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Margaret Sanger spoke to the Fabian Society in London, England, in 1915.
The speech merits special attention both because its manuscript is the
oldest surviving example of Sanger's oratory and because it was the
last set of public remarks delivered by Sanger from the stance of a
radical socialist. Sanger delivered the speech at a time when she was
relatively inexperienced at oratory and when her public image was
evolving toward one that would allow her work to move forward more
effectively. The speech offers a priceless glimpse, into Sanger's early
development as a public speaker and social movement leader.
MARGARET
HIGGINS SANGER (1879-1966) is immediately identifiable to a wide
variety of people as the founder of Planned Parenthood. Oddly, however,
it seems that she is recognized only rarely, even by specialists in
communication, as a rhetor whose active speaking career spanned half a
century.(n1) The purpose of this essay is to begin to correct this
oversight by examining a speech of approximately 2,500 words made by
Sanger on July 5, 1915, at Fabian Hall in London, England.(n2)
The Fabian Hall speech merits special attention for two reasons.
First, the handwritten, pencil manuscript from which it was delivered
is the oldest extant example of Sanger's speechmaking and our only
record of her early, unalloyed socialist oratory. It provides us with a
unique opportunity to "hear" Sanger speak from the stance of an
unrestrained rebel, rather than from the relatively more genteel
posture that characterizes her subsequent speeches. Second, the speech
provides a unique glimpse of Sanger's early development as an orator,
and it captures her talent for crafting the kind of fiery, caustic
phrases with which her later work frequently would be peppered. At the
same time, however, the Fabian Hall text provides evidence that Sanger
had not yet learned how important it was to analyze and attempt to
adapt to her audience in advance of a speaking occasion. As this essay
demonstrates, Sanger lustily harangued the Fabian Society members, but
probably persuaded them very little (if at all). Before the speech at
Fabian Hall can be examined meaningfully, however, it is necessary to
place it in the context of Sanger's earliest years of social activism
and her development of a rhetorical persona that was appropriate to the
movement which she aspired to lead.(n3)
MARGARET SANGER AND THE BIRTH OF THE UNITED STATES BIRTH CONTROL
MOVEMENT By the end of 1910, Sanger was active as a socialist lecturer,
speaking to small groups of women about health issues. By 1912 she had
become a regular columnist for The Call. In 1913 and 1914, she spent
several months in Scotland and France, traveling with her husband and
family. Along the way, she investigated the living and working
conditions of the poor, began her study of birth control practices
among European women and attempted, with little success, to shore up
her increasingly unstable marriage.
In early 1914, Sanger took her children and returned to the United
States ahead of her husband, who lingered for a while in Paris hoping
to invigorate his fitful career as painter. Shortly after her arrival
in New York City, Sanger and a group of friends "founded a little
society, grandly titled the National Birth Control League."(n8) The
society sold enough advance subscriptions to enable her to publish The
Woman Rebel, a stridently socialist and feminist tabloid. The
publication of the first issue in March, 1914, immediately renewed
hostilities between Sanger and the United States postal authorities.
The skirmishes had begun with the suppression of two series of articles
which Sanger had written for
The Call in 1912-1913. Two years later, during her first 1916 United
States lecture tour, Sanger made a candid confession to her audience:
"They tell me that it [The Woman Rebel] was too radical, badly written,
hysterical, defiant, to all of which I plead guilty."(n9) She was happy
to acknowledge the paper's shortcomings, because what it lacked in
focus and polish was more than compensated for by the dramatic impact
it had upon her career. Seven out of the first nine issues of The Woman
Rebel were suppressed by the Post Office.(n10) The growing controversy
about the tabloid culminated in August, 1914, when Sanger was arraigned
on four criminal counts of violating the Comstock Act, which classified
as obscene "every article or thing designated, adapted or intended for
preventing conception...."(n11) The arraignment stimulated significant
national publicity for Sanger and the birth control movement. That
publicity was heightened even further when Sanger left behind her
children and husband and fled to Europe in November, 1914, to avoid
prosecution.
