MacFormat 1996 July/macformat-039.iso/DATABASE/BODY/SANGER.TXT

Text File | 1996-01-29 | 8.3 KB | 162 lines | [TEXT/MSWD]

1.5
The phrase "birth control" was coined in 1914 - almost
certainly by Margaret Sanger. Then 30, she was a former
nurse who had been fighting since girlhood for women's
rights, and her work among the New York poor had
convinced her that contraceptive knowledge was one of those
rights. At that time Comstock's law of 1873, forbidding
dissemination through the mail of information about
contraception, represented the views of the American
medical professional: almost to a man they declared attempts
to prevent conception injurious and wicked. Mrs Sanger was
the most energetic of the courageous handful of people who
disputed this, not only in her writings for newspapers and in
her own paper, Woman Rebel (several numbers of which
were suppressed), but in action. She opened the first US birth
control clinic in 1916, in Brooklyn; she and her sister were
soon in prison. Undaunted, she issued Birth Control Review
and continued to lecture, and by the mid-Twenties her
persistence had won a hearing in the US for advocates of
birth control and, soon after, the co-operation of the medical
profession. By 1932 there were 80 clinics
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2.2
Book review

Although sociologists and feminists will be interested in Mrs.
Sanger's book as a record of a fight to win public opinion to
her cause and to reform the laws of her country, it is perhaps
most interesting as the evocation of a personality, a most
unusual and dynamic personality.  Child of a happy-go-lucky
sculptor of gravestones and of a rather grim mother who had
to wrestle with poverty in her struggle to feed eleven
children, Margaret was very early initiated into the
hardships of the working-class woman's life; and her career
as a nurse, following an education sketchy so far as schooling
was concerned, but rich in human experience, determined
her subsequent activities.  She tells, with passionate sincerity
which sometimes amounts almost to fury, of the death of one
of her patients, a young wife and mother who had been told
by the doctor that another pregnancy would kill her, but
treated humorously by that same doctor when she asked him
how to avoid pregnancy.  On the night of the woman's death,
after a valiant fight for her life, her nurse went home, took
off her nurse's uniform and announced that she would do no
more patching; women, she felt, were groaning under the
burden of accidental and inescapable motherhood, children
already ridden with poverty and illness.  She would find out
how to reform this state of things, if it cost her her life.

That decision is typical of many.  Marrying an artist, living
very happily with him a sort of blissful garden-city
domesticity, she helped him to design and build the house of
their dreams, and together they spent many laborious hours
making a rose window for the new home.  On the day they
moved in it was burnt down.  Her reaction to this episode is
remarkable.

I stood silently watching the effort of months of our work
and love disintegrate... this thing of beauty had perished in a
few minutes.  I stood there amazed, but I was certain of a
relief, of a burden lifted, a spirit set free... Somewhere in the
back of my mind I saw the absurdity of placing all of one's
hopes, all of one's efforts in the creation of something
external that could perish.  My scale of suburban values had
been consumed by the flames...

Such flashing enlightenments are common in Mrs. Sanger's
life.  On another occasion, sent to the mountains apparently
to die quietly of tuberculoses, she suddenly decided that  if,
in order to live, she had to spend her days drinking milk and
medicines, miles away from the current of active life, she had
better die.  Telegraphing to a startled husband that she was
coming back to New York, she took up her normal life there,
fought the disease and apparently succeeded curing it.  Yet
again, in 1913, she was determined to go to Paris to learn all
she could about contraception, which was practically
unknown in America; and this time transported a husband
and three children with her.  She says she cannot remember
how they paid for the trip;

I cannot remember how trips were financed... I do things
first and somehow or other they get paid for.  I suppose here
is the real difference between the idealist - or the fanatic, as
we are called - and the ordinary "normal" human being.

Her fights with the laws of her country filled the Press of the
world a few years ago.  It began with the postal authorities
suppression of her paper, The Woman Rebel, in which she
stated the case for contraception but gave no practical
information; the issues of this paper which had appeared had
brought in such a flood of inquiries from women that Mrs.
Sanger had printed an edition of 100,000 copies of her
booklet, "Family Limitation," which were packed and
addressed to inquirers and ready to be dispatched when she
gave the signal.  Before this signal was given she was
arrested for an article in The Woman Rebel and indicted.
Then came the first great personal struggle of her life -
should she appear at Court the next morning with her case
inadequately prepared, since the whole of her time in
between arrest and trial had been spent in organizing her
children's care in case of long imprisonment - or should she
run away?  Finally she decided to run to Europe, get all the
facts and figures she needed about the incidence of crime,
poverty and illness with large families, and the working of
family limitation in countries where it was practised.  When
the case was called next day she was over the Canadian
border, on the first stage of her flight to Europe.  Thence she
returned two years later with all her facts prepared, and
yielded herself to the police, with the result that the case was
finally dismissed, ostensibly because the authorities did not
wish to make a martyr of her, but really, as she points out, as
a result of the Press campaigns her first arrest had aroused.

There was still much work to do, and other arrests and police
intervention before she won her way; she was dragged from
her first slum clinic and taken to prison; when later it was
made legal for properly qualified doctors to give such
information as was necessary to preserve the life or health of
married women, doctors employed by Mrs. Sanger were
arrested in circumstances somewhat discreditable to the
police.  But at the end of her book she can look round on
clinics or other media of help accessible to almost every
woman, though she cannot yet feel that enough propaganda
has been done to make these clinics as useful to the
community as they might be.
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2.3
A sexually unhappy marriage, and the search for information
it provoked, inspired Marie Stopes to write "a book on
marriage and sex (which) would teach a man and a woman
how to understand each other's sexual problems". This was
Married Love (1918) which sold 2000 copies in its first
fortnight. After her marriage to Humphrey Vernon Roe, who
helped her publish it, she wrote Wise Parenthood (1918),
which included descriptions of various methods of birth
control. In 1921 she opened Britain's first birth control clinic
in Holloway, London. So at the age of 40, after an earlier
career as a scientist, she had discovered the work that was to
fulfil her life. The medical profession was hostile and the
Roman Catholics attacked her even more fiercely. In 1922 a
Dr Halliday Sutherland wrote of her work so venemously that
Marie Stopes sued him for libel. It was the first of many legal
battles, which served to spread her fame to the millions of
women she wanted to reach. She was not only a brilliant
propagandist - she even wrote a play about birth control -
but a woman prepared to put her vision into practice
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2.5
Mrs. Margaret Sanger, a pioneer of the birth control
movement and its leader in the United States of America, has
arrived in London on her way in India in response to an
invitation from the All-India Women's conference to address
the annual session, to be held in Travencore in December.
Mrs. Sanger has not previously been to India, but in 1922
toured in China and Japan to introduce and recommend the
idea of conscious control of parenthood.  On Thursday Mr.
and Mrs. John H. G. Guy gave a dinner at the Barbers' Hall
Monkwell Street, to meet Lord Horder, president of the
British birth control organization, and was supported by Mr.
H. G. Wells.