Authors: Marge Piercy
Moishe and she had been right to escape from the Pale and come to America. Golden it wasn’t, but they had a chance here, as opposed to no chance at all except to be slaughtered in a pogrom, die of cholera like her parents,
zikronim
l’
brakhah,
or starve to death eating grass of the field. She had seized that opportunity and now she could see her grandchildren flourishing. Rose was going to City College in the fall to be a teacher. Her brother Harry was a floor walker in Gimbel’s, except he was talking of joining the army, which scared Freydeh. The army had taken Kezia’s first husband. She wished Harry had gone to school and got a profession, but he liked the girls and having a good time. Now he wanted a uniform, to go off to France. He was handsome but silly.
People would ask, as Rose had, why did you stay alone? She could only laugh. She had founded a family None of them would be poor again unless they were complete schlemiels. She had dragged them all into the middle class—never a lot of money but enough if they were careful. At seventy-four she still had her wits and much of her strength. She had even taken a little to religion in her old age, keeping the holidays—for the sake of the children, she said, but it was for herself, to celebrate the turning of the years, to celebrate her family, to celebrate being a Jew, to celebrate survival, above all survival. She was a matriarch, one without a husband but rich in love and connection. Let it continue to be so, she prayed to no one in particular. Let it continue for a while, so I can enjoy.
Anthony had an enemy whose evil ways preyed on him, as had been the case with the Woodhull woman, with Restell—now it was a young harlot named Sanger. She was married but that didn’t keep her from taking up with radicals and artists and writers and who knew what free-thinking trash. She had been preaching her devil’s gospel of preventing conception, trying to make sex free and light for women, trying to keep women from facing the consequences of their sins. Instead of carrying out the mission for which the Lord had created them, they wanted to take control of their bodies away from their husbands and their God and do exactly whatever they wished.
He had believed he thoroughly crushed that particular evil, but then the anarchist Jewess Emma Goldman started speaking about family limitation in public and even giving obscene demonstrations of the use of rubber articles to prevent conception. She was promptly jailed, but when she got out she went on with the devil’s work. Lately she had passed on the mantle to young Sanger. Goldman had been a midwife; Sanger was a nurse. Women who stayed at home with their children never caused this kind of trouble.
Society needed him more than ever. He might be old, he might sometimes be weary, but his calling was more important than before, for morals were slipping. He did not always win in court these days. His favorite judges had retired. The newspapers ridiculed him when he went after those who showed paintings of naked women, as if there were any difference between dirty French postcards and dirty oils hung in a gallery or a museum. Both corrupted through the eyes. When he arrested a female
bookkeeper at the Art Students League in New York because the so-called artists were advertising a show of pictures of naked ladies, the newspapers vied with each other in cartoons. They made a fuss when he had a vile play by an Irishman named Shaw—
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
—closed down. They also went after him when he arrested a spiritualist, Ida Craddock, who had written a clearly obscene sex primer called
The Wedding Night
full of diagrams and so-called scientific explanations. He had her convicted in federal court. Before she could go to prison, she slashed her wrists and turned on the gas. Good riddance, but the papers made a fuss. As if any right-thinking man needed a manual to do what he should with his wife. He remembered his own beautiful wedding night with Maggie.
He suppressed a suffragette paper for printing articles about prostitution. Respectable women did not write about such things or care to read them. But the worst of the criminals he had been pursuing was the public nurse who worked on the Lower East Side out of the Henry Street Settlement House, Mrs. Sanger. She came from a pious Catholic home—her mother had been pregnant eighteen times—but she had married a free-thinking Jew, William Sanger, and been corrupted. She wrote articles about the artificial prevention of birth for
The Call
, a scurrilous socialist rag. He got the P.O. to notify
The Call
it would be seized if it continued to run her series “What Every Girl Should Know.” The next issue came out with a large blank space where Sanger’s column had been, headlined “What Every Girl Should Know by Order of the Post Office—NOTHING.”
Then the hussy went off to France with her husband. When she returned, she wrote more obscene articles for an even more noxious rag, this one published by the Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—called
The Woman Rebel.
