Suggestions as to what to do for a girl who was “in trouble” or a
married woman who was “caught” passed from mouth to mouth—herb teas,
turpentine, steaming, rolling downstairs, inserting slippery elm,
knitting needles, shoe-hooks. When they had word of a new remedy they
hurried to the drugstore, and if the clerk were inclined to be friendly
he might say, “Oh, that won’t help you, but here’s something that may.”
The younger druggists usually refused to give advice because, if it were
to be known, they would come under the law; midwives were even more
fearful. The doomed women implored me to reveal the “secret” rich people
had, offering to pay me extra to tell them; many really believed I was
holding back information for money. They asked everybody and tried
anything, but nothing did them any good. On Saturday nights I have seen
groups of from fifty to one hundred with their shawls over their heads
waiting outside the office of a five-dollar abortionist.
Each time I returned to this district, which was becoming a recurrent
nightmare, I used to hear that Mrs. Cohen “had been carried to a
hospital, but had never come back,” or that Mrs. Kelly “had sent the
children to a neighbor and had put her head into the gas oven.” Day
after day such tales were poured into my ears—a baby born dead, great
relief—the death of an older child, sorrow but again relief of a
sort—the story told a thousand times of death from abortion and children
going into institutions. I shuddered with horror as I listened to the
details and studied the reasons back of them—destitution linked with
excessive childbearing. The waste of life seemed utterly senseless. One
by one worried, sad, pensive, and aging faces marshaled themselves
before me in my dreams, sometimes appealingly, sometimes accusingly.
These were not merely “unfortunate conditions among the poor” such as we
read about. I knew the women personally. They were living, breathing,
human beings, with hopes, fears, and aspirations like my own, yet their
weary, misshapen bodies, “always ailing, never failing,” were destined
to be thrown on the scrap heap before they were thirty-five. I could not
escape from the facts of their wretchedness; neither was I able to see
any way out. My own cozy and comfortable family existence was becoming a
reproach to me.
Then one stifling mid-July day of 1912 I was summoned to a Grand Street
tenement. My patient was a small, slight Russian Jewess, about
twenty-eight years old, of the special cast of feature to which
suffering lends a madonna-like expression. The cramped three-room
apartment was in a sorry state of turmoil. Jake Sachs, a truck driver
scarcely older than his wife, had come home to find the three children
crying and her unconscious from the effects of a self-induced abortion.
He had called the nearest doctor, who in turn had sent for me. Jake’s
earnings were trifling, and most of them had gone to keep the
none-too-strong children clean and properly fed. But his wife’s
ingenuity had helped them to save a little, and this he was glad to
spend on a nurse rather than have her go to a hospital.
The doctor and I settled ourselves to the task of fighting the
septicemia. Never had I worked so fast, never so concentratedly. The
sultry days and nights were melted into a torpid inferno. It did not
seem possible there could be such heat, and every bit of food, ice, and
drugs had to be carried up three flights of stairs.
Jake was more kind and thoughtful than many of the husbands I had
encountered. He loved his children, and had always helped his wife wash
and dress them. He had brought water up and carried garbage down before
he left in the morning, and did as much as he could for me while he
anxiously watched her progress.
After a fortnight Mrs. Sachs’ recovery was in sight. Neighbors,
ordinarily fatalistic as to the results of abortion, were genuinely
pleased that she had survived. She smiled wanly at all who came to see
her and thanked them gently, but she could not respond to their hearty
congratulations. She appeared to be more despondent and anxious than she
should have been, and spent too much time in meditation.
At the end of three weeks, as I was preparing to leave the fragile
patient to take up her difficult life once more, she finally voiced her
fears, “Another baby will finish me, I suppose?”
“It’s too early to talk about that,” I temporized.
But when the doctor came to make his last call, I drew him aside. “Mrs.
Sachs is terribly worried about having another baby.”
“She well may be,” replied the doctor, and then he stood before her and
said, “Any more such capers, young woman, and there’ll be no need to
send for me.”
“I know, doctor,” she replied timidly, “but,” and she hesitated as
though it took all her courage to say it, “what can I do to prevent it?”
