BOOK REVIEW The Mother of Pro-Choice Regina Morgan-Sanchez Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and The Bird? Control Movement in Amer- z'ca by Ellen Chesler. Simon and Schus- ter, 1992, 639 pp. 11 1957, at the end of her career as a founder and spokesperson for one of the most significant social move- ments in our century, Margaret Sanger was invited by Mike Wallace, then a crack young investigative journalist, to appear on his nationally televised in- terview show. Wallace promised an un- rehearsed and uncensored treatment of ?an adult topic that we feel mer- its public examination.? In soliciting Sanger for the appear- ance, Wallace had been less than can- did. It was not assessing the significance of birth control that inter- ested him, but rather Sanger?s presum- ably unconventional attitudes toward sexuality, marriage, the family, and God. Wallace relentlessly gravitated to the sensational, accusing Sanger of leaving her husband and children to pursue her owu elusive ?freedom.? ?Now, what was this joy, this freedom that you craved?? he demanded. Inexplicably caught off guard, Sanger replied, somewhat apologeti- cally, that it was humanitarian con- cern?particularly the suffering of women and children?that motivated her to pursue what became a ?calling. When the discussion turned to reli- gion, \Wallace managed to expose Mar- garet?s long-nurtured hostility to the Catholic Church. But he saved his most devastating salvo for last. Wasn?t Sanger responsi- ble for eroding public morality? Did she not offer women freedom from re- sponsibility by enabling them to avoid the consequences of questionable sex- ual behavior? ?Could it be,? he in- Regr'n?a crank-Sanchez is professor of history at UCLA. She is the author of Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (Oxford University Press, 1985). sisted, ?that they have followed the lead of women like Margaret Sanger by neglecting family life for a career?? What is significant about this event is not Sanger?s uncharacteristic reti- cence in defending her cause (she was seventy-eight and ill, and the dialogue left family and friends shocked and in tears at her meekness) but Wallace?s savage attack. One need only compare the interview to retrospectives with countless public men at the time who had also generated controversy?Nor- mal Mailer, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Henry Millerwto know that Sanger was singled out for special treat- ment. Indeed, the incident reveals a deep'seated American ambivalence about women heroes. We like ours dig- nified, motherly, and self-less?witness our long love affair with Eleanor Roo- sevelt. But here was the individual who fought relentlessly for women's right to unqualified sexual and reproductive freedom, a right even today Americans grant only with hesitation. Wallace was not going to let her off the hook. Fortunately, Ellen Chesler has no intention of allowing Margaret Sanger to remain trivialized and forgotten. Her finely textured and comprehen- sive biography supplants the some- times unflattering treatment Sanger has received from other historians, none ofwhom pursued, as Chesler did, the voluminous sources on three con- tinents or conducted personal inter- views with Sanger?s family members, friends, and birth control associates. The work of a skilled storyteller, this masterfully detailed and penetrating social and political analysis reframes many of Sanger?s most controversial decisions?her move from leftist to centrist politics, her connection with eugenicists, her d?tcnte with the medical profession, and her support of an international birth control move? ment whose methods and outlook she continually questioned. Here, too, is a perceptive portrait which celebrates Sanger?s without papering over her consid- erable shortcomings. Born in 1879 to a working-class Irish family in Corning, New York, Sanger?s first memory was, at the age of three, of being banished kicking and screaming from the room where her mother, Anne Higgins, lay ill from the complications of tuberculosis and too many pregnancies. There were eleven children in all, and Higgins carried the burden with a gentle stoicism suffused with a Catholic piety that her daughter never fully acknowledged. Years later, Margaret remembered her mother simply as an uncomplaining hostage to the endless cooking, cleaning, and emotional demands of a huge family. Michael Higgins, Sanger?s father, was an affectionate husband but a dismally poor provider. His attraction to social- ism, labor militancy, and the anticleri- calism of Robert Ingersoll energized him considerably more than the mun- dane task of earning a living. While he may have served Sanger as an early in- tellectual mentor, Chesler perceptively argues that his most enduring legacy was teaching her never to become de- pendent on, or defined by, a man. anger's craving for autonomy led to the pursuit of nursing as a career, a common choice at the turn of the cen- tury for rural and working-class daugh- ters who wished to better themselves. She relished the work as well as the self-esteem it gave her. But at the end of her second year, she met and im- pulsively married a handsome young architect after a passionate courtship that left him ecstatic and her in some confusion at her willingness to forgo the coveted degree. William Sanger, a socialist refugee from an orthodox Jewish family, shared Margaret?s reli- gious iconoclasm and still embryonic critique of class relations. Chesler interprets the event as a temporary sur- render to passion, conventional ro- mance, and her need for the emotional and material security her father never 65 