The Mansion of Happiness

by Jill Lepore

  But by the 1920s, Mother’s Magazine was long gone, and so was that era, and, surely, Hecht thought, motherhood had changed, just as childhood and adolescence and marriage and work had changed. Everything was getting speedier and more scientific. Then, too, if there ever was a moment in American history to launch a magazine, this was it. Americans were buying magazines like never before. DeWitt Wallace started Reader’s Digest in 1922; Henry Luce and his former Yale classmate Briton Hadden started Time in 1923.3

  Time, in fact, had a great deal in common with Hecht’s little newspaper, Better Times. It, too, was an abridgment of the week’s news. In the Taylorized age of efficiency, speedy Americans, Hecht and Luce and Hadden believed, were too busy to read the daily paper. For people who measured time in Happiness Minutes, the New York Times, just like those big, heavy parenting manuals, was too long. It was also “unreadable,” too dense, too demanding; Time would be everything, abridged: a week’s worth of news in twenty-four pages that could be read in an hour. An early bid for subscribers read, “Take TIME: It’s Brief.”

  Hecht’s Better Times was small, the smallest newspaper in the world, not much bigger than an index card; it measured less than four inches by five. Luce and Hadden came up with a different gimmick, and theirs was slicker and smarter. Their pages would be big, but their stories would be short. Each issue was to contain one hundred articles, none over four hundred words long. They put together dummy issues by cutting sentences out of seven days’ worth of newspapers and pasting them onto pages. At first, Time was a kind of clipping service, assembly-line news, manufactured in a Taylorized shop. If not for Reader’s Digest and another rival, the Literary Digest, they might have called it a “digest.” They sorted the news into categories—national affairs, the arts, sports—which, amazingly, hadn’t been done before. “The one great thing was simplification,” Luce wrote. “Simplification by organization, simplification by condensation, and also simplification by just being damn well simple.” Theodore Roosevelt’s Simplified Spelling Board had lobbed the extra “e” from abridgment. Turning the Times into Time was a savings of a letter, right there. No wasted letters, no wasted thought. As Luce and Hadden explained in the magazine’s prospectus, “TIME is interested—not in how much it includes between its covers—but in HOW MUCH IT GETS OFF ITS PAGES INTO THE MINDS OF ITS READERS.” They also clipped their prose. “You’re writing for straphangers,” an old professor of theirs advised. “You’ve got to write staccato.” Hadden marked up a translation of Homer’s Iliad, underscoring compound phrases, like “wine-dark sea.” (“A sea as dark as wine” dragged.) No longer did events take place “in the nick of time”; they happened, instead, “in time’s nick.”4

  Time was meant for businessmen; the magazine’s advertising department puffed that its subscribers were “America’s most important and interesting class—the Younger Business Executive.” A poll conducted five years after Time began reported that 80 percent of its subscribers were “plainly of the executive and professional class”; 62 percent owned stocks and bonds; more than 50 percent had servants; more than 40 percent belonged to country clubs; and 11 percent owned horses. These were the nation’s small and big businessmen, striving; one Time brochure asked, “Can you afford to be labeled as a man from Main Street?”5

  George Hecht must have paid close attention to the launch of Time. He had been beaten at his own game. And so, in 1924, he began raising money for a magazine about parenting—Time for parents. Harold Ross was trying to find backers that year, too, writing a prospectus for the New Yorker, a magazine meant to be everything Time wasn’t. Where Luce and Hadden had announced that Time would be edited “so that a mind trained or untrained can grasp it with minimum effort,” Ross explained that his magazine “will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers.” It would not save anyone any time; it would not spare anyone any effort. There would be goings-on, but it wasn’t going to be newsy. “As compared to the newspapers, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic,” he wrote. Ross wanted his magazine to be distinguished for its wit, art, integrity, and discrimination. He noted, “It will hate bunk.” The New Yorker, he said, “is not of that group of publications engaged in tapping the Great Buying Power of the North American steppe region by trading mirrors and colored beads in the form of our best brands of hokum.”6

  George Hecht, though, was keen to sell timely bunk, not to mention the nation’s best brands of hokum. Modern, speedy mothers were as busy as businessmen, he figured, and just as concerned with success and efficiency and the opinions of Main Street. The sort of women who read zippy books like Christine Frederick’s time-saving guides New Housekeeping and Household Engineering didn’t have time to read big, heavy child-rearing manuals. They could read his little monthly magazine. And, to protect their babies and children, they would buy anything, so long as they could be kept good and worried.

  For an editor, Hecht wanted a woman. He required “that she be a college graduate, that she should have had an editorial position preferably with a woman’s magazine, that she should be able to write if dire necessity ever required it of her, that she be married and that she should be a mother.”7 It might not be a bad idea if she were a worrier, too. He looked around. And then he called into his office Clara Savage Littledale, ex–woman’s page reporter, former war correspondent, mother of one, future editor of Parents magazine.

