What Every Girl Should Know

by J. Albert Mann

  “Maggie?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I’m going to elope.”

  I let go of her arm and back away.

  “Maggie?”

  I shake my head, willing her to be quiet. She’s leaving me. She’s going to get married. Ethel. Married.

  And I’ll be alone.

  She throws her arms around me. I don’t hug her back, but I allow her to hold me. I need her to hold me.

  “Why?” I ask, my question muffled by her embrace.

  “I have to get out.”

  I nod against her shoulder.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Does Mary or Nan know?”

  “Just you.”

  “And Jack,” I add.

  “And Jack,” she says.

  “Maggie,” she whispers. She knows. She knows she’s leaving me. Alone. With him.

  “I’m all right.”

  But I’m not. I’m not all right.

  Somehow, though, I manage to look like I am all the way home—then on through to the night, and into the next day. One moment at a time. One day at a time. One disappointment at a time. I manage to pretend everything is all right. I manage. To not think about how slowly, slowly, slowly this is all becoming quite normal.

  March 1, 1900

  The winter has come and gone, just as it seems my life is doing. Best not to think about it. Best to do as my mother did. As the world says to do. My duty. It’s incredibly easy to do. It begins on a Monday and follows into Tuesday, and before you know it, you’re counting off the week, the month, the year. My only goal each day is to arrive at the place where I might finally sit and read the next novel I have borrowed from the Free Library.

  Ethel leaves for Jack. My brothers leave for school or factory. I run the house. And my father migrates from his breakfast at the marble-topped table to his books and papers at his chair. Eugene Debs has grown in fame and deed, and so has grown in my father’s estimation of him. Our house fills with Socialist papers. He is also digging into psychology. Between the two of us, the books pile up.

  With Arlington in school and my mother in the grave, it is he and I during the long days. It does not escape my heart how much my younger self would have loved this.

  “What have you got there?” he growls.

  I shift my position in the chair so he can’t read the title of my novel.

  “Look here at what I’m reading,” he demands.

  I know what he’s reading. He’s reading The Social Democratic. He’s always reading The Social Democratic. I do not look.

  “Now here is a man worth reading,” he continues, shaking his paper at me. “Not the ninny you’re holding.”

  He drones on. But I don’t listen. I’ve heard this speech before. Yesterday. And the day before that. He believes novels are foolish.

  “. . . an uncultivated mind . . .”

  He is difficult to shut out.

  “Read what will benefit you in the battle of your life,” he admonishes.

  “I am reading what will benefit me in the battle of my life. The Three Musketeers. And it’s doing just what I want it to do—taking my mind away from here.” At this, I remove myself to the kitchen, because not even Alexandre Dumas can drown out the annoying brogue of Michael Higgins.

  “I see you are agitated, Margaret,” he shouts after me. “ ‘Progress is born of agitation,’ as the good Mr. Debs has said. ‘It is agitation or stagnation.’ ”

  I plop myself at the kitchen table and attempt to read, but the word stagnation has me slamming my book down on the cool marble and walking about the floor. And of course, now I am agitated. Making my father right. Which makes me even more agitated.

  I stomp over to the cookstove to put the kettle on, but stop. I don’t want tea. I look around the kitchen for what I do want, but I know what I want isn’t here. What I want is . . . beyond here.

  I sigh, and turn toward the window and look out into the rainy gloom just as I had once looked in through a window on another gloomy day long ago.

  “Mother,” I whisper, so lightly the word doesn’t fog the glass.

  I’d do anything to see her reflection behind me. Moving through the kitchen, a baby on her hip, one in her belly, and coughing, even. I’d take her coughing. But the only reflection I see is my own. Silent and still, my long braid neatly plaited and resting over my shoulder, looking very much as if it had been carefully placed there, looking very much like her.

  Without thinking, I pick up Mary’s butchering knife and saw through my braid. Hair being sliced through by a knife turns out to be one of the loudest sounds I’ve ever heard. I stare at the rope of it in my hand. What did I do? What did I just do?

  I fling the braid and the knife onto the table, clapping both my hands to my head. My head without a braid. A braid I’ve worn all my life.

  I look up at my reflection in the window and gasp . . . a real Nan gasp, which makes me laugh. I shake my head and my hair puffs wildly around my shoulders. Staring at this unfamiliar girl in the window, I realize that she too wants something beyond here. Of course she does. We all do.

  Mary longs for the stage. Nan burns to write. Every girl I know—Emma, Esther, Amelia—has wanted something beyond . . . perhaps even my mother. Wanting it, though, is one thing. Being able to choose it is quite another. And maybe this is what every girl should know—there is no freedom without choice.

  Making the choice to live the life I want to live, the life I need to live, is true agitation. Progress might be born of agitation, as Mr. Debs, said, but I know how much more there is to agitation besides progress. Hard things. Like a beet thrown at close range, and the cold, uncaring eyes of an entire town.

