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Category Archives: Sex & Sexuality
Remembering Joan of Arc
Posted on May 30, 2019 by amymcools
Joan of Arc by Amy Cools, about 1998. My mental image of her then was influenced by popular iconography and films, much of it which, as I did, portrayed her as tall, fair-skinned, and light-haired (think Ingrid Bergman's 1948 film portrayal). In real life, she was somewhat short, dark-eyed with black hair, and had a sun-tanned, athletic body that, despite their describing it as attractive, aroused no lust in her fellow soldiers. Perhaps this resulted from their idealization of her as too godly for mere mortals to touch. Or perhaps, as I surmise, her indifference to sex with men was too manifest to give rise to that kind of chemistry. My drawing does, I think, manifest my youthful idea of her as a lovely tomboy, as an active, confident girl was then miscalled. Joan's wearing the white shift which she wore to the stake and holding her cross made of two sticks tied together, which a sympathetic bystander quickly fashioned to comfort her on her way to execution
My fascination with Joan of Arc, born sometime in 1412 and put to death by fire on May 30th, 1431, is long-standing, beginning in my girlhood. Joan, as you likely know, is the French national heroine who fought to remove medieval France from English rule, whose exploits turned the tide and guaranteed France's ultimate victory in the Hundred Year's War.
She was the daughter of prosperous peasants in Domrémy, France. On a self-proclaimed mission from God to restore French rule to the rightful heir of the House of Valois, she convinced the local baron, military leaders, and eventually the crown prince to put her in charge of the dispirited French army, despite the fact that she was illiterate, militarily inexperienced, and a teenage girl.
By the time Joan reached the Dauphin, as the French crown prince was called, the French had long been in the habit of losing battles, even when they had the upper hand in numbers and defensive position, often because they were unable to cohere as a unified fighting force. French society was still feudal, highly stratified by class, and the army was no exception. Common soldiers were ill-equipped and underused, mistrusted and despised by aristocratic and wealthy knights jealous of their own superior rank. They could not bring themselves to give common soldiers opportunities for a share in the military glories of conquest. So French armies, fractured by class with everyone out for themselves, lost time after time to the more pragmatic and unified English forces. Troops of English longbowmen, for example, were made of up common soldiers highly valued for their strength and skill, and the English army made full use of them, to the detriment of the French. When Joan came along, a peasant in direct communication with Saint Micheal the Archangel, patron saint of French knights, she served as the much-needed unifier of French sympathies. Knights and commoners alike were united by their love of her and what she represented, and they began to fight as one, an army made holy and therefore equal: the aristocracy and chivalric order may have been respecters of persons, but the God who called Joan to lead them in their sacred quest was not.
Joan also whipped the army into shape, demanding that they train as hard as she did. She banned gambling, swearing, and prostitution from the camps, and required that soldiers attend religious services regularly. These reforms served the double purpose of further unifying soldiers through daily rituals that helped internalize their sense of holy, shared purpose, and of reducing the opportunities for alcoholism, venereal disease, and other ravages of hard living that could weaken her forces. She also prohibited raiding and pillaging which further unified French sympathies, especially of the common people and the countryside who had long suffered the predations of marauding English and French soldiers.
Joan of Arc, ca. 1450-1500, oil on parchment, artist unknown, public domain
Once she had raised the Seige of Orléans, drove the English from fort after fort, and led the Dauphin to be crowned King at Reims, her hawkish mission fell victim to what she considered dithering and intrigue, and what Charles VII considered diplomacy to save lives and capital. As Joan saw it, aristocrats and corrupt clerics, still jealous of their own social standing and opportunities for power either as leaders in the newly strengthened French order or as secret English collaborators, blocked her next great project: to deliver Paris from English control. She relieved her frustration and boredom by leading a series of minor skirmishes against the English, and was finally captured at one of these. She was handed over to an ecclesiastical court, led by French clerics symphathetic to the English cause, so they try her as heretic, 'proving' her in league with Satanic fiends, as the great English playwright William Shakespeare portrays her in Henry V. This would discredit her godly mission, her power to unite the French, and her assistance to Charles VII's cause, thereby undermining his royal legitimacy. She was burned at the stake in Rouen, having accomplished the first part of her mission, the liberation of Orléans and the coronation of her King, and setting in motion the second part, the complete liberation of France from English rule, at only nineteen years old.
But it was clear to both French and English that the 'holy' court that condemned Joan was led and manipulated by political actors, not by men of God whose chief concern was to protect the Church from heresy. About twenty years after her death, the victorious French king Charles VII, who owed his crown and the reclamation of his kingdom to Joan, was finally reminded of his debt of gratitude by the realization that his hold on power was threatened if his rule was the result of the machinations of a heretic. A trial of rehabilitation and nullification commenced in the mid-1400's, which formally vindicated her and proved to their satisfaction her mission came from God. Almost five hundred years after her death, Joan of Arc was proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church.
Joan of Arc statue in Paris, France, photo 2015 by Amy Cools. This stylized depiction of her, in that Art Deco style I so love, makes me think of a green flame: green for the fields in which she roamed as a child shepherd, flame for her passionate intensity. Her attempt to liberate Paris by force from English rule was put to a stop by Charles VII's diplomatic maneuverings, as well as by a wound she suffered in the failed assault. Paris was recovered by the French only a few years later by a means this inveterate warrior dismissed as a sign of weakness: by treaty. I believe, by the way, the fire she was wont to ignite in the hearts of soldiers also flamed in the breasts of the liberators of Paris five hundred years later in WWII.
I was religious as a child and a teenager, and admired her then as a Catholic saint. By my late teens, I had left religious belief behind, but my admiration for her has only grown and deepened over the years. She became something more to me, more rich, more mysterious, more complex. I think of her now as a native genius, with no other language or context in which to express, to herself and others, her political and military insights than the religion which infused her life and the life of the lives of her fellow countrypeople. And the way she was able to baffle, rebut, and defeat her interrogators at the show trial by those determined to discredit her before burning her at the stake remains a marvel. Her intellect was such that, despite her illiteracy and lack of formal education, she was able to see right through the legal deceptions of her judges and prosecutors, avoiding every verbal trap and pitfall they set for her, turning their attacks and arguments right back on them.
In preparation for this anniversary of her death, I've immersed myself in writing and art about Joan. Besides various histories, I've recently re-read Mark Twain's historical novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which was recommended to me by my devoutly Catholic grandmother. I've read it many times over the last two decades. It was Twain's own favorite of all his novels; he proudly announced he spent twelve years researching it and two years writing it, which he did for no other novel. While Joan is as full of comical scenes and quips as any of his other works, it's a tender book, channeling his love for his own wife and daughters, with much less sarcasm and much more earnest, overtly expressed sorrow and compassion than anything else he ever wrote. His Joan is suffused with the sweetness, purity, and honesty he perceived much of in young girls and too little of in the rest of the world. Twain's ideas about young girls and women are, I think, hyper-sentimental, naive, even dehumanizing to the extent that his ideal of female virtue did not include the full range of human reason and passion. He, like most in his era, in Joan's time, and in fact, Joan herself, fetishized female virginity. But I love his account of Joan's brave life and tragic death nonetheless, just as we can be forgivingly fond of the quaint idealizations of our fathers, uncles, and grandfathers of the sweet purity of womanhood while secretly rolling our eyes.
Drawing of Joan of Arc by Clément de Fauquembergue, as a doodle on the margin of the protocol of the parliament of Paris, dated May 10th, 1429. It's the only contemporary image of her
Unlike Twain's tender ideal of Victorian-style womanhood and the Church's monumental Saint, I find the complex, flesh-and-blood Joan, full of marvelous virtues, deep flaws, incredible natural abilities, inexplicable quirks, and ordinary human qualities, much more interesting. I admire her courage, audacity, bravery, energy, savviness, intelligence, trust in her own abilities, and independence of spirit. I'm disturbed and even at times repelled by her single-minded, sometimes bloodthirsty willingness to sacrifice so many human lives for her cause; her insistence that those things going on in her own mind were the absolute truth and must be believed and obeyed or else; her absolute allegiance to the divine right of kings as established by male bloodline (especially given that many of the French preferred the less ruthless, less feudal, more legally scrupulous style of English rule); and her hyper-religiosity which impelled her to write letters calling on others to put Muslims and religious dissenters to the sword.
The real Joan is such a compendium of attributes and mysteries that she's become an icon and an inspiration to perhaps the diverse set of people I can think of:
Joan of Arc is a working person's icon. She's a self-made woman who got her start working with her hands in the fields, and given very little formal education. But with her own common sense, strong sense of self, and enterprising spirit, she pulled herself up by her bootstraps more quickly and to a greater height than nearly anyone else in history. She began as an illiterate peasant in a feudal society and ended up chief of the armies of France before she reached twenty, and after her death reached even greater heights as a Catholic saint, a military legend, and France's eternal national hero.
Joan of Arc is a religious icon. She claimed an intimate knowledge of the will of God through the voices of his emissaries he sent to her, St Michael the Archangel, St Catherine, and St Margaret. She's a treasured if difficult icon for Catholicism: she claimed that God spoke to her directly through heavenly messengers, even as the Church considered itself the divinely-appointed sole intercessor between humanity and heaven. Though she presented a challenge to Church hierarchy and to the Pauline conception of women as the silent, submissive inheritors of Eve's great sin, Joan was re-reconciled to the very Church that had condemned her, for a variety of theological as well as (I think history makes clear) political reasons. (Re-reconciled because her first formal ecclesiastical examination at Poitiers, to establish the truth of her mission before she was allowed to meet the Dauphin, declared that she was devout, orthodox in religion, a true virgin, and free of deceit). Though she remained passionately loyal to the Church and hated religious dissent, she also embodied the independent spirit that inspired the Protestant revolution, centered on the conviction that God can, and does, speak directly to us in our hearts and through Scripture, no earthly intercessors required.
World War I lithograph poster, 1918. It's rather a strange one, using the image of Joan to encourage women to help the war effort by attending to their domestic concerns; the US military still banned women from fighting. But Joan was all the rage then: Twain's thoroughly researched novel, together with other renewed scholarly interest in her over the previous fifty years, made the story of her life much more widely known, and the Church had recently beatified her. She was made a saint two years after this poster was published.
Joan of Arc is a military icon. She loved fighting and spurned any diplomacy beyond plans to move the English out of France as quickly as possible. Though she initially wept at the sight of soldiers wounded and dead as a result of her aggressive tactic of direct assault, she continued to lead every charge in her favored, necessarily casualty-heavy way. Her rhetoric in letters and speech, though embellished with appeals to Christian forbearance and mercy, was violent, filled with threats to chop off heads and put to the sword all who did not obey the will of God as she proclaimed it to be. She inspired deep and enthusiastic devotion in her soldiers, even in her most hard-bitten, most skeptical generals, and quickly achieved a mythic stature among her countrypeople that even General Douglas MacArthur could only envy.
Joan of Arc is a queer icon. She was a cross-dresser who disdained sex with men. Her first simple style of male garb was a practical measure for a soldier who needed to move freely and for a woman often surrounded by men in a culture that regarded single women without escort as fair sexual prey. But over time, as she first encountered the delights of elegant and expensive clothing, showered upon her as gifts of admiration and gratitude, she became quite the clothes horse. She saw no problem with this: medieval sensibilities often conflated holiness with material richness just as the Old Testament did, and God, his favorites, saints, and angels were almost invariably portrayed in the richest of finery. But her enemies mocked her adopted style of wearing silken hose and richly embellished garments in fine fabrics as proof she was as vain, conceited, and driven by lust for personal fame and riches as they had always said. Another reputed French visionary, a young shepherd boy being groomed as Joan's more convenient, less pugnacious replacement as saintly advisor to the king, blamed her capture on her having fallen prey to vanity and luxury. They claim that she was captured because of her finery, pulled off her horse by the fancy little cape she had grown fond of wearing.
Jeanne d'Arc by Albert Lynch, engraving from Figaro Illustre magazine, 1903, public domain
Joan of Arc is an art and fashion icon. Her exploits, her cross-dressing, her independence of spirit, and her short hair inspired centuries of creative people to capture this wondrously unique individual on canvas, in brass and wood, and in textiles. And songs, poems, stories, films, plays, and countless other forms of creative expression emphasize this, that, or the other facet of her varied and mysterious character. And the Joan-style, French-invented bobbed haircut of the 1920's, the same decade which saw Joan's canonization and women's obtaining the full legal right to vote in the United States and Britain (it took France another twenty years), became a potent symbol, a public declaration that each cropped head recognized that:
Joan of Arc is the feminist icon, par excellence. She bested men in daring and stamina on the battlefield, in intellect time after time in the courtroom, in keeping her own counsel and determining her own destiny despite opposition from family, church, and society, in self-preservation from her would-be prison rapists, and in the courage she displayed on the day of her death. And yet, as she charmingly boasted near the beginning of her final trials, she was confident that she a better seamstress and spinner than just about any other woman! She wore armor, pretty dresses, rough men's clothes, and over-the-top finery as it suited her. She sang, rode horses, adventured, communed with God and angels, told men and other women what to do, and drove thousands of people to distraction wondering what to make of this extraordinary, inspiring, difficult, inexplicable, and unforgettable person.
