When Sex Changed: Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars

3. “That Means Children to Me”: The Birth Control Review in Harlem

3 / “That Means Children to Me”: The Birth Control Review in Harlem “The slums of our large northern cities are matched in vice and poverty in the Negro quarters of the southern cities. Certain streets of all these fair cities are lined with rows of closely built wooden shanties—sometimes row behind row—where the colored people live. There are a few ‘apartment’ houses, our cook says she lives in one of them.” —blanche schrack of atlanta, georgia, “editorial comment,” The New Emancipation: The Negroes’ Need for Birth Control, as Seen by Themselves, special issue, Birth Control Review (September 1919) The first issue of the Birth Control Review dedicated specifically to the concerns of African American women began on an inauspicious note with this editorial from white activist Blanche Schrack, whose knowledge of the issues facing urban Black Americans apparently comes to her through . . . her cook. Though the birth control movement has been reviled in twenty-first-century conservative circles for its supposed promotion of “black genocide,”1 readers of the 1919 New Emancipation issue of the Birth Control Review would be treated not to a tirade against Black reproduction, but to a paternalistic social welfare version of birth control politics, in which white birth control advocates figure themselves as saviors of African American mothers. Schrack sums up this perspective at the end of her editorial: “Colored mothers are no more able to help themselves than are white women under similar circumstances. The obligation to aid them to make their lives decent and livable lies therefore , directly with the white women of the country.”2 Whatever complex motivations and histories underlie the racial politics of birth control, Schrack’s editorial in this “special issue” makes two things clear: the Birth Control Review writers saw birth control as a problem with facets peculiar to African American women, and particularly southerners, and those writers expected their primary audience to be made up not of African Americans, but of the “we”—white women—whose familiarity with Black communities comes through their domestic employees.3 Schrack’s is not the only voice calling attention to the need for birth control in African American communities in this issue of the Birth the birth control review in harlem / 77 Control Review, however. Two African American women writers, Mary Burrill and Angelina Weld Grimké, contributed to the issue. Burrill’s one-act play They That Sit in Darkness is a classic story of tragedy that could be prevented by birth control. The play is set “in the South in our own day”; its main character, Malinda Jasper, is a poverty-stricken mother of at least nine children. Her oldest daughter, Lindy, hopes to go to school at Tuskegee, but Malinda’s death, caused by physical labor begun too soon after the birth of her most recent baby, puts an end to her dreams. While the play, which is written in dialect, contains some eugenic elements in its descriptions of some of Malinda’s children as not “right in de haid” and having “little withered limbs,”4 its message—birth control can help improve families’ health and women’s opportunities for education—fits the agenda of birth control advocacy in a relatively straightforward and sympathetic way. Grimké’s piece, however, is not so easily categorized. The daughter of one of the first African American graduates of Harvard law school and a white midwestern woman, raised by her abolitionist aunts Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Angelina Weld Grimké was primarily a poet whose work in short fiction and drama is overtly political and focused largely on the issue of lynching. The plot of her short story for the Birth Control Review, “The Closing Door,” reflects her political interests. The narrator , Lucy, is the fifteen-year-old ward of Agnes Milton and her husband, Jim, a deliriously happy couple, all of whose dreams appear to have come true when Agnes becomes pregnant. However, Agnes becomes anxious , telling Lucy “there’s—such—a—thing—as being—too happy—too happy.”5 Agnes is prescient, and tragedy arrives in the form of a telegram informing the Miltons that Agnes’s brother Bob in Mississippi has died. Struck down by the loss, Agnes becomes unhinged when her other brother Joe arrives with the news that Bob was lynched by a white mob. Reacting to the news, she thinks first of her status as a pregnant woman: “I!—I!—An instrument of reproduction!—another of the many!—a colored woman—doomed!—cursed!—put here!—willing...