Part 32

He had had all sorts of wares hurled at him—ostrich feathers, fans, baskets, sapphires, scarabs. He was satiated with strange sights and lore—Buddha’s Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, caravans of bullocks, the English club at tiny Port Swettenham in Malaya, the enormous porters of Egypt who picked up trunks as though they were handbags, women veiled and women unveiled, mosques, the Coptic church where Joseph and Mary were supposed to have hidden Jesus from Herod, the date trees along the road to Memphis, the underground Temple of the Bull, the remains of an old proud world at Alexandria where Cleopatra had once held court, the primitive ferry-raft on which we had crossed the Nile to see the place where Moses had been found in the bullrushes, the wonderful ride, weird and lovely, across the Sahara to view the Pyramids and Sphinx. On his way to Switzerland he had traveled by gondola along the canals of Venice, had been trailed through the art galleries of Milan.

After a few weeks at Montreux Grant was fully recovered, but he was now homesick for the first time since we had left New York eight months before. All he wanted was to see Tilden play in the tennis matches at Wimbledon, and then go home. Because I did not think he should miss the reception which H.G. was giving, I had him fly across the Channel to London, and afterwards, appreciating his longing to be among his own age and kind, I shipped him off on the maiden voyage of the _Majestic_ to a camp in the Poconos. By the time he was back at Peddie he was up with his class, his mind vastly enriched, and able to approach his studies in a more mature manner. I have never regretted taking him with me.

I myself remained in London for the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference to be held July 11–14. The inclusion of the words birth control was a definite concession on the part of the Neo-Malthusians to the new trend of thought. It was a delight to be amid conditions where tolerance reigned and the atmosphere was unblighted by legal restrictions. The scientific candor of the discussion was reported in the newspapers with sincerity and sobriety.

John Maynard Keynes, who had become famous almost overnight as the result of his book, _The Consequences of the Peace_, presided at one of the afternoon meetings. Later, I had lunch with him. He was tall and well-built, with clear, cold, blue eyes, a fine shapely head, brow, and face, a brilliant bearing and brilliant intellect. I was impressed by the fact he did not smile. Because he gave each question of yours so much consideration, he seemed constantly perplexed, but when he once started to talk you knew he had already put aside the thing as having been solved, and gone on in advance. You were probably more puzzled at his next question than he at yours.

In the two years that elapsed before I saw Keynes again he had married Lydia Lopokouva of the Russian Ballet. He had become an entirely different person—his serious mien and countenance had been changed to a buoyant, joyous happiness. His knowledge of the problems of money, population, and economics were of a nature far above the grasp of an ordinary intelligence, yet in his conversation with his wife he always implied she knew the subject as thoroughly as he, and answered her queries as though their minds were together. He was the only Englishman, perhaps the only man, I ever knew to do this.

Unlike Lydia Lopokouva, most women had a strenuous battle trying to prove themselves equal to men; this marriage conflict was inseparable from modern life. I could sense it frequently when coming in contact with a married couple—on her part the years of rebellion, and on his of trying to put her down as a weakling.

Sentiment has extolled the young love which promises to last through eternity. But love is a growth mingled with a succession of experiences; it is as foolish to promise to love forever as to promise to live forever.

To every woman there comes the apprehension that marriage may not fulfill her highest expectations and dreams. If in the heart of a girl entering this covenant for the first time there are doubts, even in the slightest degree, they are doubled and trebled in their intensity when she meditates a second marriage.

J. Noah H. Slee, whom I had known for some time, was what the papers called “a staid pillar of finance.” He was South African born but had made his fortune in the United States. In customs and exteriors we were as far apart as the poles; he was a conservative in politics and a churchman, whereas I voted for Norman Thomas and, instead of attending orthodox services, preferred to go to the opera.

An old-fashioned type of man, J.N. yearned to protect any type of woman who would cling. Complications, therefore, confronted us. I had been free for nearly ten years, and, for as long, had been waging a campaign to free other women. I was startled by the thought of joining my life to that of one who objected to his wife’s coming home alone in a taxi at night, or assumed she could not buy her own railroad tickets or check her baggage. Nevertheless, despite his foibles, he was generous in wanting me to continue my unfinished work, and was undeterred by my warning that he would always have to be kissing me good-by in depots or waving farewell as the gangplank went up.

I had to consider also that I had two boys to be educated, and that children were much more to a woman than to a man. Yet I knew he would be kind and understanding with them. Furthermore, he had faith both in individuals and in humanity; his naïve appearance of hardness was actually not borne out in fact. He kept his promises and hated debts; we attached the same importance to the spirit of integrity.