*Listen to the podcast version here or on Google Play, or subscribe on iTunes
It's my dream and my plan, as soon as resources and time allow, to follow the life and ideas of Joan of Arc in France. Stay tuned, though it might be quite a while, and in the meantime, here are some great sources for learning more about this marvelous woman:
Ditié de Jeanne d'Arc (Song of Joan of Arc) ~ by Christine de Pizan, ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977), trans. L. Shopkow
Henry VI, Part I ~ by William Shakespeare, 1591 via Open Source Shakespeare (website)
Jeanne d'Arc ~ by T. Douglas Murray, New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1902 (excerpts detailing her trial)
Joan of Arc ~ by Beckett Graham and Susan Vollenweider, The History Chicks podcast, episode 51
Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured ~ by Kathryn Harrison, New York: Doubleday, 2014
Joan of Arc ~ 1948 film directed by Victor Fleming, screenplay by Maxwell Anderson
Joan of Arc: A History ~ by Helen Castor, New York: HarperCollins, 2015
Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint ~ by Stephen Wesley Richey, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003
The Passion of Joan of Arc ~ 1928 film, screenplay by Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc ~ by Mark Twain, 1896
The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc ~ by Daniel Crown for The Awl, Apr 3, 2012.
Saint Joan ~ 1957 film adapted George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Otto Preminger
Posted in Feminism, Happy Birthday!, Religion, Sex & Sexuality, Written by Amy Cools	| Tagged Carl Theodor Dreyer, Christine de Pisan, Daniel Crown, feminism, France, General Douglas MacArthur, Hundred Year's War, Joan of Arc, Leonard Cohen, Liberation of Paris, Mark Twain, Medieval History, Patron Saint, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Queer Icon, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc, World War I, World War II	| Leave a comment
The Bodies of Men Who Have Perished: Reading the Iliad in the 1980s, by L.D. Burnett
Posted on November 7, 2017 by amymcools
"Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus," Gavin Hamilton, ca. 1763
Queer love lies at the heart of the Iliad as a work of art.
This was not the claim of my fall quarter Western Culture prof, though he certainly tried to explain the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos, and how that fit into Greek ideas of manhood, and how it fit (or didn't) with our own ideas of sexuality. I don't think he used the word "queer," but he did emphasize that to call those two heroes "a gay couple" or "gay lovers" would be both anachronistic and inattentive to the complexities and resonances of the intimacy between them. Or something like that.
But "queer" as a word that points to a body of scholarly theory and "queer" as a word reclaimed by folk whose intimate relationships, whose inner and intertwined lives, don't fit neatly within simple binaristic categorizations – that's a fitting enough word for a consideration of Patroklos and Achilles and the Iliad and the canon and the culture of the 1980s.
What struck me on this re-read of the Iliad was the distinctive portrayal of Achilleus's grief. Many warriors fall in these few days of battle, and many Greek heroes, and Trojan heroes too, lose men dear to them – perhaps as dear, indeed, as Patroklos was to Achilles. Warriors on both sides are smitten with sorrow to see their brothers in arms fall, and warriors on both sides fight fiercely to retrieve the bodies of their fallen comrades – though no battle rages as fiercely or as long as the battle for Patroklos's body.
And when that broken body is returned to the tents of Achilles – there grief pours forth from different, deeper streams. It is all the grief of brothers in arms, and more. It is the grief of a lover for not only the life, but the very body, of his beloved.
Achilleus's anguish over the broken body of Patroklos is compelling. In a way, I suppose, it is echoed in Priam's grief as he later pleads for Hector's body. But I think rather Priam's grief harmonizes with Achilleus's sorrow – it is grief in a different register, or maybe a different key altogether, and they share but one note in common between them: an unfathomable tenderness toward the body of their own fallen warrior, beloved, though loved in different ways.
Here is how Achilles mourned, and what he feared:
Peleus' son led the thronging chat of their lamentation
and laid his manslaughtering hands over the chest of his dear friend
with outbursts of incessant grief. As some great bearded lion
when some man, a deer hunter, has stolen his cubs away from him
out of the close wood; the lion comes back too late, and is anguished,
and turns into many valleys quartering after the man's trail
on the chance of finding him, and taken with bitter anger;
so he, groaning heavily, spoke out to the Myrmidons….
So speaking brilliant Achilleus gave orders to his companions
to set a great cauldron across the fire, so that with all speed
they could wash away the clotted blood from Patroklos….(XVIII, 316-323, 343-345)
The poem goes on to describe in detail the tender care Achilles and his companions take in cleaning and preparing Patroklos body for his eventual funeral.
Yet no mortal effort can overcome decay. The body of the beautiful, the beloved one, his spirit shorn from the world of the living, will see corruption, Achilles fears, before he has a chance to return from avenging Patroklos's death. And he is not resigned.
His mother cannot comfort him, but she can help him.
Thetis, the water nymph, the immortal, does two things for her son in his grief: she commissions for him immortal armor from the Olympian forge of Hephaistos, and when she returns with the enchanted shield – that immortal aesthetic object, art that literally captures the full round of earthly life, a frieze of figures in constant motion, the whole world of human meaning and meaning-making to live on and on past the death of the hero who will bear it on his shoulders – she gives her son what aid she can in caring for the body of his friend.
Achilles, after receiving the armor, tells his mother,
I am sadly afraid,
during this time, for the warlike son of Menoitios
that flies might get into the wounds beaten by bronze in his body
and breed worms in them, and these make foul the body, seeing
that the life is killed in him, and that all his flesh may be rotted."(XIX, 23-27)
Achilles' love for Patroklos does not transcend the burdens of embodiment. This a feature that some other readers, maybe from another time or maybe now, might see as a great flaw. But in Achilles I see a mother's son grieving for his lover, and like his mother, I find in this no cause for reproach.
In turn the goddess Thetis the silver-footed answered him:
"My child, no longer let these things be a care in your mind.
I shall endeavor to drive from him the swarming and fierce things,
those flies, which feed upon the bodies of men who have perished….
Go then and summon into assembly the fighting Achaians,
and unsay your anger against Agamemnon, shepherd of the people,
and arm at once for the fighting, and put your war strength upon you."
She spoke so, and drove the strength of great courage into him;
and meanwhile through the nostrils of Patroklos she distilled
ambrosia and red nectar, so that his flesh might not spoil. (XIX, 28-39)
Ambrosia is an Olympian gift, the drink of the immortals – but that was not the gift we talked about when we discussed this work in reading group in the 1980s. Instead, we talked about that shield, about how the poet celebrated art and storytelling as something immortal, with the shield of Achilles a stand-in for the poet's work itself: a made thing through which life immortal moves. That was our focus: understanding the meaning of the shield of Achilles.
But the years during which Stanford freshmen were asked to read the Iliad were the very years when AIDS was ravaging queer communities, sweeping away queer lives (and hemophiliacs' lives, and needle-sharing heroin addicts' lives and unsuspecting partners' lives) in an ever-advancing tidal wave of utter destruction. Imagine the keening grief of Achilles magnified by the millions. Imagine the great immortal shield, the Solace of Art, clattering to the ground, unfinished and undone, because the artists – the writers, the painters, the set designers, the actors, the sculptors, the dancers, the poets, the singers, the writers of songs – were literally wasting away. Often they were mourned by the friends, their comrades in arms, their partners in love. But often they died, as Patroklos did, and Achilles too, far away from home – disowned, despised, abandoned.
"David Kirby on his deathbed, Ohio, 1990," Therese Frare / LIFE
We were reading this text against that background, but I'm not sure how many of us made the connection. At the time, I did not. Seeing they do not see…
Now, though, every time I teach the second half of the U.S. history survey, I talk at length about the AIDS crisis. I talk about the murderous neglect of the Reagan administration, and the vile hatefulness pouring forth from many key leaders on the religious Right, who called AIDS a punishment from God and a fate that gays deserved. I talk about how many in mainstream American culture, out of prejudice and fear, had turned their backs on their own fellow citizens, and how AIDS activists and allies incessant advocacy and hospice training and political work and lobbying and protesting and constant painful heartrending public appeals to shared humanity and common decency combined to force the nation to take heed, to take care, to pour research and resources into finding a cure, a treatment, a ray of hope.
I tell my students that in the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS was seen as a sure death sentence, and many saw it as a sentence that its sufferers deserved. But now there is preventative treatment, and treatment for symptoms, and maybe even hope of a cure. And on the final exam, every semester, I have one or two students who tell me some version of, "I'm gay [or, I'm queer, or, I'm a LGBTQ ally] and I didn't know anything about this history. Thank you so much for teaching this. We didn't cover the AIDS crisis in high school."
And at first I think, How could you not cover the AIDS crisis in a high school U.S. history class? On the other hand, how could you begin do it justice?
And who am I to judge? I read Achilles mourning for Patroklos, lover for beloved, and my thoughts turned to abstractions like Art and Immortality, Great Books and Canonicity, when matters of much greater import were at stake.
Learn, and live – live. There were too many who did not.
This piece was originally published at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Blog
L.D. Burnett received her Ph.D. in Humanities (History of Ideas) from the University of Texas at Dallas (2015), where she is currently employed as the 2017-2018 Teaching Fellow in History. Her book, Canon Wars: The 1980s Western Civ Debates at Stanford and the Triumph of Neoliberalism in Higher Education, is under contract with University of North Carolina Press. (Bio credit: S-USIH)
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*All views and opinions expressed by guest writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ordinary Philosophy's editors and publishers
Posted in History of Ideas, Sex & Sexuality, Written by Guests	| Tagged Achilles and Patroklos, AIDS crisis, Greek ideas of manhood, L.D. Burnett, Queer love, The Iliad	| Leave a comment
O.P. Recommends: Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner, by Ross Douthat
'No doubt what Hefner offered America somebody else would have offered in his place, and the changes he helped hasten would have come rushing in without him.
But in every way that mattered he made those changes worse, our culture coarser and crueler and more sterile than liberalism or feminism or freedom of speech required….
Now that death has taken him, we should examine our own sins. Liberals should ask why their crusade for freedom and equality found itself with such a captain, and what his legacy says about their cause. Conservatives should ask how their crusade for faith and family and community ended up so Hefnerian itself — with a conservative news network that seems to have been run on Playboy Mansion principles and a conservative party that just elected a playboy as our president.'
Read this article in full in the New York Times' Opinion Page for Sep 30th, 2017
~ One thing I'd like to make clear: I don't at all endorse the ageism I discern in many of the articles I've read that are critical of Hefner, including this one. So many of these writers imply that Hefner's sexuality was distasteful, at least in part, because of the physical attributes associated with aging. For example, Douthat mocks Hefner's 'papery skin' and 'decrepitude' as if they were among those things the reader should be disgusted by. I don't believe it's any more justified to stereotype older people as it is to stereotype women based on narrow conceptions of what desirable or likable people should look like.
Posted in Ethics & Morals, Feminism, Politics, Reviews & Recommendations, Sex & Sexuality, Written by Amy Cools, Written by Guests	| Tagged conservatism, Donald Trump, Flesh Peddling, Fox News, Free Speech, Gender Stereotypes, Hugh Hefner, liberalism, Objectification of Women, Playboy Mansion, Playboy Philosophy, Ross Douthat	| 1 Comment
Castor, Helen. Joan of Arc: A History. New York: HarperCollins, 2015
Crown, Daniel. 'The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc'. The Awl, Apr 3, 2012.
De Pizan, Christine. Ditié de Jeanne d'Arc (Song of Joan of Arc), ed. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1977), trans. L. Shopkow
Graham, Beckett and Susan Vollenweider. 'Joan of Arc', episode 51 of The History Chicks podcast
Harrison, Kathryn. Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured. New York: Doubleday, 2014
Joan of Arc, 1948 film directed by Victor Fleming, screenplay by Maxwell Anderson
Murray, T. Douglas. Jeanne d'Arc. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co, 1902 (excerpts detailing her trial)
The Passion of Joan of Arc. 1928 film, screenplay by Joseph Delteil and Carl Theodor Dreyer, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
Richey, Stephen Wesley. Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003
Saint Joan, 1957 film adapted George Bernard Shaw's play Saint Joan, screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Otto Preminger
Shakespeare, William. Henry VI, Part I, 1591. Via Open Source Shakespeare (website)
Twain, Mark. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1896.