Right on its masthead it proclaimed heresy: No Gods, No Masters. The Jewess Goldman wrote for it. He had Sanger indicted on a whole string of counts in federal court. This time he would put her away. She was part of that swarm of commies and free lovers and so-called artists who infested Greenwich Village. Misfits from every small town in the country collected there and egged each other on.
Her lawyer got her postponement after postponement. Finally the day came for trial, but Sanger did not show up. He learned she had written a pamphlet,
Family Limitation,
printed by a Wobbly press. Then she disappeared, a fugitive. However, her husband was still in his studio. Anthony suspected William Sanger must have a cache of obscene pamphlets. In the meantime, it was Thanksgiving and he took a week off in Asbury Park, where he had moved Maggie and Adele. Adele was a woman now, just as
pleasant and compliant as she had been as a little girl. She was a real help to Maggie, doing a good part of the cooking. As long as she didn’t get distracted, she was a fine helper. Maggie was thinner than ever and suffered from rheumatism; still she kept everything in order. He came home to a world of comfort and warmth where he could relax and be catered to. The following Monday he was ready to resume his chores and plan his attack on William Sanger.
He received a report that Margaret Sanger was in England. Somehow she had acquired a false passport and escaped him, for a while. A war was on in Europe and that might keep her there for a year or two. Now, he could not go in person to William Sanger, as the man had seen him in court when his wife was indicted. He sent his assistant. “Charlie, you pose as a dealer in condoms. You say how you admire her filthy articles and you want to help distribute her pamphlet. Get him to sell you one. Tell him we’ll translate it into Jewish and Italian.”
It worked. Sanger rooted around and came up with a copy, giving it to Anthony’s assistant Charlie. Now he could raid Sanger’s studio for more copies. They found a mother lode. He would have the pamphlet declared obscene. Then everything had to be put on the back burner when President Wilson required his presence as a delegate to the International Purity Conference in San Francisco. Preparation took most of his time through May. San Francisco was wet and chilly. He returned from the conference to the hot muggy late spring at home with a cold that turned into pneumonia. The lawyers had been wrangling over William Sanger all this time, but his trial was scheduled before the State Supreme Court of the Fourth District in September. Anthony would be ready. He was going to get this freethinker and stow him away in anticipation of the day he could lock up the wife.
The trial was tumultuous, with Sanger conducting his own defense. Anthony got angry and said bluntly that Mrs. Sanger was a heinous criminal who sought to turn every home into a brothel. He got into shouting matches with members of the public allowed into the court, including the Jewess Goldman’s lover Alexander Berkman and that notorious Red, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. When he saw who came to defend Sanger, he was surer than ever that these were dangerous elements who must be locked away. William Sanger kept making speeches, calling Anthony “a victim of an incurable sex phobia who lacked the intelligence to distinguish between pornography and scientific information.”
Anthony wasn’t fond of Judge McInerney, who censured him for
speaking out of turn, but at least he refused to let Sanger plead free speech. The best judges, who always ruled in his favor, were gone from the bench. In the end the judge ruled that
Family Limitation
was indecent, immoral and a menace to society. “This crime is not only a violation of the laws of man but the law of God as well in your scheme to prevent motherhood. If persons would go around and urge Christian women to bear children instead of wasting their time on women’s suffrage, this city and society would be better off.” But all McInerney slapped on Sanger was a fine of $150 or thirty days in jail. Sanger went off to jail. Anthony went home, sick again. What was the use of winning when the penalty was a mere inconvenience?
He felt weak and feverish. He could barely make his way to New Jersey. Maggie forced him to bed. The doctor said pneumonia had returned. He was running a high fever and cooking as in an oven. The trial had worn him out, all those Reds screaming. The judge had not done his job, for he should have held them all in contempt of court. It had been a circus, and in the end Sanger was given such a light sentence it turned the trial into a farce. Anthony was bitter. He had worn himself out on the side of good, and the judge had the nerve to tell him to shut up. That thirty-day sentence made a mockery of his crusade.
