movement then organized by Maria Stritt had practically gone out of
existence and its place taken by a more popular demand for the right to
abortion. For a single year the statistics of Berlin indicated that out
of forty-four thousand known pregnancies twenty-three thousand were
terminated by this means, though it was technically illegal. Women were
now campaigning for a bill before the Reichstag to permit operations to
be performed lawfully in hospitals, where fatalities could be reduced by
proper sanitary care. Not one of those with whom I talked believed in
abortion as a practice; it was the principle for which they were
standing. They were resolved to have no more babies for cannon fodder,
nor until they could rear them properly.
Most of the doctors whom I interviewed said that what Germany needed was
children and lots of them. I asked one if the medical profession, as a
whole, were doing anything to prevent entrance into the world of those
children whose backs were so weak that they could never sit up straight,
whose bones were too soft to hold the weight of their bodies. He
answered abruptly, “By aborting the mothers we are doing our best to
cope with conditions as we find them. It is not our work to change
them.”
I was hounding everybody to learn the whereabouts of the contraceptive
formula for which I was searching, and was finally given the name of a
gynecologist who should know, if anybody did, where it could be found. I
made an appointment, and he greeted me in the most cordial way. When I
questioned him about the reported sterility of German women, he agreed
with the argument that, the situation being what it was in the country,
the population should be checked for the next five years. “Here is a
friend indeed,” I said to myself.
I then gently brought up the subject of abortion. “Doesn’t this seem a
ridiculous substitute for contraceptives?”
The doctor rose, his chest sticking out; he buttoned his coat, bowed
formally, and inquired, “Where did you say you came from?”
“New York City.”
“Are you sure you are not from France or Belgium?”
“Certainly not.”
“Nobody who has the welfare of Germany at heart could talk to me as you
have this morning. Only enemies could come here to give such information
to our women.”
I wished he would sit down; he made me nervous. But I went on. “Why is
it such an act of enmity to advocate contraceptives rather than
abortions? Abortions, as you know yourself, may be quite dangerous,
whereas reliable contraceptives are harmless. Why do you oppose them?”
To my horror he replied, “We will never give over the control of our
numbers to the women themselves. What, let them control the future of
the human race? With abortions it is in our hands; we make the
decisions, and they must come to us.”
That was not the tone of this doctor alone but also that of most of his
confrères.
Thinking that Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld might know about the formula,
Havelock had given me a letter to him, and I presented it at the
Institute of Sex Psychology, where abnormalities were being studied and
treated. This most extraordinary mansion, bestowed by a prince of
Bavaria who had himself been cured of inversion by Dr. Hirschfeld, was
furnished sumptuously. On the walls of the stairway were pictures of
homosexuals—men decked out as women in huge hats, earrings, and feminine
make-up; also women in men’s clothing and toppers. Further up the steps
were photographs of the same individuals after they had been brought
back to normality, some of them through adaptation of the Voronoff
experiments in the transplantation of sex glands. It was not a place I
particularly liked, although I was interested to see how a problem which
had cropped up everywhere in the post-War confusion was being attacked.
Dr. Hirschfeld was kind and gave me the address of a firm in Dresden
which he believed might be manufacturing the formula, so off I went to
that city. It was memorable for my meeting with Maria Stritt, a darling
little old lady, as quaint in her way as Dr. Vickery in hers. This tiny
aristocrat, like one of the dolls for which her city was famous, had a
fine vigorous mind, and spoke English with care and a better choice of
words than most Americans. Again I made the rounds of the doctors and
again found none concerned over birth control; I went to the address
where the formula was supposed to be, only to be directed on to Munich.
Munich, to me the most lovely city in Germany, seemed the most
prosperous of any I had visited. I noticed a difference immediately; the
streets were cleaner, the people less hungry-looking. There was more
food, more clothing in the shops, and much greater activity. It had
always been synonymous in my mind with music and _Liebfraumilch_, and I
was delighted to be asked to dine at a hotel which I was told was the
smartest and gayest in town. “Oh, we envy you. You’ll have dancing,
you’ll have wine, you’ll have everything.” But it turned out to be a
night club in the most blatant New York style, one table elbowing
another, the people—Germans, not tourists—dancing to last year’s jazz,
the whole place shrieking nouveaux riches. This, too, was part of
post-War life.