Posted in Feminism, Happy Birthday!, Religion, Sex & Sexuality, Written by Amy Cools	| Tagged Carl Theodor Dreyer, Christine de Pisan, Crossdresser, Daniel Crown, feminism, General Douglas MacArthur, Hundred Year's War, Joan of Arc, Leonard Cohen, Liberation of Paris, Mark Twain, Medieval History, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Queer Icon, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc, World War I, World War II	| 5 Comments
Margaret Sanger in the San Francisco Bay Area, California
Posted on April 2, 2017 by amymcools
Scottish Rite Masonic Temple mosaic, above the doorway of what's now the Regency Center, San Francisco
Fairly early on in my research for my history of ideas series on Margaret Sanger in New York City, I discover that she delivered one of her more famous addresses here in Oakland. Practically just around the corner from where I live, in fact!
So I've long had the idea of doing a follow-up Sanger project here in the San Francisco Bay Area, certain I'd find she's been here more than once. That turns out to be the case. And not only do I discover that she visited here several times, I find that the excellent library at the University of California at Berkeley has some great resources for filling in some gaps in my information about Sanger in NYC. So, this story will have two parts: the first part is about sites associated with Sanger here, and the second part is about some discoveries I make in U.C. Berkeley's archives following up on two NYC sites.
Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, now the Regency Center, at Sutter and Van Ness in San Francisco, CA
Stairway and elevator at the Regency Center, formerly the Scottish Rite Temple at Sutter and Van Ness, San Francisco
I: Sanger in Oakland and San Francisco
Friday, March 31st, 2017
I head first to San Francisco, a quick and easy trip on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit System, our subway/ell) across the Bay, and take a pleasant walk on this spring day from Montgomery Street station east, first along Post through Union Square, then on Sutter. December 16th, 1928, Sanger spoke at the Scottish Rite Hall in San Francisco, at Sutter and Van Ness. The Scottish Rite Masonic Temple moved into its new quarters in the early 1960's, and this building became the Regency Center, a multi-purpose venue. In fact, I was here just a few years ago when I saw John Cale, one of my very favorite musical artists of all time, perform in the ballroom, but Sanger likely spoke in the Social Hall. It's also likely she delivered more or less the same speech she delivered at Oakland Civic Auditorium three days later, the story of that speech will follow below. Perhaps the speeches and corrections she scribbled onto the speech, which I link to here, constitute the differences between her addresses at the San Francisco and Oakland venues.
Small upper room in the Scottish Rite Temple, now the Regency Center, San Francisco
I write to people who manage and organize events at the Regency Center but am unable to line up a day to meet soon that will work with all of our schedules.
But since I have this free afternoon on a glorious spring day, I head over anyway, in case I luck out and end up there at a good time. Turns out, the very helpful man I find here, who's in charge of setting up events, regretfully tells me there's just too much going on for me to head upstairs and poke around to the rooms where she may have spoken; various contemporary sources designate the venue as the Scottish Rite 'Hall' and 'Auditorium', so the exact site is unclear. So I take photos in the places he allows me to wander: the hallway, the main stairway, and a meeting room just off the main landing now converted into a small bar.
About 22 years earlier, in August of 1916, Sanger wrote to her friends Charles and Bessie Drysdale, 'In San Francisco [on a birth control lecture tour] I had a collapse, and was three days in bed under medical care, but recovered sufficiently to hold six meetings.' As you may recall, Sanger suffered from recurrent tubercular infections, and from time to time they made her quite ill and exhausted. I have yet to find a record of specific locations she visited or stayed in San Francisco on that trip. Sanger didn't mention her time in Oakland in this letter, though she may have meant to include the greater Bay Area when she said 'San Francisco', as visitors often do. Since she delivered her Oakland speech only three days after this San Francisco tour, this may have been one of the six meetings she spoke of.
So I return to Oakland to follow in Sanger's footsteps there.
Margaret Sanger Hotel Oakland appearance, Oakland Tribune, Thu Jun 15, 1916, evening edition, front page. For the full article, click here. The drawing looks nothing like Sanger, and what's up with the silhouette of celery? Yes, I know it's meant to be a vase…
Hotel Oakland Ballroom, vintage postcard via Hotel Oakland Village website
On June 15, 1916, Sanger gave a speech in the ballroom of the Hotel Oakland at 270 13th St. I don't find a transcript of this speech, but I do find a newspaper article about this event, which includes a summary of its main points as well as a review. The speech was well received by the audience, according to Gene Baker, writing for the Oakland Tribune. He compared Sanger favorably to Emma Goldman, Sanger's one-time friend and ally from whom, truth be told, Sanger co-opted the mantle of birth control advocate-in-chief. As Baker commented in his article, Sanger was much more traditionally 'feminine' than Goldman in appearance, 'slight' and prettily dressed. Sanger was both a committed sex-positivist and a straight woman and saw no contradictions between her feminist convictions and in making herself attractive to men. Baker also described Sanger as speaking with intensity (which indicates she was feeling better since her collapse in San Francisco) and with scientific coldness. Perhaps she did convey a sense of scientific detachment, given her habit of buttressing her calls for action with a barrage of facts and statistics, or perhaps he perceived her keen grasp of the issues and her memory for detail as unfeminine and therefore 'cold.'
Baker also wrote of her outspoken opposition to Theodore Roosevelt's beliefs about childbearing in this speech; she frequently published rebukes and rebuttals to the President's public stances against birth control and in favor of large families. (Baker mentioned that she spoke out against Roosevelt in San Francisco as well.) Both Sanger and Roosevelt were eugenicists but of different types: Sanger believed in negative eugenics, in curing human ills through having less children, especially if the parents were ill, disabled, or too poor to bring up well-nourished, well-educated, and well-housed children, and Roosevelt believed in positive eugenics, improving the human race through intelligent and hardworking people having as many children as possible.
Hotel Oakland, now Hotel Oakland Village senior citizen community
Hotel Oakland Village main lounge, Oakland, CA
Hotel Oakland, vintage postcard via Hotel Oakland Village website
Hotel Oakland Historical Plaque, Oakland, CA
The Hotel Oakland, which opened as a luxury hotel on December 23rd, 1912, is now a senior community residence. Its grand edifice is little changed, but its garden is no longer so sumptuous and much of its interior is much plainer, having been stripped of its chandeliers and fancy furniture and painted plain white, though the lounge ceiling is painted a lovely antique-gold color. I sign in at the desk and walk around the first floor, greeting each person I see with a hello, a smile, and a nod, everyone is friendly and welcoming, and no one questions my presence. I take photos freely on the ground floor except in the large back room converted into an activity and physical therapy area, which, it so happens, appears to be the former ballroom I seek. I ask the person who works there if I may take pictures; she's a Spanish speaker, and I ask in that language (unforgivably clumsily, given that I'm a California native and I should be more adept) if I may take pictures. She explains that the person that could authorize this won't be back in until Monday, so I depart. As much as I am historically nosy, I make it my practice never to infringe on the territory of working people. They have enough to worry about without wondering if they could get in trouble on my behalf.
I do, however, take photos of the front lobby, in full view of everyone there who appears not the least concerned with my presence except to return my smile when they happen to catch my eye. Most of the residents are Chinese. This is no surprise since the Hotel Oakland Village, as it's now named, borders Chinatown, and like the neighborhood in general, it is family-oriented, with visitors of all ages coming and going, often taking the elderly residents for local outings, such infirmities as they have lovingly supported by wheelchairs, walkers, arms, and hands. The parks in this neighborhood often contain large groups, sometimes very large, of older people going through the graceful, slow, deliberate movements of Tai Chi. It's likely they include many of the residents of this hotel. The sight of these people, something like colorful wildflowers waving in the wind, something like windmills if windmills were endowed with personalities, intention, and rich history and could move deliberately to music, warms my heart on my morning walks.
Oakland's Chinatown at the time of the Hotel Oakland's heyday; many of these old houses stand today. This photo is on the wall of the Oakland Hotel Village main hallway
Margaret Sanger Speeches, Announcement for Oakland and S.F, in the Oakland Tribune, Sun Dec 16, 1928
Next, I visit the Oakland Civic Auditorium, later called the Kaiser Convention Center, also just a few blocks from my house, near Lake Merritt. On December 19th, 1928, Sanger delivered the speech 'The Necessity for Birth Control' here. It was a least as dedicated to eugenics-based arguments about the ill effects of 'feeble-minded', ill, disabled, and poor people having children to whom they passed down these traits and which they could not care for properly, as it was about preventing suffering.
The eugenics arguments and opinions she used in this speech are hard to take now, just as they were for many then. Yet to be fair to Sanger, we must remember that her arguments were informed by her experiences working as a visiting nurse in the slums where the poorest of the working poor lived in NYC, where the best efforts of public charities often seemed to hardly make a dent in relieving suffering, especially when, as Sanger believed, so much of it was preventable:
In her speech, Sanger said:
To define Birth Control, we say it is the conscious control of the birth-rate by scientific means that prevent the conception of human life. Prevent, remember. Prevent does not mean to interfere. It does not mean to destroy. There is no more interference with life through birth control than there is to remain unmarried or to live a celibate life. We also say "to control." Control does not mean that you limit. When you control your furnace you do not have to put the fire out. When you control your motor you do not necessarily stop your car. To control the birth rate means that there shall be the same right for those who do not wish to have children as for those who do wish to have them. There are no objections to those who wish to increase the size of their families, but on the other side there seems to be a great deal of question and controversy as to the right of those who wish to limit or control the number of their children. ~ Margaret Sanger, 'The Necessity for Birth Control'
Booklet for the Oakland Civic Auditorium and Opera House, now Kaiser Convention Center, Oakland Public Library
Oakland Civic Auditorium as it appears today
The Oakland Civic Auditorium had stood for 14 years when Sanger spoke here in 1928 and she had become very well known indeed in the dozen intervening years since she spoke at the Hotel Oakland. The Auditorium is a huge venue, as we can see in historical photos: it held Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and the Barnum and Bailey circus, symphony orchestras, and other large-scale entertainments. The history of this place is wonderful, with so many other amazing activists, artists, speakers, and performers appearing here over the years: Isadora Duncan, Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King, Jr, the Grateful Dead… It's no longer in use, standing empty since just before the turn of this century, but I hope this beautiful Beaux-Arts edifice is reclaimed, restored, and put to as good a use as it once was.
Buffalo Bill Wild West Show at the Oakland Civic Auditorium, photo from booklet at Oakland Public Library
II: More About Sanger in NYC at U.C. Berkeley's Doe Memorial Library
Research & photos: gathered on various dates from November 2016 to March 2017
And now, here's my follow-up on two sites associated with Sanger in NYC:
Margaret Sanger Letter to Noah Slee on Barclay Hotel Stationery, excerpt, from the Sophia Smith Microfilm Collection
From Day 1, Part 3: 'I track down a listing in the Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collection Series catalog for a microfilm of a letter Sanger received from the Barclay hotel, but I don't have access to it at the moment. It's not available online and I've not yet had a chance to visit the library at the University of California at Berkeley, which has a copy'
I finally get around to tracking down the microfilm collection, stored deep in the archives at the Doe Memorial Library at U.C. Berkeley, with the assistance of the ever- kind and helpful Nancy Oanh Tran. In looking through the microfilms of documents dated around the time of Sanger's stay at the Barclay Hotel, I find a phone message for Sanger and many chatty letters to her husband Noah Slee written on Barclay Hotel stationery. The letters discussed visits to and from friends, a visit from her son Grant, how much less pleasant it was to drive a car in New York City than in Tucson, how disorganized she was, and so on. Most of the contents of these letters are of little interest to anyone outside of their relationship, their circle of friends, and of course, dedicated historians, except, I think, for one thing: she begs him not to join her in New York City, and not to ask her to leave her work there yet. In her second marriage, she demanded the freedom she wanted that she did not find enough of in her first, and she got it through endearments, compliments, even sappiness, so that Noah would feel loved and not abandoned; through cajoling; through explanations and arguments about the importance of her work and her need to do it unimpeded; and even through what reads to me like a guilt trip.
o I American Eugenics Society journal, Doe Memorial Library at U.C. Berkeley
From Day 2, Part 2: 'According to Robin Pokorski's Mapping Margaret Sanger, 'The Hotel Astor was the site of the National Birth Control Conference of November 19 and 20, 1929. The conference was sponsored by the American Birth Control League.' I find few contemporary references online to the talks and attendees of this conference other than a few remarks in some contemporary newspapers and a brief excerpt from Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment, Volumes 3-4, 1930, published by the American Eugenics Society. An article from The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin outlines some of the topics of discussion, such as the Comstock laws and the current science of reproduction, and lists some of the headliners of the conference, which include 'famous educators, doctors, and pastors.' '
In doing further research, I find there's a copy of the American Eugenics Society journal also in the collections of U.C. Berkeley's Doe Memorial Library.
Mary Louise Inman, who wrote an account of and commentary on the meeting for the Eugenics Journal, wrote:
'Most of our adult generation can remember when [the birth control movement] was chiefly characterized by determined looking ladies selling The Birth Control Review on metropolitan street corners, Margaret Sanger being held up for her propaganda, and a general feeling in the lay breast that the whole thing was not quite respectable.