The doctor said his pneumonia had taken an acute form. Maggie kept vigil at his bedside. His minister came—not a man he was as close to as he had been to Budington, but a good old-fashioned blood-and-thunder type. Anthony drifted in and out of the room. Sometimes he was in court shouting his wrath. Sometimes he was stalking a pornographer, pistol in hand. Sometimes he was lecturing on traps for the young. Sometimes he was in his bedroom, a warm September day with a hornet buzzing against the bedroom window and Maggie in a chair wiping his forehead with a damp cloth and praying. Sometimes the minister was back and prayed with her. He saw William Sanger, his face red with anger, shouting about free speech. He saw Madame Restell wrapped in silks and furs running away from him in her carriage pulled by black and white horses. He saw the shyster Howe with his diamonds twinkling in a purple and green vest and the Woodhull strumpets at the bar. He saw Victoria being led up to a scaffolding while he waited to pull on the rope.
Twice he rallied enough to pray with Maggie and the minister, sending for his secretary to dictate a report to the society. He could feel himself slipping away. The fever was burning him up. He worried a little, not about his soul but about his successor, who lacked drive. Anthony had arrested
enough people during his career to fill a sixty-car passenger train. Who else could boast as good service to morality? He might be going to his reward, but the laws he had pushed through Congress were on the books to be used, and they would be, for they had teeth and claws. His successor would do his job, but he would not rejoice in being the mighty right hand of the Lord as Anthony had. Then once again he slid into the hot dark, the pool of burning mud where the sinners he had pursued were cooking like dumplings in soup. I’ve got you, he shouted, watching them burning naked and boiling like lobsters. I’ve got you once and for all!
M
ARGARET SANGER RETURNED
to the States late in 1915, hoping that in her absence the legal situation might have changed. Comstock was dead, although his brutal laws remained on the books. Newspapers, periodicals, lecturers were openly arguing the legitimacy of contraception. The term she had first used in
The Woman Rebel,
“birth control,” was everywhere now. It was suddenly respectable, even necessary, to discuss what Comstock had forbidden to be mentioned.
When she finally came to trial, she had wide public and elite support, now a sought-after lecturer and a celebrity. All charges were dropped.
A year later, with her sister Ethel—nurses, both of them—she opened the first birth control clinic in America in Brownsville, in Brooklyn. From a storefront she distributed handbills through the neighborhood in English, Yiddish and Italian. “Mothers—can you afford to have a large family? Do you want more children?” When they opened the clinic, the line of women, most with baby carriages, stretched around the block. They managed to see almost five hundred women before the police closed them down. Margaret served thirty days in the Tombs, treating it as a rest and relaxation cure. Her case was won on appeal. A few years later they opened a legal clinic unmolested.
I
HAVE RELIED ON
many books and several interviews in doing the research for this novel. An even reasonably complete bibliography would cover at least seven or eight pages, but I wish to give particular thanks to the following: Anne M. Derousie at the Woman’s Rights National Historical Park for her help on Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her time in Seneca Falls, and Michael Callahan, historian, raconteur and ranger at Castle Clinton National Monument in Manhattan.
For Victoria Woodhull, some of the most useful books were:
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull,
by Barbara Goldsmith (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which I found great on all the characters;
The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull,
by Lois Beachy Underhill (Bridge Works, 1995);
The Victoria Woodhull Reader,
edited by Madeleine Stern (M & S Press, 1974), which contains her speeches and articles; and
Notorious Victoria,
by Mary Gabriel (Algonquin Books, 1998). Not surprisingly, given her penchant for rewriting her own past, many of the stories and facts are in contradiction, and I have chosen those I thought likeliest.
For Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friend Susan B. Anthony, I found most useful of the many biographies and histories:
The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement,
by Miriam Gurko (Schocken Books, 1974);
Feminism & Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869,
by Ellen Carol DuBois (Cornell University Press, 1978);
The Elizabeth Cady Stanton–Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches,
edited by Ellen Carol DuBois (Northeastern University Press, 1981);
Extraordinary Woman: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
by Elisabeth Griffith (Oxford University Press, 1984);
Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897,
by Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Northeastern University Press, 1993; first published in 1898).