What Every Woman Should Know is a bi-weekly series on American Women’s History.

Editor’s note: Beginning this month, The New Agenda Blog will be featuring regular columns from a diverse group of terrific contributors. Anna Belle Pfau, who blogs at Peacocks and Lilies, is an amateur historian who specializes in American women’s history. Every other week she’ll be writing about key historical moments that, as she says, “every woman should know.”

The progression of rights for American women is a story of unlikely alliances. The Seneca Falls Women’s Right’s Convention of 1848, which kicked off the First Wave, was itself the result of the unlikely alliance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (a young newlywed on her honeymoon) and Lucretia Mott (a 47 year old Quaker teacher) in a most unlikely place for these New England women: London, England. The 19th Amendment passed because of the alliance of Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, who had actually publicly opposed each other before coming together to work both public and private channels.

Similarly, the movement to legalize birth control and improve women’s health education was also built on an unlikely partnership between two very different women. The story of Margaret Sanger is a familiar one to many American women (largely because of the work Planned Parenthood has done to pay tribute to her legacy), but few are aware of her work with Emma Goldman, or their run-ins with the arch villain of the story, Anthony Comstock.

Goldman and Sanger Meet

Because of the inferior opportunities afforded to women throughout history, finding a woman with the kind of public charisma Emma Goldman held is quite rare. Even more remarkable is that she came up from a dispossessed group without any power and was still able to effect the kind of change she did. Goldman was born to Russian Jewish parents in 1869 and immigrated to America with her sister at the age of 15. She always worked, usually in factories and sweatshops in and around New York City. By the time she was 20 she was drawing large crowds on the streets of New York as a spokeswoman agitating for a broad labor movement. She grew increasingly radicalized as she aged.

Early in her activist career, after a stint as a kind of social worker in the slums of New York, she began advocating for birth control. Her ideas on gender politics had long been developing, resulting in the “juicy” tidbits of information about her that historians like to include: she advocated free love and anarchy. And she lived those values, living with several lovers after her short, failed marriage, and generally refusing to recognize unjust authority unless she had to. She was arrested many times and eventually deported. She and Margaret Sanger met after Sanger and her husband, William, moved to New York in 1910.

Margaret Sanger, who was a trained nurse, also worked in the slums of New York, acting as part-midwife, part-gynecologist to women who were pregnant with or nursing their fourth, fifth, or sixth child in as many years. These women wanted nothing more than to avoid another pregnancy. Both Sanger and Goldman saw the toll this constant state of pregnancy had on women and their families, the vicious cycle of poverty perpetuated by a system that didn’t care. Maybe they couldn’t make the system care, but they could teach about planning, and offer birth control to help. The two quickly became friends and the older Goldman mentored young Sanger, showing her the ropes of the vast network of social protest activist in New York City, including a birth control movement that was broadly supported by activists for other issues.

Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Act

It seems crazy to even think about today. When we think of furtive passengers smuggling in illicit packages from overseas we immediately think of drugs. Not the Customs Agents of Sanger’s and Goldman’s time. They were thinking of information on birth control. They were also searching for other paraphernalia that we can’t mention on this family-oriented blog. There were also Postal Inspectors sifting through mail, stalking senders, searching their premises for anything that might be a violation of The Comstock Act. The Comstock Act was a very big deal, and it empowered a lot of government agencies to moderate the lives of every American.

Passed in 1873, The Comstock Act was the brainchild of Anthony Comstock, a prominent New Yorker who managed to create quite a career for himself by lobbying business and government to control vice and obscenity. The law criminalized distribution of material characterized as “obscene,” which included everything from certain medical text books, to information on birth control, to plays and literature, as well as pornography many would find quite tame today. Comstock was eventually appointed a United States Postal Inspector, and empowered with a gun and the right of arrest. For 40 years he and his agents policed every corner of the United States. Many were arrested. People were deported. The obscene material was burned in the streets.

