Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.Sanger, Margaret
History
Margaret Sanger: an autobiography.
Sanger, Margaret
Birth control -- United States -- Biography; Sanger, Margaret, 1879-1966
Many of the buyers of the _Review_ had been disappointed because it
contained no practical information. “I have your magazine. All in there
is true but what I want to know is how not to have another baby next
year.” Thousands of letters were sent out explaining that the _Review_
could not print birth control information. Nevertheless, some of the
appeals, particularly from women who lived on lonely, remote farms, were
so heart-rending that I simply had to furnish them copies of _Family
Limitation_, though urging them to go to their physicians.
Every once in a while I had a telephone message to come down to the Post
Office at an appointed hour. I did so, wondering and uncertain. Was the
interview to be about the _Review_, _Family Limitation_, or what?
The official in the legal department whom I always saw, fatherly though
not old, used to say, “Now, Mrs. Sanger, you’re still violating the law
by sending your pamphlet through the mails. If you keep this up they’ll
put you in jail again.”
I objected, “The Government and I had this out years ago. The Federal
case was dismissed.”
“It never can be settled while we get these protests.”
To prove the Post Office was not having such an easy time of it, he
pulled open a drawer and inside was a little pile of pamphlets and
letters from religious fanatics, self-constituted moralists of one kind
or another, women as well as men, who had received their copies and then
complained. He showed me envelopes addressed to the Governor of New
York, to the President of the United States. I studied the handwriting
to see whether I could recognize it as identical with any that had come
to me. Perhaps the postmark was Wichita, Kansas; there could not be many
from a town of that size, and presently I remembered the request. It was
a shattering thing to see that drawer. I had been earnestly trying to
aid despairing mothers, and had been betrayed.
“Here’s this proof against you, Mrs. Sanger. What are you going to do
about it?”
“Nothing. As long as these women ask me to help them, I’m going to do
so.”
I intended to continue to the limit of my resources whether or not I had
help from those whom I had originally counted upon. In order to make
women’s clubs feel the need as I did I had often gone miles at my own
expense to present a topic that had taken me years to prepare and then
had had to express it to the accompaniment of the clatter of dishes or
the stirring of spoons in after-dinner coffees. The members had seemed
to have their minds on hot rolls or had been fidgeting to get on to the
bridge tables. Sometimes a few, who had come to dabble in
sentimentality, had experienced a pleasant emotional response, “Oh, the
poor things,” but that had been as far as it had gone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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