Bavarian _Gemütlichkeit_ could not be altogether downed. On Saturdays
the trams were literally jammed with men and women, young and old, who
had put on their climbing clothes, donned their packs, and here hieing
themselves away to near-by resorts or to the hills. With them went their
guitars or accordions, and when the singing began everybody knew all the
words—no tum-de-tum-de-tum. If they did not have their own instruments
there was sure to be a wandering musician to play, and the floors of
every hostelry or open-air _Biergarten_ were literally filled with
whirling, waltzing figures. Everyone seemed able to enter into the folk
dances, although to me they appeared complicated—many steps, much
precision, and a great deal of dignity.
Hunger and poverty existed in plenty, however, in the city. Hospitals
were lacking in the simplest and most ordinary articles—no soap, no
cod-liver oil, no rubber sheets, insufficient clean linen. Even the
babies had to lie all day in wet diapers, and consequently the poor
little waifs were a sad, miserable lot. Another tragic thing which gave
me nightmare for weeks was to see children’s mouths covered with running
sores, because the sole available meat and milk came from cattle
suffering with hoof-and-mouth disease.
Here at Munich the “birth strike” was most violent. The former medical
chief of the Communists told me the women of Bavaria were determined to
stop having babies; he himself had given information to thousands and
had intended to establish clinics all over the state had the Communist
Republic remained in power.
Only the preceding spring the Communist red flag had for three weeks
flown from the house tops of Munich. I met representatives from both
sides of the political arena. The middle- and upper-class conservatives
claimed the revolutionists had not been capable of managing affairs,
being good agitators but not good organizers—able to start things but
not knowing how to finish them. They had not given up their guns; money
had been put aside and peasant costumes and boots were ready for escape,
because the existing bitterness made it likely the struggle was not yet
settled. Communist leaders, on the other hand, claimed they had allowed
their enemies to flee and then had been tricked and fooled, and knew at
last they could expect no quarter. Their ideals, their faith in
humanity, their consideration, had cost them their lives and liberty,
and they would not forget this valuable lesson.
At a meeting of the Communist Party I was introduced to Mrs. Erich
Mühsam who, with her husband and their friend Landau, had gone to the
front and distributed leaflets to call the boys back home. Landau, a
gentle soul who so believed in the goodness of man that he had pleaded
with the soldiers to be brothers and not to take life, had been kicked
and clubbed to death by the White Guard, which had afterwards marched to
the Mühsam apartment and, when they could not find anybody there, had
wrecked it with machine guns. Fortunately for the Mühsams they were
already in jail.
Though the Revolution was supposed to be over, Erich Mühsam was still
imprisoned. In every country during such upheavals thousands are cast
into jail and, unless some other upheaval occurs to get them out, they
remain there; many pacifists in the United States were not freed until
long after the Armistice.
In 1928 I saw Erich Mühsam—every inch a poet, an artistic and delicate
organism, almost helpless-looking. In 1935, under Nazi rule, he was
returned to a concentration camp—a hangover on the black list.
The account of his fellow prisoners ran something like this: One
afternoon he had been told to “report at headquarters and bring a rope.”
“Where can I find a rope?”
“I don’t know. Get it!”
“They’re going to kill you,” he was warned as he started out, still
lacking a rope.
“Oh, it’s just one of their jokes—a form of torture.”
“You may be right; you’ve scarcely lifted a voice.”
But that evening his comrades discovered him dangling by the neck from a
beam. They said he could never have climbed up himself and that,
furthermore, he had been beaten to death before he had been hung there.
Nevertheless, officially he had committed suicide.
I met in Germany probably a hundred thorough-going conservatives and
only one Mühsam, and yet he it was who stood out spectacularly.
My own interests were keeping me busy enough. I finally found that the
formula I was seeking was made in Friedrichshaven, on Lake Constance. I
initiated a correspondence with the chemist, asking him to come to
Munich, and enclosing stamps to make sure of his reply. He could not
make the journey but, instead, invited me to Friedrichshaven.