Here we see before our eyes the evolution of an idea. That the movement has undergone a decided moral, social, and intellectual transformation is evidenced by the presence on the speaker's platform of some of our foremost religious leaders, together with eminent writers, physicians, educators and scientists, as well as other professional and non-professional men and women of the highest social standing.' ~ Inman, Eugenics, Jan 3oth ed, p 12
As I read further, I take notes. They go:
National Birth Control article for Eugenics journal by Mary Inman, 1930
'In his speech, one Dr. E. Bord Barrett, a former Jesuit and still a practicing Catholic, held out hope that the Church would be flexible and adaptable on the birth control issue. He was a believer in the social benefits of birth control, and based his hope on the fact that so many Catholics used birth control, that Church-mandated celibacy for priests and others indicated that the Church recognized it was not always in the best interests of individuals and communities for everyone to have children, and that the Church blessed marriages of couples who could not have children.
Dr. Hannah Stone, director of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and Sanger's long-time colleague who was arrested in the raids on the W. 15th Street clinic, was among the speakers, but her talk was not recorded or described in Inman's article.
Ministers and rabbis voiced their support for birth control on humanitarian and personal responsibility grounds.
The second day of the conference was dedicated to issues related to eugenics. They discussed the questions of whether it was desirable to 'breed geniuses at will', if it could be done at all; who would be qualified to decide what are 'desirable' human traits and types beyond those which impart health and the ability to take care of ones' self; whether 'spiritual values' should be brought to bear on the issues, and much more.
Albert Edward Wiggam, worried that birth control might exacerbate a differential birth rate between those who are prudent, far-sighted, intelligent and self-controlled enough to be more likely to use birth control, and those who conceive and bear children thoughtlessly. He believed these traits were largely transmissible, predicting the likely behavior of the next generation. To counteract this problem, Wiggam believed that birth control needed to be universally and readily available as well as easy to use.'
Margaret Sanger, from Eugenics journal, Doe Memorial Library at U.C. Berkeley
The article ends by noting that Margaret Sanger could not attend the conference, which surprises me! Instead, she sent a telegram which was read to the attendees since her attendance was sorely missed given her role as a founder of the movement and the most important activist of her time for women's rights, since the suffragists. Inman predicted that birth control would become as readily accepted in society as women's right to vote, however controversial its past. She was mostly right. Though many Americans are uncomfortable with publicly funding birth control since we believe so firmly in the right to religious dissent, most Americans actually do use birth control, at least at some point in their lives. And as Sanger hoped, it has become readily available, easy to use, mostly every cheap, and all very safe. And she played a very significant role in bringing this about.
Thank you, Margaret Sanger.
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Duchsherer, Aimee. 'Better Babies or More Babies?: Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and the Birth Control Movement'. July 16, 2015, Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickenson State University blog.
The Hotel Oakland Village website: 'History: Grand Hotel' and 'Historical Photos'
Inman, Mary Louise. 'The National Birth Control Conference' from Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment, Volumes 3-4, January 1930, pp 12-17.
'Kaiser Convention Center'. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
The Margaret Sanger Papers Electronic Edition: Margaret Sanger and The Woman Rebel, 1914-1916, eds. Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo and Peter Engelman (Columbia, S.C.: Model Editions Partnership, 1999)
The Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collection, eds. Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo, Peter Engelman, and Anke Vass Hubbard, 1996. #Microfilm 77685 , S15:0042. Reel S15: May 1938 – Nov 1938
Brochure for the Kaiser Center, one the old Oakland Civic Auditorium, Oakland Library collection
'The Regency Ballroom: About', from their website
'The Regency Center'. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
'Regency Center: Venue Overview: History', from their website
Sanger, Margaret. 'A "Birth Control" Lecture Tour', Aug 9, 1916. Published article: Malthusian, Sept. 1916, 83-84. (Sanger's letter to Charles and Bessie Drysdale published as an article)
Sanger, Margaret. 'The Necessity for Birth Control,' Dec 19, 1928. Typed Draft Speech. Source: Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, Library of Congress Microfilm 130:0226
'Social Hall SF: Venue Info', from their website (part of the Regency Center)
Tillmany, Jack. 'Regency I: 1320 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94109'. Cinema Treasures website
Posted in Feminism, History of Ideas, Sex & Sexuality, Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas, Written by Amy Cools	| Tagged Albert Edward Wiggam, Barclay Hotel, Birth Control, Chinatown, Eugenics, Hannah Stone, Hotel Oakland, Margaret Sanger, Oakland, Oakland Auditorium, San Francisco, San Francisco Scottish Rite Hall, Scottish Rite, Social Hall	| 1 Comment
How a Hackneyed Romantic Ideal is Used to Stigmatise Polyamory, by Carrie Jenkins
There's no longer anything unusual about wanting an open relationship. Many who consider themselves progressive about sex, gender, love and relationships know this. It's just that almost nobody in an open relationship wants to be open about it. What's surprising is that so many people feel the need for secrecy.
I've been out as polyamorous for years. Because of this, non-monogamous people who aren't out often feel able to talk to me about their own situations. When I go to conferences, I can't help noticing all the philosophers who are in closeted non-monogamous relationships. This discrepancy between reality and socially acknowledged reality can be disorienting; the 'official' number of non-monogamous people in the room is almost always one (me).
So what's going on? No doubt there are several factors at work, but I want to talk about one that's both powerful and insidious: non-monogamy isn't considered 'romantic'.
Romantic love is widely considered to be the best thing life has to offer: 'failing' at romance is often construed as failing at life. Amatonormativity is a name for the attitude that privileges lives based around a focal monogamous romantic relationship. What gets called 'romantic' isn't just about classification; it's about marking out those relationships and lives we value most.
This monogamous ideal is supposed to appeal to women especially. According to the stereotypes, single women are desperate to 'lock down' a man, while men are desperate to avoid commitment. There's nothing new here: monogamy has historically been gendered. Even in situations where marrying more than one woman has been illegal, it has often been normal for men to have mistresses, but different rules have applied to women. This is unsurprising: in a patriarchal society with property inheritance passing along the male line, paternity is key, and enforced female monogamy is an effective way to control it.
Women's sexuality can also be policed by developing a feminine model that includes a 'natural' desire for monogamy, plus social benefits for conforming to that model (and penalties for non-conformity). This model can then be internalised by women as a 'romantic' ideal inculcated via fairytales. In a similar vein, rather than allowing only men to have more than one partner, we can instill a subtler cultural belief that men's infidelity is 'natural' and therefore excusable, while women's infidelity is not.
Our language undermines gender-related optimism about monogamous romantic ideals: there is no word for a male 'mistress'; romantic comedies are 'chick flicks'. 'Romance' novels are marketed to and consumed by women. Brides are 'given away' by men to other men. We never hear about 'crazy old cat gentlemen'. And how many married men do you know who've taken their wife's surname? These attitudes persist not just in word but in deed: wives in hetero marriages still do more housework than their husbands, even if they earn more (which they rarely do).
Recent growing acceptance of same-sex love as 'romantic' has presented challenges to gendered norms. But this has happened alongside another change: monogamy has become an even more powerful 'romantic' ideal by including same-sex relationships. And its impact is intensely gendered.
Women who enter voluntarily into non-monogamous relationships are a direct challenge to the idea that women are 'naturally' monogamous. They are socially penalised to maintain the status quo. A non-monogamous woman will be portrayed as debased and disgusting – a 'slut'. When I have discussed my open relationships online, I have been called a 'cum-dumpster', a 'degenerate herpes-infested whore', and many other colourful names.
My internet trolls focus on sex, partly because presenting non-monogamous relationships as 'just sex' makes it easier to degrade them, and partly because women who violate the monogamy norm – whose sexuality is out of (someone's) control – are a threat to an ancient feeling of entitlement over women's sexuality and reproductive potential. In contrast, a non-monogamous man is, at least sometimes, liable to be regarded as a 'stud'.
Apart from monogamy, the only other relationship structure that controls paternity in a similar way is patriarchal polygamy, which is stigmatised in contemporary North America, for reasons including bona fide feminism as well as racism and cultural imperialism. One effect of this is that monogamy is seen as the only fair and liberal alternative.
Actually, there are many alternatives. But to tolerate them is to tolerate widespread social uncertainty about who is having sex with whom. This would extend to everything sex is entangled with, and everything it represents. Our ideals of 'romantic' love regulate not just our expectations about sex but also our conceptions of family and the nature of parenthood.
Ultimately, what we call 'romantic' is a philosophical issue that touches on the core of who we (think we) are, and what we value. I believe that the 'romantic-ness' of romantic love is largely socially constructed, and as such malleable. We collectively write the 'script' that determines the shape of the privileged ('romantic') relationship style. This script has changed, and will continue to change. But currently that process goes on largely below the radar: we aren't supposed to see it happening, or realise that we can control it. Romantic love maintains a wholly 'natural' image, evading challenge or critical scrutiny by seeming inevitable, incomprehensible and wonderful.
We must get beyond this. We need to question the limits we have placed on what counts as a 'romantic' relationship. Freedom to love – the right to choose one's own relationships without fear, shame or secrecy – is critical, not just for individuals but for us all collectively. Non-conformity is the mechanism that reshapes the social construct to better represent who we are, and who we want to be. Instead of forcing our relationships to conform to what society thinks love is, we could force the image of love to conform to the realities of our relationships.
But it won't be easy. If the love of a polyamorous triad is seen as 'romantic', and hence as valuable as the love of a monogamous couple, then the triad should have the same social and legal privileges as the couple. How could we deny them the right to be co-parents? How could we defend the legal or financial benefits of monogamous marriage, or the lack of legal recourse for anyone fired for being polyamorous? These are the privileges by which we signal to monogamous couples and nuclear family units that theirs are the most socially valuable social configurations.
Nor could we defend the countless ways in which non-monogamous people are stigmatised and rejected. My boyfriend's father no longer speaks to him about anything but the weather because he is in a polyamorous relationship with me. An extended family member literally prayed over me when she learned that I was non-monogamous, feeling an urgent need to ask Jesus to 'save' me from this 'culture'. Stigma against non-monogamy is beyond a joke: researchers have uncovered assumptions that the non-monogamous are just bad people: less likely to walk their dogs, or floss their teeth.
It's far easier to pretend that this is not really happening. Or that it's not really a big deal. Perhaps you feel that way right now: perhaps you're thinking you don't know any non-monogamous people. But I wouldn't be too sure. Until quite recently, an awful lot of people thought that all their friends and relatives were straight.
Carrie Jenkins is a writer and philosopher. She is working towards an MFA in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book is What Love Is and What it Could Be (2017). She lives in Vancouver. (Bio credit: Aeon)
~ This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Listen to Carrie Jenkins discuss romantic love with Joe Gelonesi at The Philosopher's Zone
Posted in Sex & Sexuality, The One & the Many, Written by Guests	| Tagged Carrie Jenkins, Joe Gelonesi, Monogamy, Open Relationships, Philosophy of Love, Polyamory, Romantic Idealism, Romanticism, Same Sex Relationships, The Philosopher's Zone, What Love Is and What it Could Be	| 3 Comments
Happy Birthday, Angelina Weld Grimké!
Angelina Weld Grimké
El Beso
Twilight—and you
Quiet—the stars;
Snare of the shine of your teeth,
Your provocative laughter,
The gloom of your hair;
Lure of you, eye and lip;
Yearning, yearning,
Languor, surrender;
Your mouth,
And madness, madness,
Tremulous, breathless, flaming,
The space of a sigh;
Then awakening—remembrance,
Pain, regret—your sobbing;
And again, quiet—the stars,
Twilight—and you. (via Poets.org)
Let us celebrate the memory of the wonderful and far-too-unknown author of this gorgeous poem and so many other wonderful works of art and literature on her birthday!
Alix North of Island of Lesbos writes of Grimké:
Angelina Weld Grimké was born [on February 27th, 1880] in Boston, the only child of Archibald Grimké and Sarah Stanley. Angelina had a mixed racial background; her father was the son of a white man and a black slave, and her mother was from a prominent white family. Her parents named her after her great aunt Angelina Grimké Weld, a famous white abolitionist and women's rights advocate.
Angelina received a physical education degree at the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1902. She worked as a gym teacher until 1907, when she became an English teacher, and she continued to teach until her retirement in 1926. During her teaching career, she wrote poetry, fiction, reviews, and biographical sketches. She became best known for her play entitled "Rachel." The story centers around an African-American woman (Rachel) who rejects marriage and motherhood. Rachel believes that by refusing to reproduce, she declines to provide the white community with black children who can be tormented with racist atrocities. "Rachel" was the only piece of Angelina's work to be published as a book; only some of her stories and poems were published, primarily in journals, newspapers, and anthologies.
