Terrible Virtue (7 page)

I
WAS SITTING AT
the dining table in the apartment on 135th Street, organizing the notes from my summer research, when I heard Bill's key in the lock. Time must have got away from me. It often did when I was working. I glanced at the watch pinned to my shirtwaist. It was only a little after three. It wasn't late, he was early.

When I looked up again, he was standing in the archway. Something about his smile made me uncomfortable.

“You're home early. Are you sick?”

“Change the vowel. Not sick, sacked. The august firm of McKim, Mead & White no longer requires my services.”

“No!”

The smile grew wider and more malevolent. “Yes.”

“But you're the best draftsman they have.”

“Apparently they don't think so.”

“It's because of your socialist connections. We always knew you were working for the enemy.”

His mother came down the hall from the kitchen. Voices traveled in that apartment. “It's because you're a Jew,” she said.

He looked from one of us to the other, and the grin became feral. “The two are not mutually exclusive.”

Three evenings later, he returned from God knew where—since he'd been fired, I didn't like to ask what he did with his time—and stood in the archway again. His smile was different, but I didn't like it any better. It reminded me of the grin my father used to wear when he returned home to tell us how he'd bested the town's devout believers, capitalist dupes, and spineless followers in a philosophical argument.

“The august firm of McKim, Mead, etcetera, etcetera, and so forth doesn't know it, but they gave us a blessing in disguise. We're free!”

“Free?” I wasn't arguing. I just didn't understand what he meant. We still had three children. We still had to feed and clothe and shelter them. The only thing we were suddenly free of was a regular paycheck.

“To go to Paris. You say the Europeans are light-years ahead of us in contraception. You'll do your research, I'll paint, and the children will learn French. We'll all learn French.
Bonjour
.
Comment
allez-vous? Voulez-vous coucher avec
moi?
Think of it, Peg, it will be a fresh start.”

He seemed to be growing taller, broader, more handsome as he spoke. I remembered again why I'd married him. I stood, crossed the room, and put my arms around him.

“A new start in Paris,” I agreed.

“Without the Greek or the Eagle.”

Why did he always have to ruin things?

A FREEZING FLAT
four floors up on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, even one across from the Luxembourg Gardens where the children could play, turned out to be no place for a new start. We shivered in flannel underwear, suffered from chilblains, and grew more short-
tempered each day. The children were not chattering in French. They were sulking in silence. The situation was hardest on Peggy. She barely recovered from one cold before she succumbed to the next. She lay on her small cot either gray and listless with the cold or flushed and burning with a fever. Later, when Bill tried to blame me, I'd remind him that Paris had been his idea.

Two and a half months after we arrived, I told Bill I was ready to return home. We had another row about it. He insisted he painted better in Paris. I pointed out he had few enough canvases to prove the point.

“I'm sorry. It's just that you seemed to get more done in New York.”

“New York! That hellhole of free love and promiscuity. That's what you can't wait to return to?”

I went into the bedroom, where I kept my research, found a map I'd discovered a few weeks earlier, and carried it back to him. It was a representation by gradations of shading of the incidence of prostitution in the various arrondissements.

I held it out to him. “New York is a hellhole of promiscuity? Take a look at this. Not a single arrondissement is white.”

He didn't even glance at it. The door slammed behind him.

When he returned several hours later, he was carrying a bouquet of camellias. They weren't roses, but I still tried not to think of how much they cost. We ended up in bed. We always ended up in bed after an argument. But the sex never changed anything. The next day I booked passage for the children and me on the SS
New
York
.

BILL STOOD ON
the pier crying. His image was wavy through the tears streaming down my own face. Beside me on the deck the children were weeping too, though they weren't sure why.
They didn't want to leave their father, but they were overjoyed to be going home, and a boat was an adventure.

Tugs inched the ship away from the dock. The horn sounded a cry that sent a shiver down my spine. Engines rumbled. Black water churned around the hull. One after another the streamers from ship to shore snapped. I felt the breaks as if in my own body. How could I be leaving Bill? I was miserable. I was leaving Bill. I was free!

BILL SANGER

I CAN'T RECALL THE TRAIN RIDE BACK TO PARIS. MY MIND HAD SHUT DOWN, MY BODY GONE NUMB FROM THE PAIN OF YOUR LEAVING. I WALKED FROM THE GARE SAINT-LAZARE TO THE FLAT. I WAS TRYING TO TIRE MYSELF, THOUGH I KNEW THE EFFORT WAS HOPELESS. I'D NEVER BE ABLE TO SLEEP WITHOUT YOU BESIDE ME
.

