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Margaret Sanger’s Network of Feminists: Funding the Birth Control Movement

Joan Marie Johnson

in Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870-1967

Many feminist philanthropists believed that economic and political rights for women were incomplete without the right to control one’s reproduction. America’s leading birth control advocate, Margaret ... More

Many feminist philanthropists believed that economic and political rights for women were incomplete without the right to control one’s reproduction. America’s leading birth control advocate, Margaret Sanger, was a skilled fund-raiser. She carefully managed a network of society women who supported her organizations, publications, and private life. Chapter 6 takes a new approach to understanding Sanger: by moving the spotlight from Sanger to her supporters, it becomes clear that her strategic turn to wealthy women did not come at the expense of her feminism (even if she did drop her socialism), as has been argued by some historians. This chapter shows that women like Gertrude Minturn Pinchot and Juliet Barrett Rublee rallied behind Sanger, creating a Committee of 100 to defend her and promote the birth control movement. Unafraid of being arrested, their personal lives and their birth control advocacy revealed their feminism. Chapter 6 focuses on the ways that feminism undergirded rich women’s donations, compelled them to take on controversial issues, and pushed them to influence Sanger and shape the movement and the American Birth Control League and Planned Parenthood. Furthermore, this chapter demonstrates the social networks of power created by wealthy women.Less

“Female Choice” and the Reproductive Autonomy of Women

Kimberly A. Hamlin

in From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women's Rights in Gilded Age America

Chapter four traces the Darwinian concept of “female choice” of sexual partners as it reverberated through feminist and socialist reform circles at the turn of the twentieth century. Darwinian ... More

Chapter four traces the Darwinian concept of “female choice” of sexual partners as it reverberated through feminist and socialist reform circles at the turn of the twentieth century. Darwinian feminists, including Eliza Burt Gamble and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, argued that humans needed to return to female choice, a practice that was the norm throughout the animal kingdom except among humans. Socialists, too, embraced female choice and suggested that only economically independent women were capable of freely choosing their mates. Female choice offered feminist socialists one unified way to critique the institution of marriage, decry the lack of economic opportunities for women, denounce capitalism for creating a class of wealthy people for whom fitness was not a criterion to mating, and reject the type of women—corseted, dainty, and submissive—so often selected as wives by men. Ultimately, these ideas shaped the early thinking of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, a socialist who studied with the British Neo-Malthusians and with sexual selection expert Havelock Ellis.Less

Sterilization, Birth Control, and the Catholic Confrontation with Eugenics

Christine Rosen

in Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement

Although engaged in questioning the precepts of the eugenics movement from its inception, Catholic leaders’ interest in the movement reached its apogee in the late 1920s, when the twin issues of ... More

Although engaged in questioning the precepts of the eugenics movement from its inception, Catholic leaders’ interest in the movement reached its apogee in the late 1920s, when the twin issues of compulsory sterilization and birth control came to dominate the debate over eugenics. Through an examination of the work of Rev. John A. Ryan and Rev. John M. Cooper, two Catholic leaders who were once members of the American Eugenics Society, this chapter describes the intellectual journey of the Catholics who eventually became the eugenics movement’s most fervent opponents. It reviews Catholic debate about eugenic sterilization, the reaction to Margaret Sanger’s fledgling birth control movement, and the lay and clerical reaction to Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti Connubi.Less

Feminism and Science: Funding Research for the Pill

Joan Marie Johnson

in Funding Feminism: Monied Women, Philanthropy, and the Women's Movement, 1870-1967

While Sanger’s early focus was on increasing access to and information about birth control, one of her most loyal supporters, Katharine McCormick, consistently argued for the research and development ... More