MARGARET SANGER AND THE EVOLUTION OF HER PUBLIC IMAGE
Sanger's flight set in motion a series of events and experiences
which, in the opinion of historian Linda Gordon, influenced "the entire
future course of birth control in the United States...."(n12) A full
consideration of Sanger's year in Europe is beyond the scope of this
essay, but summarizing a few of its most important features can sketch
the outlines of the profound personal, professional, and rhetorical
changes which it produced for Sanger.
First, Sanger traveled extensively in Spain and France with Lorenzo
Portet, a Spanish revolutionary who was living in exile in Liverpool.
She spent a significant amount of time talking with women in both
countries about their birth control problems and methods. Sanger also
carried on a passionate, but clandestine love affair with Portet, who
was also married. By associating with Portet, Sanger may have absorbed
strategies for controlling the focus of her public image, since he was
remembered vividly by a contemporary as a person who "masked a
revolutionary temperament with fastidious manners, much as he concealed
his gun beneath an impeccably tailored suit."(n13)
Toward the end of her year of exile, Sanger became especially
concerned that her affair with Portet might become widely known. Her
husband was increasingly impatient with her refusal to return to the
United States and, apparently, she feared that he might accuse her
publicly of deserting her children and dallying irresponsibly in
Europe. Such an accusation would have undermined Sanger's struggle to
cultivate the appearance of being a devoted mother, unjustifiably
persecuted by the United States government, who spent her lonely days
in exile pining for her sons and daughter. As a result, Sanger even
went so far as to write a letter to her husband and inform him coldly
and directly that it would be her pleasure "to relieve you of any duty
toward me which you might have at one time performed, and on the
receipt of this letter you may feel privileged to send the three
children to me on the first boat & consider your duties to them
& to me ended for all time."(n14) Her husband anxiously declined
the offer, but Ellen Chesler has pointed out that Sanger's conduct
during this period was typical, since she "lived a profoundly
unconventional life, but . . . traditional social sanctions always
governed the public image she projected, if not her actual
behavior."(n15)
After her initial visits to Spain and France with Portet, followed
by a respite in England, Sanger spent several weeks in Holland,
studying its sophisticated system of birth control clinics and
education. The information and testimony she gathered during her
observations became significant pieces of evidence that she would cite
often in her later works. Upon her return to London from Holland,
Sanger developed an intimate relationship with Havelock Ellis. Ellis
was regarded internationally as an expert on human sexuality and
psychology. He guided Sanger through a course of serious, systematic
reading at the British Museum about birth control, human sexuality, and
related topics. In addition to calculating the importance of Sanger's
formal learning under the direction of such an influential mentor, it
is also important to take into account the fact that she established a
deeply nurturant bond with Ellis that would help to sustain both of
them for many years and through many difficult times. The esteem with
which Sanger regarded Ellis and his opinions may be especially
important to understanding the development of her rhetorical persona.
As Chesler has pointed out, Ellis made no secret of the fact that, from
the beginning of his relationship with Sanger, he "strongly disapproved
of her radical politics."(n16) Given even the few examples selected for
use in this essay, it seems clear that Sanger's studies, travels, and
relationships during her European exile provided significant impetus
for a shift in her political stance and her rhetorical tactics as an
aspiring social movement leader. As Reed has summarized it, what Sanger
learned and experienced in Europe moved her to change from "the woman
rebel model she got from Emma Goldman to the nurse-mother lobbying
among social and professional elites."(n17) One would expect for this
sort of change in Sanger's public image to be reflected in her
rhetoric. As this essay will demonstrate, her speech at Fabian Hall may
have been the rhetorical fulcrum on which her shift in style was
levered. Unfortunately there is very little material, aside from
Sanger's early written rhetoric, with which to compare the text of the
Fabian Hall speech. There are no surviving manuscripts or notes of the
remarks that Sanger delivered when she taught in New York City, in
1910-1911, on human reproduction, venereal disease, and women's health
issues. There are two full speech manuscripts (and one possible
fragment) that survive from her 1916 United States lecture tour,(n18)
but those lectures enact the "nurse-mother" persona identified by Reed
and others. The "Fabian Hall Speech, July 5, 1915," on the other hand,
demonstrates no dulling of the sort of radical hyperbole that Sanger
had wielded in 1914 in the pages of The Woman Rebel. The speech makes
it clear, in other words, that the tempering influences of Portet,
Ellis, and Sanger's other cultured British and European role models
blossomed only after Margaret confronted her audience at Fabian Hall.
