Comstockery in America

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Comstockery in America

Newspaper article

By: Margaret Sanger

Date: July 15, 1915

Source: Sanger, Margaret. "Comstockery in America." International Socialist Review (1915): 46-49.

About the Author: Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) was a nurse who fought for public access to information on contraception in the early part of the twentieth cen-tury. Her efforts to disseminate birth control information led to her repeated arrest for violating the Comstock Act in the United States. She helped to found Planned Parenthood, an organization that helps provide health and gynecological care for women in the United States.

INTRODUCTION

In 1873, Anthony Comstock, the Postmaster General of the United States, succeeded in persuading the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that became known as the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act stated, in part, that it was illegal "to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, an obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement …"

Critics of the Comstock Act claimed that Anthony Comstock—under the impetus of his religious convictions (he was a conservative Congregationalist)—was imposing his own brand of morality on others. When the law passed in 1873 there was little opposition. However, by the early 1900s, as women's rights activism increased in the United States, critics began to voice their dissent.

Margaret Sanger was one of eleven children. Her mother was pregnant eighteen times and died at the age of fifty. Sanger was strongly affected by her mother's health struggles related to childbirth and childrearing. As a nurse, she visited the tenement houses and slums of the Lower East Side of New York City. Urbanization, immigration, and industrialization converged in the first decade of the twentieth century, and Sanger's experiences working in public health with the poor convinced her that access to family planning information was crucial for poor women and men. According to Sanger's own writings, her patients frequently asked her how to stop having babies; husbands and wives alike begged for such knowledge.

By 1912, Sanger resigned from nursing and took up the cause of what she called "birth control," the use of a basic understanding of natural family planning and conception to control family size. In 1913, she founded the publication Woman Rebel, which published information on birth control. She was indicted for mailing "obscene" material and violating the Comstock Act, but left for Europe before a trial could take place.

In this excerpt from her article "Comstockery in America," Sanger discusses some of these events and also expresses her contempt for an industrial system that she perceives to be corrupt and in collusion with the government to oppress the poor and working class urban citizens. Sanger adopted the Socialist cause and published this article in a Socialist publication.

PRIMARY SOURCE

There have been many publications during these years which have been suppressed by the orders of Comstock, and the publisher imprisoned, but one of the latest, and most flagrant disregard of Press Freedom was in the suppression and confiscation of the monthly publication,"The Woman Rebel." This was a working woman's paper, the first of its kind ever issued in America. It had for its motto: "Working Women, build up within yourselves a conscious fighting character against all things which enslave you," and claimed that one of the working woman's greatest enslavements was her ignorance of the means to control the size of her family. The editor promised to defy the existing law and to impart such information to the readers of "The Woman Rebel" and urged all working women to rally to its support.

The first issue in March, 1914, was suppressed. The May, July, August, September and October issues were suppressed and confiscated, and three indictments, on the March, May and July issues, covering twelve counts, were returned against me, as the editor, by the Federal Grand Jury. One of the counts against me was for an article called "Open Discussion." This was a discussion of the subject of birth control and was considered "obscene." Another was an article announcing the organization of The Birth Control League, setting forth its object and methods of organization. All the indictments were returned and counts were made on all articles which discussed the idea of the Working Woman keeping down the number of her family.

"The Woman Rebel" did not advocate the practice of this knowledge as a "panacea" for the present economic enslavement, but it did urge the practice of it as the most important immediate step which should be taken toward the economic emancipation of the workers. Thousands of letters poured in to me from all over the country. I was besieged with requests for the information from all kinds and classes of people. Nearly every letter agreed with me that too long have the workers produced the slave class, the children for the mills, the soldiers for the wars, and the time had come to watch the masters produce their own slaves if they must have them. We know the capitalist class must have a slave class, bred in poverty and reared in ignorance. That is why it is quite consistent with their laws that there should be a heavy penalty of five years' imprisonment for imparting information as to the means of preventing conception. Industry in the U.S.A. is fairly new; it is reaching out in foreign lands to capture trade and to undersell its rival competitors. They have only one way to do this, and that is to get labor cheap. The cheapest labor is that of women and children; the larger the number of children in a family, the earlier they enter the factory. We need only to look to our mill towns to see the truth of this statement; so the conditions in the cotton mills of the South where little boys and girls, eight, nine and ten years of age, wend their sleepy way to the mills in the morning before the winter sun has risen, to work at a killing tension for twelve hours as helper to the mother, and return again when the sun has set.

We, who know the conditions there, know that the father cannot get a man's wage, because a child's labor can be had. There is an average of nine children to every family in these and in other industrial sections where child labor exists and wages run low and infant mortality runs high.