  Margaret Louise.

  I don’t know what lies beyond. Neither did she. But she knew I’d go. Beets be damned. Maybe this was the reason she sounded so sad.

  * * *

  I arrive on time for the earliest train with everything I own: a valise carrying two dresses, three pairs of knickers, a nightgown, and of course, my beautiful silk gloves—all neatly folded and packed. My coat is buttoned to my chin to keep out the raw cold of spring. My boots are laced up tightly. My face is washed. My hair, free. Anyone witnessing my clipped stride as I walk down Market Street would have no other choice but to agree, I look like someone who is on her way to challenge the world.

  Historical Note

  Margaret Louise Higgins Sanger (1879-1966) left home at twenty and entered into an accredited three-year nursing program at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, New York. Nursing was not respected then as it is today. It was considered equal to being a house servant—a job Margaret knew all too well.

  As a visiting nurse on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Margaret witnessed the despair, sickness, and death brought on by unwanted pregnancy, self-induced abortion, child abandonment, and child labor. In essence, she saw aspects of her mother’s life playing out over and over again inside the tenements, a life she had desperately tried to leave behind. It was here that Margaret realized her mission—not as a doctor in the service of her mother, but as an activist in the service of all women.

  Margaret began her crusade by speaking, writing, and distributing pamphlets and information on female sexuality, sexual education, and contraception—coining a new term: “birth control.” These actions were not only considered obscene at the time, but were also illegal. She was arrested in 1914 and fled the country to avoid prison, living in exile in Europe for a year. She returned in 1915 to fight the charges against her, and to open the first American birth-control clinic, beginning a long battle to make family planning and sexual education part of regular health care. For this, too, she was arrested. And this time, she served thirty days in prison.

  But Margaret continued her work. She went on to launch the first legal family planning clinic, promote new contraception (notably the birth control pill), and to fight for a woman’s right to control her health and reproductive future—none of which was withou
t controversy. It didn’t help that Margaret remained the same person who thought it was a good idea to cross a train trestle high above the Chemung River. Margaret not only attempted to acknowledge a woman’s sexuality, but proclaimed women had the right to have sex for pleasure, an absolutely unacceptable concept in early 1900s America—and an idea women still fight for today.

  Margaret defied the conventions of society, and for doing so, she often paid with her reputation. Her refusal to live the socially conventional life expected of women brought harsh judgment from the society she rejected. This harsh judgment still follows her legacy today. Most of the vitriol aimed at Margaret personally, stems from her advocacy of eugenics.

  Eugenics was a widely held scientific belief in Margaret’s lifetime that aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population. Margaret was a eugenicist, as were Theodore Roosevelt and Helen Keller, among many others. In this time period, eugenics could be found in the high school science textbooks of more than half the states in the country. Today, we realize just how ableist, racist, and sexist this thinking is. It is from eugenics that the horrendous idea of sterilizing certain women—namely women with disabilities and women of color—arose.

  Margaret did advocate the sterilization of what was then medically termed the “mentally unfit.” She defined these as people who could not properly care for children due to disease or disability, citing alcoholism and severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. She was far from alone in this view: The majority of the medical community agreed with her, as did the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of sterilization of the “unfit” in Buck v. Bell in 1927, with only one judge dissenting. A ruling both Robert Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union and W. E. B. DuBois of the NAACP agreed with. This view was partly due to ignorance at the time about the nature of mental illness, and partly due to the lack of treatment options. There were few medications available for people with mental illness, and often the solution was a lifetime of institutionalization.

  Although it is true that Margaret did believe in sterilization of the “mentally unfit,” her detractors took this view—a view we realize today is unacceptable—one step further, stating that she also applied this idea of sterilization to races and religions, and thus deemed her a racist. This is false. As Margaret wrote in 1934, “If ‘unfit’ refers to race or religions, then that is another matter which I frankly deplore.”

  Margaret was actually a progressive thinker on race for her time. She opened her clinics to both black and white families and would not hire any nurse or doctor who did not agree to treat patients of color. The power structure that wanted—and still wants—her reputation ruined constructed a racist version of Margaret, hoping it would damage her message. To this end, Margaret’s words were often taken out of context to purposely distort her views on race, and thereby detract from her mission. One quote used repeatedly to attack her came from a letter written to a donor about the Negro Project (a name that reflected how black Americans were commonly identified at the time).

  The project was an effort to bring birth control and healthcare to black Americans in the south who were being neglected by the public healthcare system. It was supported by W. E. B. DuBois of the NAACP, as well as by Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women. In this letter, Margaret wrote about how she was encouraging more community involvement—by training black ministers in outreach so they might aid in the recruitment of black doctors and nurses for the project—because she feared the project might be misunderstood if it was solely run by white people. She ended these thoughts with the sentence: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” What she meant was this: The last thing we want is for anyone to think our goal is to exterminate black Americans. She was worried that anti-birth-control advocates would undermine the project, painting a sinister picture of it. Ironically, using the first half of this quote, they did just that.