She described them later as "quite different from the little Socialist
gatherings of working women I had addressed at home."(n19)
Possibly Sanger's experience at Fabian Hall was instrumental in
jolting her out of the radical, revolutionary rhetorical stance she had
assumed since joining the Socialist Party in 1910. The next time that
Sanger delivered anything other than casual, impromptu remarks to an
audience was nine months after the Fabian Hall speech. After federal
prosecutors capitulated in mid-February, 1916, and entered a nolle
prosequi in The Woman Rebel case, Sanger took advantage of the national
publicity and interest in birth control that was generated by the
trial. She embarked on her first United States lecture tour in April,
1916. Throughout the tour (which took her, in just under 90 days, to 20
cities for 37 speaking engagements)(n20) she was mute about her
socialist roots and leanings. Instead, she emphasized to reporters who
covered her tour that she wanted them to remind their readers that she
was first and foremost a loving mother of three children and also a
trained nurse.(n21)
This "mother-nurse" persona(n22) at the lectern was undoubtedly born
of necessity in the aftermath of the kind of inflammatory inventions
which Sanger had created in The Woman Rebel and at Fabian Hall. The
persona of an unregenerate socialist, or even an anarchist, had brought
Sanger essential publicity and notoriety, but only at a significant
cost. Sanger had ample opportunity to tally those costs during the
tense and turbulent months after she returned from exile and awaited
trial on The Woman Rebel charges. It must have become clear to her that
clinging to her old persona would lead her to follow in the footsteps
of Emma Goldman, who was being harassed, silenced, and jailed
repeatedly (and who would be deported in 1919 and die in exile). Sanger
reconstructed her image, so that it clashed less obviously with the
political and social climate in the United States in 1916. That
climate, of course, was even less hospitable to socialist and anarchist
rhetoric than was England in 1915.
When Sanger toured in 1916, for example, she often spoke within a
few days of visits by Teddy Roosevelt. The ax-President and hero of San
Juan Hill was on the stump against Woodrow Wilson and loudly beating
the drum for war preparedness. Roosevelt also was irrevocably and
volubly opposed to birth control, which he called "race suicide."(n23)
When Sanger stepped to the platform to address her largely female,
middle-to-upper class audiences, therefore, she realized that she had
to contend directly with the credibility of Roosevelt as well as a host
of like-minded politicians and self-styled patriots. As Sanger remarked
during an interview at her tour stop at Denver in May, 1916, "when a
man of Colonel Roosevelt's personality and influence begins to talk,
people, especially women, listen."(n24) Sanger's sensitivity to the
consequences of her audiences' values, beliefs, and attitudes matured
during the course of her 1916 tour, perhaps as a direct result of what
she learned both on and off the platform while she carried her message
from city to city. There is no evidence that she knew that sort of
sensitivity, however, when she approached the task of speaking at
Fabian Hall in 1915.