All the passengers on dismounting at the station seemed to have someone
to meet them except myself. I noticed a smallish man with what appeared
to be bangs under his hat, front and back, standing on the platform and
holding a tight bunch of wild flowers wrapped up in a newspaper, a
matching one in the buttonhole of his coat, but as far as I could see he
was serving no special purpose there. I went to a hotel, and in a very
short while the little man himself arrived, having identified me as the
American lady he had come to greet. His quaint bouquet was my welcome to
Friedrichshaven.
The chemist, with his father and brothers, ran an unpretentious factory
which, in addition to other products, was making the contraceptive in
the form of a jelly. It had been put out before the War, then dropped,
and was now just starting up again and beginning to find a market in
Germany. He feared to let me go near his establishment, suspicious that
America might steal his formula. But he showed me a picture of it, and
gave me a few sample tubes, saying I could obtain others from his
sister, who was going to act as his agent in New York. Thus was
inaugurated a new phase in the movement—the use of a chemical
contraceptive.
I had letters of introduction to several people in Russia, and had hoped
to be able to go there, but I had commenced handing out my extra
dresses, underwear, stockings, shoes in Berlin; my friends had so little
and were so generous that I could not endure it, and now, in the face of
an approaching winter of hardship, without wardrobe and no prospect of
securing one or even sufficient food, I had to abandon the Russian plan.
I had talked clinic, clinic, clinic while I was in England. Having
myself been convinced, I wanted the Neo-Malthusians also to believe that
it was a better way than advice through literature. A few of them were
assembling to meet me in the Netherlands, and thither I turned my steps.
As soon as the train north was over the border, cream was brought and
delicious fruit; the contrast between one side and the other was too
obviously brutal and awful. It almost made me ill to see so many
delicacies in the Dutch shop windows when children in Germany were
starving.
With the Drysdales, to Amsterdam came Dr. Norman Haire, Australian born,
a gynecologist who had settled in London, sensed the public interest in
birth control, informed himself thoroughly on the subject, written a
great deal about it, and become prominent in the movement, advocating
contraception from his Harley Street office.
As Dr. Haire and I went around visiting clinics we found that the
countless stores where contraceptives were sold had fitting rooms in
back with midwives in charge. They did not maintain the old Rutgers
standards. I was disappointed to see the deterioration which had taken
place since 1915. During the reorganization period of Europe the
tendency, under Russian influence, was for young laborites to be in
charge of things, and they aimed to turn out Dr. Rutgers and the Dutch
Neo-Malthusians and put clinics, which were dedicated to the workers, on
a strictly utilitarian basis. Here as elsewhere they could agitate and
tear apart but lacked executive ability. The new board, composed mainly
of laymen, did not realize that such technical knowledge and experience
was required as only a physician like Dr. Rutgers possessed. He was a
sad and unhappy man, profoundly discouraged over the odds against which
he had to struggle.
Nonetheless, my English friends were converted to the idea of clinics,
and Bessie Drysdale and Dr. Haire planned to open one soon in London.
_Chapter Twenty-three_
IN TIME WE ONLY CAN BEGIN
“_Enough, ’tis the word of a Grand Bashaw;
You needn’t to bother about the law.
He told me they wasn’t to speak at all,
You don’t need a warrant to clear a hall.
He told me to tell them to stir their stumps;
When ‘Clubs!’ is the order, then clubs is trumps.
What else would it be when I’m just a cop
And he is a Reverend Archbishop?_”
ARTHUR GUITERMAN
In confirming my conviction in 1918, Judge Frederick E. Crane of the
Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York had for the first
time interpreted the section of the state law which permitted a licensed
physician to give contraceptive advice for the “cure or prevention of
disease”; and, further, he had taken from _Webster’s Dictionary_ the
broad definition of disease as any alteration in the state of body which
caused or threatened pain and sickness, thus extending the meaning of
the word far beyond the original scope of syphilis and gonorrhea. But,
never satisfied, I wanted women to have birth control for economic and
social reasons.