THE CONCIERGE LET ME INTO THE DARK SOUR-SMELLING HALLWAY. SHE ASKED WHERE MADAME WAS. I TURNED MY FACE AWAY. I WAS ASHAMED TO HAVE HER SEE THE TEARS. I KNOW I SHOULDN'T TELL YOU THIS. MY WEAKNESS ONLY FEEDS YOUR DISGUST
.

I CLIMBED THE STAIRS TO THE FLAT AND STOOD OUTSIDE IT. THE KEY HUNG USELESS IN MY HAND. I COULDN'T LIFT MY ARM. I DIDN'T HAVE THE HEART TO UNLOCK THE DOOR. I DIDN'T HAVE THE COURAGE TO WALK INTO THAT APARTMENT, DRAINED OF THE CHILDREN'S VOICES, EMPTY OF YOU, UNOCCUPIED BY LOVE, THAT WORD WE NEVER STOP ARGUING ABOUT. I SHOULD HAVE GONE WITH YOU, BUT I COULDN'T RETURN TO THE WORLD YOU WERE MAKING FOR YOURSELF. DOES THAT MAKE ME A COWARD? I FELT LIKE ONE. MY CRAVENNESS SHADOWED MY STEPS BACK DOWN THE STAIRS AND OUT INTO THE STREET
.

THE CAFÉ AROUND THE CORNER GLOWED IN THE COLD NIGHT. NORMALLY MY EYE WOULD HAVE BEEN TRYING TO MEMORIZE THE
EFFECT OF THE LIGHT SPILLING THROUGH THE WINDOW AND OVER THE WET COBBLESTONES. I BARELY NOTICED IT. STILL, THE CAFÉ WAS BETTER THAN THAT EMPTY ROOM
.

I WAS A FEW FEET AWAY FROM THE DOOR WHEN A WOMAN IN A FRAYED COAT WITH GAUDILY ROUGED CHEEKS FELL IN STEP BESIDE ME. SHE CALLED ME MONSIEUR, AND ASKED IF I WAS LONELY, AND PROMISED SOLACE. I DIDN'T WANT THAT KIND OF SOLACE, NOT NOW, NOT WHEN YOU USED TO URGE ME TO SLEEP WITH OTHER WOMEN. YOU PRIDED YOURSELF ON YOUR LACK OF JEALOUSY. I TWISTED IN THE COLD WIND OF YOUR INDIFFERENCE. YOU DIDN'T LEAVE A MAN MUCH, PEG. BUT HERE'S THE WORST PART OF IT. BY SOME CRUEL COSMIC JOKE OF GOD, IN WHOM I DON'T BELIEVE, OR NATURE, I STILL LOVE AND WANT YOU
.

I WAS AS
happy to be going home as the children were, though I wasn't sure what I was going to do when I got there. The French were, as I'd told Bill, ahead of us in contraception, and I'd learned a great deal during my stay, but the knowledge would get me nowhere without a strategy. It wasn't enough to teach a handful of desperate women specific methods. I needed to overthrow archaic laws, reshape public opinion, and enlighten, or at least outsmart, the men in power who were determined to keep us in chains. But how? Should I break the laws in order to win judgments in the courts or lobby legislators to write new laws? Should the issue be free speech or women's rights or public health, which was just beginning to garner attention? The possibilities raced around in my head as the ship steamed toward New York and shipboard life, oblivious to the problem, went on about me.

The voyage was calm for a winter crossing, and the children and I linked arms and circled the deck while the ship rolled
gently beneath our feet and the wind hurried us down the starboard side and fought us up the port, or vice versa when we went in the other direction.

They ate at an early children's sitting, and I ate alone in the dining room at the second sitting. I was seated next to a man who wore handsome silk ties and expensive suits that were soft to the touch. He carried a silver cigarette case engraved with his initials and told me he'd never known a socialist before. You bet, I wanted to say. But as we sat side by side at meals, and danced across the polished floor of the main saloon, and promenaded the deck arm in arm after I'd put the children to bed, I sensed that my radical ideas titillated him almost as much as my physical closeness. He invited me to his cabin. I went.