Only her poetry reveals Angelina's romantic love toward women. The majority of her poems are love poems to women or poems about grief and loss. Some (particularly those published during her lifetime) deal with racial concerns, but the bulk of her poems are about other women, and were unlikely to be published for this reason. Only about a third of her poetry has been published to date… Read the complete bio and a wonderful selection of poems here…
…and learn more about Angelina Weld Grimké at:
Angelina Weld Grimké – in Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, edited by Yolanda Williams Page
Angelina Weld Grimké – by Judith Zvonkin for The Black Renaissance in Washington, D.C.
Angelina Weld Grimké – from Encyclopædia Britannica
Grimke, Angelina Weld (1880-1958) – by Claudia E. Sutherland for Blackpast.org
Grimkè's Life and Career: The Introduction to The Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké – by Carolivia Herron for Modern American Poetry at the Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Further reading: Selected Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance: A Resource Guide – Angelina Weld Grimké
Posted in Feminism, Happy Birthday!, Reviews & Recommendations, Sex & Sexuality, Written by Guests	| Tagged Akasha Gloria Hull, Angelina Weld Grimké, Black History, El Beso, feminism, Harlem Renaissance, Lesbian Literature, Lynching, Playwright, Poetry, Romantic Poetry	| Leave a comment
Margaret Sanger NYC Sites, Day 4
Posted on January 25, 2017 by amymcools
Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Center at Margaret Sanger Square, Mott and Bleeker Streets, NYC
Friday, October 21st, 2016
It's cold and rainy, so I spend a long morning with my coffee as I do more research. Try as I might, I just can't identify, with any certainty, the exact site of the Queens County Penitentiary, Long Island City, where Margaret Sanger was imprisoned for thirty days in 1917 for operating her Brownsville birth control clinic. Nor do I locate the site of the original White Plains Hospital where Sanger trained as a nurse. I had pored over the atlases of that town, from that time, in the New York Public Library map division, and I searched assiduously in their digitized records this morning. No luck.
So I finish my account of the first site I visited on Tuesday and publish it, then head out. It keeps raining, but oh well, it's not a terribly long walk and besides, I welcome a walk in the rain, under my umbrella, of course. The drought back home had been mostly unrelenting for ages and it's nice to experience a good rain again.
My first destination is Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Center at Mott and Bleecker Streets. The rain is really coming down and I'm fairly wet by the time I get here, so I hurriedly enter the lobby. Immediately, a man approaches me and asks what I'm looking for, while another man at the desk trains his eye on me. Not unfriendly, but alert. I explain my mission and present my driver's license and business card. He makes a call upstairs to see if the director of the center has a moment to meet with me, but she's heading out for a meeting. I ask if I can take a photo of the colorful mural on the lobby wall, but they say no: for security reasons, no photos are allowed inside the building. I express my understanding: after all, such establishments are under constant threats of terrorism and negative, often distorted and falsified media. I'm content with taking photos of the outside, and note the array of security cameras.
'Advice to Married Ladies', Madame Restell abortion ad in the New York Times, Nov 9th, 1865
New York City has a long history as a place where a woman can more readily obtain an abortion than just about anywhere else. In his detailed article on the subject, Robert Nizza wrote for New York magazine:
'In many ways, the story of abortion in the United States is the story of abortion in New York. There were no laws against the procedure until the 1820s. Before that, British common law allowed abortions before "quickening," or the moment when the fetus first moved. It was in New York in 1828 that America's first real abortion law was passed. The debate of the day wasn't driven by religious concerns about when life begins. Instead, as James C. Mohr's classic history of the subject, Abortion in America, explains, Albany responded to pressure from doctors who were aghast at quacks' butchering women and scamming them with phony abortifacient potions. The law was really about medical regulation, and, according to Mohr, it went completely unenforced.'
Sanger opposed abortion on the same health and safety grounds as the medical community Nizza refers to. We can only guess what her stance would be on abortion today, though based on her stated reasons for opposition to the practice as well as her refusal to condemn the women who sought abortions, I think her position would echo Bill Clinton's: that abortion should be safe, legal, and through the ready availability of safe, legal, and affordable birth control, rare.
The Pleasure Chest 'Free Pleasure' painted storefront window, New York City
I take the subway to my next destination, which is close enough so that I'd ordinarily walk but I don't want to spend the day in soaking wet pants; I'm already very damp from my first long walk. On my way from the station, just around the corner from where I'm headed, I'm amused to see a sex shop storefront that's vibrantly painted with the words 'Free Pleasure' surrounded by cartoon-like images of pleasure devices. It's apropos to the birth control debate that I've been considering throughout this journey. Each side might find it illustrates their views: those who share Sanger's view that sex and reproduction are not and should not be necessarily linked, and those that oppose all forms of artificial birth control on the grounds that they're contrary to nature and to God's will. The latter also find the idea of sex unmoored from reproduction repellent because they believe it will lead to irresponsible and extramarital sex, and corrode family values and ideals of sexual purity. They might interpret the colorful shop window as a negative demonstration of the cheapening of sex from permissive birth control laws and secular sexual mores. Sanger, like her fellow sex-positivists, believed instead that unmooring sex from reproduction leads to happier, more romantic and less stressful marriages, and to healthier and more prosperous families while providing a broader scope for women to enjoy and explore their sexual natures. They would likely interpret this painting as a positive demonstration of sexual freedom.
4 Perry St, Manhattan, New York City
Just around the corner, I arrive at 4 Perry Street, where according to Robin Pokorski of NYU's Mapping Margaret Sanger project, Sanger lived for a short while in 1914, between Waverly Place and Greenwich Ave in Greenwich Village. A couple of other sources mention this as well. Yet aside from brief statements of this fact in those secondary and tertiary sources, I'm unable to discover anything else about her time here with online research alone, including the exact stretch of time she lived here, but there's plenty of readily available evidence that shows where Sanger lived elsewhere that same year. Sanger's correspondence, both to and from, were addressed '34 Post Ave' from March to October of that year, and her journal The Woman Rebel directs all inquiries be sent there. She arrived in New York City from Paris in early January 1914. According to her autobiography, she rented the apartment on Post St 'as soon as possible' after she arrived, and she left New York for Europe again in late October to flee another obscenity trial for her Woman Rebel publications. That pretty much leaves January and February of 1914 as the time frame in which she could have lived here on Perry St. In these first two months of the year, she was reestablishing herself as an activist, now for birth control. As you many remember, she had just left her husband William behind in Paris to do so.
I duck into an inviting establishment right down the way on Greenwich Ave at Perry, lured by the promise of handmade meatballs and a tasty ale. This is my last day in NYC this trip, and I'm going to slow down and take it easier today. I write notes and linger over my meal, hoping the rain will stop. I like the rain, but it's very difficult to take photos I require for this project since that requires both hands. I balance my umbrella over my head with the handle tucked under my arm, but it tends to flop over as I move to get the best shots. So I linger until the rainfall lightens, though it doesn't really stop for awhile.
Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, New York City
Margaret Sanger, Ethel Byrne, Carnegie Hall, The New York Times, Jan 29th, 1917, p 1. To see this article continued on p 3, click here
My next destination is another landmark I've been wanting to visit: Carnegie Hall. There are three particular Sanger-related occasions which bring me here to 881 Seventh Ave at 56th St.
On the afternoon of Jan 29th, 1917, there was a protest rally and mass meeting here at Carnegie Hall. Sanger's sister Ethel Byrne had been sentenced to 30 days in jail the week before for running the Brownsville birth control clinic with Sanger. Sanger and nurse Fania Mandeil went on trial on the day of the Carnegie Hall protest; Sanger was certain she would be convicted and imprisoned, outcomes she did nothing to avoid. Byrne and Sanger were both determined to attract as much attention as possible to their cause, be it fame, notoriety, or otherwise. Byrne, tried, convicted, and imprisoned first, went on a hunger strike. She was forcibly fed after several days without food and water left her in terrible shape, even close to death. Sanger, initially supportive of her sister's decision to hunger strike, changed her mind when she observed its awful toll on her health. She decided not to go on her own planned hunger strike after all, as she was determined to fight tirelessly for her cause. Instead, Sanger passed out copies of the first edition of the Birth Control Review to the attendees of the protest at Carnegie Hall, and announced to the press that there would be five hundred babies and their mothers present to demonstrate that their work was, in fact, pro-baby and pro-family. Sanger, Byrne, and Mandeil certainly had the support of very many mothers, as well as non-mothers, in the Brownsville community they served.
The New York Times published a transcript of the brief speech she delivered here that day. It goes:
'I come to you tonight from a crowded courtroom, from a vortex of persecution. I come not from the stake at Salem, where women were burned for blasphemy, but from the shadow of Blackwell's Island, where women are tortured for "obscenity."
Birth control is the one means by which the working man shall find emancipation. I was one of eleven children. My mother died when I was 17 because she had had too many children and had worked herself to death. I became a nurse to help support my family, and I soon discovered that 75 per cent of the diseases of men and women are due to sex ignorance. I determined that when I was able I would do what I could to solve that problem. I found that the average person was as ignorant of sex matters as our most primitive ancestors. There has been progress in every department of our lives except in the most important–creation. So I came to the conclusion that the greatest good I could do was to help poor women to have fewer children to be brought up in want and poverty. I threw my nurse's bag away and swore I would take it up no more. I went to Europe and studied the birth control clinics there and came back to America to do what I could.
Colonel Roosevelt goes all about the country telling people to have large families and he is neither arrested nor molested. But can he tell me why I got sixty-three letters in one week from poor mothers in Oyster Bay asking me for birth control information? No woman can call herself free until she can choose the time she will become a mother.
My purpose in life is to arouse sentiment for the repeal of the law, State and Federal. It is we women who have paid for the folly of this law, and it is up to us to repeal it. It is only by birth control that woman can prepare with man, her brother, for the emancipation of the race.'
Margaret Sanger and her son Grant in Japan, 1922, public domain via Library of Congress
Some years later, on October 11th, 1922, the American Birth Control League hosted a 'Welcome Back' event for Sanger here. She had returned in August from a tour of Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Egypt, Yemen, and London that year. She commenced her journey in Japan, setting sail in late February and arriving on March 10th. The Japanese government initially denied her a visa on the grounds that her birth control message was contrary to their official position: strong population growth was necessary for the military and political strength of Japan. But Sanger, ever energetic, and persuasive, forceful, and charming as the circumstances called for, bought passage on a ship bound for China via Japan. During the voyage, she finagled a way in, prevailing upon Japanese officials she met on board to use their influence to get her a visa. Upon arrival, she was welcomed by a large crowd of citizens, reporters, police, and other government officials, many welcoming but some not. In the end, she was able to speak, travel, and tour Japan's fledgling community of birth control providers as planned, and continued in like vein throughout Asia. While in Japan, she stayed with Shidzue Ishimoto, a fellow feminist, activist, and proponent of birth control, and they would work together throughout the years. While on this world tour, she also attended the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference at Kingsway Hall in London, from July 11th-14th.
Margaret Sanger (center), Dorothy Bocker (right), and Anne Kennedy
Sanger also spoke at a birth control meeting held here at Carnegie Hall on December 6th, 1924, introducing many of her friends and fellow activists in the birth control movement. One of the speakers she introduced was her colleague Dr. Dorothy Bocker, who worked with her at the first iteration of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, founded almost two years before. As Sanger often pointed out, much of the opposition to birth control stemmed from ignorance, especially on the part of the medical and scientific community. Strange as it may seem today, this ignorance was mostly born of squeamishness and a fear of offending prevailing views of sexual propriety. Now, we'd think of a physician or scientist's interest in sex and reproduction as worthy examples of proper scientific and humanitarian interest, but this was rarely the case in Sanger's time. So she decided that her second birth control clinic needed to be staffed by a licensed physician and that this physician would gather clinical data so thoroughly and systematically that it could be accepted as evidence by the medical and scientific community. Over time, Bocker and Sanger differed in their methods of evidence gathering sufficiently that, according to Sanger, she and Dr. Bocker 'agreed to part company in December of the second year', which is the very month this conference was held here at Carnegie Hall. Sanger pushed for far more rigorous record keeping and longer-term patient follow-up than Bocker was willing to undertake. However much they were disagreeing at the time of this Carnegie Hall meeting, Sanger introduced Dr. Bocker warmly, if succinctly. Dr. Hannah Stone, who was rounded up in the raid on the 46 W. 15th Street location in 1929, replaced Dr. Bocker as medical director early the next year.
353 W. 57th Street, formerly the American Women's Association Clubhouse, NYC
Margaret Sanger with H.G. Wells (right) and Otis Skinner, 1920
I have one site left on my list to visit for my Margaret Sanger journey here in NYC: the former location of the American Women's Association Clubhouse. There are two occasions which bring me here. The first is an event on November 12, 1931, when Sanger received the Medal of Achievement from the American Women's Association. According to Pokorski of the Mapping Margaret Sanger project, Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at this event. Roosevelt was a supporter of birth control, and along with her husband Franklin, was a friend of Sanger's. But when Franklin Roosevelt was running for the presidency and then, once he had won it, neither he nor Eleanor would publicly endorse birth control on the advice of his staff and political supporters. This AWA event was, then, was one of the last occasions where Eleanor would publicly endorse this movement until the Roosevelt presidency was far behind her.
