Woman of Valor (10 page)

In the last-minute rush of the session of 1873, Congress amended the United States criminal code to prohibit the transport by public mail of materials including the following:

Yet, if Congress had overreached its intentions, it made no effort to correct them. In 1878, a group calling itself the National Liberal League petitioned Washington with 60,000 signatures demanding modification or repeal of the statute, but Comstock again confronted a committee hearing on the matter with his piles of smut, and no further Congressional action was again attempted until the 1920s. Meanwhile, the original statute had triggered an immediate impact at the state level, and every state but New Mexico took some form of action. Twenty-four of them passed conforming legislation prohibiting not only the transport of obscene materials, contraceptives, and abortifacients, but also their circulation by any means of publication or advertising. Most, nonetheless, did exempt licensed physicians, and some of them even pharmacists as well. Yet, fourteen state statutes also enjoined speech on the subjects at hand, and the Connecticut legislature outlawed contraceptive practice outright, though it provided no effective means of enforcing its will.

Next door in New York, however, state representatives chartered the YMCA's Committee for the Suppression of Vice as a publicly sponsored vehicle for legal enforcement of its prohibitions. Comstock himself was authorized by the United States Post Office and by the State of New York to work as a “special agent,” with the power to undertake searches and seizures and to make arrests. Only under more sober circumstances in 1881 would Albany legislators respond to pressure brought by the medical profession and amend the statute to curb Comstock's jurisdiction and allow physicians to prescribe contraception for use in combating the spread of syphilis and other diseases. “An article or instrument used or applied by physicians lawfully practicing, or by their direction or prescription, for the cure or prevention of disease,” was thereafter declared exempt from definition as “immoral or indecent,” but this was the extent of the alteration.
¹⁹

Prohibited from interfering with doctors in his home state, Comstock remained free to persecute nonprofessionals who dared challenge him, and his particular penchant for hounding sexually flamboyant women suggests that his entrapment anxiety may not have extended only to
merchants
of vice. His first demonstrable victory came when an infamous but well-established New York abortionist, who practiced under the French name of “Madame Restell” (though in reality she was a British-born commoner named Ann Lohman) committed suicide after Comstock indicted her for criminal negligence in connection with the death of a client. Following soon upon this incident, Comstock staged a major press event by appearing at the sensational trial of radical feminist Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, who distinguished themselves nationally in the 1870s with an outspoken candor about sexuality. The two women stood accused of libeling the prominent Brooklyn minister, Henry Ward Beecher, by exposing his alleged extramarital escapades in one of the unorthodox feminist newspapers they published. Comstock testified on Beecher's behalf, and the result was a hung jury, but Woodhull found herself persecuted for her views and ultimately left the country, abandoning women's rights to those more cautious about speaking out on sex. Several years later, Comstock enjoyed an unequivocal success in the Massachusetts prosecution of an outspoken sex radical there, named Ezra Heywood, for distributing an underground journal that advocated free love and advertised contraceptives.

However flamboyant these encounters, the larger effect of Comstock's zealotry is hard to measure. Not a single reputable physician was actually prosecuted during his tenure, and medical supplies were regularly mailed without interference, as were limited circulation textbooks incorporating contraceptive information. Comstock himself publicly denied that the laws bearing his name had ever been intended to handicap physicians in private practice, though, at the same time, he called all nonprocreative sexuality, even in marriage, “bestial and base.” In place of artificial contraception, he counseled self-restraint and refused to admit the possibility of a distinction between moral and immoral uses of preventives. Even if his obscenity laws did not technically circumscribe physicians, this bald identification of contraceptive practices as criminal and immoral seems to have discouraged their intervention in all aspects of the matter. Physicians in private practice who counseled their patients on contraception did so quietly. The subject was all but banned from public discourse on the subject, records of medical symposia reflecting only occasional interest. It was not until 1912 that the American Medical Association again debated contraception openly at the encouragement of its outgoing president Abraham Jacobi, husband of the outspoken female physician, Mary Putnam Jacobi, and himself the proponent of a more socially responsive medicine.
²⁰