MARGARET SANGER AND THE FABIANS Sanger's speech at Fabian Hall
clearly deserves to be studied because it is the only verbatim record
of her first efforts at public speaking on behalf of the movement which
she aspired to lead. When considering the speech, however, it is
essential to remember that although Sanger had some childhood training
in declamation, debate and, acting, she was not an experienced orator
in 1915.(n25) As was noted earlier in this essay, of course, she had
delivered a series of socialist lectures five years earlier in New York
City. They cannot be regarded as more than minimally influencing her
development as a public speaker, however, aside from the fact that they
apparently were well received by small, sympathetic audiences of
immigrant women and Sanger's fellow socialists. Those lectures, in
other words, were confidence building "success experiences." Given her
lack of experience, it is not surprising that Sanger seems to have
ignored any consideration of the characteristics of her audience when
she prepared her remarks for the Fabian Hall engagement. Instead, as an
inexperienced speaker she concentrated on what she wanted to say, how
she wanted to say it, and on her status as the speaker.
The Fabian Hall manuscript makes it clear that Sanger's objective
for the speech (and, indeed, for most of her previous activities in
England and around Europe) was to rally support for the fledgling
United States birth control movement. Because of her inexperience as a
speaker, it may be a mistake to view the Fabian Hall speech's
shortcomings as some sort of calculated challenge to her audience's
positions. Purposefully provoking hostile or cynical responses from the
audience at Fabian Hall simply would have undermined ten months of
effort on Sanger's part to win respect and support for the National
Birth Control League and for the role she desired as the leader of the
United States birth control movement. Whether purposefully sought or
not, however, the response which Sanger apparently received from her
audience seemed "a tremendous awakening."(n26) When Sanger first
embarked for England in November, 1914, she carried a letter of
introduction to the Liverpool branch of the Fabian Society. On her
first evening after debarking, she attended a Fabian lecture on the
war.(n27) The Fabian Society was formed in London in January, 1884, by
Edward Pease, Frank Podmore, and Hubert Bland, who had previously been
members of a group called the "Fellowship of the New Life" (whose
secretary was a young Havelock Ellis).(n28) Pease and his companions
had found the Fellowship to be too spiritually oriented for their more
pragmatic political tastes. They withdrew from it to establish a new
society whose name "derived from a dubious political reference to the
Roman general Fabious Cunctator, whose tactics in his campaign against
Hannibal were supposedly both cautious and forthright."(n29) The Fabian
Society membership rolls soon included such notable names as those of
Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who had made a courageous defense
of contraception when they were prosecuted in 1877 for republishing
Charles Knowlton's 1832 tract on methods of birth control, Fruits of
Philosophy: or, The Private Companion of Young Married People. Their
case, which was reversed on appeal, won widespread but short-lived
support for Neo-Malthusian doctrine from British liberals.
Alice Vickery and her son, Dr. C. V. Drysdale, and his wife, Bessie,
were the core that sustained the Neo-Malthusian Society at the time
when Sanger reached England. As Chesler has noted, they "were lonely
voices for their cause and understandably, therefore, gave enthusiastic
welcome to a beleaguered American convert."(n30) Among the boons they
secured for Sanger were her introduction to Havelock Ellis and, in
July, 1915, the opportunity to lecture at London's Fabian Hall. If
Sanger's memories of the Fabian Hall speech are accurate, even though
they are written over twenty years later in her autobiography, then it
appears that she may have prepared for that audience on the basis of
the meager impression that "these representatives of nearly every
social and civic organization in London, had the rationalist attitude
and preferred to listen to principles and theories."(n31) She also
remembered that when she surveyed the lecture hall, the "atrocious and
hideous English hats gave it an intellectual and highly respectable
air."(n32) As the discussion below will indicate, when Sanger stepped
to the Fabian Hall lectern she must have been blissfully ignorant of
the significant differences between her old auditors, with their
susceptibility to the inflammatory locutions of the Industrial Workers
of the World, and her new audience, whose reserved demeanor signaled a
traditional Fabianist attitude toward outside lecturers. Fabian Society
member and historian George Bernard Shaw had summed up that attitude
near the turn of the century: [W]e contracted the invaluable habit of
freely laughing at ourselves which has always distinguished us, and
which has saved us from becoming hampered by the gushing enthusiasts
who mistake their own emotions for public movements. . . We knew that a
certain sort of oratory was useful for "stoking up" public meetings;
but we needed no stoking up, and, when any orator tried the process on
us, soon made him understand that he was wasting his time and ours. I,