The doctor was a kindly man, and he had worked hard to save her, but
such incidents had become so familiar to him that he had long since lost
whatever delicacy he might once have had. He laughed good-naturedly.
“You want to have your cake and eat it too, do you? Well, it can’t be
done.”
Then picking up his hat and bag to depart he said, “Tell Jake to sleep
on the roof.”
I glanced quickly at Mrs. Sachs. Even through my sudden tears I could
see stamped on her face an expression of absolute despair. We simply
looked at each other, saying no word until the door had closed behind
the doctor. Then she lifted her thin, blue-veined hands and clasped them
beseechingly. “He can’t understand. He’s only a man. But you do, don’t
you? Please tell me the secret, and I’ll never breathe it to a soul.
_Please!_”
What was I to do? I could not speak the conventionally comforting
phrases which would be of no comfort. Instead, I made her as physically
easy as I could and promised to come back in a few days to talk with her
again. A little later, when she slept, I tiptoed away.
Night after night the wistful image of Mrs. Sachs appeared before me. I
made all sorts of excuses to myself for not going back. I was busy on
other cases; I really did not know what to say to her or how to convince
her of my own ignorance; I was helpless to avert such monstrous
atrocities. Time rolled by and I did nothing.
The telephone rang one evening three months later, and Jake Sachs’
agitated voice begged me to come at once; his wife was sick again and
from the same cause. For a wild moment I thought of sending someone
else, but actually, of course, I hurried into my uniform, caught up my
bag, and started out. All the way I longed for a subway wreck, an
explosion, anything to keep me from having to enter that home again. But
nothing happened, even to delay me. I turned into the dingy doorway and
climbed the familiar stairs once more. The children were there, young
little things.
Mrs. Sachs was in a coma and died within ten minutes. I folded her still
hands across her breast, remembering how they had pleaded with me,
begging so humbly for the knowledge which was her right. I drew a sheet
over her pallid face. Jake was sobbing, running his hands through his
hair and pulling it out like an insane person. Over and over again he
wailed, “My God! My God! My God!”
I left him pacing desperately back and forth, and for hours I myself
walked and walked and walked through the hushed streets. When I finally
arrived home and let myself quietly in, all the household was sleeping.
I looked out my window and down upon the dimly lighted city. Its pains
and griefs crowded in upon me, a moving picture rolled before my eyes
with photographic clearness: women writhing in travail to bring forth
little babies; the babies themselves naked and hungry, wrapped in
newspapers to keep them from the cold; six-year-old children with
pinched, pale, wrinkled faces, old in concentrated wretchedness, pushed
into gray and fetid cellars, crouching on stone floors, their small
scrawny hands scuttling through rags, making lamp shades, artificial
flowers; white coffins, black coffins, coffins, coffins interminably
passing in never-ending succession. The scenes piled one upon another on
another. I could bear it no longer.
As I stood there the darkness faded. The sun came up and threw its
reflection over the house tops. It was the dawn of a new day in my life
also. The doubt and questioning, the experimenting and trying, were now
to be put behind me. I knew I could not go back merely to keeping people
alive.
I went to bed, knowing that no matter what it might cost, I was finished
with palliatives and superficial cures; I was resolved to seek out the
root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose
miseries were vast as the sky.
_Chapter Eight_
I HAVE PROMISES TO KEEP
How were mothers to be saved? I went through many revolving doors,
looked around, and, not finding what I was seeking, came out again. I
talked incessantly to everybody who seemed to have social welfare at
heart. Progressive women whom I consulted were thoroughly discouraging.
“Wait until we get the vote. Then we’ll take care of that,” they assured
me. I tried the Socialists. Here, there, and everywhere the reply came,
“Wait until women have more education. Wait until we secure equal
distribution of wealth.” Wait for this and wait for that. Wait! Wait!
Wait!
Having no idea how powerful were the laws which laid a blanket of
ignorance over the medical profession as well as the laity, I asked
various doctors of my acquaintance, “Why aren’t physicians doing
something?”
“The people you’re worrying about wouldn’t use contraception if they had
it; they breed like rabbits. And, besides, there’s a law against it.”
“Information does exist, doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps, but I doubt whether you can find it. Even if you do, you can’t
pass it on. Comstock’ll get you if you don’t watch out.”