gave her. The marriage proved a bit of a detour, but it was the last time Sanger would allow herself to be thrown off course while in pursuit of her goals. Though she once confided to a friend that she learned everything she knew about romantic love from Bill Sanger, the union was not a success. Despite his radical politics, Bill Sanger?s expectations of marriage were wholly conventional. For a time the couple lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, where Margaret tried to be a proper suburban wife, and gave birth to three children in eight years. A self-absorbed and inefficient mother, she was in- different to the household tasks that intruded on her time, recalling can- didly years later that ?thrifty, good housekeeping neighbors? took her children ?into their laps, remove[d] the safety pins that held their clothes together, and sew[ed] on a proper but- ton.? Like her father, William Sanger turned out to be an unsatisfactory breadwinner and, in 1910, the couple was forced to move to a railroad flat in Washington Heights. Already registered Socialists, they plunged into the exciting world of rad- ical politics. William took up painting and Margaret lectured on health mat- ters under socialist sponsorship. They participated in mo IWW strikes. The young couple were frequent visitors at Mabel Dodge?s Greenwich Village salon and in their tiny living room hosted meetings of such famous agita- tors and bohemians as John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman. To make ends meet, Margaret worked part time as a practical nurse for the Visiting Nurses Association of the Henry Street Settlement. This ex- perience with squalid conditions, hauntingly reminiscent of her own childhood, gave a practical cast to Sanger?s political enlightenment. For her the suffering of women was par- ticularly vivid. It was while working as a midwife and physician?s assistant on the Lower East Side that she encoun- tered the tragedy, mentioned often in her speeches and writings, of Sadie Sachs. A young Jewish mother, Sachs died from the complications of a self- induced abortion after her d0ctor met her pleas for reliable contraception with the advice that she ?tell Jake to sleep on the roof. Sanger began plotting her own course of action in 1912, when she ini- tiated a controversial Sunday column 66 VOL. 7, No. 6 on sex and health education entitled ?What Every Girl Should Know, for the Socialist newspaper, the Call. She briefly visited Europe with Bill in the summer of 1913, where she researched the technology and theory of contra- ception and met with French syndical- ists and socialists who had developed a sophisticated defenSe of family limi- tation. ?With this background, she later wrote, had practically reached the exploding point. I could not con- tain my ideas. I wanted to get on with what I had to do in the world. The incident raved: a deep?seated American ambivalence about women heroes. We like ours digni?ed, mot/Jeri}; and self?less. Upon her return to the United States, she rapidly became the major spokeswoman for birth control and women?s sexual emancipation. She as- sembled a diverse collection of sup- porters and initiated publication of the ?Woman Rehei, a politically flamboy- ant magazine that disseminated infor- mation on Sexuality and birth con- trol in direct violation of the repres- sive Cornstock laws. Before long, she was receiving letters of encourage- ment and requests for information from thousands of women. In 1914, she was arrested for sending ?inde- cent" material through the mails and fled to Europe rather than stand trial. In her haste, she didn?t even say good- by to her children. While in Europe, her marriage dis- integrated, and she began a love affair with Havelock Ellis. Then at the height of his influence, Ellis?s multi- volume study of the variety of human sexual response had helped liberal- ize discourse about sexuality, both in medical circles and in the popular press. Sanger found Ellis?s beliefin the union of the physical and the spiritual, his enthusiasm for female eroticism, his tolerance of sexual diversity, and his support of complete sexual free- dom for both sexes a powerful valida- tion of her owu thought and behavior. He, in turn, was captivated by her, as a cache of some fifty love letters now in the Library of Congress attests. Her affair with Ellis was not the only one she conducted during this pe- riod?she also enjoyed satisfying and intellectually stimulating relationships with H.G. Wells and the radical Spaniard Lorenzo Porter. In 1920, she even experimented with group sex during a subsequent visit with a circle of English intellectuals linked to El- lis. The affair with Ellis was a short one, but for the rest of his life he re- mained her intellectual mentor, advi- sor, and friend. When Sanger returned to the United States in the fall of 1915, she discovered a marked shift in public consciousness on the issue of birth control. In her absence, Bill Sanger had been arrested and briefly impris- oned for handing out one of her pam- phlets to an undercover police agent. Respectable newspapers and maga- zines viewed this legal harassment as a threat to free speech. One by one, the New Republic, Harper?s W/eekly, and even the New Yer/e Timer began to de- fend the advocacy of contraception. Suddenly, Margaret Sanger was a celebrity and could set about building a moVCment. The task proved a formidable one to which she devoted the rest of her life. Believing that con- traception should be controlled by women themselves, she founded the nation?s first birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. She began publishing