While Sanger’s early focus was on increasing access to and information about birth control, one of her most loyal supporters, Katharine McCormick, consistently argued for the research and development of a new method of accessible, safe, reliable contraception controlled by women themselves, at a time when diaphragms, condoms, and withdrawal were common methods of birth control. Chapter 7 posits that McCormick’s feminism drove her to back development of the pill, correcting earlier historians who misunderstood her relationship with her husband. I also explain why Sanger and McCormick supported a prescription pill, which could be difficult for some women to obtain, while ostensibly trying to expand access to birth control. The chapter traces the way McCormick’s scientific interest in endocrinology, which developed from her intervention in her mentally ill husband’s medical care, and her feminist philosophy came together in her funding of the development of the birth control pill. At a time when Planned Parenthood was uninterested in research or concerned with developing a new contraceptive method that women could control, McCormick insisted that a pill was both possible and necessary, and she paid for its development by Gregory Pincus and John Rock. She then worked to ensure that women had access to the pill through its distribution at hospital clinics. McCormick single-handedly financed the expansion of reproductive rights for women through the development of the pill.Less

“Where Else but Greenwich Village?”: Taking Sexual Liberties, 1910s–1920s

Leigh Ann Wheeler

in How Sex Became a Civil Liberty

This chapter looks into the intimate lives of the men and women who founded the early American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), including Crystal Eastman, and Roger Baldwin and his wife Madeleine ... More

This chapter looks into the intimate lives of the men and women who founded the early American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), including Crystal Eastman, and Roger Baldwin and his wife Madeleine Zabriskie Doty. More specifically, it examines the private dilemmas faced by these individuals and the decisions they made that would have important consequences not only for the organization they founded, but also for the law and culture they shaped. It also considers how they shaped the ACLU's first policies on matters related to sexuality and how they participated in the sexual experimentation that characterized Greenwich Village's bohemian culture in the early twentieth century. Finally, it explores why ACLU leaders defended birth control activist Margaret Sanger just months after the organization was founded in 1920; the sexual experiences and values of the ACLU founders that would have significance to their creation of sexual civil liberties; the gendered personal relations and politics from which the ACLU emerged; and some of the contingencies that gave rise to sexual civil liberties early in the twentieth century.Less

Redemption through Sex

Peter Gardella

in Innocent Ecstasy, Updated Edition: How Christianity Gave America an Ethic of Sexual Pleasure

In the birth control movement and among early psychologists, redemption from original sin was translated into sexual terms. Margaret Sanger (1879–1963), the nurse who invented the phrase “birth ... More

In the birth control movement and among early psychologists, redemption from original sin was translated into sexual terms. Margaret Sanger (1879–1963), the nurse who invented the phrase “birth control” and founded Planned Parenthood, combined Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. Raised Catholic and devoted to the Virgin, she was sent to a Methodist college by her free-thinking father. There she spoke in chapel and read textbooks teaching that passions could be sanctified. Meanwhile, psychologist and Clark University president G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924) invited Sigmund Freud to lecture in 1909. Hall ignored the tragic side of psychoanalytic theory but accepted the centrality of sex. A former candidate for the Congregational ministry, Hall wrote Adolescence (1904), a study that described puberty as the key period in religious life. Both Sanger and Hall presented sexual fulfillment, especially female orgasms through intercourse with considerate men, as capable of redeeming the human race from evil.Less

Crossing the Catholic Divide: Gender, Sexuality, and Historiography

R. Marie Griffith

in Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History

This chapter looks at another area of assimilation and distinctiveness: gender and sexuality. It explores how Catholics made up roughly a quarter of the nation's population during the twentieth ... More

This chapter looks at another area of assimilation and distinctiveness: gender and sexuality. It explores how Catholics made up roughly a quarter of the nation's population during the twentieth century; how their leaders held to a particular, well-developed view of sexuality and gender; and how contemporary historians of sexuality and gender have neglected to integrate Catholicism into their accounts. Drawing on Leslie Woodcock Tentler's study of Catholics and birth control, the chapter surveys the ways in which disparate reformers, including Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, and Mary Steichen Calderone, managed their interactions with Catholic leaders and ideas. The chapter also grants specific attention to sources of the Protestant–Catholic divide, as well as to some possibilities for remedying it in new scholarly work.Less