Hundreds of people who scarcely knew me were delighted when the news of our marriage eventually became public. Within one week letters began to arrive from all over the United States and Canada. One man wrote he had helped me get up a meeting at San Francisco and now needed a printing press—would I mail him the trifling sum of three thousand dollars? Another brought to mind I had had dinner at his home when lecturing in his city, and now that he had painted enough pictures to hold an exhibit, would I finance it? Dozens of ministers, old men, old ladies, writers, sculptors wanted me to set them up in business, musical concert work, bookshops, recalling the time they had taken me in cars to meetings, or that I had slept in their beds. Parents requested me to send their children to schools, to Europe, to sanatoriums—heaven knows what. I never knew people could need so much. I longed with all the desire in me to make out a check for every lack and wave a magic wand and say, “So be it.”

But all I could do was write back that I had no more wealth than before—my husband’s was his own. And I still required as many contributions to birth control as ever.

I had not wanted the worry or trouble of handling money, nor do I want it today. The things I valued then I value now, not for what they cost, but for what they are. To me dollars and cents are only messengers to do my bidding, and nothing more. To use them properly and get results is my responsibility.

When I asked J.N., “Why do you lock things up?” he replied, “I always do, don’t you?”

“Never. I haven’t anything worth locking up.”

That is the way I still feel.

It seemed so final when again I started a home, but there had been a gathering loneliness in my life—not seeing the children except on holidays, never having time to spend with old friends or to make new ones, and with such rich opportunities constantly offering themselves. I knew very well, however, what sort of a house I wanted—a simple one, something like Shelley’s in Sussex.

In 1923, with stones gathered from the fields we built a house near Fishkill, New York, cradled in the Dutchess County hills, beside a little lake. On it we tried out swans, but they did not work; although they looked picturesque, they were too messy. So we changed to ducks and stocked the water with bass. I planned a blue garden which grew up and down and threw itself about the house and altered with the seasons. Pepper, a cocker spaniel puppy of two months, came the first year and bounced and leaped around us as we walked through the woods or rode horseback over the hills.

Willow Lake was only sixty miles from New York. I could make out the menus for a week ahead, leave directions for the gardening, be in my office fairly early and back again for dinner at night. Later, for working purposes, we built a studio among the treetops on the edge of a cliff from which I could look far off across the majestic valley of the Hudson.

Domesticity, which I had once so scorned, had its charms after all.

_Chapter Twenty-nine_

WHILE THE DOCTORS CONSULT

After coming back from around the world I found nothing had been done about the Tenth Street clinic, which I had expected to be in operation. No members of the Academy of Medicine had come forth to back Dr. de Vilbiss, and I had paid the rent for the last twelve months while vainly waiting.

Now I gave it up and decided to start afresh. The more I had studied, the more clearly I had recognized that it was not possible to advise a standard contraceptive for all women any more than it was possible to prescribe one set of eyeglasses for all conditions of sight. Only upon examination and careful check-up could you determine the most suitable method. No detailed statistics had ever been kept except at Brownsville, and those case histories had never been returned to me by the police. I wanted to collect at least a thousand such records for a scientific survey before any opposition could interfere with the plan.

Many women were still coming to me personally for information at 104 Fifth Avenue. The best thing to do was have a woman doctor right there to take care of them—a quiet way to begin. It was hard to locate one foot-loose and free; I could have no shying or running off at the first indication of trouble. In making inquiries I heard of Dr. Dorothy Bocker, who held a New York City license though she was at present in the Public Health Service of Georgia. This single, cordial, and enthusiastic young woman knew practically nothing about birth control technique, but was willing to learn. The difficulty was that she wanted five thousand dollars a year.

At first this appeared an almost unsurmountable obstacle. Here was just the person I had been looking for, but it seemed beyond my power to raise so large a sum. I was loaded with the financial weight of the _Review_ and the League. That organization had been admitted as a membership corporation and hence could not secure a license to conduct a clinic, which in New York was synonymous with a dispensary. No clinic, therefore, could be included in its budget; it would remain a department of the League by courtesy only, being actually my private undertaking. Where could I find someone to donate such an enormous amount?

Then I remembered Clinton Chance, a young manufacturer of Birmingham, who had prospered exceedingly both before and during the War. He and his wife, Janet, had become good friends of mine during my 1920 visit to England. Having felt the need of a more sound and fundamental outlet for his riches than that provided by charity, he had come to see that birth control information was far better for his employees than a dole at the birth of every new baby. He was not in any sense a professional philanthropist, but only wanted to help them be self-sufficient.

