16 November 2019

The Pivot of Margaret Sanger


"The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers could no longer, at least for me, ring with conviction," Margaret Sanger.


I

Margaret Sanger remains one of the most controversial figures of American activism. Moreover, she is probably not even well known outside certain, limited circles as an activist. Not even the far right-wing Phyllis Schlafly, of the American Eagle Forum, bears such enmity from both left and right alike.

Sanger has been relegated to a certain attic in our collective memories, and she is hardly alone, as I will name drop some of the other historical class warriors who've been similarly obscured.

But unlike a Leon Trotsky, Carlos Franqui, Karl Kautsky, or Rosa Luxemburg, Sanger's memory has been so carefully cobbled down as to make her inconsequential. This is a loss to feminism, the class war, and to Marxism; and it is probably deliberate.

Sanger, of course, is mostly known as the founder of Planned Parenthood and a proponent of abortion. But in the same breath she is also renowned as a racist and eugenicist. This has placed her in a No Man's Land [pun intended, as I shall show] where while Planned Parenthood and the so-framed "women's access to health care" are celebrated, its key protagonist must be carefully relegated to that attic of the crazies.

A passage of a 1939 letter she wrote to a friend has been cited often as proof of her racist feelings. It reads in part: "... We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the [Black] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members " Scholars have widely discredited the spin put on this by anti-Sanger propagandists who have tried to argue Sanger wanted to use the Black ministers to hide Planned Parenthood's extermination plans.

But I would argue we know next to nothing about Sanger, and what we think we know has indeed been smears perpetrated by both the left and the right.

II

For almost a generation before founding Planned Parenthood [originally named the Birth Control League], Sanger was a young member of the Socialist Party USA, a suffragette, and a labor organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The tasks of these organizations took her to many parts of the US as well as Europe, and she is credited with leading two labor strikes, a textile worker strike in 1912 and silk workers strike in 1913.

Ironically, it was the actual work of labor organizing not only workers (mostly male) but also engaging with the strikers' wives, families, the children, and their conditions, which provoked Sanger into interrogating the effect of her work and the broader goals of activism.

It was these questions, the direction it took her, and the backlash that has exiled this former IWW labor organizer, Marxist, and suffragette to being a virtual non-entity to her former comrades and a pariah to everyone else.

Her 1922 work, the Pivot of Civilization (Brentano's NY) was written a year after founding Planned Parenthood with her sister, Edith Byrne. The book chronicles her "pivot" from almost a generation of labor organizing to women and children after women's suffrage [the 19th amendment] was won. Pivot of Civilization begins with how her eyes were opened and hints at the forces within her own proletarian movement who were against her.

First, for good measure, she sets up the tableau by taking a swipe at the part-time organizers who numbered many of her critics: "Of late we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to work - for a week or a month - among the proletariat."

But she is humble about her own work, referring to the 15 years with the IWW and how this shaped her.

"Regarding myself I may say that my experience in the course of the past twelve to fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me certain convictions that demand expression. For years I believed that the solution of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined programs of political and legislative action.

"My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when, as an organizer for a political group in New York (IWW), I attended by chance a meeting of women laundry workers who were on strike. We believed we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their support. ‘Oh that stuff!’ exclaimed one of these women. ‘Don’t you know that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for politicians and lawmakers to Right our wrongs?’ This set me to thinking - not merely of the immediate problem - but to asking myself how much any male politician could understand of the wrongs inflicted upon poor working women."

To frame what I believe happened to Sanger, one must not only understand the splits and sectarianism in the communist movement of the day but also how she responded to the trajectories that struggles took, and how men reacted.

The linear narratives of history, often written by men, marginalize the splits that disagree with their own and erase the women they cannot vilify.

In Pivot of Civilization, Sanger credits some thinkers and activists who "encouraged and strengthened" her probably just as much as being in the homes of the striking workers and talking to their wives. She sites Rudolf Rocker, Lorenzo Portet, Francisco Ferrer, Enrico Malatesta.

Of them, perhaps Rocker is the best known and most illustrative.

After Karl Kautsky, deemed the "pope" of Marxism internationally until 1917, Rudolf Rocker is sort of a founding thinker of council communism, left libertarianism, and anarcho-syndicalism. In fact, his highly readable and engaging book, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice remains a key document in this genre. As Sanger describes Rocker, he "was engaged in the thankless task of puncturing the articles of faith of the orthodox Marxian religion." 

For veering off doctrine and challenging some presumptions – and policies – of the Bolsheviks, Rocker was marginalized.

Sanger assesses all four: "It is quite needless to add that these men who had probed beneath the surface of the problem and had diagnosed so much more completely the complex malady of contemporary society were intensely disliked by the superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian school."

Remember, Sanger is writing this in 1922. "Neo-Marxian" is not the Euro-communism of the 60's or flirtations with social democracy of the 70's. It is better explained as the transgressions criticized by the likes of Bakunin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Rocker, and others who had sharp criticisms of the communist movement and, later, of Bolshevik measures in Revolutionary Russia.

To Sanger, the "complex malady" had been reduced by many labor leaders to simply changing the economic system and holding out a Utopia.

Sanger argued the role of women had been forgotten, their subservient role in patriarchal families dismissed, and the male assumption promoted that one must have many children and this disconnect from economics. Moreover, the lives of working women and children were worsening.