Teaching Birth Control on Tobacco Road and Mill Village Alley: Race, Class, and Birth Control in Public Health

Johanna Schoen

in Silent Victories: The History and Practice of Public Health in Twentieth Century America

In the 1930s, public health professionals launched birth control programs as part of their infant and maternal health measures. In addition to reducing infant and maternal mortality rates, offering ... More

In the 1930s, public health professionals launched birth control programs as part of their infant and maternal health measures. In addition to reducing infant and maternal mortality rates, offering birth control to poor women also seemed attractive for economic and eugenic reasons. Public health birth control services simultaneously offered women reproductive control and provided control over poor women's reproduction. Although clients recognized the race and class prejudices behind many family planning programs, they took advantage of the services offered, and bargained with authorities over the conditions of contraceptive advice. Women's lack of access to contraceptive services, their poverty, their race, and gender significantly influenced their decision to participate in contraceptive field trials or take advantage of birth control programs.Less

Free Love and Hard-Boiled Sentiment

Lisa Mendelman

in Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

Chapter 3 examines Frances Newman’s neglected avant-garde novel The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), as the book elaborates the exchanges between the sentimental tradition, the evolving free love movement, ... More

Chapter 3 examines Frances Newman’s neglected avant-garde novel The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), as the book elaborates the exchanges between the sentimental tradition, the evolving free love movement, and the nascent concept of hard-boiled fiction. The chapter details how these developing cultural ideals reconfigure sentimental narratives of emotion and the body and doom their female versions to inevitable failure. The chapter further analyzes Newman’s synthesis of sentimental and modernist style to register these circumstances. Newman’s trenchant irony and elaborate prose experiments dovetail with writings by free love advocates like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, particularly in their treatment of gendered corporeal concerns like birth control and abortion. Like the disillusioned free lover whose experience the novel relates, Virgin’s negative aesthetic of feminine emotion affirms sentimental ideals.Less

Memoirs and Meaning

Jill Ker Conway

in Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals

This chapter reflects on Jill Ker Conway's spiritual journey and the way her Catholic faith had affected her scholarly life. Her Christian faith has led her interests in the moral and spiritual ... More

This chapter reflects on Jill Ker Conway's spiritual journey and the way her Catholic faith had affected her scholarly life. Her Christian faith has led her interests in the moral and spiritual dimensions of the journey in time people make. The chapter focuses on the way people narrate life histories and the forms and conventions which define what can be thought and said about those travels. It also compares narratives written by Margaret Sanger, leader of the birth control movement in the United States, and Jane Addams, founder of The Hull House and the profession of social work, with the standard male narrative. In the female narrative, she is distancing herself from the action she herself has brought about. This style of narrative is in sharp contrast to the standard male narrative, in which planning, action, and agency are the main themes.Less

Eugenic Feminism and the Problem of National Development

Asha Nadkarni

in Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India

This introductory chapter presents the accounts of birth control activists Margaret Sanger and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau to argue that positive eugenics in pre-independence Indian nationalist feminism is ... More

This introductory chapter presents the accounts of birth control activists Margaret Sanger and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau to argue that positive eugenics in pre-independence Indian nationalist feminism is largely supplanted in the post-World War II era of development by the negative eugenics of population control. Positive eugenics promotes better breeding to make the “finest men and women possible,” while negative eugenics is concerned with controlling the reproduction of men and women deemed unfit. The chapter shows how movements for birth control and reproductive rights can be aligned with emancipatory discourses.Less

Meeting the Needs: The Struggle for Economic and Social Justice

Leonard Rogoff

in Gertrude Weil: Jewish Progressive in the New South

Although battling cancer, family deaths, and the financial crises of the Depression, Weil continued her fight to establish a welfare state. Her platforms included the Goldsboro Bureau for Social ... More