In order to ascertain something about this subject which was so
mysterious and so unaccountably forbidden, I spent almost a year in the
libraries—the Astor, the Lenox, the Academy of Medicine, the Library of
Congress, and dozens of others. Hoping that psychological treatises
might inform me, I read Auguste Forel and Iwan Block. At one gulp I
swallowed Havelock Ellis’ _Psychology of Sex_, and had psychic
indigestion for months thereafter. I was not shocked, but this
mountainous array of abnormalities made me spiritually ill. So many
volumes were devoted to the exceptional, and so few to the
maladjustments of normal married people, which were infinitely more
numerous and urgent.
I read translations from the German in which women were advised to have
more children because it could be proved statistically that their
condition was improved by childbearing. The only article on the question
I could discover in American literature was in the _Atlantic Monthly_ by
Edward Alsworth Ross of the University of Wisconsin, who brought to the
attention of his readers the decline of the birth rate among the upper
and educated classes and the increase among the unfit, the consequences
of which were sure to be race suicide.
The Englishman, Thomas Robert Malthus, remained little more than a name
to me, something like Plato or Henry George. Father had talked about
him, but he meant mostly agriculture—wheat and food supplies in the
national sense. Possibly he had a philosophy but not, to me, a live one.
He had been put away on a shelf and, in my mind, had nothing to do with
the everyday human problem. I was not looking for theories. What I
desired was merely a simple method of contraception for the poor.
The pursuit of my quest took me away from home a good deal. The children
used to come in after school and at once hunt for me. “Where’s mother?”
was the usual question. If they found me at my mending basket they all
leaped about for joy, took hands and danced, shouting, “Mother’s home,
mother’s home, mother’s sewing.” Sewing seemed to imply a measure of
permanence.
I, too, wanted to drive away the foreboding barrier of separation by
closer contact with them. I wanted to have them solely to myself, to
feed, to bathe, to clothe them myself. I had heard of the clean,
wind-swept Cape Cod dunes, which appeared to be as far from the ugliness
of civilization as I could get. Socialism, anarchism, syndicalism,
progressivism—I was tired of them all. At the end of the spring,
thoroughly depressed and dissatisfied, I tucked the children under my
arms, boarded a Fall River boat, and sailed off, a pioneer to
Provincetown.
In 1913 the tip of the Cape was nothing but a fishing village with one
planked walk which, I was told, had been paid for by Congress. Up and
down its length the bellman, the last of the town criers, walked,
proclaiming the news.
At first we lived in the upper story of a fisherman’s house right on the
water. After he went out in the morning, his wife and her children, and
I and mine, were left alone. Then the old women recalled scenes from
their early days on the whaling vessels. Their mothers had brought them
forth unaided, and their own sons, in turn, had been born on the ships
and apprenticed to their husbands. They fitted into life simply, but the
younger Portuguese, who were taking over the fishing industry, were
asking what they should do about limiting their families.
The village was rather messy and smelled of fish. I was still too close
to humanity and wanted to be more alone, so we moved to the extreme end
of town. Our veranda faced the Bay, and when the tide was high the water
came up and lapped at the piles on which the cottage was built. Stuart,
Grant, and Peggy used to sit on the steps and dabble their toes. At low
tide they had two miles of beach on which to skip and run; it was a
wonderful place to play, and all summer we had sunrise breakfasts,
sunset picnics.
Ethel, who had married Jack Byrne, was now widowed and had also gone
into nursing. She had considerable free time and stayed with me.
Consequently, I was able to leave the children in her care when I made
my expeditions to Boston’s far-famed public library, taking the _Dorothy
Bradford_ at noon, and coming back the next day. Even there I found no
information more reliable than that exchanged by back-fence gossips in
any small town.
I spent the entire season at Provincetown, groping for knowledge,
classifying all my past activities in their proper categories, weighing
the pros and cons of what good there was in them and also what they
lacked. It was a period of gestation. Just as you give birth to a child,
so you can give birth to an idea.
