two. Anderson pleaded with him to see a doctor and work out what he called “a rational way of living under the circumstances.” He suffered from insomnia, began to take sleeping pills, and started showing up groggy at work in the morning. The problems with his heart grew more serious. On several occasions he was hospitalized, and by the middle of 1956 he was forced to stay home and rest. In the summer of 1956 he conducted interviews number 7,984 and 7,985. “It is a shame,” he noted, “that there comes a time that you have to work up data and publish it instead of continuing gathering. Frankly, I very much enjoy the gathering.” He was ever the scientist, delighted by discovery. On August 25, 1956, he died, at the age of sixty-two.

TWENTY-ONE

T
HE REVOLUTION IN BIRTH
control had begun in 1950, when Margaret Sanger, the great warrior for that cause, renewed an old friendship with a formidable dowager named Katharine McCormick. Much of both women’s lives had been about fighting to advance the cause of sex education and birth control and fighting against the Catholic Church, which sought to stop such efforts. For most of her life Sanger had been on the radical fringe, constantly living with harassment and the threat of jail. But after forty years of leading the struggle, her ideas on sexual hygiene and population control had moved so much into the mainstream of social opinion that she was even featured in
Reader’s Digest,
the bible of middle-class America. At this point in her life she was anxious to launch an all-out scientific drive for her greatest dream: a birth-control pill. What she needed, first of all, was a wealthy contributor, and that was where Katherine McCormick came in.

There was nothing conventional about Sanger’s life. As a mother she was, at best, erratic and distant—when her son Grant was ten he wrote from boarding school, asking what to do at Thanksgiving, since all the other boys were going home. He should, she answered, come home to Greenwich Village and Daisy, the maid, would cook him a fine dinner. She had little time for such minor intrusions as children and holiday dinners. She was an American samurai, and she had spent her life on a wartime footing. Her passion was the right of women to control their own bodies. Her principal enemies (and she had many enemies) were the Catholic Church and clergy, because in her struggle to inform women about birth control, they did much to prevent her from reaching the urban poor, who were often Catholic.

She came honestly by radicalism. She was born in Corning, New York, in 1879, one of eleven children; her mother suffered from tuberculosis and died at fifty. She believed her father’s sexual appetite had expedited her mother’s death. Her father was an audacious, old-fashioned Irish radical whose iconoclasm did not include women’s issues; fight the establishment he might, but when it came to his family, his daughters were virtually indentured servants. At nineteen she started nurses’ training in White Plains, New York. She considered marriage as equivalent to suicide, but at age twenty-two she met a charming painter and architect named Bill Sanger. He pursued her ardently, and six months after meeting him, despite her promises to herself, she found herself married and soon pregnant. Because her health, like her mother’s, was frail, she spent much of her first pregnancy in a sanatorium. Two more children followed.

But Bill and Margaret Sanger soon tired of White Plains and moved to New York City. For Bill, the draw was all those other young men who hoped to be artists, but his young wife was attracted to the political ferment of Greenwich Village. Everywhere there were meetings, parties, and demonstrations. She became deeply involved with such radicals as Big Bill Haywood of the IWW and yet quickly established her own agenda; it was radical, not in the conventional political sense, but in sexual terms.

As Mabel Dodge, who ran one of the great radical salons of the period, wrote of her, “It was she who introduced us all to the idea of Birth Control and it, along with other related ideas about sex, became her passion. 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 contraception, but sex-knowledge about copulation and its intrinsic importance. She was the first person I
ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh. This, in those days, was radical indeed ... Margaret Sanger personally set out to rehabilitate sex.”

By 1913, her marriage was beginning to break up. She wanted to put theory into practice regarding greater sexual freedom, but Bill Sanger did not. She increasingly began to regard him as a bore and even suggested that he take a mistress. He was appalled. “I am an anarchist, true, but I am also a monogamist. And if that makes me a conservative, then I am a conservative.” Her zeal and sense of urgency increased as she encountered the lives of the poor urban women of New York City. They bore the full brunt of the misery of being new immigrants, and she experienced their plight by walking the tenements of the Lower East Side. The depth of the poverty and misery overwhelmed her: In one Jewish section of the Lower East Side, known as New Israel, there were 76,000 people crowded into 1,179 tenements. “Oh, Juliet, there never was such a Cause,” she wrote to a friend of the urban poor a few years later. “These poor, pale-faced, wretched wives. The men beat them. They cringe before their blows, but pick up the baby, dirty and unkempt, and return to serve him.” Their only method of family planning was to line up on Saturdays with five dollars and submit to hack abortionists. She was amazed to find they knew virtually nothing about contraception and basic sanitation. They were strangers to their own bodies. She started writing for a radical paper,
The Call,
and announced a series of articles about venereal disease, and other reproductive issues to be called “What Every Girl Should Know.” She was promptly told by postal authorities that the entire issue would be suppressed for violating the Comstock laws.

