In Our Control (4 page)

The decades that followed the passage of the Comstock Law saw a continuity of contraceptive sales during which a thriving birth control black market endured despite constant challenges. Whatever was being said in public, in private contraceptives were being used, and frequently this reality provided individuals, communities, and judges with opportunities for social activism.

Those jailed repeatedly for selling birth control were often acquitted or given slaps on the wrist that enraged Comstock, who continued to take the application of his law seriously and personally. Comstock understood that this was akin to legal nullification, and although it didn’t constitute the norm, it was frequent enough that many repeat offenders readily returned to their profitable deviant ways. Many people with no economic interest in contraception privately and publicly opposed Comstock’s uncompromising stand and saw it as out of touch with the realities of modern life. As Tone explains, “Although the frequent ridiculing of Comstock may help explain support for violators of the Comstock Law in general, it cannot account for the special leniency granted birth control offenders in particular. Rather those entrusted with enforcing contraceptive laws made choices that bespoke a tolerance of birth control and compassion toward those who sold it.”
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Despite active resistance, the illegal status of birth control presented serious limitations for women and their partners. First, it created a world where regulation was impossible, where people of disparate qualifications could sell products of varying quality and safety. Second, it contributed to the increased classing of contraception: both contraception and abortion continued to be available for middle- and upper-class women who could afford to “buy secrecy.”
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Janet Farrell Brodie notes that most middle-class married women felt little to no impact from the Comstock Law and “had abortions and babies in the privacy of their own homes.”
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A third problem was that as long as the trafficking of birth control remained illegal, no scientific research could be performed on new methods.

Contraceptive Crusaders: Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, and the Battle for Legal Birth Control

Six years after the Comstock Law went into effect, Maggie Louise Higgens—Margaret Sanger—was born, the sixth child in a poor upstate New York family. There were forty-three years between the passage of Comstock’s legislation and the opening of Sanger’s first (illegal) birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Few historical figures are as complex and contradictory as Margaret Sanger. Was she the feminist crusader who marshaled
socialist tactics in the service of gaining greater rights and opportunities for women? Or was she a proponent of negative eugenics who searched desperately for a drug that would curtail the growth of populations in “slums and jungles”?
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Indeed, two distinct Sangers emerge from even a cursory look into the life of this legendary woman. Her beliefs and motives undoubtedly changed over the course of a long lifetime, but she could also be pragmatic and ideologically promiscuous in the service of her great cause.

Sanger’s mother, Anne, was a devout Catholic who became pregnant eighteen times and birthed eleven children before eventually dying of cervical cancer. Ideology is, to some extent, biography, and this experience undoubtedly influenced young Margaret, who became a nurse, married, had a child, and began working in the slums of New York City. By her midthirties, Sanger was defying the Comstock Laws by distributing a pamphlet called “Family Limitation” and publishing a short-lived newspaper called
The Woman Rebel
(the first place in which she used the term she coined, “birth control”), which promoted, demanded, and educated readers about contraception. Early on, Sanger was unabashedly radical, and she saw the purpose of fertility control as creating new opportunities and freedoms for women. She looked to European models and ideas that borrowed from socialist principles.
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By 1912, Sanger was already imagining a “magic pill” that could be used for contraceptive purposes, but it would be many years before this would become more than a dream.

Separated from her husband and newly exposed to many of the radical ways of thought circulating in early twentieth-century New York, Sanger set out in 1913 for Europe to learn about modern contraceptive techniques. A second trip in 1915 took her to Holland in the hopes of meeting pioneering doctor Aletta Jacobs, a great champion of the Mensinga diaphragm. Jacobs had started thinking about the value of a contraceptive system that was controlled by and carried the authority of the medical profession. She believed that only doctors could properly fit a diaphragm, and soon Sanger began to see the value of such logic. (In a satisfying irony, while Sanger was away, her estranged husband, William, was arrested by Anthony Comstock for distributing “Family Limitation.” During the trial, Comstock caught pneumonia, which just a short while later killed him.)

In the fall of 1916, Sanger and her sister opened the first American birth
control clinic in Brooklyn. Despite having more clients than they could handle, the two women were soon put out of business after a government raid. Sanger returned to the lessons she had learned from Jacobs, and just two years later she won a court case that allowed her to open a legal clinic that provided services under doctor supervision and for the treatment of gynecological problems only. It was the beginning of the end for contraceptive opponents. Sanger soon founded other clinics as well as the American Birth Control League, which would eventually become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

If there were two Margaret Sangers, there was only one Marie Carmichael Stopes. She was brash, egotistical, difficult, and an ardent and unapologetic eugenicist. Only a year younger than Sanger, Stopes was born in England in 1880. Unlike her American counterpart, both her parents were educated, and Stopes went on to become the youngest PhD in Britain.
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She became interested in sexual health after her first marriage, when her husband experienced impotency; the two never consummated their union.

Shortly before her divorce, she attended a lecture given by Sanger at Fabian Hall in London.
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The two had dinner that evening, and Sanger was impressed by Stopes’s enthusiasm. A week later she provided Stopes with a cervical cap and some educational pamphlets on contraception. But their friendship was short lived, and in the years to come the two would become fiercely competitive. In 1918 Stopes wrote the popular and scandalous book
Married Love
, and by 1921, she and her new husband, Henry Verdon Roe, opened Britain’s first clinic.