Between interims of brooding and playing with the children I took part
in the diversions of the minute colony of congenial people. Charles
Hawthorne had a school of painting, and Mary Heaton Vorse with her
husband, Joseph O’Brien, were there; so also were Hutch Hapgood and
Neith Boyce. Jessie Ashley had lifted Big Bill Haywood out of the slough
of the Paterson strike and brought him down to rest and recuperate.
Big Bill was one of the few who saw what I was aiming at, although
fearful that my future might involve the happiness of my children. Even
he did not feel that the small-family question was significant enough to
be injected into the labor platform. Nevertheless, as we rambled up and
down the beach he came to my aid with that cheering encouragement of
which I was so sorely in need. He never wasted words in advising me to
“wait.” Instead, he suggested that I go to France and see for myself the
conditions resulting from generations of family limitation in that
country. This struck me as a splendid idea, because it would also give
Bill Sanger a chance to paint instead of continuing to build suburban
houses.
The trip to Europe seemed so urgent that no matter what sacrifices had
to be made, we decided to make them when we came to them. In the fall we
sold the house at Hastings, gave away some of our furniture and put the
rest in storage. Although we did not realize it at the time, our
gestures indicated a clean sweep of the past.
Anita Block proposed that we go via Scotland; she wanted me to write
three or four articles on what twenty-five years of municipal ownership
in Glasgow had done for women and children. Socialists were talking
about how everything there belonged to the people themselves and had
earned their own way—banks, schools, homes, parks, markets, art
galleries, museums, laundries, bath houses, hospitals, and tramways. The
city was about to pay off the last debt on the transportation system,
and this was being hailed as a great victory, a perfect example of what
Socialism could do. It sounded big and fine, and I, too, was impressed.
Certainly in Glasgow, I thought, I should find women walking hand in
hand with men, and children free and happy.
In October the Sangers sailed from Boston on a cabin boat, little and
crowded, and one black night two weeks later steamed up the Clyde. The
naval program of 1913 was causing every shipyard to run double shifts,
and the flare and glare against the somber dark was like
fairyland—giant, sparkling starlights reaching from the horizon into the
sky, a beautiful introduction to Utopia.
The very next day I started out upon my investigations. To mind the
children, aged nine, five, and three, I availed myself of a sort of
employment bureau run by the Municipal Corporation. I had been told that
anyone could call here for any imaginable type of service. In response
to my summons, there promptly arrived at my door, standing straight and
machine-like, a small boy in a buttons uniform, with chin strap holding
his cap on the side of his head. Willie MacGuire’s stipend was to be
twelve cents an hour, or fifty cents for the half day. His function was
to take the three out, entertain them, and return them faithfully at any
time designated. Though he was no bigger than Stuart, his efficient
manner reassured me, and I soon learned that he performed his duties
diligently.
Religiously I made the rounds of all the social institutions, and at
first everything appeared as I had been led to expect—except the
weather. It had always just rained, and, when the sun did show itself,
it was seldom for long enough to dry up the walks. Though the streets
were clean, they were invariably wet and damp, and nobody wore rubbers.
Everywhere could be seen little girls down on their knees, scrubbing the
door-steps in front of the houses, or, again, carrying huge bundles or
baskets of groceries to be delivered at the homes of the buyers. The
people themselves seemed cold and rigid, as dismal as their climate.
Only the policemen had a sense of humor.
As I proceeded, flaws in the vaunted civic enterprises began to display
themselves. Glasgow had its show beauty spots, but even the model
tenements were not so good as our simplest, lower-middle-class apartment
buildings. One had been constructed for the accommodation of “deserving
and respectable widows and widowers belonging to the working class”
having one or more children with no one to care for them while the
parents were away. But the building had been turned over to the
exclusive use of widowers. Widows and their children had to shift for
themselves.
All tenements were planned scientifically on the basis of so many cubic
feet of air and so much light per so many human beings, ranging from
quarters for two to those for five. No overcrowding was allowed.
“Well,” I asked, “what happens when there are five or six children?”
“Oh, they can’t live here,” replied the superintendent. “They must go
elsewhere.”
“But where?”
Conversation ceased.
With particular attention I traced the adventures of one family which
had expanded beyond the three-child limit. The parents had first moved
over to the fringes of the city, and thereafter as more children were
born had traveled from place to place, progressively more dingy, more
decrepit. They now had nine and were inhabiting a hovel in the
shipbuilding slums, unimaginably filthy and too far from the splendid
utilities ever to enjoy them.