for one, should be very sorry to lower the intellectual standard of the
Fabian by making the atmosphere of its public discussions the least bit
more congenial to stale declamation that it is at present.(n33)
There is nothing in the accounts of the Fabian Society to indicate
that it had either lowered its intellectual standards or ameliorated
its long-standing attitude toward "stale declamation" by 1915. Had
Sanger known its history better, she might have styled her lecture at
Fabian Hall differently. The substance of her speech also makes it
clear that she was painfully unaware of three important features of the
Fabian Society: its female members' commitment to suffrage; its
long-standing distaste for the proletariat; and its concern about
declining birth rates.(n34) Sanger introduced her speech by disclaiming
any special knowledge of her topic, except that which might derive from
her experiences as a nurse. She also made an unfocused, ambiguous
statement of the purpose of her lecture: "I simply wish to show that
there is a special side of our present day propaganda which should
receive more of our attention...."(n35) She then closed her
introduction with a hyperbolic claim that must have been intended to
shore up her socialist credentials. She told her listeners that she was
"rocked in the cradle of socialism--for my father was one of the Early
pioneers of Socialist thot in [the] USA."(n36)
After a brief, anecdotal digression that highlighted the "world
famous Puritanism" of the United States while lampooning the monarchy
of Spain,(n37) Sanger moved to her first major theme: the liberation of
women. She recalled for her audience a decade of "tremendous awakening
in all civilized countries among women,"(n38) an awakening manifested
in the work of two groups: the "Votes for Women Groups" and the
"Feminist Groups."(n39) Sanger then expressed her disdain for the
former group and her view that "fortunately the working girl has not
been greatly enthused by this propaganda."(n40) She attacked the "Votes
for Women" advocates by asserting that "their vision of life goes as
high as obtaining political positions for women now today &
aspiring to the lofty attitude of police women, detectives, police
[commissioner], etc."(n41) She argued for the negative consequences of
this "vision of life" by offering three examples. First, she recounted
the brutality of Chicago policewomen during a cloak maker's strike,
where "the working girls found to their great surprise that the
policewoman's club hurt just as much swung from the fair hands of her
own sex."(n42) Second, she chronicled some of the "cruelties" brought
into the women's prison system by New York City Police Commissioner
Katharine B. Davis, such as refusing "to allow inmates to receive
outside meals until they were weak and ill," and concluded that "today
there is little hope from the hands of a woman."(n43) Third, Sanger
shared "a letter from a friend" in California who told her that "at the
last election . . . the women had gone mad on prohibition[,] that they
were going to tie the state up so dry, that a working man would have to
pay five shillings for a perscription to keep a pint of cider vinegar
in the house."(n44) Sanger wrapped up her trio of examples with a curt
dismissal, "So much for Votes for Women." She attempted to blunt her
attack, however, through a codicil: "Its not that I deplore votes for
women for certainly if votes are good for men they are good for women
too. But the vision of these women is too narrow & women as police
matrons etc. are the same tools in the system as the men are so long as
this system [remains]."(n45)
Sanger's pointed disdain for the "Votes for Women Groups" signals
her ignorance of the fact that in England "the early Suffrage movement
was mainly Socialist in origin: most of the first leaders of the
Women's Social and Political Union were or had been members either of
the Fabian Society or of the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party], and it
may almost be said that all the women of the Society joined one or more
of the Suffrage Societies which for the next seven years [1908-1915]
played so large a part in national politics."(n46) Such women, along
with the men who supported and shared in their activism, would scarcely
have found anything inviting in Sanger's curt dismissal of the
importance of the suffrage movement, her lopsided portrayal of it as
having low and often masculinist aims, and her assertion that it was
fortunate that "the working girl has not been greatly enthused by this
propaganda."(n47)
Having dispensed with the "Votes for Women Group," Sanger turned to
a consideration of the "Feminist" groups. She lauded this movement and
identified the unifying concern of these "awakened women" as being "one
of the first steps toward Womans emancipation and future
development--the ownership & control over her own body."(n48) In
almost the same breath, however, she lamented, "this movement like all
other big vital shots has been cut up and narrowed down to such a
degree that it is scarcely recognized as Feminism...."(n49) Sanger then
launched a virulent attack upon United States feminists. The attack
essentially duplicates, in both tone and substance, the disdain
expressed by Sanger in a piece, "The New Feminists," which had appeared
sixteen months earlier on the front page of the first issue of The
Woman Rebel.