If Comstock never succeeded in suppressing sex radicalism or the popular culture's brisk trade in contraception and abortion, however, he did manage to push them farther underground into the hands of quacks and charlatans. Reputable publishers banned the subject altogether from popular editions, and this left only paper-bound pocketbooks, printed in remote areas of states like Texas and Kansas, where they were out of the reach of censors. Respectable farm journals, women's magazines, and most mail-order catalogs accepted only advertisements disguised under such euphemisms as the ubiquitous “feminine hygiene.” Patent medicine manufacturers became multimillionaires, but they cautiously coded announcements for contraceptives. Lydia Pinkham, for example, made a fortune selling emmenagogues to dispel “stomach tumors.” Edward Bliss Foote, the proponent of womb veils and a popular health writer, was convicted by Comstock and forced to reissue his advice book on contraception in a truncated version that only advertised douching. As to the manufacture of commercial contraceptives, standardization and regulation of quality and price became virtually impossible, and in these nebulous circumstances the contraceptive market expanded out of the reach of the law, until some federal policing of merchandise was undertaken in the 1930s.
²¹

Yet these constraints on public discussion of sexuality had no apparent impact on behavior. Indeed, as birthrates continued to plummet, patterns of sexual behavior grew more permissive rather than less. There is little reliable survey data from this era on sexual behavior, but the same Dr. Clelia Mosher of Stanford University, who questioned the wives of professors about contraception in 1895 also asked about sexual responsiveness, and on this matter, her data has been variously interpreted. She reported nearly universal sexual activity, but still a sizable incidence of orgasmic deficiency and rather low levels of desire on the part of women, at least by more recent standards. Only a third of the women claimed they usually reached orgasm—a few more said “sometimes”—and the majority said they were interested in sex only about once a month. Lack of enthusiasm for sex, not surprisingly, correlated directly with reports of ineffective use of contraception.

By contrast, Alfred Kinsey's pioneering studies of women who came of age in the earlier years of this century found that they experienced greater frequency of intercourse in marriage, nearly universal contraceptive use, and higher levels of sexual satisfaction. Moreover, they did not confine sexuality to marriage but instead engaged in permissive premarital sex-play, which for most stopped short of intercourse, though fully a third of Kinsey's respondents also admitted having consummated these relationships, most often with the partners they subsequently married, Margaret's own personal experience in this respect once again being instructive.

This closer accommodation to a single standard of sexuality for men and women also paralleled the decline of prostitution as a sexual outlet for men. The availability of commercial sex had long enforced a double standard and provided a semilicit physical outlet for men, but progressive efforts in public health and social hygiene increased awareness of the high risk of contracting venereal disease from prostitutes and of the unfortunate consequences of sexual vice in a world without antibiotics or any other assured cure. Even as physicians and scientists developed new regimens for treating syphilis and gonorrhea, it remained apparent that the best deterrent to the spread of disease was outright prohibition. The campaign to regulate prostitution actually produced a more liberal sexual doctrine in this country, its hallmark a new egalitarianism in personal conduct that licensed middle-class women to be sexual, so men would not need to find relief away from home.
²²

Most important, birthrates continued to decline as a result of private contraceptive arrangements made quietly among networks of women or by husband and wife. Small families became increasingly fashionable by the turn of the century, especially among the most prosperous families, where one and two children were not uncommon. And fertility declined steadily, if still more slowly, among women of the working classes as well.
*

By the early 1900s, indeed, the venerable Anthony Comstock's reputation had declined. He became something of an eccentric symbol of old-fashioned values—“a four square granite monument to the Puritan tradition”—in the description of one of his biographers. His celebrated 1905 injunction against the American production of Bernard Shaw's
Mrs. Warren's Profession
, a comedy of manners with prostitution as its theme, was never enforced in court, though it earned the country an international reputation for philistinism. Comstock still achieved notoriety with the confiscation of nude female drawings in a pamphlet of the Art Student's League in New York City in 1914, but again there were no legal repercussions. A cartoon in
The Masses
, then a popular journal of the left, parodied Comstockery by showing a man dragging a woman's body before a judge with a caption that read, “Your honor, this woman gave birth to a
naked child
.” Several months later, in fact, he lost his official status as a government agent, which left him with only the institutional support of like-minded fanatics whose voluntary commitment to vice suppression had long helped support his activities.
²³

