Rhetorics of Motherhood

2. From “Wild Woman Writer” to “Mother of Two”: Margaret Sanger, Birth Control, and Ethos Repair

24 2 From “Wild Woman Writer” to “Mother of Two”: Margaret Sanger, Birth Control, and Ethos Repair Wild Woman Writer in Federal Court. —Richmond Virginian, 26 August 1914 Woman Editor Writes on Sex, Is Indicted. —New York Evening Journal, 25 August 1914 Woman Editor of Free Love “Bomb” Magazine in Court. Advocates Assassination, Dynamite and Scientific Decreasing of Birth Rate. —Detroit Free Press, 26 August 1914 Mrs. Margaret H. Sanger Arraigned on Charge of Advocating Assassination. Defends Unmarried Motherhood and Owns “No Gods or Masters.” —Baltimore Star, 20 August 1914 “Advanced Ideas” of Woman Editor Meet Disapproval. Government Charges Margaret H. Sanger with Expounding Assassination and Right to Destroy. —Philadelphia Public Ledger, 27 August 1914 Mrs. Sanger to Defy U.S.: Urges Birth Control. —New York American, 27 August 1914 Margaret Sanger had a serious image problem in 1914. In March of that year, she founded the Woman Rebel, a militant, feminist paper with the masthead “No Gods, No Masters.” It appeared at a time when “American radicalism was at one of its peaks of strength and breadth” (Gordon, Woman’s Body 207). Sanger, as an editor with “advanced ideas,” addressed a wide range of issues pertinent to working-class women: “I believe that woman is enslaved by the world machine, by sex convictions, by motherhood, and its present necessary childrearing, From “Wild Woman Writer” to “Mother of Two” 25 by wage-slavery, by middle-class morality, by customs, laws, and super­ stitions” (Publisher’s note, 1). It was also the first publication to print the term birth control, a subject Sanger was determined to discuss following her experience as a maternity nurse in the crowded tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. There she encountered impoverished immigrants, struggling to survive in “conditions that made the so-called sacredness of motherhood a term of unspeakable irony”: Pregnant women—drunken husbands—hungry children, children born to a heritage of disease, filth, crime—this was the order of the day. As one pregnancy followed another, a family sank deeper into the mire. And always denied contraceptive knowledge by their doctors, these women were driven to other means. On Saturday evenings before the office of a cheap abortionist they lined up, each waiting her turn. (qtd. in Reed 14) Although her patients pleaded for birth control, the only methods available to them were abstinence, coitus interruptus, or condoms, none of them completely in women’s control and, therefore, “utterly insufficient and untrustworthy” (Katz 17.) Furthermore, even if she knew of alternate means of contraception, Sanger could not divulge that information unless she was willing to defy the Comstock laws. Congress passed the “broad but vaguely defined federal statute” in 1873 and prohibited use of the public mail system to transport “obscene” material, which included “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that might be used to prevent conception or produce abortion (Chesler 67–68). Eventually, the federal Comstock law “spawned a legion of state imitators,” muzzling the discussion and prescription of birth control, even by medical professionals (Hull and Hoffer 36). Sanger’s inability to help her clients prompted her to research contraceptive methods in libraries across the country and to publish sex-education articles in leftist newspapers, including the Call, Il Proletario, and Solidarity (Reed 14). In 1912, she began a regular column, “What Every Girl Should Know,” that provided women with clear, accurate, accessible information about human physiology and the healthful aspects of sex.1 Her 9 February 1913 entry on venereal disease was censored by the Post Office (which monitored mailed materials for evidence of obscenity ), marking Sanger’s first entanglement with the Comstock laws and preparing her for a similar response to the Woman Rebel, which was immediately suppressed by postal authorities. By August 1914, she faced grand jury indictments on three counts for publishing obscenities, each From “Wild Woman Writer” to “Mother of Two” 26 carrying a potential fine of $5,000 and jail term of ten years (Reed 30). The indictments garnered national attention, but as the chapter’s opening headlines indicate, newspapers’ depictions of Sanger were more likely to repel than to attract any but the most radical supporters. Their references to the editor’s “advanced” ideas regarding assassination, dynamite, free love, bombs, and birth control reflected her commitment to revolutionary change on multiple fronts and alignment with socialist tenets that framed women’s free sexual expression and reproductive control as by...