The further I looked, the greater grew the inconsistency. The model
markets carried chiefly wholesale produce, and the really poor, who were
obliged to huddle on the far side of the city, contented themselves with
bread and tea and were thankful to have it. Another disappointment was
the washhouses, dating from 1878 when they had been deemed a public
necessity because men had protested they were being driven from their
homes by washing which, on account of the incessant rain, seemed to hang
there forever. A stall cost only twopence an hour, less expensive than
heating water at home, and there were always women waiting in line. But
the tram system, which was on the point of being liquidated in spite of
its low fares, forbade laundry baskets, and, consequently, those who
were not within walking distance—and they were the ones who needed it
most—were deprived of its use.
Throughout the slum section I saw drunken, sodden women whose remaining,
snag-like teeth stuck down like fangs and protruded from their sunken
mouths. When I asked one of the executive officers of the corporation
why they were so much more degraded than the men, he replied, “Oh, the
women of Glasgow are all dirty and low. They’re hopeless.”
“But why should this be?” I persisted.
His only answer was, “It’s their own fault.”
Bill and I walked about late at night, overwhelmed by the unspeakable
poverty. The streets were filled with fighting, shiftless beggars.
Hundreds of women were abroad, the big shawls over their heads serving
two purposes: one, to keep their shoulders warm; the other, to wrap
around the baby which each one carried. It was apparent that their
clothing consisted only of a shawl, a petticoat, a wrapper, and shoes.
Older children were begging, “A ha’penny for bread, Missus, a ha’penny
for bread.”
It was infinitely cold, dreary, and disappointing—so much talk about
more wages and better subsistence, and here the workers had it and what
were they getting?—a little more light, perhaps, a few more pennies a
day, the opportunity to buy food a little more cheaply, a few parks in
which they could wander, a bank where their money earned a fraction more
interest. But as soon as they passed beyond the border of another baby,
they were in exactly the same condition as the people beyond the realm
of municipal control.
Municipal ownership was one more thing to throw in the discard.
One dull, rainy day, glad to leave behind the shrill, crying voices of
the beggars of Glasgow, we boarded a horrid cattle boat bound for
Antwerp. The children were all seasick as we bounced and tossed over the
North Sea. It was something of a job to handle the three of them with no
nurse, especially when the storm threw them out of their beds on to the
cabin floor. Fortunately they suffered no fractures, although twenty-six
horses in the hold had to be shot because their legs had been broken.
We arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris at the end of another dismal,
bewildering day—toot-toot! steam, luggage, brusque snatching by
blue-smocked, black-capped porters, all looking like villains, jam at
the ticket gate, rackety taxi to a hotel on the Left Bank.
Paris seemed another Glasgow, more like a provincial village than a
great metropolis. The atmosphere of petty penury destroyed my dreams of
Parisian gaiety and elegance; even the French children were dressed in
drab, gloomy, black aprons. Within a few days we had sub-let an
apartment on the Boulevard St. Michel across from the Luxembourg Gardens
where Grant and Peggy could play. It was four flights up, and the cold
penetrated to the marrow of our bones. We could put tons of briquets
into the little fireplaces and never get any heat. All the family went
into flannel underwear, the first since my early childhood.
I presented Stuart to the superintendent of the district _lycée_. He
demanded a birth certificate, and I had none.
“But without it how can I tell where he was born or how old he is?” The
official seemed to imply that Stuart did not exist.
“But,” I protested, “here he is. He’s alive.”
“No, no, Madame! The law says you must have a birth certificate.”
I had to send him to a private school, which was something of a drain on
the budget.
Bill found a studio on Montparnasse, just back of the Station. Again and
again he came home aglow with news of meeting the great Matisse and
other revolutionary painters barely emerging from obscurity. I trailed
around to studios and exhibits occasionally, but I was trying to become
articulate on my own subject, and paid scant attention to those who
loomed up later as giants in the artistic world. The companionship of
Jessie Ashley and Bill Haywood, who had just come to Paris, was more
familiar to me.