Terrible Virtue (8 page)

“I work at the post office now.” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his upper lip, which was covered with a film of sweat, though the spring evening was cool. “I can't afford socialist meetings, not with a wife and five little ones to support.”

So that was it. He wanted contraceptive information. No wonder he looked so furtive.

“I shouldn't be here now,” he went on, “but I heard something down at the post office that I thought you'd want to know.” He glanced around the hall again. “An order came down from the top today. From now on, we're supposed to hold all second-and third-class mail, magazines, and newspapers in wrappers up to the light to make sure another piece of mail isn't enclosed.” He hesitated. “Some of the men asked what we were looking for. ‘A rag called
The
Woman
Rebel
,' the supervisor said. ‘It's been declared obscene, but the bitch—'” His face flamed. “Excuse me . . . the lady . . . ‘who edits it, name of Mrs. Margaret Sanger, has been trying to fool us by mailing her filth camouflaged in respectable newspapers and magazines.' I just thought you'd want to know,” he repeated.

I said I was very glad to know and thanked him. He started down the hall, but I called him back.

“There's a man standing across the street. I'm sure he's one of Comstock's stooges. When you get downstairs, take the service entrance in the back. It leads to an alley that comes out around the corner. If he doesn't see you leave, he'll think you're a tenant. We don't want him suspecting that you came to see me, though I'm grateful you did.”

He smiled, and though he still looked frightened, he no longer looked miserable.

I STOPPED WASTING
my time trying to hide copies of the magazine.

In the July issue, I ran an article called “Are Preventive Means Injurious?” and another titled “The Marriage Bed.” If the number of letters that flooded in was any indication, our mailings were getting through. It was only a matter of time until Comstock upped the ante.

THE ELECTRIC FAN
set behind a block of ice was no match for the August morning. When the bell rang, I moved to the door slowly, like a swimmer churning through water.

Two men, one burly, one slight, stood in my doorway sweating. Half-moon-shaped stains hung from the armpits of their jackets. Their detachable shirt collars looked as if they'd come through the wringer of a washing machine. The burly one asked if I was Mrs. Margaret Sanger. I said I was. He pushed past me into the apartment. His sidekick followed.

They looked around the room as if they expected to find evidence of something. Then the burly one asked if I was the editor and publisher of a magazine called
The
Woman
Rebel
. He smirked when he said it. Again I admitted I was. He held out a legal-looking document. There was nothing I could do but take it.

I opened the seal and stood reading. A grand jury had indicted me on nine counts.

“A maximum sentence of forty-five years in the penitentiary,” the fat one gloated.

The number made me shiver in the summer heat. I'd been looking forward to a chance to state my case in court. I'd known I might have to serve time in jail. Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and half the people in my world had been locked up at one time or another for good causes. But not for forty-five years.

After they left, I sat at the dining table staring at the indictment, gazing into the future. I saw my children huddled in the bleak visitors' room of a state prison, the boys refusing to speak, Peggy clinging to Ethel in fear. I saw them growing older, bodies elongating, faces taking definition, while I shriveled into an old woman and faded into the distance, out of their lives.

But as I went on sitting there, three other children crept into my consciousness, only they weren't children but undersized adults, made old before their time by the misery and deprivation of life in a Grand Street tenement. Those were the children who persuaded me. I could not give up the fight for all children, even if it meant losing my own.

But I was being melodramatic. The post office had tried to silence me. The courts, if they carried through on this, would give me an opportunity to be heard. But they wouldn't carry through. That was the point. They didn't want me to speak, because they knew that all across the country, women, and many men, were eager to listen. They didn't want to make a martyr of a respectable woman either. And they did think I was respectable, despite Mr. Comstock's henchmen lurking across the street. Respectable and sympathetic. I was a mother alone
with three small photogenic children. When reporters came to interview me, as they occasionally did, Stuart and Grant greeted them at the door, took their hats, and sat politely while the newsmen fired questions at me and I fired back. Peggy had an uncanny ability to spot the softhearted among them, climb into their laps, and wind her arms around their necks. She had my instincts for sizing up people. No judge, politician, or government official in his right mind would send the decent mother of those three winning, well-behaved children to the penitentiary for forty-five years. Society wouldn't stand for it.

T
HE MORNING OF
the arraignment I put on a severe black dress with a starched white collar and a small black hat trimmed with a demure veil.