Yet if the intemperate zeal of old age eroded Comstock's personal credibility, his legislative legacy continued to resist change. Obscenity laws lent themselves well to selective enforcement and provided a convenient tool for government suppression of social deviants and, as Margaret would soon discover, of political radicals as well. Male politicians were hardly more anxious to debate sexual subjects openly than advocates of women's rights were, and this curious but unmovable constellation of elements sustained Comstock's anachronistic laws, even long after the old man himself was gone.
²⁴

Margaret breached a well-established social and political contract when she took on Anthony Comstock in the columns of
The Call
. She did not invent a freer sexuality for women or discover contraception, but by insisting on raising both as public issues, she did fundamentally alter the social discourse of her times and of our own.

For the moment, however, her principal heresy was in becoming as much a political radical as she was a social libertarian.

M
argaret had used the Socialist Party to establish herself within a community in New York and to find her voice as a journalist, but to her dismay the issues she began to write about, and feel so deeply, attracted little attention from party leaders. Within a year she openly shared in a growing resentment that only lip service was being paid the real concerns of women. Jessie Ashley, whom Margaret greatly admired, withheld a $500 contribution to the New York City locals for women's work in 1912, because she could secure no agreement from the governing body on how the money would be spent.
¹

In the preceding twenty years, the number of women in the labor force had doubled from 4 to 8 million. Yet, despite the extraordinary success of the Women's Trade Union League in leading the strike of 1909-10 that invigorated the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union, the Socialist Party and the male-dominated trade unions made little further effort to organize women workers, whose labor was stereotyped as marginal and impermanent. As a result, many women were frustrated by internal squabbles and began to break ranks.
²

Despairing of conventional political processes, Margaret drifted toward the party's left wing and radical tactics of direct action in support of labor. Her
Autobiography
admits that she first found herself in “absolute rapture” at a laundry strike in New York City in 1911, while listening to the IWW's favored female agitator, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Flynn was known, among activists, affectionately but with respect, as “girlie,” and in tabloid headlines of the day as the “Rebel Girl.” That day she advised the workers not to surrender their pay envelopes in a walkout, but instead to engage in a form of quiet sabotage of their employers by deliberately mixing up orders of socks and shirts. The two women next had the chance to talk at the Sangers' uptown flat, while bathing Peggy in the sink. Then came the strike at Lawrence.

The Wobblies had moved East to organize immigrant textile workers and for this decidedly unpolished but committed band of organizers. Margaret, who was native-born, well-spoken, and quietly attractive, became an especially valuable recruit. When the IWW struck the Lawrence textile mills in Massachusetts early in 1912, she was asked to lead a well-staged and highly publicized evacuation of workers' children from the strife-torn Massachusetts town to New York City, an action intended as much to call attention to the strike and to arouse sympathy, as it was to protect the children from extreme conditions. The bitter job action had put 22,000 people out of work, most of them foreign-born, and the humanitarian tactic played brilliantly as sympathetic families in New York took in the forlorn immigrant children. The favorable publicity so enraged local authorities that they used billy clubs to prevent a second contingent of children led by Flynn from leaving town.

The violence provoked Congressman Victor Berger to call an investigation, and in March Margaret traveled to Washington with several young women strikers to condemn the textile industry for its assault on women, children, and families. Helen Taft, the President's wife, and Alice Roosevelt, the former President's daughter, came to hear the testimony of the “nurse from New York,” as she was billed, and her moving portrayal of the children of wool workers, who in the cold of winter were without warm clothes, made national headlines as a “remarkable exposition of capitalist brutality.” Within two weeks the strike was settled, and the workers won raises of 5 to 25 percent, gains which had a ripple effect throughout the New England textile industry. The results were not as positive, however, in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, where Margaret was twice arrested a month later for trying to prevent workers from entering a silk plant the Wobblies did not successfully organize.
³

Lawrence brought her overnight recognition and a valuable initiation in political organization, promotion, and lobbying. She also took away from the experience enduring friendships with strike organizers Bill Haywood, Carlo Tresca, and the charismatic, silver-tongued Flynn, friendships that would transcend her own later retreat from radical activism.