Almost half a year later, on April 20, 1932, the AWA also gave a testimonial dinner here in Sanger's honor. Sanger was deeply moved as so many of her friends and colleagues extolled her hard work and thanked her for it; her great friend and occasional lover H.G. Wells extolled her as 'the greatest revolutionary bacteriologist the world has ever known.'
I have now completed this particular journey following the life and ideas of Margaret Sanger in New York City. But I am not done with her life and ideas by any means. Please stay tuned as I continued to explore her ideas and the ways in which they change the world! And thank you for accompanying me thus far…
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'Advice to Married Ladies', Madame Restell abortion ad in The New York Times, Nov 9th, 1865, via Newspapers.com
Bromley, G.W. and Co. Atlas of the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York. Desk and Library edition, 1916, Plate*** and Plate***. Retrieved from Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division Digital Collection, The New York Public Library.
Buhle, Mari Jo. 'Women & the Socialist Party' Radical America, Feb 1970, Vol, IV, 4F2, via National Progressive Review
Chesler, Ellen. Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992
Engelman, Peter C., ""Dangerous Thoughts"? Margaret Sanger's World Trip Journal, Japan, 1922" (2010). Documentary Editing: Journal of the Association for Documentary Editing (1979-2011). Paper 28.
Eig, Jonathan. The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014.
Gray, Christopher. 'Streetscapes/The Henry Hudson Hotel, 353 West 57th Street; From Women's Clubhouse to WNET to $75 a Night.' The New York Times, Jan. 4, 1998
Lizza, Ryan. 'The Abortion Capital of America: As the Pro-Life Movement Intensifies Nationwide, New York Contemplates its History and Future as a Refuge'. New York magazine, June 2014
'Margaret Sanger and Eleanor Roosevelt – The Burden of Public Life', The Margaret Sanger Papers Project Newsletter #11 (Winter 1995)
'Margaret Sanger On Trial – Will Hunger Strike'. The Day Book, Chicago, Jan 29, 1917, last edition, Image 29, via LOC's Chronicling America
Moran Hajo, Cathy. 'What Happened Next? A Look at Birth Control Organizing in China Following Margaret Sanger's 1922 visit'. Jan 9, 2014, The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
'Mrs. Byrne to Have a Feeding Schedule', The New York Times, Jan 29th 1917, pp 1, 3, via Newspapers.com
Pokorski, Robin. 'Mapping Margaret Sanger' from The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
'Sanger on Trial: The Brownsville Clinic Testimony'. Newsletter #25 (Fall 2000) of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Sanger, Margaret. 'American Women's Association Testimonial Dinner Address,' April 20th, 1932. Margaret Sanger Papers, L.O.C., LCM 128:0237B-243A, The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Sanger, Margaret. 'Carnegie Hall Address,' Jan 29, 1917. Source: Mrs. Sanger Defies Courts Before 3,0000, New York Times, Jan. 30, 1917, via The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Sanger, Margaret. 'Individual and Family Aspects of Birth Control', Report of the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, July 11-14, 1922. From The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Sanger, Margaret. Margaret Sanger, an Autobiography. Cooper Square Press: New York 1999, originally published by W.W. Norton & Co: New York, 1938
Sanger, Margaret. 'Opening Remarks at Carnegie Hall Meeting', Dec 6th, 1924. Source: Margaret Sanger Papers, Library of Congress, Microfilm 130:701, via The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Sanger, Margaret. The Pivot of Civilization, 1922. Free online version courtesy of Project Gutenberg, 2008, 2013
Samples from The Margaret Sanger Papers Project for the Model Editions Partnership, eds. Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo and Peter Engelman (Columbia, S.C.: Model Editions Partnership, 1999)
'What Every Girl Should Know About Nursing'. The Truth About Nursing, Oct 15, 2006
Posted in Feminism, Human Rights, Sex & Sexuality, Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas, Written by Amy Cools	| Tagged abortion, American Women's Association, Birth Control, Carnegie Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Fifth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, Franklin Roosevelt, Free Love, H. G. Wells, Japan, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York City, Planned Parenthood, Ryan Lizza, Sexual Mores, Shidzue Ishimoto, The Pleasure Chest	| 2 Comments
Margaret Sanger NYC Sites, Day 3 Part 2
34 Post Ave near Dyckman St, Inglewood, Manhattan, NYC, 2016 by Amy Cools
Thursday, October 20th, 2016, continued
I exit the A train at the Dyckman St station, the second to the last stop on the line, and walk a couple of blocks to 34 Post Ave. Margaret Sanger moved into 'an inexpensive little flat' here in January of 1914 leaving her husband William, or Bill as she called him, behind in Paris. The Sangers had lived there for a few months as Sanger researched and wrote and William worked to establish himself as a painter. En route to Paris, they stopped in Glasgow, Scotland, so that Sanger could observe and write about the effects of municipal ownership, a system of public ownership often endorsed by Socialists, for a newspaper assignment. While in Paris, Sanger met with many socialists and activists, all the while researching French methods of contraception. But she was growing bored and restless, eager to get back to work and engage in activism once again. She and the three children returned to New York City around the New Year, leaving William behind to continue his artistic pursuits.
The Woman Rebel, First Edition, March 1914, directed that inquiries be sent to Sanger's 34 Post St address
The lady in the photo above, in the black and white checked jacket, is standing in the doorway of today's number 34, but this building does not date to Sanger's time here: it was built in 1920. Sanger's apartment in the former building was small, cheap and according to Sanger, dingy. But big things would happen here. On the return voyage from Paris to New York City, she had conceived of a journal that was, as her biographer Ellen Chesler describes it, 'dedicated to working women and intended to challenge Comstock's prohibition of information about sexuality and contraception'. Sanger and a group of like-minded radical thinkers and activists launched The Woman Rebel from the kitchen table of that little apartment, publishing the first edition in March of 2014. One of those radicals, Otto Bobstein, invented the term 'birth control' which Sanger seized on and popularized, often claiming to have invented it. Perhaps she lied, or perhaps this is an example of one of those memories that longtime friends or siblings argue over, of a favorite term or phrase used often and long enough that no-one can remember who really came up with it first.
In a speech at Hotel Brevoort given a few years later on January 17th, 1917, Sanger agreed with the magazine's critics that The Woman Rebel was '..badly written; …crude; …emotional, and hysterical; that it mixed issues; that is was defiant, and too radical. Well, to all of these indictments I plead guilty!' She was proud nevertheless of the passion and sturdy defiance expressed in its pages. And what was printed on those pages led to her first indictment on obscenity charges, which drove her right back to Europe by the end of the same year she had returned and established this journal.
Apartment buildings which include 34 Post Ave near Dyckman St, in Inwood, upper Manhattan. The row continues for most of the block, all identical, including the site of Ethyl Byrne's place at 26 Post Ave.
A few doors west in the same apartment row of identical buildings, heading back towards Dyckman St and the subway station, is number 26 Post Ave. Sanger stayed here with her sister and fellow birth control activist Ethel Byrne for a time in 1915. Sanger's daughter Peggy had died of pneumonia just a short time before on Nov 6th, 1915.
Margaret Sanger, left, and Ethel Byrne, right, in court in 1916
Sanger and her sister Byrne enjoyed a close relationship in their early lives and into the nineteen-teens. Byrne, who left her husband and children to pursue her own nursing career, was very involved with Sanger's early birth control activism. She had gone on a hunger strike when imprisoned for her own role in Sanger's Brownsville clinic, to the point of seriously endangering her health. And Byrne had often helped care for Sanger's children while Sanger was in exile in Europe and out of town as she was very frequently. However, their relationship deteriorated over later years. Byrne was a direct, no-frills woman who thrived on practical work and remained a nurse for the rest of her life; Sanger had given up nursing in favor of theory and activism. Byrne disapproved of Sanger's solicitation of wealthy society women for the cause; Sanger was willing to accept help, connections, and most crucially, money, wherever they were offered. It seems easy to pick sides in this divide, and I'm tempted to take Sanger's on the grounds that I think Frederick Douglass would, according to my understanding of his pragmatist views: to eschew practical and political concerns in favor of staying true to the highest ideals of a cause is to show a commitment to the ideals themselves and not necessarily to the cause's success. This won't do when it comes to the liberty, health, and very lives of actual human beings. But it also takes people such as Byrne to make a successful cause: the idealistic, uncompromising, hard workers who are driven to perform many of the most laborious, tedious, and thankless tasks. Here's to you, Byrne, and all your hard work!
163rd St at Amsterdam. 503 163rd St. used to face where the bus is now.
I take the A train back south a few stops to the station at 163rd and walk to 502 W. 163rd St at Amsterdam. According to Bromley's Atlas of that same year, the building that once stood at 502 was on the north end of a wedge-shaped lot, now vacant, at the intersection of 163rd, Amsterdam, and St Nicholas Ave /Juan Pablo Duarte Blvd. This section of St Nicholas Ave is another busy section of the street, crowded with small shops, fruit and vegetable stands, and sidewalk vendors.
Sanger spoke at the Free Synagogue here on Sunday, April 22nd, 1923. Rabbi Louis A. Mischkind, a socially conscious, progressive, even radical religious leader, had invited Sanger to speak on birth control at the Tremont Temple. When his superiors objected, he moved the talk here to the Free Synagogue but was still demoted for his disobedience. Sanger's Birth Control Review extolled his decision as an act of free speech heroism.
St. Nicholas Avenue at 149th Street, Broadbelt houses built in the late 1800's.
Apartments on St Nicholas Avenue at 149th, some of which date to Sanger's time here or shortly after
Next, I walk a little over two-thirds of a mile south to where Sanger, newly wedded to William (she called him Bill), moved into a "practically suburban" "little apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue at 149th Street" shortly after their wedding on August 28th, 1902. As of the time I write this, I've found no exact address for their apartment here, just this little description she wrote in her autobiography. Their first son Stuart was born here on November 28th, 1903. The strain of his birth added to her general poor health, already worn out by a tough bout of her recurrent tuberculosis. She was also terribly despondent, with what her description indicates was post-partum depression. After she recuperated for some months in a farmhouse and a sanitarium, the couple moved to Hastings-on-Hudson. As we've seen, however, the suburban life did not suit the Sangers in the long run, especially Margaret, and they returned to New York City in 1910.
I continue south on St Nicholas, turn left on on 138th St, and go about two long blocks until I make a brief right on 7th Ave, also called Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. Here at 2352 7th Ave, Sanger opened the Harlem branch of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau on May 23, 1930. The BBCRB's locations further south in Manhattan mainly served local women of European descent but Sanger believed that many other women needed the help of her clinics. She decided to open this northern branch to serve them.
On the right, 2352 7th Ave (Adam Clayton Powell) at 138th St, NYC, the site of the Harlem branch BBCRB clinic
This clinic in Harlem was actually Sanger's second attempt to open a clinic in New York for black and other underserved women; she had briefly opened one in west Midtown, in a small, predominantly black, impoverished neighborhood called Columbus Hill. I have not yet found an address for its former location. This first clinic was not a success and closed after only a few months; Sanger thought it would be best to conserve resources to open a clinic in a place where she might reach more people. She had the support of many black leaders throughout these efforts, including the influential Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of the Abyssinian Baptist Church (for whom this street has been renamed), Mary Bethune, and W. E. B. DuBois. DuBois spoke here on one occasion that fall, on November 21st, 1930.
Interestingly, a rumor that persists to this day, that Sanger's efforts to provide reproductive services for black women were racist, may have originated with an intellectual and tactical foe of DuBois'. A Harlem preacher named Marcus Garvey believed that the black and white races could never get along and must be separated. He founded a shipping company called 'The Black Star Line' with the ultimate goal of taking all African descendants back to their home continent to found a racially pure black nation. To this end, he opposed all forms of contraception or childbirth limitation for black people: the nation of his dreams would need as many citizens as black women could bear to make it a vibrant and strong one. Garvey attacked Sanger's clinics and all efforts to help black women control their fertility as genocidal projects. DuBois took the opposite view, believing that black people could and should live as equal citizens in the United States and wherever else they wanted to live, and that black families could better gain their rights as their financial and physical health improved through judiciously constrained childbearing. Of course, Sanger and DuBois were in agreement on this, as they were on matters of racial equality.
The Harlem clinic was more successful than the Columbus Hill one, but still only stayed open for about seven years. Though Sanger hired a black doctor and social worker to run the clinic, there was likely enough Garvey-inspired rumor and suspicion of their motives that the clinic not as widely welcomed as they hoped. No wonder, then, that she wrote that infamous line in a 1939 letter regarding her efforts to serve black women in the South: 'We don't want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population…' The 'word', untrue and unjustified as it was, had already 'gone out' for her Harlem clinic several years before.