“What the well-dressed nun is wearing this season,” Ethel said when she came to pick me up.

She could joke, but I knew what I was doing. Ted Schroeder, who had given up on getting me into psychoanalysis but was still devoted to good causes, had warned that Judge Hazel, who would preside at my arraignment, was the father of nine. It was no accident that I had turned up on his docket.

Most of the morning was gone by the time the clerk called the case of the
People versus Margaret Sanger
. The phrasing gave me a moment's pause. I was outnumbered.

I rose, approached the bench with eyes lowered, the docile young lady my mother had wanted me to be, and stood listening as the prosecutor read the charges. When he finished, the judge leaned forward and peered down at me. From under lowered lashes, I looked up at him. My magazine could provoke. I would seduce.

“She doesn't look like a bomb thrower or assassin to me,” he
said to the district attorney, then brought his gavel down and postponed the case until the fall term.

I had been right. No judge in his right mind would make a martyr of me.

THOUGH THE
WOMAN REBEL
hadn't yet run any specific information on contraception, it had urged readers to ask for it. Bags of letters arrived demanding it. I began work on a pamphlet describing the various methods of birth control. Friends warned against it. Bill wrote from Paris urging caution. I was already under indictment, they pointed out. My case had been postponed, I explained.

I wrote the booklet “Family Limitation” in a white heat, like my father on a bender. Months of research poured out. The myth of the safe period. The practice of coitus interruptus. The use of condoms. The pessary, the sponge, and vaginal suppositories. I covered it all in only sixteen pages in language simple enough for a child, or at least young people stirred by sex, and any uneducated adult to understand.

The hard part was finding someone to produce it. Twenty printers turned me down. I'm not exaggerating. I kept a list. A few said it was too smutty. Most said it was too dangerous. Men who'd risked prison for running off calls for strikes and incitements to violence would not touch a pamphlet about women's bodies. One called it a Sing Sing job. Finally a brawny Russian labor organizer who operated a linotype across the river in New Jersey agreed to do the job after hours. I never asked him how many children he had, but I was willing to bet it was a full house.

Word of the pamphlet had already spread through the so
cialist and anarchist grapevine. Women—and men too—wrote asking for copies. Radical groups and labor organizations requested bulk deliveries to distribute to workers in the mills and mines and factories. When people couldn't get hold of a printed version, they copied someone else's by hand. There were also typed bootleg versions. I imagined secretaries and typewriters, their hands hovering over the keys, one eye on the door, working in deserted offices as the windows grew dark in the evening or as the sun came up in the morning.

THE BOYS HAD
left for school, Peggy was with the woman downstairs who took care of her these days—now that Bill was gone, so was his mother, but Peggy was such a winning child that I never had difficulty finding people to look after her while I worked—and the dining room sat silent and peaceful in the October morning. Crimson and purple and yellow leaves pressed against the windows turning them to stained glass. Sunlight slanted across the paper-littered table. I basked in it as I wrote a letter to the editor of
Metropolitan
Magazine
in answer to an article by Theodore Roosevelt urging women, of good American stock of course, to have at least six children. No, shaming women of good American stock who dared to have fewer than six children.

The telephone shattered the silence. I stood, crossed the room, and took the earpiece off the wall. The voice on the other end of the line asked if he was speaking to Mrs. Margaret Sanger. I told him he was. He said he was calling from the district attorney's office.

“You have a court hearing tomorrow morning at nine, Mrs. Sanger.”

“But I was given no warning.”

“The court must have notified your lawyer.” The voice wasn't unkind, merely businesslike.

I didn't tell him that I hadn't got around to hiring a lawyer. I'd been too busy writing, printing, and distributing “Family Limitation.” And I was still toying with the idea of representing myself, though Ted Schroeder warned it would be dangerous for me and detrimental to the cause. If I slipped up in any way, I would have no grounds for appeal. If the court ruled against me, I would set an unfortunate precedent. But I had no intention of slipping up.

I told the voice on the other end of the line that I would be there.

I PUT ON
the same black dress with the starched white collar and the same hat with the demure veil, part superstition, part calculation.

Once again, the clerk called the case of the
People versus
Margaret Sanger
, but this time I didn't feel outnumbered. I walked to the front of the room, stood before the bench, and looked up through lowered lashes. The judge screwed up his features as if he smelled something unpleasant.