Many of the stockholders of these mills are legislators and congressmen who have to do with the making of the laws. Naturally it is to their interest that child slaves be born into the world and their duty is to enforce the laws to that end.

"The Woman Rebel" told the Working Woman these things, and told her that a large family of children is one of the greatest obstacles in the way to obtain economic freedom for her class. It is the greatest burden to them in all ways, for no matter how spirited and revolutionary one may feel, the piteous cry of hunger of several little ones will compel a man to forego the future good of his class to the present need of his family.

It is the man with a large family who is so often the burden of a strike. He is usually the hardest to bring out on strike, for it is he and his who suffer the most through its duration. Everywhere, in the shop, in the army of the unemployed, in the bread line where men are ready to take the place of a striker, it is the large family problem which is the chief of the multitudes of miseries that confront the working class today.

"The Woman Rebel" told the Working Woman that there is no freedom for her until she has this knowledge which will enable her to say if she will become a mother or not. The fewer children she had to cook, wash and toil for, the more leisure she would have to read, think and develop. That freedom demands leisure, and her first freedom must be in her right of herself over her own body; the right to say what she will do with it in marriage and out of it; the right to become a mother, or not, as she desires and sees fit to do; that all these rights swing around the pivot of the means to prevent conception, and every woman had the right to have this knowledge if she wished it.

As editor and publisher of "The Woman Rebel," I felt a great satisfaction and inspiration in the response which came from working men and women all over America. For fourteen years I have been much in the nursing field, and know too well the intolerable conditions among the workers which a large family does not decrease.

I saw that the working women ask for this knowledge to prevent bringing more children into the world, and saw the medical profession shake its head in silence at this request.

I saw that the women of wealth obtain this information with little difficulty, while the working man's wife must continue to bring children into the world she could not feed or clothe, or else resort to an abortion.

I saw that it was the working class women who fill the death list which results from abortion, for though the women of wealth have abortions performed too, there is given them the best medical care and attention money can buy; trained nurses watch over them, and there is seldom any evil consequence. But the working woman must look for the cheapest assistance. The professional abortionist, the unclean midwives, the fake and quack—all feed upon her helplessness and thrive and prosper on her ignorance. It is the Comstock laws which produce the abortionist and make him a thriving necessity while the lawmakers close their Puritan eyes.

I saw that it is the working class children who fill the mills, factories, sweatshops, orphan asylums and reformatories, because through ignorance they were brought into the world, and this ignorance continues to be perpetuated.

I resolved, after a visit to France, where children are loved and wanted and cared for and educated, to devote my time and effort in giving this information to women who applied for it. I resolved to defy the law, not behind a barricade of law books and technicalities, but by giving the information to the workers directly in factory and workshop.

This was done by the publication of a small pamphlet, "Family Limitations," of which one hundred thousand copies were distributed in factories and mines throughout the U.S.

SIGNIFICANCE

Like many essays written by activist women during this time, Sanger's work appealed to the reader's sense of humanity. She discussed the poor mothers' health, the toll on children, the pleadings from husbands and wives for information on the prevention of conception so that parents could give their existing children a better life. This theme—appealing to the reader's emotions regarding the plight of the poor—was a common Progressive Era theme.

Sanger's theory concerning industry, government, and the intentional suppression of information on birth control, however, was a shocking concept to the middle class of that era. Socialists argued that contraception information would lead to "economic emancipation" for the poor. The bearing of nine, ten, eleven, or more children by a woman who worked twelve hour days, six days a week, led to the continuation of cycles of poverty. In addition, it could lead to an early death for the mother—leaving her children orphaned and deepening the need for child labor to help support the family. Sanger connected the government's regulation of birth control information with industrial development; her writings claimed that the Comstock Act had become a tool to force the poor to continue to produce the workers that fed industrial growth, while limiting the poor worker's ability to rise out of the slums and achieve personal progress.

In addition to her own arrest for various articles and actions, Sanger's husband William was arrested in 1915 after a postal agent, pretending to be a Socialist friend of Margaret Sanger's, requested a pamphlet on birth control called "Family Limitation." William Sanger was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty days in jail for this violation of the Comstock Act.

In October 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to offering counseling and written materials on family planning, the clinic provided condoms and diaphragms. It was shut down within nine days and Sanger was charged with "maintaining a public nuisance." She served thirty days in jail and appealed her case, also arguing for the right for doctors to distribute birth control information and devices to patients. The appellate court ruled for her conviction but did permit doctors the right—when medically necessary—to dispense birth control information and supplies.

In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which eventually became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the largest organization in the United States devoted to women's health and contraception.

In 1936, the U.S. Congress repealed the Comstock Act.