She strongly identified with the engaging but fiercely committed Flynn. The two attractive and spirited Irish women both traced the roots of their political activism to well-intentioned but domineering fathers, who had disappointed them for being so “long on talk and short on work,” as Margaret once caustically described them. They also had in common strong-willed mothers, who had encouraged independence in their daughters. Most important, perhaps, they shared the experience and responsibility of being mothers themselves, since Flynn had a child from a brief teenage marriage, who lived with her family in the Bronx. Here the similarities stopped, however, for while Margaret was struggling over responsibilities to a young family, Flynn was riding the IWW strike circuit from coast to coast, lending her flaming oratory to the cause of labor from the mills of the East to the mines out West. When they met, Flynn had also just become involved in a tempestuous love affair with the mysterious and daring Tresca, whose abandoned Italian wife and daughter lived just blocks away in New York.
*

Late in 1912, Flynn and Tresca led a strike of restaurant and hotel workers in New York, which caused a riot they did not condone but, at the same time, refused to condemn. On this occasion the workers rebuked the call for nonviolence and rather than simply adulterate the food they prepared and served, they left their jobs, smashed the plate glass windows of Delmonico's and other elite establishments, and wildly attacked scab workers. Circumstances quickly overtook ideology.
⁴

The publicity generated by these events gave the Wobbly leadership, and the philosophy of syndicalism which it endorsed, an increasing celebrity outside radical circles, especially among an East Coast intelligentsia that had long heralded the rights of labor. The French philosopher Henri Bergson developed his doctrine of the primacy of immediate subjective experience—his
elan vital
—and gave intellectual respectability to grass-roots labor confrontation. He was invited to lecture at Columbia in 1913 and was also profiled in the Sunday magazine of
The New York Times
. But if university scholars and Greenwich Village literati were suddenly engaged by the new unrest, established Socialists and trade unionists in this country were not so easily romanced. The success at Lawrence had been made possible by an effective coalition of IWW organization and Socialist Party money and public relations. Virtually on its heels, war broke out between the party's reform faction and those willing to condone violence. The reformers held control and, singling out Haywood, voted to expel any member who opposed electoral participation and advocated direct action. Margaret, along with most of the left wing, resigned her party affiliations, and the rift never healed. So too, the American Federation of Labor disavowed the New York cooks and waiters who had followed Flynn and Tresca, splitting the local into warring factions.
⁵

Differences of strategy that had been tolerated only a year earlier became open fissures on the landscape of the left, and the debate over tactics and goals intensified in 1913 during the long and disruptive silk workers' strike in Paterson, New Jersey. As with Lawrence, the practical short-term goals were a minimum wage, an eight-hour day, extra pay for overtime, and other minor workplace reforms. But a zealous IWW leadership, inspired by its victories in New England and ever conscious that Paterson was within range of the nation's communications hub in New York City, also attempted to convert the thousands of strikers there into true believers in the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of class conflict. Flynn took charge of the strike along with Haywood and Tresca, and the goal, in her words, was to create “a feeling of solidarity” out of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political constituencies in Paterson—to instill a unified “class spirit, class respect, class consciousness.” To this end the Wobblies did more than organize picket lines. They deluged Paterson with forums, rallies, marches, and parades, and on Sundays sponsored mass picnics, which were meant to keep the strikers' spirits high and ward off the likelihood of a break in ranks. In this effort they enlisted the money, sympathy, and skills of New York's bohemia just across the Hudson River, providing a critical opportunity of politicization for many of its young rebels, most notably the romantic John Reed, who first went to jail in Paterson when local authorities tried to rid the town of outside agitators.
⁶

The Paterson strike reached an impasse by midyear as the repression and sheer mayhem instigated by company management and local officials escalated, while the strike funds and emergency relief needed to maintain discipline among the strikers began to run out. Looking for a publicity vehicle on the order of the Lawrence children's crusade, a group of Greenwich Village supporters met with Haywood at Mabel Dodge's famous salon and came up with the idea of staging an enormous pageant in New York's old Madison Square Garden that would feature the silk workers themselves in a vivid dramatization of their plight. Margaret had been traveling back and forth to Paterson to lecture striking women as part of the IWW educational strategy, and to organize an evacuation of children comparable to the one she led at Lawrence. She was apparently at the Dodge evening that launched the pageant, and subsequent organizational meetings were held at her apartment. John Reed threw himself into staging the event with customary zeal, and on June 7, 1913, it became part of history. Thousands of spectators broke into revolutionary chants and song as 1,000 strikers reenacted their struggles, and Wobbly leaders shouted out their standard fare with an immense IWW sign and a flaming red stage set as their backdrop.