“Where is your lawyer, Mrs. Sanger?”

“I didn't think one was necessary to plead for a postponement.” I let the shyest hint of a smile play around my mouth.

The judge's scowl deepened. “I expect you back in court after the noon recess, Mrs. Sanger. With a lawyer.” His gavel came down with a bang intended to make me jump. I managed not to give him the satisfaction.

I called Ted Schroeder. He didn't say he'd told me so. He instructed me to stay where I was.

“J. J. Goldstein will be there in half an hour, forty-five minutes at the outside.”

“J.J.?”

“Jonah J. Goldstein. If he'll take the case. His Tammany connections won't like him defending a birth controller.”

“You're sending me a Tammany lawyer?”

“He cut his teeth with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement and Mary Simkhovitch at Greenwich House.”

“Ah, the grandes dames who do the feather-dusting of welfare work. Aren't you afraid I'll shock him?”

“I'm hanging up now, Margaret. Try to get the chip off your shoulder before J.J. gets there. And try to believe me when I tell you that Anthony Comstock is not playing games. Nine counts. Forty-five years.”

Jonah J. Goldstein did not take half an hour. Twenty minutes later he came barreling down the marble corridor of the courthouse, a short powerhouse of a man with wide shoulders and deep-set black eyes sunk in dark smudges that spoke of long hours of work or years of unhealthy living or both. His suit coat was too broad for him and his trousers too long. The man had obviously never heard of a tailor. His hat was too big too, and sat low on his forehead. When he took it off to introduce himself, his eyes flashed with impatience at this headstrong woman who insisted on tangling with the law. I disliked him on sight.

JONAH J. GOLDSTEIN

YOU DIDN'T DISLIKE ME, PEG. YOU JUST DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF ME. IT WASN'T ONLY THE CLOTHES. THAT CAME FROM GROWING UP POOR. YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT. YOU LEARN TO GET YOUR
MONEY'S WORTH, OR AT LEAST AS MUCH FABRIC AS POSSIBLE. IT WAS ME, THE POOR JEWISH BOY ON THE MAKE FOR A BIG CHANCE. YOU KNEW FROM THE GET-GO I WASN'T ONE OF THOSE SMOOTH OPERATORS, THE ONES WHO BUZZED AROUND YOU, WRITING YOU FLOWERY LOVE LETTERS AND POETRY, FINDING A DOZEN DIFFERENT HIGHFALUTIN WAYS TO SAY THEY WERE CRAZY ABOUT YOU. I USED TO BE SORRY I WASN'T ONE OF THOSE JOES, BUT NOW I KNOW IF I HAD BEEN, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE GIVEN ME THE TIME OF DAY. WHY WOULD YOU WANT A SECOND-RATE IMITATION WHEN YOU HAD THE REAL THING WITH THOSE SOCIALIST PARLOR SNAKES AT HOME AND LATER THAT GANG IN ENGLAND, THE WANTLEY CIRCLE? SOMEDAY SOMEONE IS GOING TO WRITE A REAL BIOGRAPHY OF YOU—NOT A WHITEWASH LIKE THE ONE BY THIS LADER FELLOW, WHO CAN'T SEE STRAIGHT FOR BEING SO CRAZY ABOUT YOU—AND I CAN SEE THE INDEX NOW. SANGER, MARGARET, LOVE AFFAIRS, SEE BRODIE, HUGH; CHILD, HAROLD; DE SELINCOURT, HUGH; ELLIS, HAVELOCK; MACDONALD, ANGUS; MYLIUS, EDWARD; PORTET, LORENZO; ROBERTS, WALTER; ROMPAPAS, JOHN; WELLS, H. G.; WILLIAMS, WILLIAM; AND SO ON FOR A COUPLE OF PAGES
.