  If stages of life are artifacts, parenthood seems, at first, different. There have always been parents, and parents have always been besotted by their children, awestruck by their impossible beauty, dopey high jinks, and strange little minds. But the word “parenthood” dates only to the middle of the nineteenth century, and the notion that parenthood is a distinct stage of life, shared by men and women, is, historically, in its infancy. An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help raise your siblings, have the first of your own half dozen or even dozen children soon after you’re grown, and die before your youngest has left home. In the early 1800s, when American women could expect to bear between seven and eight children, life expectancy hadn’t reached forty.8 To be an adult was to be a parent, except that people didn’t usually think of themselves as “parents”; they were mothers or fathers, and everyone knew that there was a world of difference between the two.

  In George Hecht’s day, all that was changing, which is what worried eugenicists like Paul Popenoe. The Gilbreths aside, many people, especially wealthier people, were having fewer children, living longer, and starting families later in life. Why? Economists, sociologists, and anthropologists have offered all sorts of theories to explain this change, including the price of land, the cost of labor, industrialization, the market revolution, and rising literacy rates. But the fertility rate began to fall, in the American colonies, around 1750, a century before it began to fall in most of the rest of the Western world, and long before any real advances in contraception. Methods practiced since antiquity included abstinence, abortion, infanticide, prolonged breast-feeding, herbal abortifacients, barriers like pessaries, and, most commonly, withdrawal. Not until the widespread vulcanization of rubber in the 1850s was there any significant technological advance in contraception. What seems to have happened is that American women, caught up in the late eighteenth century’s revolution against authority, accomplished a domestic revolution: they extracted from their husbands help in limiting family size by the most easily available method, withdrawal. They joined the revolution by controlling their childbearing. “At length over wedlock fair liberty dawns,” one almanac put it, in 1771. “And the Lords of Creation must pull in their horns.”9 Ahem.

  The demographic transition altered both the ages of man and the voyage of life. In the eighteenth century, almost everyone lived in households with children in them. Living longer while having fewer children meant that the slice of the population consisting of adults who did not have children at home—people who would never have children, hadn’t h
ad them yet, or had already had them and now had an empty nest—grew. In 1880, 70 percent of American adults lived in households with children under the age of fifteen; by 1920, by which time the average American woman was bearing only about three children, that percentage had fallen to 55.10 For the first time ever, adulthood no longer implied parenthood. Your chances, as an adult, of living with children at any given moment were not much more than one in two. In the wealthier classes, childbearing and child rearing no longer circumscribed every woman’s life; motherhood and fatherhood, while not the same, had more in common than ever before. All these changes, aggregated, transformed parenthood, which began to look mystifying, especially to the increasing numbers of people who had not grown up raising their siblings, neighbors, cousins, or nieces and nephews and who, it turned out, had no idea how to bathe or dress or soothe a baby. Looking after babies and little kids is hard work, but as the number of children dwindled, so did the number of middle- and upper-class adults with any real skill at doing it. In stepped experts, who generally wanted to encourage wealthier families to have more children, and poorer families to have fewer. Parental-advice literature, like Mother’s Magazine, had proliferated beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, but the science of parenting dates to the Progressive era, when turning middle-class parents into amateur scientists was the work, mainly, of journalists.11

  Clara Savage, born in Belfast, Maine, in 1891, was the youngest of six children. Her father was a Unitarian minister. She grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts. Starting when she was fifteen, she kept a diary.12 She wanted to be a reporter, and while still a student at Smith, she wrote features for the New York Times. She was just the kind of college girl Paul Popenoe was concerned about. After graduating in 1913, she became the first woman reporter hired by the New York Evening Post, where she was assigned to cover the suffrage movement. She had grander ambitions, but at the Post, as elsewhere, women weren’t allowed into the newsroom; she was named editor of the paper’s women’s page. (Joseph Pulitzer had started the first women’s page in 1886, in the New York World. Women’s pages lasted for about a century. In 1969, the Washington Post renamed its “For and About Women” page the Style section; other newspapers soon followed suit. Motherhood blogs, which turned up in online newspapers in the early twenty-first century, were something of a throwback.)13 For the Post, Savage interviewed Ida Tarbell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She wrote about shopgirls and suffrage. She reported, too, on eugenics. “Much telephoning to find out where and when the Executive Committee on Race Betterment would meet,” she once wrote in her diary. “It took three of them to tell me. If they’re as executive about bettering the race—!”14

  Savage also fretted, constantly, about what it meant for her to work. “Read ‘The Diary of a Working Woman’ by Adelheid Popp,” she wrote in her own diary one day. (In her autobiography, Popp, an Austrian socialist and labor organizer, chronicles the horrors of toiling in factories and workhouses, from childhood, a life she declared not fit for a human being.)15 But Savage had scant interest in socialism or social problems like economic inequality. She was young and nervous and ambitious; she was chiefly interested in her plight as a career girl. Her diary is a litany of self-rebuke, one apology nipping at the heels of another. “I ought to be more appealing when I’m out for news and not just think I’m a business woman in same basis as a man reporter,” Savage wrote. “Very stupid of me!” She was keenly aware of her professional vulnerability: women reporters were the first fired. “Saw Peiser at lunch,” she recorded. “And she told me the Mail had given up its women’s page and she and Miss Cole are just suddenly dropped! I’d rather have $20 a wk. on the Post than $40 on the Mail!” She worried, especially, about whether she should be working at all: “I lay on the couch, was tired and lonesome for—oh! well, merely for a house, husband and baby!” But when she interviewed working mothers, she found herself judging them. “Put a teacher-mother story together, feeling very archaic because I believe that a mother’s place is in the home. Why they want to teach when they have tiny babies is beyond me!”