The relationship between the birth control movement and eugenic science is a murky yet enduring one. The idea for eugenic fertility control, dating from 1883, originated with Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin’s. He believed that people of “superior stock” should be encouraged to reproduce, and other “inferior” people discouraged or prevented from doing so. It was based partially on a misinterpretation of Darwin, and partially on a reinterpretation of the work of English economist Thomas Malthus, who held that population growth would eventually outstrip the world’s resources.

Two major schools of eugenics stem from Galton’s original theory. Positive eugenics sought to encourage procreation in the “fit” members of
society; in an American context this usually meant white, Protestant, native-born people. Negative eugenics tried to prevent or curtail births among “inferior” people—a category that originally included eastern and southern European immigrants, but quickly shifted to African Americans.

The relationship between birth control advocates and eugenics—and the alliances built between these two groups—went on to haunt both the feminist movement and the development of contraceptive science. Early birth control activists used two major strategies for making contraception respectable: they encouraged the medicalization of the process and products, and they took advantage of anxieties about the dangers of excess fertility in potentially destabilizing communities in society—in other words, the poor, and ethnic and racial minorities. Many people who were not compelled by concern for individual women and their rights were willing to accept birth control as a useful tool for maintaining the social status quo. Writing about Margaret Sanger, Rickie Solinger notes, “Sanger’s appeal is classic because it divides the purpose of contraception into two: emancipation for women, and race betterment for society. Sanger did not apparently stop to consider whether these goals can coexist or if the second goal must, by definition, be gained only at the cost of giving up the first.”
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But what effect, if any, did the eugenic ideals of clinic founders have on the women who sought their services? While Sanger increasingly accepted eugenic arguments about using fertility to control poverty and other social problems, she never deserted the opposite notion, namely that controlling fertility might provide a way out of poverty for many women. Dorothy Roberts notes that while Sanger “was motivated by genuine concern to improve the health of the poor mothers she served rather than a desire to eliminate their stock,” she still relied on certain destructive principles, namely, “that social problems are caused by reproduction of the socially disadvantaged and that their child bearing should therefore be deterred.”
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Whether Sanger meant it or not, her embrace of these tenets damaged the birth control movement and created a space to abuse rather than enhance the rights of many women. As Roberts explains, “Sanger’s shifting alliances reveal how critical political objectives are to determining the nature of reproductive technologies—whether they will be used for women’s emancipation or oppression. As the movement veered from
its radical, feminist origins toward a eugenic agenda, birth control became a tool to regulate the poor, immigrants, and Black Americans.”
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In February 1930, Sanger opened one her famous clinics in Harlem. Perhaps because of concern in the African American community that her true intentions involved limiting their fertility for nefarious ends, patients declined to use the facility, and it closed just a few years after opening. The initial failure of the clinic contained lessons for future reproductive rights activists. After the first several years with an all-white staff, Sanger changed tacks and reopened the clinic with a black doctor, social worker, and nurses. The number of African American patients began to steadily increase. But despite acknowledging the desire of the community for health services provided by, as well as for, black women, Sanger was unwilling to truly cede control of the clinic to black leadership. Dorothy Roberts explains that Sanger, “like other whites in the birth control movement, saw the role of Black leaders and health professionals as facilitating their organizations’ efforts among the Black population.”
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The women’s movement in the second half of the twentieth century would face similar problems: while white activists desired the participation and support of black feminists, they struggled to share control and to reprioritize the movement as they understood it to truly accommodate diversity.

During the decades when eugenic thinking had the most impact on social policy, laws to allow the sterilization of those thought to be “unfit” proliferated. This trend began in 1907, when Indiana became the first state to pass a law allowing the sterilization of criminals and “imbeciles.” Deciding which people fell into these categories was a responsibility entrusted to doctors and lawmakers. When several other states began to pass similar laws, some people pushed back with legal challenges. A truly dark moment for the American judicial system came in the 1920s with the case of a young Virginia woman named Carrie Buck. Buck, the daughter of a prostitute, was seventeen when she was raped and became pregnant as a result. Despite a horrible childhood in which she had been removed from her mother’s care and placed in a foster home, Buck had managed to do well in school and was helpful with household duties in the home where she was placed. When she became pregnant her foster father immediately began legal proceedings to have the girl declared “feebleminded,” a term used euphemistically and interchangeably with sexual promiscuity. After
giving birth to a daughter while confined to a mental hospital, Buck was sterilized against her will. The resulting court cases eventually led to the Supreme Court upholding her sterilization. In one of the most regrettable and famous opinions he wrote, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind … Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
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In addition to sterilization laws, which disproportionately targeted African Americans and the poor, laws prohibiting interracial marriage had been passed in thirty states by 1940. While both measures would be repealed by the 1960s, as we will see later, sterilization abuse with racial and class dynamics continued through less legally sanctioned channels well into the 1980s.
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Condoms, Douches, and the Increasing Respectability of Birth Control in the 1920s and 1930s

If Margaret Sanger took the first tentative steps toward the legalization of female birth control, World War I accomplished the same task for men. Venereal disease—primarily syphilis and gonorrhea—had plagued the US military since its creation. In the nineteenth century, military leaders took a hard line against those infected with the illnesses, understanding them as evidence of a flawed character and not a larger epidemiological problem. Tone explains, “Enlisted soldiers were chronically under-diagnosed, and the afflicted were often treated punitively, as if their disease were secondary to their disgrace.”
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