THE REAL SURPRISE IS THAT THE WORLD NEVER CAUGHT ON. WHEN IT CAME TO PUBLIC RELATIONS, SOMETHING THAT DIDN'T HAVE A NAME IN THOSE DAYS, YOU WERE A PRO. YOU WAGED A REVOLUTION DRESSED IN PRIM BLACK DRESSES WITH PRUDISH WHITE COLLARS. YOU SLEPT WITH WHOMEVER YOU PLEASED WHENEVER YOU PLEASED AND HAD EVERYONE BELIEVING YOU WERE A DEVOTED MOTHER, ALONE IN THE WORLD, STRUGGLING TO BRING UP YOUR CHILDREN ON YOUR OWN. SOMETIMES WHEN I WENT TO ONE OF YOUR TALKS, I HAD TO LAUGH.
YOU MEAN THAT DELICATE LITTLE LADY WITH THE SOFT VOICE IS MARGARET SANGER, THE BIRTH CONTROL REBEL?
THEY ASKED ONE ANOTHER INCREDULOUSLY. IF THEY HAD ONLY KNOWN
.

DON'T GET ME WRONG. I'M NOT CRITICIZING YOU FOR THE MASQUERADE. YOU HAD TO DISSEMBLE. WOMEN WOULD HAVE PILLO
RIED YOU IF THEY'D LEARNED THE TRUTH. MEN WOULD HAVE DONE WORSE. THEY DON'T LIKE HAVING THEIR SEXUAL PREROGATIVES USURPED. BUT I DIDN'T MIND IT. I LOVED IT. AND YOU. I THINK I KNEW IT THAT FIRST DAY, EVEN IF YOU DIDN'T. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? I HAVE A FEELING YOU DID. YOU JUST DON'T LIKE TO ADMIT IT, BECAUSE THEN YOU'D HAVE TO ADMIT YOU MADE A MISTAKE, IN THE BEGINNING, AND AT THE END
.

I STARTED TO
tell J. J. Goldstein what had happened in court that morning. He cut me off.

“You never should have gone in without a lawyer.”

“Last time the judge gave me a postponement. He said I didn't look like a bomb thrower.”

He stared at me for a moment. “You don't,” he said finally. “But courts don't convict on appearance. At least not only on appearance. If the request comes in the proper form from a lawyer, the judge will grant a postponement. I guarantee it.”

“You guarantee it?”

He grinned. I was shocked. How had this short Jewish know-it-all come by that irresistible lock-up-your-daughters smile?

“You'd prefer maybe a lawyer who's scared of his own shadow?” He took my arm and started toward the courtroom. “Come on, Mrs. Sanger. Let's get you sprung.”

J. J. Goldstein did not get me sprung. He approached the bench, half swagger, half deference. He used the proper language requesting a month's stay in the case of the
People versus Margaret Sanger
. The judge barely let him finish.

“Request denied.”

J. J. Goldstein requested a two-week stay in the case of the
People versus Margaret Sanger
.

“Denied.” The judge looked from J. J. Goldstein to me. “Mrs. Sanger will appear in court tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.” This time the sound of wood hitting wood as he brought down the gavel succeeded in making me jump.

Outside the courtroom, J. J. Goldstein said we could discuss the case over a cup of coffee. He looked at me from under the wide brim of that ridiculous hat. “On second thought, you need a drink.”

We went to a restaurant around the corner from the courthouse. It was all cut velvet and fringed swags. The headwaiter greeted him warmly. I don't know why I was surprised. Ted had said he had Tammany connections. The real puzzle was why he would risk them to defend me.

“The way I see it,” he said after we were seated at a table and he'd ordered a sherry for me and a whisky for him, “you plead guilty, and I get you off with a year. Probably less.” He sat staring at me for a moment. “Definitely less. I guarantee it.”

“You guaranteed you could get me a postponement.”

“You want to cry over spilled milk or you want to beat this? The DA might even settle for a fine. All you have to do is admit your guilt and seem contrite. The clothes are fine, but the act doesn't cut the mustard.”

“What do you mean, the act? You think I'm not serious about this?”

He flashed the dangerous smile again. “I think you're dead serious. I just don't want the judge to think it. Stop looking him in the eye.”

He was right. The moment the judge had denied the postponement, I'd dropped the docile-young-lady façade.

“And stop acting as if you're smarter than every man in the courtroom. For all I know you are, but don't let it show. Turn on the charm. You bamboozle the judge, I'll plead you guilty to
satisfy the DA, and we'll have you out of there with a fine. Your political friends will be happy to pay it.”

“I can't plead guilty.”

“Why not? You are. You sent those magazines through the mail.”

“I set out to prove the law is unjust. Pleading guilty will only validate it.”

He sat looking at me. His manner was all elbows, but his eyes gave away the hole in his heart.