Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.Sanger, Margaret
History
Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.
Sanger, Margaret
Birth control -- United States -- Biography; Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966
Late in 1917 a new recruit was enlisted. Nobody ever knew Kitty Marion’s
true name. She had been born in Westphalia, Germany, and when she was
fifteen her father had whipped her once too often and she had run away
to England, where eventually she had headed a turn at a music hall.
The London slums had aroused Kitty’s social conscience, and she had
abandoned her own career to enroll with Mrs. Pankhurst in the suffrage
crusade, becoming one of the most determined of her followers. When put
in jail she set fire to her cell, chewed a hole in her mattress, broke
the window, and upon being released threw bricks at Newcastle Post
Office. Seven times she went to prison, enduring four hunger strikes and
two hundred and thirty-two compulsory feedings, biting the hand that
forcibly fed her. Since it was distasteful to the Government to have any
suffragette die in prison, Kitty, under the so-called Cat-and-Mouse Act,
was once released to a nursing home until she should have strength
enough to return to confinement. Friends visited her there, exchanged
clothes with her, and she escaped. On another occasion the Bishop of
London personally begged her to give up her struggle. At the outbreak of
war, the Pankhurst forces hustled her over to America rather than have
her run the almost certain risk of deportation or internment.
Selling _The Suffragette_ on the streets of London had been part of the
initiation which duchesses and countesses and other noble auxiliaries to
the Pankhurst cause had had to undergo. Kitty had stood side by side
with them. Since we had so experienced a veteran ready for service we
began to offer the _Review_ on the sidewalks of New York. Our more sober
supporters objected because they considered it undignified. But men and
women from here, there, and everywhere passed through the commercial
centers of New York, and this was a real means of reaching them.
All of us took a hand, but Kitty was the only one who stood the test of
years. Strong, stoutish, tow-headed, her blue eyes bright and keen in
spite of being well on in her fifties, she became a familiar sight.
Morning, afternoon, and until midnight—workdays, Sundays, and
holidays—through storms of winter and summer, she tried every street
corner from Macy’s to the Grand Central Terminal. But her favorite stand
was Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, right at Times Square. In
her own words she was enjoying “the most fascinating, the most comic,
the most tragic, living, breathing movie in the world.”
Many people still think I must be Kitty Marion. Everywhere they say to
me, “I saw you twenty years ago outside the Metropolitan Opera House.
You’ve changed so I wouldn’t know you.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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