These were named after Anthony Comstock, a fundamentalist who had waged an uncommonly successful campaign in the latter part of the nineteenth century to suppress all information about sex in this country. Comstock was so puritanical that, among other things, he got the courts to arrest store owners who left naked dummies in their store windows. The laws, slipped through a lame-duck Congress on the last day of its session, were designed to prohibit the use of the mail for transporting pornographic materials, in particular obscene postcards. But Comstock expanded the definition of pornography to include all information about sex, including information on birth control.

By 1914, Sanger started her own newspaper,
The Woman Rebel.
“No Gods, No Masters,” announced the masthead. Women, she wrote in the first issue, should “look the whole world in the face with
a go-to-hell look in the eyes; to have an ideal; to speak and act in defiance of convention.” The paper would primarily contain articles on birth control, and Sanger spent a considerable amount of time in the library studying all the information available on the subject. From the start, Comstock himself went after her paper and demanded that the postmaster suppress it.

That was to set the tone for the next forty years. She would see her lectures closed, herself and her associates arrested, her clinics sacked. A few months after she started publishing, she was indicted for violating the Comstock laws. As her trial approached, she sent a copy of her birth-control pamphlet to the judge and then fled the country. In Europe she had a passionate affair with Havelock Ellis, one of the early sex researchers. She traveled widely, studying contraception as it was used in more tolerant countries. She returned in the fall of 1915, because Bill Sanger had stayed behind and been arrested. She did not want her husband to steal the glory. As she faced trial, she got a bit of public relations advice from John Reed, the famous radical. Because she was so lovely, he suggested she should have a prominent photographer take her portrait. Most people thought crusaders looked like Amazons, Reed told her. So she wore a plain dress with a wide Quaker collar, her hair was up, and her two young sons posed with her. The photo was extremely effective, appearing in hundreds of newspapers. With the publicity about the case going her way, the district attorney began to ask for postponements. Soon he dropped the case, perhaps to prevent her from becoming a martyr.

Her cause was gaining respectability and she began to attract new allies—society wives instead of radicals. They were, more often than not, college-educated women from old families and good homes, with a bent toward social work. She helped form the “Committee of One Hundred,” and Gertrude (Mrs. Amos) Pinchot, the wife of the governor of Pennsylvania, was her chairwoman. In 1916 she embarked on a major speaking tour throughout the country. She attracted large crowds everywhere she went. In St. Louis the theater at which she was to speak was locked. In Portland, Oregon, she was arrested. In Boston, where authorities had threatened to close any meeting at which she spoke, she stood on the stage with a gag around her mouth while Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., read her speech.

In late 1916, she opened the first of her birth-control clinics, designed to provide information for all women on birth control. Flyers were passed out among the poor, in English, Yiddish, and Italian. The police moved immediately: She and her sister were arrested.
But each new arrest was seen now as a victory. Slowly, steadily, she was shifting the focus from herself to those who threatened our most basic liberties.

In 1921, she sponsored a three-day conference on birth control at the Plaza Hotel and Town Hall in New York City. On the final day, Sanger and a British speaker named Harold Cox, a former member of Parliament, were to appear. They arrived to find a huge crowd gathered outside. The doors to Town Hall had been locked by New York City police, who also had formed a tight circle around the building. When the police opened the doors momentarily to let out those who were already inside, Sanger and Cox were swept inside. She tried to speak but was carried out of the hall by the police. Police reserves had to be called up to protect the station from an increasingly angry crowd. It was the turning point in her struggle: The manner in which her right to free speech had been abridged shocked the city and the nation. According to the policemen involved, New York’s Roman Catholic archbishop had not even bothered to call the mayor or any other municipal figure to see what could be done. He had merely called the local precinct captain, who, on his own authority, had shut down the meeting.

The New York Times
ran a story about it. Later, Mrs. Sanger said of the incident, “It was no longer my lone fight. It was now a battle of a republic against the machinations of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Her singularity of purpose was remarkable: “If you like my religion—birth control—we shall be friends,” she once told a friend. She hated that many of her colleagues hid behind the title “Planned Parenthood.” That was a euphemism. “It irks my very soul and all that is Irish in me to acquiesce to the appeasement group that is so prevalent in our beloved organization,” she wrote.

Despite the opposition of the Catholic Church, the popularity of her cause continued to grow. At her sixth annual birth-control conference, in 1925, more than a thousand doctors sought admission. In 1931 she ordered a hundred Japanese diaphragms through the mail as a means of testing customs. In the court case that followed she won a significant victory. Judge Augustus Hand ruled that even though the Comstock laws were clear in intent, Congress in 1873 had not had access to modern information on the danger of pregnancy and the potential usefulness of contraception. That decision opened the mails to the sale of contraceptive devices. By 1937 the business of contraception reached sales of $250 million annually.