Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.Sanger, Margaret
History
Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.
Sanger, Margaret
Birth control -- United States -- Biography; Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966
It was a challenge. We hurried over to Third Avenue and for twenty
dollars refurnished the office. The loss of the contributors’ cards,
however, was irreparable. I could never, in spite of my best efforts,
recover either them or the missing funds.
The strain to finance the _Review_ was so great that after June no more
issues came out until December—the printer trusted us as far as he was
able from month to month. Often the bank account was down to the last
hundred dollars, just enough to hold it open. Yet it might be necessary
to mail letters; the call might be urgent. I was hesitant to spend that
last amount, but I believed faith could bring anything to realization.
Invariably when I operated on that principle and did what I was impelled
to do, money poured in perhaps ten times over. Always we cleaned the
slate at the end of the year.
This was one of the periods of getting roots in and waiting for the
organism to grow, of quiescence before the new beginning and quickening.
I kept going, conscious that with every act I was progressing in accord
with a universal law of evolution—moral evolution but evolution just the
same.
This belief seemed at times to force locked doors. It enabled me to
dictate hundreds of letters, to interview dozens of people, to debate,
or to lecture, all in twenty-four hours. Day after day I attended parlor
meetings, night after night open forums, returning home too tired to
eat, too excited to sleep. Frequently at seven in the morning the
telephone started ringing; somebody wanted to catch me before I left the
house.
For the purpose of having a more solid and substantial basis on which to
operate the _Review_, the New York Women’s Publishing Company was
incorporated in May, 1918; shares were sold at ten dollars each. The
women who gave both monetary and moral support were the wives of
business men who advised them how to conduct this organization in the
proper fashion. Each month Mary Knoblauch opened her charming apartment
for the regular meetings any corporation was required to hold.
The movement can never be disassociated in my mind from Frances
Ackermann, who, at the suggestion of Mabel Spinney of Greenwich House,
came to us as Treasurer. She was exceptionally able and was soon one of
our bulwarks, remaining with us eleven years. Her family was wrapped up
in orthodoxy—church and Wall Street and the status quo in politics—but
Frances’ interests were much broader, and she was not content to lead
the usual type of life ordained by her social and financial standing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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