Clinton had once offered me money to set the birth control movement going in England, but I had refused then because England had enough co-workers, who were handling the situation well, and, furthermore, my place was in the United States. He had then said to me, “I won’t give you a contribution for regular current expenses, but if ever you see the necessity for some new project which will advance the general good, call on me.”

Now I cabled Clinton at length, explaining my need. He promptly answered, “Yes, go ahead,” and soon arrived an anonymous thousand pounds to cover Dr. Bocker’s salary for the first year. I made out a contract for two. She was to come in January, 1923, and we were to shoulder the risks and responsibilities together.

Even to choose a name for the venture was not easy. I had been steadily advertising the term “clinic” to America for so long that it had become familiar and, moreover, to poor people it meant that little or no payment was required. But the use of the word itself was legally impossible, and I was not certain that the same might not be true of “center” or “bureau.” I wanted it at least to imply the things that clinic meant as I had publicized it, and also to include the idea of research.

Finally, one of the doors of the two rooms adjoining the League offices, readily accessible to me and to the women who came for advice, was lettered, Clinical Research.

It was still a clinic in my mind, though frankly an experiment because I was not even sure women would accept the methods we had to offer them. We started immediately keeping the records. Dr. Bocker wrote down the history of the case on a large card, numbering it to correspond with a smaller one containing the patient’s name and address. Each applicant she suspected of a bad heart, tuberculosis, kidney trouble, or any ailment which made pregnancy dangerous, she informed regarding contraception and advised medical care at once.

In our first annual report, which attracted much attention, all our cases were analyzed. We said, “Here is the proof—nine hundred women with definite statistics concerning their ages, physical and mental conditions, and economic status.”

As time went on I became less and less pleased with Dr. Bocker’s system. She had no follow-up on patients, and I wished the clinic to be like a business in the thoroughness of its routine. I refused to approve methods as a hundred percent reliable until there had been not merely one but three checks on each woman who had been to the clinic. To begin with, she was to return two or three days after her initial visit; she usually did that. But if she did not come back inside three months, then a social worker in our own employ should be sent to call on her. Finally, she was to be examined once a year. Dr. Bocker did not see eye to eye with me that this was the only way to put the work on a sound scientific basis of facts, and we agreed to part company in December of the second year.

Dr. Hannah M. Stone, a fine young woman from the Lying-In Hospital, volunteered to take Dr. Bocker’s place without salary. Her gaze was clear and straight, her hair was black, her mouth gentle and sweet. She had a sympathetic response to mothers in distress, and a broad attitude towards life’s many problems. When the Lying-In Hospital later found she had connected herself with our clinic, it gave her a choice between remaining with us and resigning from the staff. She resigned. Her courageous stand indicated staunch friendship and the disinterested selflessness essential for the successful operation of the clinic. These qualities have kept her with us all this time, one of the most beloved and loyal workers that one could ever hope for.

The clinic could serve New York, but its practical value outside was restricted, and I was always seeking some way of remedying this. We took the preliminary step in Illinois, where no laws existed against clinics. I had arranged a conference in Chicago at the Drake Hotel, October, 1923, the first of a regional series. Mrs. Benjamin Carpenter and Dr. Rachelle Yarros, who had been with Jane Addams at Hull House, had to obtain a court decision before Dr. Herman Bundesen, Commissioner of Health, would issue a license for the second clinic in the United States.

Meanwhile, between 1921 and 1926, I received over a million letters from mothers requesting information. From 1923 on a staff of three to seven was constantly busy just opening and answering them. Despite the limitations of the writers and their lack of education, they revealed themselves strangely conscious of the responsibilities of the maternal function.

Childbearing is hazardous, even when carried out with the advantages of modern hygiene and parental care. The upper middle classes are likely to assume all confinements are surrounded by the same attention given the births of their own babies. They do not comprehend it is still possible in these United States for a woman to milk six cows at five o’clock in the morning and bring a baby into the world at nine. The terrific hardships of the farm mother are not in the least degree lessened by maternity. If she and her infant survive, it is only to face these hardships anew, and with additional complications.

In the midst of an era of science and fabulous wealth reaching out for enlightenment to advance our civilization, with millionaires tossing their fortunes into libraries and hospitals and laboratories to discover the secrets and causes of life, here at the doorstep of everyone was this tragic, scarcely recognized condition.

It was an easy and even a pleasant task to reduce human problems to numerical figures in black and white on charts and graphs, but infinitely more difficult to suggest concrete solutions. The reasoning of learned theologians and indefatigable statisticians seemed academic and anemically intellectual if brought face to face with the actuality of suffering. When they confronted me with arguments, this dim, far-off chorus of pain began to resound anew in my ears.