Interior of 2352 7th Ave at 138th St, now CHA Upscale Salon
There's now a hair salon at the on the lower level of the Harlem clinic site called Cha, and I go in. I find myself in a shining, sparkling lobby filled with mirror-lined and white furniture, a rhinestone chandelier, and white lilies in rhinestone vases. It promises pampering, which sounds glorious to this footsore woman. I see no one for a moment, then a voice calls, 'Can I help you?' A few steps in takes me to another stylist's both, where a woman with a flowing, waved, luxuriant 'do' was doing another woman's hair. I very briefly explain that I'm doing a history project and ask if I can take a quick photo of her lobby. She says yes, kindly, but distracted, focused on her client. I don't catch her name as I don't want to interrupt her task any further, but if you happen to read this, hospitable lady, thank you! Your salon is so lovely and welcoming.
135 W. 135th St, between Malcolm X and Adam Powell Blvds, where Sanger and family lived in 1911
I continue to make my way south and a little east to 135 W. 135th St, between Malcolm X and Adam Powell Blvds, where Sanger and her family lived in 1911. The year before, the Sangers returned to New York City. The house Bill had designed and built for them suffered a fire which damaged the house and destroyed many of the furnishings. The expenses of repairing the house and replacing their lost things severely damaged their already precarious finances. While the situation was stressful and Sanger was frustrated with her husband's inability to make a steady, reliable income, she was also bored and frustrated with her quiet, domestic suburban life. Upon returning to urban life, Sanger resumed nursing and Bill got into politics; both became very active in the bohemian Socialist scene. As we've discovered, it was Sanger's experiences in these years that most inspired her birth control cause, from her Socialist activism on behalf of New York City's beleaguered working class to the struggles of the poor mothers and families in the largely immigrant slums of the Lower East Side.
Earl Hall at Columbia University, New York City
As I head west on 135th St to the St Nicholas Ave station, I pass by a site I visited last time I was here: Ida Wells' New York Age newspaper offices which published Wells' groundbreaking Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and where Frederick Douglass likely met with her on at least once. I smile at the memory.
I enter the subway station where 135th St meets St. Nicholas Park and exit 116th, walking west across Morningside Park and up the hill to the Columbia University campus. It's a beautiful walk; the park is lush and green, and the campus is an inspiring and lovely place, with broad lawns and elegant buildings in so many styles: Beaux-Arts, neo-classical, and Gothic Revival, to name a few.
Interior of Earl Hall, Columbia University, NYC
Newspaper account of Sanger's talk at Earl Hall, from The Barnard Bulletin, New York, Fri Dec 11, 1925. Click to read a larger version.
I head to Earl Hall at 2980 Broadway, a little north of 116th St. On December 3rd, 1925, Sanger addressed the Social Problems Club here. She delivered her lecture 'The Necessity of Birth Control' at 4 pm to a packed house. According to the Columbia Daily Spectator, at this event, birth control 'was discussed for the first time on the Columbia Campus'. That is, at least officially. The necessity of birth control was outlined in terms of major social problems that club would likely have discussed frequently: infant and maternal mortality rates, disease, crowding, poverty, crime, and women's rights. The Barnard Bulletin published a detailed outline of the talk and its main topics (see the image and link to the right).
I take an indirect route to my next destination a mile away via Amsterdam Ave so I can see the spectacular Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on my way; it's south of Columbia University on the west wide of Morningside Park. The cathedral is as wonderful as it's been described to me by so many. I add my recommendation to theirs to visit if you haven't yet.
I continue east from the cathedral heading for 141 W. 111th St. The doorway and its stoop of the building I find here is flanked on either side by classical columns with 'Kenosha' spelled out overhead; the others in an identical row of four apartment buildings (though this is the only one whose ground floor is painted white) have porches which read 'Manitou', 'Pacific', and 'Mariposa'. I'm unable to discover any particular reason why they're named this way. According to the Municipal Archives division of the NYC Department of Records, in answer to my inquiry, building names 'were typically applied by the building architect or owner based on what you might today call "marketing-strategy"'.
Porch of the Kenosha building at 141 W. 111th St, Harlem, NYC
Here in the Kenosha building, Sanger attended meetings of the Women's Committee of the Local New York Socialist Party in 1911 through 1912. According to Mari Jo Buhle, writing for the journal Radical America in 1970, Sanger 'regularly attended local meetings with her husband, but only inadvertently did she become one of the most important activists in the movement. She was asked to replace an ailing speaker at one of the local women's meetings [of the Women's Committee of the LNYSP]. Although she had never given a public speech before, she accepted on the condition that her topic be of her own choice. She had little confidence about her understanding of Marxian theory and decided to speak about her own speciality, sex education and hygiene.' As discussed earlier, Sanger and her husband William threw themselves eagerly into the Socialist scene upon their return to New York City from Hastings-on-Hudson. This place is just a little under a mile-and-a-half, thirty-minute walk from the 135 W. 135th St apartment I visited just before Earl Hall, where the Sanger family lived at the time.
141 W. 111th St, Harlem, NYC, at center, with white porch which reads 'Kenosha'
Lincoln Correctional Facility at the northeast end of Central Park, NYC
A long block east, short block south, and half a long block east again takes me back to Central Park, this time to the northeast end. I'm looking for 31 W. 110th St, between Malcolm X and Park Ave, near NE corner of Central Park. I'm surprised to find myself looking at a placard across the front lintel which reads 'Lincoln Correctional Facility'. It's a minimum security prison, not an institution one would expect to find facing onto Central Park. It was once the headquarters of New York City's Young Women's Hebrew Association, from 1914 until the late 1930's, when the Y.W.H.A. leased the building to the U.S. Army in World War II. That explains why it doesn't look like a prison. It was a community center, with classrooms, meeting rooms, and gym facilities including an indoor pool.
On April 1, 1924, Sanger addressed the Guardian Mothers of Young Women's Hebrew Association here; as of this time, I find no record of what she said here that day.
Left, Young Women's Hebrew Association Flag Ceremony at 31 West 110th Street, 1918. Right, Lincoln Correctional Facility doorway at this address today. You can see the details and shape of the corbels supporting the overhang, the decorations around the door, and the placement and shape of the windows that it's the same doorway
Duke Ellington Circle at 5th Ave and 110th St. Notice his statue on the tall pedestal to the right
Just a half block east on 110th St to where it meets 5th Ave, I arrive at Duke Ellington Circle. There's a statue of the great jazz pianist and his instrument on a very tall pedestal in a stepped, paved, and grassy park surrounded by a traffic circle and split down the center by 5th Ave, north to south. The circle surrounded by a couple of plain brick highrises, an artistically modern building which houses The Africa Center, a few plain old mixed use buildings, and small vacant lot.
I'm seeking the site of Parkview Palace, which, according to Pokorski's Mapping Margaret Sanger, was at 110th and 5th. There is no building now of that name and indeed, none at all that appear to be of the right vintage. I consult G.W. Bromley's 1916 Atlas and find it named 'Parkway Palace' there. I spend a long time searching for photos or some other information about the Parkview Palace. I find lots of brief references to it, mostly in Socialist and anarchist history books since it was a popular meeting place for non-mainstream political thinkers and activists, and in old newspaper announcements for other events happening there. However, I find no photos of the Parkview at all. I do find a photo of the apparently more well-known Harlem 5th Avenue Theatre next door, but none that show the adjoining Parkview.
110th at 5th Ave, NW corner of intersection at Duke Ellington Circle. The Parview Palace likely stood where the Iglesia Christiana La Hermosa stands now, the red and cream building to the right
Debate on Birth Control, Margaret Sanger versus Winter Russell. Click to read the whole debate online
I'm seeking this place because Sanger debated with John Winter Russell on birth control here on December 12th, 1920. Russell was a lawyer and recent convert to Catholicism, and as we've considered in this series, Sanger was no particular fan of the Catholic church, to say the least. She was not a frequent debater, but she agreed to this one for two likely reasons. One, her participation fee. Since the Depression hit, she had to work harder to raise funds for herself and her cause. Second, this was another good opportunity to publicly refute arguments based on Catholic teaching. Sanger had many run-ins with Catholicism in the form of its influence on public policy as well as in the press and in local governments and police forces, as we saw in the Town Hall raid debacle. She likely relished the opportunity to demonstrate debating skills as a seasoned, well-informed birth control activist against this new convert to the Catholic religion. The entire debate was published by the Fine Arts Guild of New York City and is available online.
Russell gave Sanger many opportunities to defeat his arguments. For example: he equated the use of birth control with lack of sexual control, when the use of birth control actually requires a good deal of control in the form of foresight, planning, and proper use; he characterized sex without allowing for reproduction as animalistic and therefore unworthy of human beings, though it's only all other animals besides humans which don't use birth control; he conflated abortion with other forms of birth control though that characterization is not scientifically feasible and as Sanger pointed out, birth control prevents the need for abortion; he argued that pleasure can't and shouldn't be enjoyed without its counterpart of pain even though it's generally only the woman who suffers it; and so forth. In the end, Russell more or less delivered the sort of arguments Sanger expected, which were, as she perceived them, rooted in a narrow and rigid brand of religiosity, sexual prudery, misogyny, and lack of scientific understanding. She and many other believed that she won this debate handily.
I've come to the end of my third day in New York City following Sanger, and it's been an especially long and interesting one. I've decided to return to Greenwich Village and enjoy the offerings of a couple of its long-established eateries and watering holes, to read and rest my weary feet as I fill my empty belly and warm my chilly self. Until tomorrow, then!
Adams, Michael Henry. 'The Best Address: St. Nicholas Avenue and Place, Part I', Jul 17, 2012.
'Another Look at Margaret Sanger and Race', Feb 23, 2012. From The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Bromley, G.W. and Co. Atlas of the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York. Desk and Library edition, 1916, Plate 129 and Plate 167. Retrieved from Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division Digital Collection, The New York Public Library.
Buhle, Mari Jo. 'Women & the Socialist Party' Radical America, Feb 1970, Vol, IV, 4F2, via National Progressive Review
Debate on Birth Control / Margaret Sanger versus Winter Russell, by Margaret Sanger, Winter Russell, and Emma Sargent Russell. New York, NY: Fine Arts Guild, 1921.
East 110th Street [31 West 110th Street]. Y.W.H.A., detail of steps, interior. Photo by Wurts Bros. (New York, N.Y.), from Museum of the City of New York's digitized archives
Goldberg, Michelle. 'Awakenings: On Margaret Sanger' Feb 7, 2012, The Nation
Gray, Christopher. 'Built With the Ladies In Mind', Oct. 25, 2012, New York Times: Streetscapes
Grimaldi, Jill. 'The First American Birth Control Conference', Nov 12, 2010. The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
'House Tour Preview: Margaret Sanger's Window.' Apr 22, 2010, Hastings Historical Society blog
Katz, Esther. 'Margaret Sanger and The Woman Rebel, 1914-1916: Historical Essay', 1999. From The Margaret Sanger Papers Electronic Edition, eds. Esther Katz, Cathy Moran Hajo and Peter Engelman (Columbia, S.C.: Model Editions Partnership, 1999)
'Latest News' The Birth Control Review, May 1923, Vol VII, No. 5
'Mrs. Sanger Addresses Social Problems Club', Barnard Bulletin (New York, New York) · Fri, Dec 11, 1925
'Mrs. Sanger Glad She Was Indicted', New York Tribune, Feb. 21, 1916, p. 2, via The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, NYU
'Mrs. Sanger to Talk on Birth Control', Columbia Daily Spectator, Volume XLIX, Number 58, 3 December 1925
Muigai, Wangui. 'Looking Uptown: Margaret Sanger and the Harlem Branch Birth Control Clinic'. Newsletter #54 (Spring 2010) of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
'On the Road with Birth Control', Newsletter #21 (Spring 1999) of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Revolutionary and Subversive Movements Abroad and at Home, (vol. I-II). By New York (State). Legislature. Joint Committee (address of Parkview Palace on p. 2020). J.B. Lyons: Albany, 1920
Risen, Clay. 'Prison on the Park.' Jul 9, 2002, The Morning News, New York, New York.
Sanger, Margaret. 'Birth Control: Then and Now,' 1944, Typed Article. Source: Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection
Sanger, Margaret. 'Hotel Brevoort Speech," Jan 17, 1916. From The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
'Sanger v. Famous Father of 18!' Newsletter #29 (Winter 2001/2002) of The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Sciancalepore, Victoria. 'Rebels of Post Avenue', Jan 15, 2014, Margaret Sanger Papers Project
Silver, Rabbi Samuel. 'Why I Became a Rabbi'. Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Jan 28, 2004
Soclof, Adam. 'Planned Parenthood Controversy', February 2, 2012
W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Black Star Line," Crisis, September 1922, 210–214, via History Matters website (with introduction)
Posted in Feminism, History of Ideas, Human Rights, Sex & Sexuality, Written by Amy Cools	| Tagged Birth Control, debate, Feminist History, Free Synagogue, Hastings-on-Hudson, Hotel Brevoort, Lincoln Correctional Facility, Margaret Sanger, municipal ownership, Otto Bobstein, Parkview Palace New York City, Planned Parenthood, The Woman Rebel, William Sanger, Winter Russell, Young Women's Hebrew Association	| 5 Comments
Posted on December 26, 2016 by amymcools
Margaret Sanger with Fania Mindell inside Brownsville clinic, forerunner of Planned Parenthood, Oct. 1916
I get out in decent time to start the day's explorations, just after eight, but it's not long before I realize I'm tired and hence, a little cranky. My friends and I watched the third Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debate last night and some of the commentary which followed, then finally went to sleep very late after we talked about what we just watched, and other things. I'm mostly on New York time now, but not quite.