In the tabloid, Sanger had ridiculed the "apologetic tone .... of
the first and second mass meetings held at Cooper Union on the 17th and
20th of February last."(n50) She found the ideas "very old and
time-worn": "The "right to work," the "right to ignore fashions," the
"right to keep her own name," the "right to organize," the "right of
the mother to work"; all these so-called rights fail to arouse
enthusiasm.... It is evident they represent a middle class woman's
movement; an echo, but a very weak echo, of the English constitutional
suffragists. Consideration of the working woman's freedom was
ignored."(n51)
In her Fabian Hall speech, Sanger omitted any praise of the English
suffragists and she scorned the United States' group because "it was
Feminism in name only" and because "these women--wanted the right to
work; the right to ignore fashions; the right to keep her own name,
& such poor longings of a bourgeois class suffering from loss of
vitality."(n52) She contrasted their concerns with the plight of "the
working girl" and scorned the "blue stocking prudes" because when she
"suggested that the basis of feminism was a womans right to be an
un-married mother--a stony silence surrounded them & they drew
aside their skirts less they be defiled by such shots."(n53) Having
tossed off this argument ad hominem, Sanger dispensed with the
feminists in the same curt tone with which she had dispatched the
suffragists: "So much for the feminists whose program had no place for
the working womans development, or no thot of her
emancipation...."(n54)
Much of Sanger's ire toward feminists can probably be traced to an
incident just prior to her publication of The Woman Rebel. Chesler
mentions the rebuff that Sanger received, upon returning to New York
from Europe in 1914, from "a feminist group called Heterodoxy, whose
elite membership included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Crystal Eastman,
and Henrietta Rodman."(n55) The group rejected the narrow agenda of the
suffragists, as did Sanger. She hoped to convince them, therefore, to
endorse a model for birth control activism that would unite women
across class lines. Heterodoxy rejected her overtures, however, since
they were "perhaps reluctant to associate with her avowed radicalism in
politics and social behavior, perhaps skeptical of her lack of
education and her erratic emotional behavior."(n56) Sanger was stung by
this rejection. In her 1916 lecture tours, she lumped Heteredoxy with
the suffragists and recast the tale so as to make herself a necessarily
impatient and moral visionary:
I hurried back to America to urge women here to help me to do this
important work. I asked several prominent women, suffragists,
feminists, and others, whom I knew not only believe in the idea of
birth control but practiced it. I requested these women to help me to
do this work which I thought would strike at the root of the evil. I
tried to get fifty women to go on record with me to make a test case in
the courts but I was told to wait until we got the vote, I was told to
wait until I became better known, but the cries of thousands of
suffering women would not let me wait.(n57)
At Fabian Hall, Sanger did not bother to develop any such heroic
narrative. She simply dismissed the suffragists and the feminists from
her rhetorical stage. In other words, the two groups which she
characterized as her antagonists were simply "straw figures." Sanger
portrayed them in the ways which made it the easiest for her to
ridicule and defeat them. Having gotten the suffragists and the
feminists out of her way, Sanger then plucked a third straw figure from
the wings and railed against it for the rest of her speech. The hapless
villain was "the Master Class or the boss--who has subtly &
silently instituted in most all the large shops and stores where many
women work--a Welfare Society, which so far has been a wonderful tool
in the hands of the boss to blind the workers to their slavery."(n58)
Sanger's unrestrained championing of the working class signals
another lapse in her analysis of the Fabian Hall audience. In 1919, the
Fabians would amend their charter "to declare for the first time that
the Society was `a constituent of the Labour Party,'(n59) a move which
meant that they "threw in their lot with the unions and the provincial