Sensitive women of our clerical staff were constantly breaking down in health under the nervous depression caused by the fact we had so little knowledge to give. One who went to Chicago to help rehabilitate soldiers wrote me, “I’m feeling much better. These men who have lost a leg or arm come in, apparently disqualified forever, but something is being done about them, and it is happy work, not forlorn like yours.”

To prove that the story could be told by the mothers themselves, ten thousand letters, with the assistance of Mary Boyd, were selected and these again cut to five hundred. Eventually this historical record appeared in book form as _Motherhood in Bondage_.

Whenever I am discouraged I go to those letters as to a wellspring which sends me on re-heartened. They make me realize with increasing intensity that whoever kindles a spark of hope in the breast of another cannot shirk the duty of keeping it alive.

_Woman and the New Race_, which sold at first for two dollars, had a distribution of two hundred and fifty thousand copies, and it made my heart ache to know that poor women who could ill afford it were buying the book and not finding there what they sought. To the best of my ability I tried to supply general information, but the only way of extending genuine aid was to persuade doctors to give it professionally.

By a happy chance I met Dr. James F. Cooper, tall, blond, distinguished, a fine combination of missionary and physician, who left no stone unturned when a patient came to him, but devoted his whole attention to her—everything in her life was important to him. He was recently back from Fuchow, China, and was establishing himself in Boston as a gynecologist. Since he was thoroughly convinced of the vital necessity for birth control and could talk technically to his profession and interpret to the layman as well, my husband pledged his salary and expenses for two years, and I induced him to associate himself with us as medical director to go forth and try to convince the doctors throughout the country that contraceptive advice would save a large proportion of their women patients.

In January, 1925, Dr. Cooper started on a tour which covered nearly all the states in the Union. In the course of the two years he delivered more than seven hundred lectures. Occasionally he was suspected of ulterior motives, of attempting to advertise the products he recommended, but this did not sway him from his persistence. Where he found laxity on the part of medical organizations he spoke to lay associations, which applied pressure on their own physicians, demanding information. As a result of this trip, doctors really began to awake to the problem of contraception, and when it was ended we had the names of some twenty thousand from Maine to California who had consented to instruct patients referred to them.

At this point began the huge and difficult process of decentralization, so that the New York office need no longer be a clearing house. Each request which lay outside the pale of the Cooper influence required voluminous correspondence. One letter, enclosing a stamped, return-addressed envelope, was mailed to the woman, asking her to furnish us the name of her doctor. We then wrote him to inquire whether he would give her information, and offered to send supplies if she could not afford them. If he said yes, we notified her to that effect; if he said no, we gave some other doctor in her vicinity an opportunity to co-operate.

We were immediately confronted with the situation that even willing doctors had little to recommend. Literally thousands of women reported that such ineffective methods had been tendered them they had refused to pay. We ourselves did not have a great deal, and this put us in a weak position; the acceptance of the theory was ahead of the means of practicing it.

The jelly I had found in Friedrichshaven had turned out to be too expensive, because it was made with a chinosol and Irish moss base, and the price of the former was prohibitive in preparing it for poor women. Dr. Stone and Dr. Cooper, therefore, devised a formula for a jelly with a lactic acid and glycerine base, which was within our means. Most of their cases, however, were sufficiently grave for them not to feel justified in using it alone experimentally. Consequently, they took the precaution of having a double safeguard by combining the chemical contraceptive with the mechanical—jelly with pessary—which proved ninety-eight percent efficacious.

At this time we could not import diaphragms directly. Although I had given various friends going to Germany and England the mission of bringing them in, this could not be done in sufficient quantity. Furthermore, since bootlegging supplies could not continue indefinitely I had to find out how they could legally be made here.

Two young men came to help in whatever way was most necessary. Herbert Simonds, who had been in advertising, began to investigate the possibility that some recognized rubber company should make our supplies. When one and all were fearful, he and Guy Moyston, who did some publicity for us, concluded they would form the Holland-Rantos Company, selling only to physicians or on prescription. They spent their own time and thousands of dollars personally on research, in the end perfecting a quality of rubber that could stand the variations of climate in the United States—hot houses and cold winters, Florida dampness and Western dryness.

Meanwhile, Julius Schmid, an old established manufacturer, had been importing from his own concern in Germany a few diaphragms, but only on a modest scale because he did not want to run afoul of the Comstock law. As soon as he saw a potential market in the medical profession he fetched from the Fatherland several families who had been making molds there, gave them places to live in, and set up a little center, expanding gradually until eventually he sold more contraceptive supplies than any firm in the world.

But this was all in the future.