  Three more quotes wrongly attributed to Margaret are still used today to spread a false racist persona of her. The first is a quote from W. E. B. DuBois: “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among Whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.” The last two are: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control,” and “Colored people are like human weeds and have to be exterminated.” Margaret simply never said either one.

  Margaret’s personal and political faults were—and continue to be—exaggerated and misrepresented by those who wish to sabotage her message: that “Women should have the right to control their bodies, and therefore, their lives.” This doesn’t mean her faults should be excused. However, just as with the work of men, her faults should be considered alongside her work and within the context of history.

  Margaret Louise Higgins Sanger changed our world. Born a cheeky little girl in a factory town, she grew up to become a bold woman who led an extraordinary fight against the most powerful opponents in the world: men, the United States government, and the Catholic Church. She succeeded not only in beginning discussions about women’s sexuality, sexual health education, reproduction, family planning, and contraception, but also in influencing and affecting the laws to change and improve these basic human rights. The structures she built: the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the International Planned Parenthood Federation—are still providing sexual and reproductive healthcare and education to almost five million women worldwide.

  One hundred and forty years after her birth, Margaret’s ideas are still considered controversial. The societal debate over a woman’s right to her own body continues to rage today. Choosing to have a baby is both an individual decision and a societal one, just as being human is experienced individually and societally. Each of us balances our individuality against our need to participate in a shared human experience. Maggie spent her life searching out this balance. And in doing so, she helped to move the scales—so weighted against women—a little closer to the center.

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction. I made it up. This doesn’t mean none of this actually happened. It did. “Maggie” Louise Higgins Sanger grew up in Corning, New York, and she lived in that house by the tracks with her very large family. She also hung from the train trestle, washed dishes with her sisters, and helped her father dig up her little brother’s grave. Most of the events in this book were pulled straight out of Margaret’s autobiography. Some events I combined, and others I reordered for narrative purposes. I recreated Margaret’s life as fiction because I wanted to know her better and I wanted you to know her better.

  But then why make it up?

  The answer is freedom.

  I wanted the freedom to combine Margaret’s own words found in her autobiography with letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and the accounts of her life as seen through the eyes of the people who knew her and the scholars who studied her. But to create a breathing, thinking, doing Margaret, I needed the freedom to add to all this my own human sense of who she was as a growing person. Therefore . . . I got to know her as well as anyone can know someone who died before they were born, and then I played Dr. Frankenstein and jolted her alive with the electricity of my imagination.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I’d like to express my gratitude to the scholars, historians, and archivists whose dedication in seeking out, preserving, studying, and organizing the life and work of Margaret Sanger provided me the means to write this book. A special thank-you to Peter Engelman of the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University and Smith College for his precious time and boundless expertise. And to Ellen Chesler for inspiring me through her amazing work in Woman of Valor. You wrote, “Every woman
in the world today who takes her sexual and reproductive autonomy for granted should venerate Margaret Sanger.” And because of you, I do.

  I’d also like to thank the following local librarians and historians. Details matter. And these are the folks who diligently watch over them. Thank you to Nancy Magrath of the Rakow Research Library in Corning, New York, as well as to Tom Dimitroff and Peter Foley, local historians in Corning and Claverack, New York, respectively.

  If teachers light your way, the following people are bright indeed. Mary Quattlebaum began this work with me as a picture book biography, never dousing the idea with the very real limitations this form would have entailed for my subject. And because of Mary, it grew into a middle grade—where Liz Garton Scanlon took it up with equal gusto, encouraging experimentation while also managing to be a frank editor. Carolyn Yoder stepped in to read it in all its forms, waving me on. And Reka Simonsen, with Julia McCarthy at her side, spent an entire year reshaping it into the book it is today. Dearest Reka, your energy, vision, and patience are astonishing.

  Shouting from the sidelines were a host of the most spectacular writing friends. If you think having people along the path rooting for you is no large matter, you’ve never run a marathon, and surely writing a novel is a marathon. I adore you . . . Cate Berry, Sarah Cassell, Leslie Caulfield, Jennifer Salvato Doktorski, Robin Galbraith, Adrienne Kisner, Carol McAfee, and of course, the Vermont College of Fine Arts Writing for Children and Young Adults’s one and only Dead Post-Its Society.

  Thanks always to my agent, Kerry Sparks. You are a true partner.

  And love to my husband, Kevin Mann, who endured something akin to the torments of hell having to listen to me go on about Margaret Higgins Sanger for years.

  A final acknowledgment to Margaret Higgins Sanger. So much in my life has been made possible due to your work and dedication. Thank you.