enthusiasts."(n60) In 1915, however, the proletariat was of little
interest to the Society's members: "For three decades the Fabians had
kept aloof from the working-class movement, arguing that they were
independents who had a special role to play in promoting collectivism
among the middle classes."(n61) Sanger's attack on the "poor longings
of a bourgeois class suffering from loss of vitality,"(n62) therefore,
was an insult (whether intended to be so or not) which would have done
little to stimulate her audience's identification and empathy with her
stance. In writing about "Fabian tactics" in his history of the early
years of the Fabian Society, George Bernard Shaw archly noted, "We have
never advanced the smallest pretension to represent the working-classes
of this country."(n63) On the basis of Sanger's vitriolic criticism of
the "Master Class," it is evident that she was ignorant of this stance.
Sanger detailed the machinations of the Master Class' Welfare
Society, to which working women paid "$10 weekly out of their
wages"(n64) and from which "they receive medical attention when they
are ill etc."(n65) She asserted that while one nurse kept the women
healthy enough to work efficiently, another nurse "dresses up poorly
like the girls themselves & goes among them"(n66) and "keeps her
fingers on the pulse of the shop to see there will be no strikes."(n67)
The working women also heard lectures twice a week whose "key note . .
. is to inject into these girls a slave morality."(n68) Having been
taught to "rise & bow to your master & show deference to his
authority over you," the women became "a tame, lifeless spiritless
mass, without personality or life. . ."(n69) Sanger attacked the
oppression engineered by the "boss class" by arguing that "the working
girl agrees only to sell her labor to the boss--not her morality....
She's never to forget that there is a war constantly going on . . . [,]
and its up to her to get the largest wage for the least amount of
toil...."(n70) The woman's conflict "between her class and the boss
class"(n71) was also to be carried over into the personal sphere: "so
must she fight for the right to own & control her own body, for the
ownership of her own body to do with it as she desires--& its no
ones business what those desires may be."(n72) The call for women to
reclaim control over their bodies was one which Sanger had sounded over
a year earlier in The Woman Rebel, where she argued, "A woman's body
belongs to herself alone. It is her body. It does not belong to the
Church. It does not belong to the United States of America or to any
other Government on the face of the earth."(n73) This argument served
as the premise for Sanger's contention that "enforced motherhood is the
most complete denial of a woman's right to life and liberty."(n74)
Sanger elaborated on this same contention in her Fabian Hall
speech(n75) including four themes that would find a place in her 1916
United States lecture tour speeches: "the wages of the average man are
scarcely sufficient to keep more than one child as it is;"(n76) "the
far reaching Effect of abortions;"(n77) "the terrible loss of infant
mortality among the working people;"(n78) and "it is 9 out of ten girls
living the life of the underworld who come from parents who had large
families & whose fathers belonged to the unskilled &
unorganized laborers."(n79)
As she moved to conclude her remarks, Sanger attacked "better baby
funds, Little Mother leagues, Milk Stations for babies,"(n80) and
"child nurseries for the children while Mother slaves in
factories"(n81) as the products of "sentimental minds"(n82) which chose
to focus on "an alleviation of present day misery & ignorance
Rather than go to the root of the question...."(n83) Sanger argued
that, in contrast, her "agitation in the Woman Rebel" produced birth
control leagues "reaching from coast to coast" and that those leagues
"promise an agitation among the workers on this subject which should
have marked results in the next four or five years."(n84)
Sanger's simplistic harangues about the relationships among such
complex variables as economic conditions and infant mortality,
abortion, and maternal, as well as family health indicate that she was
unaware that the Fabian Society had appointed a subcommittee in May,