Emma Goldman had been agitating for birth control and free love for more than decade by the time she met Sanger, and she had already been arrested for violations of the Comstock Act, specifically for distributing information on birth control. By the time Sanger began crusading for access to birth control around 1910, Comstock’s personal power was already waning. However, his last great campaign was against Margaret Sanger and the budding birth control movement, for which she was the most notable speaker and activist. As a trained nurse, Sanger often wrote about the health issues associated with sex and reproduction. Her first encounter with censors was over an article on avoiding venereal disease she wrote for her series, What Every Girl Should Know (hence the name of this series), published in New York Call. In 1914, however, she was indicted for violating the Comstock Act after she started a magazine called The Woman Rebel, which advocated for radical feminism, including access to birth control on the grounds that it promoted sexual liberation and broke the chains of feminine oppression, among other reasons. Rather than face trial and certain conviction, she fled to England under a pseudonym. While she was away, Comstock had her husband arrested for distributing one of her family planning pamphlets to a postal worker.

A National Movement is Born

In those New York City slums, Emma Goldman, champion of the working class and poor, often poor herself, and Margaret Sanger, nurse, wife of a prominent New York architect, and a women’s rights activist, forged a friendship that would change the world. When Sanger fled to England, it was with a list of contacts that included friends of Goldman, who further radicalized Sanger. Sanger began her advocacy of reproductive issues because of the personal tragedy of losing her mother to cervical cancer after 18 pregnancies (11 live children). After her work in the slums of New York with Goldman, she began to see birth control as a tool of liberation. She began to realize she needed to create rhetoric for different audiences of women. This is precisely what she was trying to do with the publication of The Woman Rebel.

When Comstock died in September of 1915, Sanger returned home, arriving in October of that year. After returning, she struggled with whether or not she should fight the charges against her or plead guilty. Her five year old daughter died unexpectedly in November, and pressure from her lawyers for her to plead guilty began to mount. At that fragile moment, ironically through the mail, Sanger would receive these words from her mentor, Emma Goldman:

My dear,

I wrote you a long letter from Chicago yesterday. Today I heard that our good friends Schroeder & others are urging you to plead guilty.

That would be too awful! Just kill the movement you have helped to advance in 50 years? I hope you will do no such a thing. That you will be as brave as you have so far.

Dear, dear Girl, I appreciate your state of mind. I feel deeply all you have gone through since you began your work. But at the same time I feel that it would be a great impardonable error were you now [to] allow yourself to be beaten. To compromise when there is no need of it.

You have friends all over the country. You can have whatever means will be needed to fight. You have aroused the interest, as no one ever has. Think of losing it all by declaring yourself guilty. Don’t do it!

And that, dear readers, is exactly what she did. This is where you may know the story. Margaret Sanger did indeed lobby all of her friends across this country, mobilizing many isolated birth control and reproductive rights movements under The Birth Control Federation of America, which later became Planned Parenthood. Her work, built on the work of Emma Goldman before her, allowed women to pursue information and tools that allowed for greater freedom over a woman’s lifetime. Whatever their political affiliation, women today have greater control over their reproductive capacity and greater reproductive freedom in general. That has led to freedom and opportunity in other areas of life. These tangible benefits are what Sanger and Goldman wrought.

What’s more, this unlikely alliance is an example of what can be achieved when women who seemingly have nothing in common unite to work on common goals.

Epilogue

The federal government eventually dropped the Comstock charges against Sanger after public sympathy erupted over the death of her child. Sanger and Goldman both continued to be arrested for distributing birth control information, until Sanger successfully lobbied for a physician exemption from the law and promptly set up shop with an all-female staff, including several physicians. Goldman and Sanger eventually had a falling out that ended their friendship. Though Comstock died in 1915, his legacy lived on in his young protégée, J. Edgar Hoover.

Sources:

The Emma Goldman Papers
Emma Goldman
Anthony Comstock’s “Chastity” Laws
Margaret Sanger Papers Project