Therefore, in January, 1921, Anne Kennedy and I went to Albany to find a
sponsor for a bill which was to change the New York law. It was not only
a question of amending it, but also a means of educating the public, of
explaining our cause through the medium of legislation. Months of
preparation were required, hours of tramping the floors of State
buildings at Albany, interviewing one person after another, securing
promises of help, breaking down hostility.
When people said that women who would not have children were selfish and
preferred lap dogs, I replied, “All right. Then it is better for the
children not to be born.” That type of woman should die out
biologically, just as did the different species that were caught in the
mire and slime and could not reproduce themselves. It is a principle
that applies to human beings also, that they must work through their
environment in order to survive.
As soon as you could get out of people’s minds what birth control was
not, they almost invariably said, “Why, yes, certainly, that sounds
reasonable.” Many of the lawmakers themselves believed that the measure
might be of great benefit, but the party whip cut too deeply.
Birth control was once described by Heywood Broun as dynamite from the
point of view of the politician. If he supported it, he might lose
votes; if he opposed it, he might lose votes. “There is nothing a
politician hates more than losing votes. He would much rather the
subject never came up.”
One assemblyman from Brooklyn at first agreed to introduce our bill and
then wrote, “I very much regret, but after consulting with some of the
leaders of the Assembly, I have been strongly advised not to offer your
bill. I am told it would do me an injury that I could not overcome for
some time.” Another refused on the ground of “levity from his
associates.” But a few years later we found a young, courageous
legislator who introduced a bill and secured hearings. Although it was
defeated, the atmosphere was clarified.
Mrs. Hepburn, who had been in the suffrage movement early and had been
one of the sponsors of Mrs. Pankhurst’s tour of the United States, now
lived in Hartford, Connecticut. Although the mother of six, including
the actress, Katherine, she retained her youthful face and figure, being
almost like a sister to her children, playmate and companion for them at
tennis, golf, and swimming. Young men asked her to dinner with the same
pleasure that they asked her daughters.
Closely associated with her was Mrs. George H. Day, Sr., a grandmother
in 1921. She always came from Hartford for every Board meeting of the
League and, in turn, her house was a place of refuge for poor, worn-down
friends of causes. They could go there and be ministered to by a staff
of servants and come back, rested and rejuvenated.
With two such seasoned campaigners to back us, we carried our
legislative activities into Connecticut, the only state where “to use a
contraceptive” was a crime—as though it were possible to have a
policeman in every home! A mere six years had elapsed since the movement
had begun; consequently, that we were now able to get a hearing was in
itself a triumph. Nevertheless, no easy task faced us; so much red tape
had to be broken through. But here at Hartford we did succeed in finding
an introducer who could hold his own under ridicule. Then we had to
educate him, feed him with facts—medical, social, historical—so that he
could defend his bill.
A young priest stood forth as our chief opponent, basing his objections
on the laws of nature, which he claimed were contravened by birth
control. Fortunately the committee had a sense of humor. In my
ten-minute rebuttal I was able to answer the “against nature” argument
as Francis Place had done a hundred years earlier. I turned the priest’s
own words on himself by asking why he should counteract nature’s decree
of impaired vision by wearing eyeglasses, and why, above all, was he
celibate, thus outraging nature’s primary demand on the human species—to
propagate its kind. The laughter practically ended the “unnatural”
thesis for some time.
In New Jersey another attempt was made. The law there allowed doctors to
give information for “a just cause,” but they were fearful of including
minor ailments under this interpretation. The bill introduced at Trenton
had a hearing, but it also failed to pass.
The whole thing was nerve-wracking but was part of the experience we
gained. And, furthermore, whenever we had hearings, the local work
progressed much more rapidly as a result. Nothing was lost, however
expensive the plowing and sowing. Apparent defeats were victories in the
long run.
It then seemed to me from glancing over current clippings and
publications that people all over the world were discussing birth
control. The English Baron Dawson of Penn had been Court Physician to
Edward VII and had continued in this same post during the reign of
George V. But he had broader interests, too. One of the great events in
the history of the movement was his speech at the Church Congress at
Birmingham in answer to the doctrine promulgated by the Bishops at
Lambeth that sexual union should take place for the purpose of
procreation only:
Imagine a young married couple in love with each other being
expected to occupy the same room and to abstain for two years. The
thing is preposterous. You might as well put water by the side of a
man suffering from thirst, and tell him not to drink it. Romance and
deliberate self-restraint do not to my mind rhyme very well
together. A touch of madness to begin with does no harm. Heaven
knows life sobers it soon enough.