I was not sorry afterward, though he wanted me to be. He wanted me to creep around in darkness, clutching my clothes to hide my bare flesh, begging for reassurance that the incident was not what it appeared to be. He didn't like my strutting naked in the unsparing electric light. He bridled at the sound of my heels clicking jauntily down the passage away from his cabin, back to my own. He hated my joy, my lack of shame—oh, how those upstanding men love shame—my independence. But he found them irresistible too. For the rest of the crossing, he couldn't stay away from me.

His prurient small-mindedness gave me the idea. It slapped me in the face as fresh as the wind as I came around the stern of the ship during a solitary walk on the next-to-the-last night at sea and sent me hurrying down to the ship's library. I would start by banishing shame.

I tugged off my gloves, took a sheet of stationery and a pen, and began to write.

The Woman Rebel

I leaned back and looked at the words. No one who saw them on the cover of a magazine could mistake the contents. I sat up to the desk and began to write again.

No Gods: No Masters

It was the old Wobbly slogan, but it fit.

Now I couldn't stop.

A woman's duty: To look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in her eyes, to have an ideal, to speak and act in defiance of convention.

I had found the means of my mission. I would publish a magazine that spoke to and for downtrodden women everywhere. I would rouse them to mutiny against the forces that enslaved them. I would give them the tools to choose when to fulfill the supreme function of motherhood. And I did think it was supreme, as long as it was of our own volition. I would do all that, and one more thing. By sending the magazine through the mails, I would challenge Comstock's absurd and pernicious law.

W
ALTER, AKA THE
Eagle, was waiting for us on the pier. He hugged the boys, held Peggy high in the air, embraced me, and asked how Paris had been.

“I hate Paris,” Peggy answered before I could.

I found an apartment on Post Avenue near Dyckman Street. It was so far uptown that the Broadway subway streaked out from underground into fresh air to reach it. The country atmosphere would be good for the children, the rent was cheap, and I could use the dining room as an office.

Now all I had to do was raise money to publish my magazine. I started my appeal with Theodore Schroeder, a free-speech lawyer who was known to support radical causes. We met at the Liberal Club on MacDougal Street on a surprisingly mild evening in the middle of a January thaw. The window in front of the two Morris chairs where we sat facing each other was open a few inches, and I could smell the onions wafting up from Polly's restaurant next door. Hippolyte Havel, the patent-leather-haired Russian revolutionary from Mabel's evenings who was Polly's lover and the cook, insisted that if onions were as expensive as caviar, the world would call them a delicacy.

I told Ted about my idea for the magazine, the people who had promised to contribute articles, and the other financial backers. The last was a bit premature. No one had yet written a check, but I was sure they would.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket, removed his glasses, wiped first one lens and then the other, put them back on, and sat staring at me with owlish intensity. “Tell me, Margaret, have you ever been psychoanalyzed?”

I tried not to show my impatience. Since Freud had come to America to give a series of lectures four years earlier, Ted had been in thrall to the doctor's theories. He believed in psychoanalysis the way my mother had believed in the virgin birth.

“No, but if you'd like to write an article about your experience, I'd be happy to run it in the magazine.” I wouldn't be happy, but I'd do more than that for five hundred dollars, or even three or two.

“I wasn't speaking about me. I was thinking of you and your motives for wanting to start this magazine.”

“My motives? Look around you. Tenements bursting with sick starving children. Hospital wards and graveyards full of women desperate not to have another baby. Abortionists thriving. Those are my motives.”

“On the surface, yes, but I think it goes deeper than that. It always does. If you go into psychoanalysis for three months, I'll give you money for your magazine . . .” He hesitated.

I waited.

“. . . providing you still want to publish it at the end of that time,” he said with a smile that was too smug by half.

“You think I won't?”

“I'm certain you won't.”

It was maddening. While I was fighting for women's lives,
he was worrying about my childhood fears and sexual fantasies. You see, I had read some Freud, or at least articles about his theories.

“I don't have three months. I've got to start publishing this magazine.”

“What are you afraid of finding out?”

“I'm not afraid of finding out anything. I just refuse to waste time lying on a couch, talking about my dreams, while women and children are suffering and dying. I won't do it, Ted. I can't.”

He shook his head. “You're a stubborn woman, Margaret.”

I gave him a smile that stopped just this side of flirtatious. “No one ever made a revolution by being reasonable.”