The abortion issue came up almost immediately in the debate since the first question from the moderator was about the Supreme Court and the appointment of justices. Trump pledged to nominate only strongly anti-abortion candidates. Clinton was adamant that Roe v. Wade and laws protecting women's access to birth control and abortion (with appropriate limitations) be upheld. Clinton also strongly endorsed Planned Parenthood, praising the services it provides and criticizing all efforts to defund it. I, for one, am grateful to Planned Parenthood, the organization that Margaret Sanger founded. Like the women Sanger made it her mission to help, I needed health care that I could not yet afford when I was still in my late teens and early twenties. I found it at Planned Parenthood. I'm grateful to the warm and caring providers there, and I simply did not find what many of the organization's opponents describe: a ruthlessly pro-abortion, anti-life organization. Instead, I met women who gave me wise and medically-correct advice on all aspects of women's health, including ways to prevent the need for abortion. That's entirely in keeping with Sanger's mission. She was, in fact, anti-abortion, with certain qualifications.
201 and 207 E 57th St, Manhattan NYC, former site of the Bandbox Theatre
Adolph Phillip's Fifty-Seventh Street Theater, later the Bandbox Theater, courtesy of Schubert Archives
I plan to head all the way to White Plains today, but as I'm preparing to buy the ticket at Grand Central Station, I pause to reconsider my day's plans. In the end, I decide to put the trip on hold: it wouldn't put my funds and time to best use since I was unable to discover the White Plains site location I sought at the New York Public Library yesterday. I'll see if I'm more successful when I do more research tonight and perhaps go tomorrow. Instead, I decide to cover the northernmost Manhattan sites on my list after I hit up a few near the southwest end of Central Park that I didn't get to yesterday.
I walk north towards Central Park and then east, and stop first at 205 E. 57th St near 3rd Ave where the Bandbox Theatre used to stand. Originally named Adolf Philipp's Fifty-Seventh Street Theatre, the theater that became the Bandbox was built in 1912, closed in 1926, and demolished in 1969. Now there's a Design Within Reach store and a high rise apartment building here.
On Feb 20th, 1916, Sanger and her supporters held a victory celebration at the Bandbox Theatre. The court had just dismissed the obscenity charges against her for publishing The Woman Rebel that had caused her to flee to Europe the year before. While she was away, many papers had begun to discuss birth control and sex a little more openly, and as you may remember, her daughter had just died suddenly the previous November, soon after Sanger's return from Europe. Public opinion was swinging to Sanger's side, and the court no longer had the appetite to pursue a case against her. What had once seemed a public defense against immorality would more likely be perceived as an attack on free speech and emerging modern, scientific attitudes about human sexuality. Even without the court case, however, the arrest and indictments proved an enormous boost to Sanger's cause. She was portrayed, by herself as well as others, as a sort of free speech and humanitarian martyr, a persecuted champion of the cause of women, especially the poorest and most downtrodden.
14 E. 60th Street, Manhattan, New York City
Then I head northwest to 14 E. 60th St between 5th and Madison Aves. It's a 13-floor building erected in 1903. Two restaurants, Rotisserie Georgette and Avra Madison Estiatorio, occupy the ground floor, and apartments above. Sanger had been staying at the Ambassador Hotel but moved to one of the apartments at this address on December 17, 1936. Her move here followed on the heels of the birth control movement's victory in the Dec 7th decision in the One Package case, and not long before Sanger attended the Conference on Contraceptive Research and Clinical Practice that met at the Roosevelt Hotel which, as you may remember, I visited on my first day following Sanger here in New York City.
1935 and 1936 were busy years for Sanger. In addition to the One Package trial, she toured India, speaking to women's groups and conferences and debating Gandhi there in December of 1935. She continued on to Hong King, then Japan. In Japan, she visited Tokyo's fledgling birth control clinic founded by her Japanese counterpart Shidzue Ishimoto, and reviewed birth control methods that had been developed in that country since her 1922 visit. While the birth control movement was also beleaguered in that country by law and custom, many Japanese health care professionals were working on new and effective methods of birth control in that island nation where population growth was a constant and pressing concern. In 1932, she had met a Japanese physician at a birth control conference who had developed a new type of diaphragm. He had sent her that package which was intercepted in customs and led to the One Package case finally litigated three years later. She planned to continue her travels in China and Malaysia but had to cut her trip short due to recurring gallbladder trouble, then a broken arm. She stopped for a short visit in Hawaii, then returned to mainland U.S. to rest and recuperate.
The Plaza Hotel, Manhattan, New York City
I head west towards Central Park then veer south towards its southeast corner to 768 Fifth Ave at 59th St. Three occasions bring me here to the grand Plaza Hotel.
On March 15th, 1917, the National Birth Control League held a luncheon for her here in celebration of her release from Queens County Penitentiary. She had been imprisoned there for 30 days, convicted of violating anti-obscenity laws while operating her birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Then from November 11th – 13th, 1921, the First American Birth Control Conference, organized by Sanger, was held here. The conference was widely attended by medical professionals, social scientists, humanitarians, authors, suffragists, socialists, and socialites. Its list of sponsors was likewise distinguished, including famed Parliamentarian and future Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Sanger gave the opening address, in which she called on the medical profession to join social workers and birth control activists in addressing the sexual dimensions of problems of hunger, poverty, and overpopulation. As she often pointed out, there were plenty of people working hard to alleviate poverty and disease, but there were very few paying attention to their primary root causes: the human need for love and sex. This was the conference which launched the future Planned Parenthood and concluded with the Town Hall event which turned into a police raid. Between the conference and the publicity following the raid, Sanger was firmly placed as the United States', and indeed the world's, preeminent birth control activist and spokesperson.
An interior view of the beautiful Plaza Hotel, Manhattan, NYC
Several years later, on February 26th, 1929, Sanger presided over a dinner promoting the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. In her opening speech, Sanger outlined the history of her own birth control activism and the struggles and legal battles of the birth control movement in the United States from 1915 until that day. She also credited John Stuart Mill and Francis Place as founders of the modern birth control movement, about a century before her own activism began. Like Sanger, Mill was moved to support birth control by personal horror at the worst effects of children conceived in poverty: at age 17, he came across the corpse of a strangled infant discarded in a park. And like Sanger, Mill believed that when the poor had more children to help make money for the family, wages were inevitably driven down by the glut of laborers seeking employment, leading to a downward spiral of impoverishment and immiseration. So in 1823, young Mill and a friend distributed birth control pamphlets written by his father's friend and social reformer Francis Place, and were arrested and imprisoned for their trouble.
The Park Lane Hotel (with the blue flags) and adjoining buildings
I walk a little ways west along the southern end of Central Park to 36 Central Park South, a.k.a. 59th St. Here at the Park Lane Hotel, Sanger delivered her speech 'My Way to Peace' to the New History Society on January 17, 1932. In my view, it's a nasty speech. While Sanger generally insisted that birth control be entirely voluntary, the result of education and the right of women to have control over their own bodies, in this speech she called for coercive sterilization of 'the unfit'. As Nazism was developed and implemented in the years to come, Sanger opposed it staunchly, sharply criticizing its racial doctrines and opposing its coercive practices. Though she justified it on the grounds of improving public health and decreasing mortality rates, to my mind she was never able to sufficiently explain how her earlier call in 'My Way to Peace' for coercive sterilization of 'mental defectives', people with certain diseases, and convicted criminals was morally superior to Hitler's fascist system when it came to these unfortunate and marginalized groups.
New York Tribune, Fri Nov 18 1921, Announcement of Park Theater Margaret Sanger and Harold Cox appearance
One place I miss on this trip is the former site of the nearby Park Theater, near the southwest corner of Central Park, where Harold Cox delivered the Sanger speech he was prevented from making at the Town Hall five days earlier. A New York Tribune announcement describes the location as 'Columbus Circle near 59th and B'way' (Broadway). As I consult the 1923 Bromley atlas I've been consulting for much of this series, I don't find the Park Theater. Later, I search through an earlier edition of the Bromley Atlas and this time, I'm in luck. The Park Theater, renamed the Cosmopolitan Theater by 1923, was on 58th St, the second address to the west of Eighth Ave, its northeast corner at Columbus Circle at the southwest edge of Central Park. It stood where the Time Warner Center now faces onto 58th St, about where Google Maps identifies 322 W. 58th St.
In 1944, Sanger reminisced:
'…Birth control, fifteen, twenty years ago was a lurid and sensational topic… The very term was one not mentioned in polite society, thanks to Anthony Comstock who had Congress classify it with "obscene, and filthy literature"… Our struggles lacked the dignity they have today. Back in 1921, Harold Cox, brilliant member of the English Parliament and Editor of the Edinburgh Review was to speak with me at that early forum of free speech, Town Hall. Our subject was "Birth Control: Is it Moral?"
Entrance of the Park Theater, formerly the Majestic, at Columbus Circle, photo courtesy of MCNY
With astonishing directness Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick J. Hayes, through his emissary Monsignor Joseph P. Dineen, closed the meeting before it even opened. We had grown accustomed to opposition, from the combination of the Comstock group …with the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but never had the interference been so brutally direct before. Time and again theatres, ballrooms where I was to speak were ordered closed before the meeting could be held. In city after city this occurred during the years 1916, '17 and '18, but the climax was the now famous Town Hall incident which raised the issue throughout the country. Can one in public office use the power of that office to further his personal religious beliefs?
Mr. Cox and I were met at the steps of the Town Hall that evening by policemen, barred from entering and told, "There ain't gonna be no meeting. That's all I know…
We had the hierarchy to thank for so publicizing our meeting that the second held shortly after, at the big Park Theatre in Columbus Circle was packed fifteen minutes after a single door was opened. Two thousand people, many of whom had never heard of birth control before Cardinal Hayes gave it nation-wide publicity, stood outside clamoring to get in…"
I descend into the subway station at Columbus Circle and take the A train north, almost to the top of Manhattan Island. There are many sites on my list from Inglewood all the way back down to the southern end of Central Park, so I decide to visit them from north to south…
'14 East 60th Street', from 42Floors website
'About Sanger: Biographical Sketch', from The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University.
'Bandbox Theatre: East 57th Street near Third Avenue, New York, NY', International Broadway Database
Blake, Aaron. 'The Final Trump-Clinton Debate Transcript, Annotated.' Oct 19, 2016, The Washington Post: The Fix
Bromley, G.W. and Co. Atlas of the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York. Desk and Library edition, 1916, Plate 87 . Retrieved from Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division Digital Collection, The New York Public Library.
Bromley, G.W. and Co. Atlas of the City of New York, 1921 – 1923, Plate 82 and Plate 87. Retrieved from Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division Digital Collection, The New York Public Library.
Gopnik, Adam. 'Right Again: The Passions of John Stuart Mill'. Oct 6 2008, The New Yorker
Guillin, Vincent. Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill on Sexual Equality. Brill: Boston, 2009.
'International Theatre: 5 Columbus Circle (W. 58th & 59th), New York, NY', International Broadway Database
New-York Tribune, two selections from Nov 18, 1921, page 11: 'Birth Control Appeal Fails to Move Enright' and 'You Are Invited to Hear Margaret Sanger…' New York, New York. Via Newspapers.com
Sanger, Margaret. 'Gandhi and Mrs. Sanger Debate Birth Control,' Recorded by Florence Rose, published in Asia magazine, Vol. 26, no. 11, Nov. 1936, pp. 698-702
Sanger, Margaret. 'My Way to Peace,' Jan. 17 1932. From The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU
Sanger, Margaret. 'Opening Address for Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau Dinner', Feb 26, 1929. Source: Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Margaret Sanger Microfilm S71:153.
Posted in Feminism, History of Ideas, Human Rights, Sex & Sexuality, Traveling Philosophy / History of Ideas, Written by Amy Cools	| Tagged Broadbelt houses, Columbus Circle, Eugenics, Forced Sterlization, Harold Cox, History of New York, John Stuart Mill, Majestic Theater, Margaret Sanger, Nazism, Park Theater, Plaza Hotel, Radical New York, St. Nicholas Avenue, The First American Birth Control Conference, The Woman Rebel, Uptown New York, Winston Churchill	| 3 Comments

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