His speech caused an immense sensation throughout England. Headlines and
streamers announced, “King’s Physician asks Church to sanction birth
control.” The deduction was that His Majesty was endorsing it, and
stolid Britishers were all agog at the idea that Buckingham Palace was
now talking about the subject; it was hinted Queen Mary was not
over-pleased.
On this side of the Atlantic Major General John J. O’Ryan, who had
commanded the Twenty-Seventh National Guard Division, lectured on
overpopulation as a cause for war. Frank Vanderlip, once Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury and later President of the National City Bank,
had just returned from Japan, proclaiming that population must be
controlled because some countries could no longer feed themselves. Here
was an army man on the one hand, and a financier on the other, unprimed,
uncoerced, even uninvited, speaking out of their independent
experiences. They were voices in the wilderness, oases in the desert,
and certainly encouraging historical landmarks.
Among uneasy experts the sentiment was growing that population pressure
in Japan would soon create an inevitable explosion. Indeed, one of the
familiar arguments in the United States brought forward against birth
control was the “menace of the Yellow Peril,” by which was meant
specifically, Japan. What folly to reduce our birth rate when Orientals
were multiplying so appallingly fast that the downfall of Western
civilization might soon be looked for! India and China were teeming
indiscriminately, but their peoples were feeble, inert, and diseased;
whereas the Japanese were being reared under German health traditions,
were ninety-seven percent literate, and were technically equipped for
battle.
Naturally I was eager to learn as much about this situation as possible,
and welcomed the opportunity to meet the Nipponese friends of Gertrude
Boyle, who had married a gentleman of Japan. They always appeared in
pairs or groups of three, four, five at a time, talking busily in asides
with each other while I exchanged opinions with one. They were helpful
in furnishing me with unpublished facts; the older, conservative,
nationalist, militarist party advocated greater numbers, but the young,
liberal intellectuals, many of whom had attended Occidental
universities, could see the clouds already lowering on the horizon and
hoped the storm could be averted by controlled population growth. Atro,
a reporter on a New York Japanese paper, had been supplying the
last-named group, which in Tokyo called itself Kaizo, meaning
reconstruction, with clippings about birth control, and several of my
articles had been printed in their publication.
The women’s point of view was graphically described to me by the
Baroness Shidzué Ishimoto, daughter of the head of the great Hirota clan
and wife of Baron Keikichi Ishimoto, a young nobleman who had put in
practice his ideals of service. This charming, youthful and gracious
matron, tall for her race and equally beautiful by our standards, very
smart in her American street costume, had in 1919 come from her own land
where suffrage for women was still mentioned in awed tones. She had
studied our language at a Y.W.C.A. business school, and in three months
had performed the extraordinary accomplishment of mastering it
sufficiently to speak, write, and even take dictation in English.
We quickly became friends and she at once foresaw the possibilities of
birth control in bringing Japanese women out of their long suppression
in the family system. She said she intended to form a league immediately
upon her arrival in Tokyo, and did so in 1921.
During that year also clinics were started in England. That of Marie
Stopes proved popular, although instruction, given by a midwife, was
limited to mothers who had already had at least one child. Shortly
afterwards Dr. Haire and Bessie Drysdale, with Harold Cox as chairman of
a lay group to finance the work, established Walworth Center, which had
a fine gynecological thoroughness and set an example which later clinics
in England followed.
It was high time clinics were started in the United States as well.
After the Crane decision I had anticipated that hospitals were going to
give contraceptive advice. But in 1919, under Dr. Mary Halton’s
direction, two women, the first with tuberculosis, the other with
syphilis, had been taken from one to another institution on Manhattan
Island. All had refused such information, although most had agreed that
the patients, if pregnant, could be aborted. The officers in charge had
said they were obliged to protect their charters, and the staff
physicians their licenses and reputations.