He laughed. For a serious lawyer and passionate Freudian, he had a surprisingly boisterous laugh. It rolled through the room and out into the mild night. He shook his head again. That was when I knew he was going to give me the money, though he couldn't resist making a comment about the unexamined life when he did. He was wrong. I knew exactly what I was up to.

WORD OF THE
magazine spread quickly. The main thrust would be contraception, but I wanted pieces on other subjects as well. Friends and colleagues offered to write articles on everything from strikes and child labor to Mary Wollstonecraft and Cleopatra. Emma Goldman agreed to contribute an essay on marriage as a degenerate institution. I couldn't decide whether her choice of subject matter was fitting or bizarre. The U.S. government called Emma the most dangerous woman in America. Crowds flocked to hear her speak—no, not speak, harangue. She had faced down police harassment and stood up to death threats, but she was no match for a man named Ben Reitman with his
honeyed words and brutal emotional battering. He broke her heart every chance she gave him. And they weren't even married. It broke my heart too, and turned my stomach. Much as I loved love, I couldn't imagine sacrificing myself to it. I certainly would never let a flimflam philanderer like Ben Reitman work me over as Emma did.

I was ambivalent about running her piece in the first issue for another reason as well. Emma's followers liked to point out that she had been advocating family limitation years before I came on the scene. I wanted to tell them so had Plato and Aristotle and those Egyptians from the Boston Public Library. Besides, for Emma, contraception was only one of a patchwork of socialist ideas. For me it was the cornerstone. Emma didn't even have a proper name for it. Family limitation was a drab negative description. I came up with a battle cry, though I never claimed I did it alone. I know how to give credit when credit is due, no matter what people say.

We were sitting around the dining table that served as my desk. Ethel was there. She and Rob Parker had arrived late, wearing the faintly unkempt look of people who have just tumbled out of bed. Rob, a bespectacled and bookish-looking man with a slight limp, the result of childhood polio, wrote drama criticism and anything else that magazines would pay him for and his social conscience would permit. Walter Roberts, aka the Eagle, had brought sandwiches and a pitcher of beer from the local delicatessen. Kitty Marion had arrived with a bunch of violets that had seen better days. She said she'd rescued them from a trash can. Kitty had enjoyed a small success on the London stage and still looked the part with her dark luxuriant pompadour and creamy skin, but she was serious about suffrage and contraception and a variety of feminist causes. A few others were crowded around the table.

We had gathered to talk about the magazine, but I was brooding about the movement. “We have to find a new name for what we're after,” I told them. “Family limitation sounds like a Victorian lady reclining on a chaise. It isn't even an accurate description. I don't want to limit women to one or two children, like the French plan. I want a world of complete freedom where every woman can choose for herself how many children to have or even whether to have them at all.”

“Voluntary parenthood,” Walter suggested.

“Voluntary motherhood,” Kitty said, her British accent gliding over the middle syllable of voluntary.

“The new motherhood.”

“The new generation.”

“Constructive generation.”

Each suggestion led to another, but none was right.

“The point is that women must have control of their own bodies,” I explained. “Without control, we're slaves, to nature, to society, to men.”

“Control,” Rob repeated. “That's good. How about family control?”

“Population control,” someone else suggested.

“Birth rate control,” Kitty said.

I felt as if someone had just walked fingers down my spine. “Drop the rate.”

“What?” Kitty asked.

“Birth control,” I said.

So perhaps I did come up with it after all.

I STOOD IN
the small printshop as the first issue of
The
Woman
Rebel
rolled off the press. The noise was thunderous. The room
reeked of paper, molten lead, and machine oil. I hadn't inhaled anything so heady since I'd held my freshly bathed and powered babies in my arms.

The printer handed me the first page. My statement marched across it.

Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception? Everybody is aware that the old, stupid fallacy that such knowledge will cause a girl to enter into prostitution has long been shattered. As is well known, a law exists forbidding the imparting of information on this subject, the penalty being several years imprisonment. Is it not time to defy this law? And what fitter place could be found than in the pages of THE WOMAN REBEL?

The idea I'd hatched the night I'd given birth to Sadie Sachs was on the march.

WE BEGAN MAILING
the issue the next day. Various radical groups, labor unions, and progressive individuals had already subscribed. One year cost a dollar; six months, fifty cents.