"We saw that in the final analysis the real burden of industrial warfare was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children ..." writes Sanger.

III

Whatever one thinks of these opposing views - i.e., the syndicalists vs the communists - the point in this piece is to contextualize the banishing of Margaret Sanger as a purely masculine attack to marginalize her in my hopes of rehabilitating her as the Marxist and feminist she was.

That turn-of-the-century communist history deserves another article or further reading elsewhere. Suffice it to say, Sanger, like Luxemburg, Kautsky, and Rocker, found herself on the wrong side of the war of ideas when faced with what she describes in her book as "purely masculine reasoning."

This "purely masculine reasoning" put the struggle of the workers [mostly seen as men], organizing industrial actions, and the inevitability of the better world "just around the corner" as central to the labor movement, while obscuring the effects on "the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers, with their puny babies and their broods of underfed children."

"The bitter struggle for bread, for a home, and material comfort was but one phase of the problem," wrote Sanger. But there was another.

Not an abortionist, Sanger advocated the unthinkable: that poor men stop having sex with their wives, the result of which were more starving babies and greater deprivations on working class families, the burdens of which fell almost entirely on women.

But Sanger went a step worse, advocating that wives needn't submit to their husbands sexual whims - as the current Southern Baptists instruct - or to the ideas propagated at the time that the larger and more desperate the proletariat, the speedier the revolution would come "just around the corner." Sanger ridiculed this.

The empowerment of women and telling them how to regulate their family size, we are loath to forget, is what got Sanger in trouble for her tenure at the helm of Planned Parenthood, not abortion.

Sanger and her sister smuggled in contraceptive devices from Europe and provided them to women. For this, they were arrested. For teaching women about contraceptives was an added charge.

Some facts. Sanger was not an abortionist. Planned Parenthood did not start performing abortions until 1973, after Sanger was dead and buried and her name already smeared. That smearing included being called a racist and eugenicist, which are not only belied by the facts that she was a labor organizer of Black and white workers, that her clinics were fully integrated with Black and white medical staff but also that she counted among her friends WEB DuBois, who sat on the board of Planned Parenthood in its early days.

Academic research by Marxist historian Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch: Woman, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, AK Press, 2004) and Charles Valenza ["Was Margaret Sanger a racist," Family Planning Perspectives, Vol 17 No. 1, 1985] have dispelled the wild assertions against Sanger.

Further, Valenza has found that the virulent, racist quotes attributed to Sanger were actually authored by other people but indeed published in her magazines (Valenza argues it was the name recognition of some of these authors, not their messages that put them in the pages of her periodicals).

To sum up, Sanger's heresies were, first, being a Marxist and daring to stand on the side of the working class in a militant posture; but her second was essentially becoming a radical feminist, turning against the masculinist narrative of the labor movement and daring to stand on the side of poor women.

These sorts of apostasies are unforgivable and have obscured Sanger's role as a leftist and a radical but also among that anti-communist mainstream.

IV

Radical feminist women, we forget, always come up against, the "fallacy" of the "all-too-masculine" insight, as Sanger bemoans it. Be it Sylvia Pankhurst, the most radical and controversial of the Pankhurst daughters who was not only more militant than her famous mother but also embraced anti-colonialism even when the post WWII European left abandoned it, was a socialist, and is considered a rare, early white Pan-African; Edith Byrne, Sanger's more militant sister whose direct action tactics landed her in jail and with the distinction of being the first inmate in the US force-fed when Byrne went on a hunger strike for the cause of women's rights; or later, some of the Black women who joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) and found their roles to be not in the ideological trenches but in the kitchen or bed - those "all-too-masculine" gender roles assigned them.

The Right is not alone guilty of misogyny. Left is often turning on and ridiculing its feminists as apostates for not playing their designated gender roles.

Angela Davis describes in her Autobiography considering joining the BPP, seeing how her role was to be to "support the Black man," and stay two paces behind. Without a second thought, Davis made a u-turn and joined the Communist Party that she knew growing up, even though she found the Party "conservative."

Federici notes "As we learned in the feminist movement, often the first obstacle a woman encounters when she wants to make a fight is not directly the state but the man in the family." (interview, Race, Poverty & the Environment, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2012).

To dare to tread into dangerous water for a moment, there are legitimate and historical reasons why militant women sometimes demand women-only spaces within which to strategize and commune.

At any rate, regardless of one's final judgments about left-communists, syndicalism, left libertarianism, or radical feminism we should not sideline too quickly its proponents. Their contribution to the class struggle cannot be denied, and we can gain much from their insights. It is unfortunate to say that Sanger was ahead of her time in daring to see beyond the noble striking worker and raise the humanity of the "overburdened wives ... with their puny babies and their broods of underfed children" and tell women they needn't obey their husbands and intensify their own poverty. That says a lot about how conforming we are with the "fallacy" of the "all-too-masculine."

Then we are quick to bemoan first-wave feminism after women like Sanger, her sister, and Sylvia Pankhurst are removed, and we dare wonder why our movements and club meetings have so few women in them.

Sanger's rehabilitation is overdue. The class struggle needs all the radical ideas and insights it can get. And it needs them from such women who got their hands dirty, beaten up, and gagged [literally] for the practical experience they can offer us.