Although battling cancer, family deaths, and the financial crises of the Depression, Weil continued her fight to establish a welfare state. Her platforms included the Goldsboro Bureau for Social Service and the North Carolina Conference for Social Service. Weil served in New Deal agencies as chair of City Emergency Relief Committee, working for a relief program to provide social services and public works projects for the unemployed. She also supported Margaret Sanger's birth control agenda and, like many progressives, endorsed eugenics not as a racial policy but to relieve the financial burden of generations of dependent families on public relief.Less

“Marriage under Two Roofs”: Feminism and Family Life

Amy Aronson

in Crystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life

Crystal Eastman ardently pursued equalitarian feminism but also asserted that feminism must have three parts: politics and public policy; wages and the workplace; and—the distinctive final ... More

Crystal Eastman ardently pursued equalitarian feminism but also asserted that feminism must have three parts: politics and public policy; wages and the workplace; and—the distinctive final portion—the private domain of love, marriage, and the family. She believed millions of women like herself experienced acute feminist concerns not merely in the battle for economic opportunity in the workforce, or political representation and voice, but also from conflicts between their desire for the rewards of life beyond the home and for the rewards of family as well. She pursued this missing policy analysis for the rest of her life, advocating birth control in the feminist program, the endowment of motherhood, and feminist child-rearing and education. In unpublished articles, she also explored wages for wives and single motherhood by choice. All the while, Eastman was experimenting with a variety of novel approaches to integrating her feminism in own her marriage and family life.Less

The History of the Pill

Rachel VanSickle-Ward and Kevin Wallsten

in The Politics of the Pill: Gender, Framing, and Policymaking in the Battle over Birth Control

Chapter 2 places current debates about contraception policy in a broader historical context. By examining Margaret Sanger’s and Katherine McCormick’s advocacy, John Rock’s and Gregory Pincus’s ... More

Chapter 2 places current debates about contraception policy in a broader historical context. By examining Margaret Sanger’s and Katherine McCormick’s advocacy, John Rock’s and Gregory Pincus’s development of hormonal birth control, and the Supreme Court’s assertion of a constitutional right to privacy, this chapter highlights the ways in which legal regulation of reproduction is rooted in more fundamental struggles over whose expertise is valued and whose voice is heard. More generally, the analysis presented in this chapter illustrates that religion, economics, race, and women’s autonomy have informed public discourse surrounding reproductive issues since the earliest days of America’s long national conversation about birth control. In short, this chapter lays the foundation that animates the rest of the book: Who speaks? What do they say? Does it matter?Less

A Prophet Without Honor

Kristin Kobes Du Mez

in A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism

The chapter returns to Bushnell’s biographical narrative, tracing her marginalization from the American women’s movement and situating her growing isolation in terms of the decline of the social ... More

The chapter returns to Bushnell’s biographical narrative, tracing her marginalization from the American women’s movement and situating her growing isolation in terms of the decline of the social purity movement and the rise of modern feminism. It describes Bushnell’s unsuccessful efforts to combat the American Plan—the United States government’s regulation of prostitution during World War I—and recounts her strident opposition to birth control, and to Margaret Sanger’s “cult of new morality.” As a new generation of feminists abandoned the Victorian ethic of restraint in favor of one of liberation, Bushnell, and Christian women like her, appeared increasingly outmoded. They ultimately failed to fashion a sexual ethic that was both Christian and feminist, and suited to the realities of the modern world. In this way, Bushnell’s story illuminates the tensions over sexuality and morality, freedom and restraint, that continue to plague efforts to fashion a viable Christian feminism today.Less

Dark Clouds at Dawn

James Rodger Fleming

in First Woman: Joanne Simpson and the Tropical Atmosphere

Joanne Gerould was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she benefitted from educational opportunities but suffered emotional neglect, especially from her mother.