Two weeks later the letter arrived. The return address on the envelope was
OFFICE OF THE POSTMASTER, U.S. POST OFFICE
. Once again, it should have read Anthony Comstock.

I'd known it was coming, but it still caught me off guard. In the past weeks, I'd got carried away by the excitement of publication. That and my father's example had lured me into thinking I just might get away with it. He had thumbed his nose at authority and suffered no hardships, except the self-inflicted
ones. What I hadn't realized was that no one cared how a penniless Irish stonecutter ranted in his cups, but men in power were not about to let a woman with a cause use the United States mails to incite other women and some men to action.

I tore the envelope open. The letter was brief.

Dear Madam:

In accordance with advice from the Assistant Attorney General for the Post Office Department, you are informed that the publication entitled “The Woman Rebel,” for March 1914, is unmailable under the provisions of Section 211 of the Criminal Code.

E. M. Morgan, Postmaster

The letter made it clear. If I kept publishing and mailing the magazine—and nothing would stop me from that—I'd get my day in court.

The next morning, on my way to the subway, a headline in the
Sun
caught my eye.

“WOMAN REBEL”

BARRED FROM MAILS

I'd been prepared for legal harassment but not free publicity. I put down a penny, picked up a copy of the paper, and stood reading it while people hurried around me.

Too bad. The case should be reversed. They should be barred from her and spelled differently.

The cheap play on words disgusted me. The letter from the post office had been infuriating. This was humiliating. For women all over the country, the issue was a matter of life and death. For the editors of the
Sun
, it was a wink of the eye, an elbow in the ribs, a dirty joke. I crumpled the newspaper and threw it in a trash basket.

We posted the next issue in batches. Alone or in groups of two or three, we fanned out to mailboxes and chutes all over town, dropping a single issue here, five there, a dozen around the corner. I had a variety of friends and colleagues who stayed with the children, but sometimes when no one was available, I took them with me. The boys were demons, racing up and down streets, flinging the mailings into the boxes on the fly. Sometimes, I'd lift Peggy up and let her drop one or two magazines into the slot. I laughed as I heard the whoosh of insurrection sent on its way, and she giggled with me, two women rebels in cahoots. We also mailed some copies wrapped in other magazines and newspapers inside envelopes. It was an old socialist trick.

Life had never been so thrilling. Dawn often found me still clutching the last few copies, tramping up one avenue and down the next. I worked long hours with little sleep, intermittent meals, and no money, and loved every minute of it. Late at night or early in the morning, I fell into bed, footsore, bone weary, exhilarated. Muscles still tense from physical exertion, nerves still humming with the buzz of subversion, I was too tired to sleep, but not to make love. Sex took on a new intensity. It was the physical and spiritual component of our political creed. To deny it would have been cowardly.

Nonetheless, I had to be careful. I was prepared to be charged with sending so-called pornography through the mails, but I couldn't afford to have my cause sullied by personal scandal.
I knew from Bill's letters that there was gossip. He'd start out by praising my work, then suddenly change gears, accusing me of infidelity and various men of stealing my affections, as if he owned them.

He wasn't the only one who was suspicious. Sometimes when I looked out the window of the apartment, I saw strange men lingering across the street. I knew without asking that they were Anthony Comstock's henchmen. Only men obsessed with and deprived of sex could look that furtive while smoking a cigar and pretending to read a newspaper.

IT WAS ALMOST
eleven when a knock came on the door of the apartment. The sound was so soft that I wasn't sure I'd heard it. Then it came again, only a little louder. The children were asleep, and I wasn't expecting anyone. I walked to the window and pushed the curtain aside an inch. The stooge was still standing under the lamp across the street, smoking a cigar. Why did they think cigars were a good cover?

I went to the door and opened it. The man standing in the hall was tall with wide shoulders, a head of thick fair hair beneath a cheap-looking homburg, and an unnervingly handsome face. The face was vaguely familiar. It took me a moment to remember that he had been a member of Socialist Local Number Five when Bill and I had belonged. Bill had always maintained that he was in love with me, but that he was no threat because he was so stupid. Isn't it odd that men can fall for a pretty face no matter how dumb, but women are supposed to be more high-minded. I invited him in.

“Thank you, Mrs. Sanger, but what I have to say won't take long.” He glanced around the empty hall, then back at me and
blinked nervously. Whatever he was here for, he was having second thoughts about it.

I said I hadn't seen him in some time.