MARGARET SANGER and the MORALITY of BIRTH CONTROL in the 1920S

“CHURCHES IN THE VANGUARD:” MARGARET SANGER AND THE MORALITY OF BIRTH CONTROL IN THE 1920s Anna C. Maurer Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of History, Indiana University May 2015 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Master’s Thesis Committee _________________________________________ Nancy Marie Robertson, Ph.D., Chair _________________________________________ Kevin Cramer, Ph.D. _________________________________________ Jason S. Lantzer, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members: Kevin Cramer, Jason Lantzer, and Nancy Robertson, for all of their support and encouragement throughout the process of formulating and writing this thesis. I am especially grateful to Nancy Robertson for her infinite patience, numerous edits, and thoughtful feedback over the years it has taken to complete the project. I am also grateful to Janna Bennett, Meredith McGovern, and the rest of my Writing Group, who met and e-mailed as we all plodded along. Thank-you for always listening and encouraging me to push through any challenges, and especially for giving me the confidence to believe I could finish, despite all the personal joys that have slowed the process. The camaraderie has been such a blessing! Thank-you to my lifelong cheerleaders: my parents, Gerald and Patricia Whelan, who helped me start my journey in graduate school and always empowered me to pursue my goals despite the challenges, including finishing this degree. A very special thank-you to my husband, Brent Maurer, for supporting me with patience and encouragement, and especially for taking on many, many hours of extra Daddy Duties to give me the necessary time and quiet to complete this project. Finally, thank-you to my sweet daughters born along the way, Elise, Caroline, and Jillian, who have given up Mommy Time in order for me to do my work and, as they say, become a “Master of History.” I feel so blessed to be a mother of girls in an age when women have choices regarding education, career, marriage and motherhood, and I hope I have provided a positive example of all of these paths. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 “The Agony of the Living”: Improving Health and Quality of Life for Women and Children 34 Chapter 3 “Happiness in Marriage”: Promoting Sexual Intimacy and Strengthening the Family 84 Conclusion 132 Bibliography 136 Curriculum Vitae iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Overview and Argument If sexual intercourse had no consequence of pregnancy, what would become of the world? Many religious leaders in the early 1900s were afraid of the immoral associations and repercussions of birth control. The Catholic Church and some Protestants never accepted contraception, or accepted it much later, but many mainline Protestants leaders did change their tune dramatically between the years of 1920 and 1931. This investigation seeks to understand how Margaret Sanger was able to use her rhetoric to move her reform from the leftist outskirts and decadent, sexual connotations into the mainstream of family-friendly, morally virtuous, and even conservative religious approval. Securing the approval of religious leaders subsequently provided the impetus for legal and medical acceptance by the late-1930s. Margaret Sanger used conferences, speeches, articles, her magazine (Birth Control Review), and several books to reinforce her message as she pragmatically shifted from the radical left closer to the center and conservatives. She knew the power of the churches to influence their members, and since the United States population had undeniably a Judeo-Christian base, this power could be harnessed in order to achieve success for the birth control movement, among the conservative medical and political communities and the public at large. Despite the clear consensus against birth control by all mainline Christian churches in 1920, including Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, the decade that followed would bring about a great divide that would continue to widen in successive decades. Sanger put forward many arguments in her works, but the ones which ultimately brought along the relatively conservative religious leaders were those that presented birth control not as a gender equity issue, but rather as a morally constructive reform that had the power to save and strengthen marriages; lessen prostitution and promiscuity; protect the health of women; reduce 1 abortions, infanticide, and infant mortality; and improve the quality of life for children and families. Initially, many conservatives and religious leaders associated the birth control movement with radicals, feminists, prostitutes, and promiscuous youth, and feared contraception would lead to immorality and the deterioration of the family. Without the threat of pregnancy, conservatives feared that youth and even married adults would seize the opportunity to have sex outside of marriage. Others worried the decreasing size of families was a sign of growing selfishness and materialism. In response, Sanger promoted the movement as a way for conservatives to stop the rising divorce rates by strengthening and increasing marriages, and to improve the lives of families by humanely increasing the health and standard of living, for women and children especially. In short, she argued that birth control would not lead to deleterious consequences, but would actually improve family moral values and become an effective humanitarian reform. She recognized that both liberals and conservatives were united in hoping to strengthen the family, and so she emphasized those virtues and actively courted those same conservative religious leaders that had previously shunned birth control and the movement. Throughout the 1920s, she emphasized the ways in which birth control could strengthen marriages and improve the quality of life of women and children, and she effectively won over the relatively conservative religious leaders that she needed to bring about the movement’s public, medical, and political progress. Scope and Research Methodology In order to identify the major arguments Sanger made to convince religious leaders that birth control was a morally compelling reform, I have examined the rhetoric and most works of Margaret Sanger produced between 1920 and 1931. The scope of this project concentrates on the 1920s for several key reasons. The first major mainline church to accept birth control was the British Anglican Church at its Lambeth Conference of Bishops in August 1930, which led to the subsequent acceptance in March 1931 by the American Federal Council of Churches in Christ 2 (FCC), an umbrella organization of mainline American Protestant churches. From that point on, other major denominations followed and began to accept it as well. At the previous Lambeth Conference in 1920, however, even the Anglican bishops had been firmly opposed to artificial contraception, as were all other mainline Protestants and Catholics. Unlike the shift of support among mainline Protestants, the 1920s also mark the period in which the Roman Catholic Church argued even more strongly against birth control, starting with a Town Hall Raid of Sanger’s conference in New York City in 1921 and continuing through Pope Pius XI’s encyclical against artificial birth control in 1931. During this decade, then, a clear divide emerged between, on one hand, Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants, who continued to oppose birth control, and, on the other hand, mainline Protestants, who began supporting it. Finally, Sanger’s efforts became exclusively and aggressively focused on birth control after World War I, and her efforts greatly expanded throughout the decade with speaking tours, conferences, and major publications during the 1920s. For all of these reasons, the decade of the 1920s stands out as the critical one in which the major shift of opinions occurred, both in the public and especially among religious leadership. My primary source research focuses on the works of Margaret Sanger and the arguments and rhetoric that she projected, along with speakers at her conferences and fellow writers at her Birth Control Review (BCR). I have purposely excluded most documents and works of those who received her message, such as religious leaders, in order to more closely analyze the messages and themes that she emphasized. The prolific works that I examined include her letters, speech transcripts, diary entries, conference schedules and transcripts, and some articles. In addition, I have analyzed the monthly publications of the Birth Control Review, from the time Sanger began it under the American Birth Control League (ABCL) with the first issue appearing in 1917 until she resigned as editor in 1929 (publication continued until 1940). As she was highly involved in the editorial process of the magazine, her rhetoric was visible throughout the BCR issues. Finally, my research includes her major publications and books during the 1920s and shortly thereafter, including: Woman and the New Race (1920), and Happiness in Marriage (1926). 3 Literature Review In researching the role of Margaret Sanger in the birth control movement of the 1920s and the changing views of religious groups, there are several bodies of historical scholarship to explore and synthesize, including the life of Sanger, the history of the birth control movement, religion in the Progressive

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