1905, "to consider birth-rate and infantile mortality statistics."(n85)
The subcommittee's comprehensive report, issued in the Fabian Tract
series as Number 131, The Decline in the Birth Rate, was a
quantitatively based, detailed analysis of national census and
questionnaire data. This document focused on the relationships among
economic conditions, family structure, voluntary restriction of
conception, infant mortality, and women's roles and prospects. The
results of the study alarmed the subcommittee since the data indicated
that "volitional regulation of the marriage state is demonstrably at
work in many different parts of Great Britain, among all social grades
except probably the very poorest"(n86) and that "the principal, if not
the sole, cause of the present continuous decline in the birth-rate in
Great Britain is the deliberate regulation of the marriage state . . .
either with the object of family limitation, or merely with that of
regulating the intervals between births...."(n87)
The primary conclusion of the report was that "in order that the
population may be recruited from the self-controlled and foreseeing
members of each class rather than of those who are reckless and
improvident, we must alter the balance of considerations in favor of
the child-producing family."(n88) The report then warned, "the question
is whether we shall be able to turn round with sufficient sharpness and
in time."(n89) Among the changes it urged were "unlimited provision of
medical attendance on the child-bearing mother and her children,"(n90)
"the municipal supply of milk to all infants,"(n91) "feeding of all
children at school,"(n92) "maintenance scholarships for secondary,
technical, and university education,"(n93) and the rapid development of
a number of other policies that would insure that "the production of
healthy, moral and intelligent citizens is revered as a social service
and made the subject of deliberate praise and encouragement on the part
of the government."(n94)
The final lines of the report were ominous: "To the present writer
it seems that only by some such `sharp turn' in our way of dealing with
these problems can we avoid degeneration of type--that is, race
deterioration, if not race suicide."(n95) Sanger's insensitivity to
such fears, especially in light of the mounting war casualties being
suffered by the British, demonstrates her ignorance of her audience's
background, situation and outlook. Furthermore, the report's focus on
eugenics cast the situation in terms that would be reinvigorated a
decade later in the United States by Theodore Roosevelt.(n96) As was
noted earlier in this essay, Roosevelt's rhetoric against birth control
would plague Sanger during her 1916 lecture tour. In contrast to her
careless performance at Fabian Hall, Sanger's speeches in 1916
systematically attacked arguments that characterized her position as
leading to "race suicide":
Am I to be persecuted and classed as immoral because I advocate
small families for the working women while Mr. Roosevelt can go up and
down the length of the land shouting and urging this class of women to
have large families and is neither arrested nor molested but considered
by all society as highly moral? But I ask you which is the more moral,
to urge a working woman to have only those children she desires and can
support or to delude her into bearing cannon fodder for munitions
makers and professional jingoes? Let us ask ourselves which is
America's definition of morality.(n97)
Sanger ended her speech at Fabian Hall by bolstering the worth of
the propaganda that was being disseminated in the United States by the
birth control leagues: The propaganda is not a one sided NeoMalthuseian
doctrine it is one rounded out with the workers Economic Moral &
psychological attitude.
It is full of vitality & intense with indignation anger &
contempt L.] The object is to inject into the working woman a class
independence which says to the Masters produce your own slaves--keep
your religion your ethics & your morality for your selves--I'll
have none of it & we refuse to be longer enslaved by it for we are
creating our own & are building up a New Society through the
process of which we are creating our own morality and
individuality.(n98)
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