  She wondered, again and again, whether she would ever have a family of her own. “Lunch with Agnes,” she wrote, “who propounded the theory that it was economically wrong for every woman to insist on having her own children. ‘Adopt orphans!’ cried Agnes so loudly that a man sitting opposite dropped his fork to listen.” On the subject of raising a family, Savage was both dreamy and frustrated: “Marriage and children are the biggest and most beautiful thing that can come to a woman. I don’t see any prospect of either.” At the Post, she met a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter named Harold Littledale. Early on, he broached the subject of motherhood, which Savage found more shocking than talking about sex, noting in her diary, “Come to think of it, that’s the one thing I’ve never discussed with a man.”

  While Clara Savage was dating Harold Littledale, another ambitious New Yorker, Margaret Sanger, was arguing that a lot of things that couldn’t be discussed ought to be. Sanger, born in New York in 1879, was the sixth of eleven children, one of whom she helped deliver when she was eight years old. Her mother, a poor and devout Irish Roman Catholic, died at the age of fifty; her father, a stonecutter and a socialist, lived to be eighty-four. Sanger always attributed her mother’s ruined health and early death, from tuberculosis, to the exhaustion of bearing and raising children. Sanger suffered from tuberculosis as well. Nevertheless, she trained as a nurse and began caring for poor immigrant women living in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side. They begged her for information about how to avoid pregnancy. They could see that wealthy women were having fewer babies: How did they manage it? Sanger wrote, “The doomed women implored me to reveal the ‘secret’ rich people had, offering to pay me extra to tell them; many really believed I was holding back information for money.” Sanger had her own idea of what needed to be on a “women’s page.” In 1913, she wrote a twelve-part series on sex education for the Call, the Socialist Party’s daily, titled “What Every Girl Should Know.” Since its discussion of venereal disease violated federal obscenity laws, Sanger’s final essay, “Some Consequences of Ignorance and Silence,” was suppressed, lead–ing the Call to publish an announcement in its place: “ ‘What Every Girl Should Know’—NOTHING.”

  Sanger and Savage lived in the same city during these years, but they saw that city through very different lenses. Savage met the same desperately poor and overburdened immigrant women Sanger met, and found herself not only not moved to action but mystified and irritated. She wrote in her diary in February 1914, “Off to Ellis Island where I talked to a Russian family—12 children and a Father—the mother in the hospital for another baby. They were fine but I don’t see why some people have so many and others none.” Both Savage and Sanger went to hear Charlotte Perkins Gilman speak in New York that winter. “All this talk, for and against and about babies, is by men,” Gilman said in a speech she gave around that time. “One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.”16 Sanger was impressed.17 Savage was annoyed, writing in her diary, “She has a lovely face but a harsh voice and I didn’t like her especially.” Savage went to see Gilman again that April and liked her even less: “she made me furious. I dislike her manner and voice so much.”

  In March 1914, Margaret Sanger, now thirty-four years old and a mother of three, began publishing the Woman Rebel, an eight-page feminist monthly, urging her readers to “look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in the eye.” In its first issue, Sanger stated her case: “Is there any reason why women should not receive clean, harmless, scientific knowledge on how to prevent conception?”18 In the Woman Rebel, Sanger advocated “birth control,” a term she coined. Six of the monthly’s seven issues were declared unmailable and seized. Indicted for violating obscenity laws, Sanger fled the country, leaving her husband and children behind.19

  In New York, Savage, now twenty-three and still single, kept writing stories for the women’s page. Assigne
d to interview “a little woman whose husband goes to war tomorrow leaving her with a tiny baby, no money and no English!” she reported, “I didn’t realize how bad this was till I saw that woman.” But Clara Savage was no more gripped by the plight of the poor or the mission of Margaret Sanger than she had been by Adelheid Popp or Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Although she took a job as press secretary of the National Woman Suffrage Association, her political commitment was lukewarm: “Lunched with Ethel at the Club and of course we talked suffrage which is the dearest thing in life to her—but not to me!”

  In 1915, Clara Savage became Good Housekeeping’s Washington correspondent.20 Margaret Sanger returned to the United States in October of that year. After Sanger’s five-year-old daughter died of pneumonia, the charges against her were dropped; the prosecution decided that bringing a grieving mother to trial for distributing information about birth control would only aid her cause. She embarked on a national speaking tour. She debated Paul Popenoe in Washington, Popenoe opposing birth control as fervently as Sanger endorsed it.

  On October 16, 1916, Sanger opened the United States’ first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn. In a poor tenement neighborhood, she rented a storefront from a landlord named Rabinowitz, who lowered the rent when she told him what she was going to use the space for. She wrote a letter to the Brooklyn district attorney, informing him of her plan. Then she posted handbills in English, Italian, and Yiddish: