Behind birth control, a complicated history
Frank Wilson is a retired Inquirer book editor Thanks to those videotaped interviews in which representatives of Planned Parenthood sound to many people as if they're discussing the sale of body parts obtained by means of abortion, Margaret Sanger - the woman behind Planned Parenthood - is being paid
Frank Wilson
is a retired Inquirer book editor
Thanks to those videotaped interviews in which representatives of Planned Parenthood sound to many people as if they're discussing the sale of body parts obtained by means of abortion, Margaret Sanger - the woman behind Planned Parenthood - is being paid attention to again. Why, there's even an online quiz you can take consisting of a set of quotations, some by Sanger, others by Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. You have to figure out who said which.
Sanger, who died 50 years ago, would likely be pleased, since she made a career out of drawing attention to herself on behalf of her lifelong cause: birth control. (She coined the phrase.) To her admirers, Sanger is a hero; to her detractors, a villain. A new book, however, suggests that she was something more familiar - a human being with a good many admirable traits, along with some others that were less so.
The book, Terrible Virtue (Harper), is a novel by Ellen Feldman, whose 2009 novel, Scottsboro, was short-listed for the Orange Prize. This new book, by virtue of getting imaginatively inside its protagonist, reminds one, better than a straightforward biography might, that Sanger was a good deal more complicated than the cardboard cutout to which her reputation is often reduced.
Margaret Louise Higgins was born in 1879 in Corning, N.Y. Both her parents had been born in Ireland. Her father was a stonemason and an ex-Catholic freethinker and activist who supported women's suffrage. He also was an impecunious drunk. Her mother experienced 18 pregnancies and gave birth to 11 children in 22 years. She died at 49. Margaret was the sixth of those 11 children.
Feldman's narrator is Sanger herself. Sanger did write an autobiography, published in 1938. But an autobiography is addressed to the public. The narrative in Terrible Virtue reads like an interior monologue - it ends with Sanger's death in a nursing home in Arizona - and it is punctuated by commentary provided by her husbands, Bill Sanger and Noah Slee; her sons, Stuart and Grant; her sister Ethel Byrne; and others. As a note at the end on sources makes plain, Feldman did her homework.
Supporters of Planned Parenthood may be taken aback to see Feldman's fictional Sanger argue that "if scientists could harness electricity to run irons and gramophones and floor sweepers, surely mankind, or womankind, could find a way to prevent pregnancy and make abortion unnecessary." But the real Margaret Sanger, who was trained as a nurse, actually did say, "I do not approve of abortion, nor can I give the address of anyone who will perform this operation."
In one of the sections in which Stuart Sanger addresses his mother, he reminds her that one of the few stories she ever told him and his siblings of her childhood was how "your father spent his last dollar on a banquet for a visiting freethinker while the rest of you struggled to silence your protesting stomachs." He also tells her that he understands that "your mother was so busy having babies that she had no time to care for children."
It was, of course, the radical father whom Margaret Sanger took after, his anti-Catholicism pairing nicely with her zeal for birth control. And zeal it was, bearing many of the earmarks of religious fervor, as Feldman shrewdly discerns, when she has her fictional Sanger admit:
"My crusade wasn't a choice I had made; it was a calling, like the vocation of the nuns I had known in childhood. I might fall short of success, just as they might not attain perfect faith, but we had to continue the struggle."
Feldman's Sanger recounts mostly that struggle, which included some time in exile in England (in order to escape a possible 45-year sentence for sending her magazine Woman Rebel, with its detailed information about contraception, in the mail). There she met pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis, with whom she had one of her many affairs (another was with H.G. Wells).
But it is the part of her life that she refers to only hesitantly and intermittently that is most revealing. It is a kind of ghost story.
Margaret Sanger had a third child, a daughter, named Peggy, who died of pneumonia at age 5. Sanger had wanted a daughter, and felt close in a special way to Peggy, who had fallen seriously ill earlier, and was left with a limp. Doctors said it had been polio, but Sanger refused to believe that, and wouldn't allow Peggy to be fitted with a brace.
Peggy died while her mother was on a speaking tour. The fictional Sanger can't quite bring herself to say that her daughter is dead. She is, rather, convinced that Peggy is alive in a better place. She begins to attend séances. A woman tells her she has seen Peggy, and the details of her account are convincing. At the novel's end, it is Peggy who asks, "If you could do it again, would you do it the same?"
What impresses about Feldman's novel is the subtle honesty of the portrait it puts on display. After spending part of a summer with her, Grant Sanger tells his mother that "somehow I learned to hold all of you, the black and the white, the Jekyll and the Hyde, the arrogance and the insecurity, the hell-bent ambition and the capacity for love, in my mind at once."
This seems a fair assessment of Margaret Sanger. It would probably serve as a fair assessment for a good many other public figures as well.
Feldman's novel demonstrates something we would do well to remind ourselves of during our current, rather grotesque election season: Behind the policy and the rhetoric, there is always left standing just a human being, inconsistent and contradictory, at times gracious, at times pathetic, at no time perfect.