Yet for all its dramatic intensity, the event was a fiasco. Intended to raise money and support for the cause, it wound up with virtually no profit at all. The strike was lost, and after five months of poverty and unemployment, the workers returned to the factory with no gains. Some blamed defeat on the fractioning of worker unity along ethnic and gender lines, as new immigrant labor replaced the old, and women took jobs once reserved at higher pay for men. But others were quick to criticize the IWW leadership for condescending to local organizers and diverting attention from discipline and organization to symbolic but empty gestures of pageantry and song. When it was all over, Reed sailed for Florence with the new lover he found in pageant coorganizer, Mabel Dodge. Haywood followed with Jessie Ashley shortly thereafter. Flynn was left to pick up the pieces in Paterson, and Margaret found herself in utter despair.
⁷

 

When she later wrote her autobiographies, at the height of a still precarious professional achievement in the 1930s, Margaret deliberately glossed over this youthful radicalism and the profound personal alienation that gave resonance to her early political activism. Like the mature author who disowns her early work as a youthful apprenticeship, she undermined the seriousness of her intentions in this period. From her own superficial accounts, it is tempting to dismiss her radicalism as faddish and suggest that she embraced labor activism because it was daring and fashionable and a good deal less boring than the children's expeditions and women's literary groups that had occupied her time in the suburbs. In this context, she would seem more at home in the bohemian haunts of prewar Greenwich Village than on the barricades of Lawrence and Paterson. We can picture her savoring a meal at Polly's Restaurant, or having a drink at Paddy Halliday's, the fabled watering hole, where rebellion was fomented in work and politics, culture and family. The Village crowd was, of course, even more notorious for flaunting conventional marital and domestic arrangements than for advancing economic radicalism. Its apparent contempt for the moral constraints of bourgeois life was so intense that Max Eastman, intemperate editor of
The Masses
, the fashionable intellectual journal of the left, used to refer to these years as the “adolescence” of the new century.
⁸

Margaret was clearly intoxicated by bohemia's warm and welcoming community with its adventuresome and carefree spirit. The Village she knew was vigorous and alive with unconventional ideas—many of which have retained an intellectual allure well into our own time. Its meandering streets with quaint and historic houses for rent, cafes brimming with people and conversation, and shops stuffed with books and prints and bric-a-brac, offered a welcome respite from the affluent but culturally sterile suburbs she had left. The jumbled intensity of life there more closely resembled the rejected household of her childhood than the well-ordered, middle-class life she had inevitably found wanting. She felt a sentimental affinity to legions of similarly alienated young people who flocked to New York in search of kindred community. Positive associations to her youth positioned her well to embrace her generation's ethical concern for the collective welfare. The emotional conflicts and burdens of that past, however, also left her willing prey to its passion for unbridled personal liberation. For many of her contemporaries, however, including her own husband as it turned out, pursuing the twin goals of individual freedom and disciplined social renewal seemed inherently contradictory, and the failure to resolve this conflict in his own life was to leave him a defeated and dispirited man.
⁹

Yet bohemia did not define the boundaries of Margaret's experience in these years. She was not, after all, one of the groping and sensitive young writers or artists for which the era is legendary, who wandered into New York with responsibility to nothing but their own substantial talents. She had to care for a husband and three children still under the age of ten, while she also met the obligations of at least part-time paid employment. Still, it does not undermine the significance of her disenchantment with the short-term rewards of bread-and-butter Socialism, and the increasing chaos of IWW syndicalism, to say that the lure of personal freedom also engaged her. This gradual orientation toward a more intimate and personally felt politics raised her consciousness as a feminist and wrought havoc on her marriage and home life.