the Birth Controi'Re- view and, with the help of middle? and upper-class feminists, esrablished the Birth Control League, which eventu- ally became Planned Parenthood. She struggled with critics and detractors on all sides, including secular guardians of Victorian morality, the Catholic Church, and the medical profession. The latter at first opposed contracep- tion entirely and then demanded it be provided only by physicians. The compromiSCs she made during this phase of her life have elicited cen- sure from influential historians like Linda Gordon and David Kennedy. From different vantage points, both have accused Sanger of abandoning her radical heritage and watering down her commitment to working-class women. Gordon has even questioned her feminism. In rebuttal, Chesler demonstrates that Sanger?s obsession with women?s right to control their own bodies grew out of an unmiti- gated feminist idealism from which she never wavered, even after conserva- tives seized leadership of the move- ment in the early 19405. She may have been naive, but she always believed birth control would generate funda- mental social change. She dreamed of a vast socialized network of ?health clinics? offering comprehensive care to women. The tepid response of social- ists and some feminists to her cause contributed to her readiness to court financially well-off supporters (one of whom, the millionaire]. Noah Slee, be? came her second husband). Critics have also cited Sanger?s will- ingness to enlist endorsements from eugenicists and her refusal to publicly repudiate right-wing spokespersons who used the movement to limit re- production among the ethnically and racially ?unfit. Chesler is clearly un- comfortable with Sanger's eugenicism. She notes that, no simple racist, Sanger was an equal-opportunity supporter of genetic engineering who argued that the defective of all races?even whites?should be sterilized. She con? cedes that Sanger paid a price for this alliance, but does not sketch out the implications of Sanger?s Sanger?s willingness to allow the medical profession to control the new contraceptive technology has also irked feminist critics, who see this as a betrayal of her commitment to female- run, female-centered facilities. Even her farsighted internationalism, which occasionally led to alliances with male population controllers whose cultural paternalism she deplored, has proven controversial. But Sanger never hung back from difficult decisions just be? cause they required compromise. Ever the pragmatist, she was always ready to hold her idealism in check in order to accomplish her larger goals. Chesler?s political experience as chief of staff to former New York City council president Carol Bellamy giVes her a special sensitivity to the political realities and social obstacles Sanger faced. She is more tolerant of the concessions others have condemned, judging Sanger?s pragmatism to be per- haps her greatest asset as a leader. In a more conservative era than the early 19705, when scholars first revived in- terest in Sanger, We are, unfortunately, better acquainted with the power of state repression and popular inertia to undermine social change. Perhaps We need to take an object lesson from Sanger?s ability to content herself with partial solutions while digging in for the long haul. Ironically, when Mike Wallace blamed Margaret Sanger for being a bad influence on American women, he could hardly have known the sen- sational details of the life Chesler meticulously reconstructs. Sanger?s in- dependence was striking. She subordi- nated her role as wife and mother to the public cause that preoccupied her for half a century, and her children suf- fered because of it. Like many male public figures, she took love and sex- ual pleasure where she found it. Charming, vivacious, and alluring, she left lovers yearning for her wherever she went, allowing them no claim on her and asking none in return. Her life deliberately engaged all the major is- sues her cause has come to syn-IbOJize for Americans: the tranSfomation 0f the family, gender roles, and sexuality. Sangerfozmcl Ellis?s belief in tlae union oft/ye physical and tire spiritual, his enthusiasm for female eroticism, lair tolerance of sexual diversity, and lais support of complete sexual freedom for bot/9 sexes a powerful validation oflaer own thong/9t and behavior. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who first called Sanger a woman of ?valor. The biblical representation from Proverbs is of a woman who uses her power to serve others. Perhaps there is a mea- sure of irony in Chesler's title, sug? gesting that it is time to modernize this ancient symbol of female strength. Chesler presents Sanger as the quint- essential ?new woman, someone who understood that in serving others one must first learn to serve oneself. Not all of us would make her personal and professional choices, but We can surely learn from, and admire, her autonomy and direction of purpose, her relent- less energy, her zest for life and its bod- ily pleasures, and, most important, her dogged loyalty to a cause that has al- tered the lives of us all. I: MOST businesses think repro- ductive choice is none of their business. We don?t agree. We?re Working Assets Long Distance. Every time you call, we proudly 56nd money to groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the MS. no cost to you. By contrast, canceled its funding of Planned Parenthood under pressure from anti-choice groups. Of course, we also complete your calls to almost anywhere in the world, at base rates lower than ATSCT, MCI: and Sprint? 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