by Jill Lepore
You could make a parenting panic work the same way. The New York Times, where Harold Littledale was an editor, cheerfully greeted Clara Savage Littledale’s magazine as “First Aid for Parents.”50 It was first aid for ills it invented. The magazine raced from one panic to the next while, in its pages, selling products that might save children’s lives (not the lives of poor children, which were in some peril, but the lives of the children of the anxious affluent). Littledale couldn’t possibly report on panics like parrot fever; those came and went too fast for her production schedule. But she did her best to create a new panic every month. In June 1930, just after the parrot fever panic, she ran, alongside ads for Lysol, plenty of disease stories, like “How to Guard Against Colds and Flu,” by the New York Public Health Service’s Shirley Wynne, who had been much in the news during the parrot fever panic.51 More pointedly, Littledale ran pieces that turned children’s everyday experiences into clinical symptons: “Thumbsucking: Its Dangers and Treatment” and “Have Your Children the Daily Bath Habit?” and “How Well Do We Protect Our Children?”52 There was more to worry about than colds and flu. What would become of children who sucked their thumbs or who didn’t get soaped up every day? They might succumb; they might fail; they might die. So much to worry about, so little time; the magazine, and microbe hunters, had answers. And then, a few months later, you could run a piece about how thumb sucking wasn’t so bad after all.
Within a year of Children’s first issue, Hecht and Littledale had changed the magazine’s name, to the Parents’ Magazine, which made much sense, since all this business about parenthood had very little to do with kids. As Littledale would explain in 1930,
Once it was believed that the very physical fact of parenthood brought with it an instinctive wisdom that enabled one to rear children wisely and well. Parents knew best. Today fathers and mothers are unwilling to struggle under such a load of self-imposed omniscience. Even if they were, the facts would be against them. For in this country various studies made in the last ten years present incontrovertible data to prove that devoted but unenlightened parenthood is a dangerous factor in the lives of children.53
This almost passes for a definition: Parenthood is being so inept that you’re a danger to your own children. “Our want of knowledge is nothing short of criminal,” Stella Crossley wrote in “Confessions of an Amateur Mother.”54 That, at least, was the premise of Littledale’s magazine, and its price.
By 1931, the Parents’ Magazine boasted two hundred thousand subscribers.55 Littledale, however, was frustrated. She wrote a prodigious amount of fiction, odd and rather terrifying stories, many about love gone wrong. She sent them to dozens of magazines, but her efforts to publish them met with little success.56 Her own magazine, though, kept growing. Its vast readership carried Littledale into broadcasting; she was heard on NBC radio from 1932 to 1943, her show filling Emily Post’s noontime slot on Wednesdays, Miss Manners’s day off. “I Am a Failure as a Mother” she titled one of her talks.57 She administered advice by the anecdote. “Fathers Are Parents, Too!” was her answer to a letter from a listener who wished he knew his children better. Littledale’s advice was often perfectly sensible. Grown-ups should enjoy living with children, she liked to say, but they shouldn’t live for them. She didn’t much like spanking; she thought kids needed to learn to do things for themselves; she wisely told the listener who said she was a failure as a mother, “One way to be a failure as a mother is to overplay the role.” She had six rules for dealing with kids: be fair; be polite; be there; don’t wobble; don’t pretend to be perfect; and don’t be too serious. On more particular matters, such as how to handle a crying baby, Littledale’s advice, like her magazine, followed parenting fashion, which changes as often as the length of hemlines.58 Urgent social issues that affected how very many Americans raised their children—segregation and hunger, for instance—had no place on Littledale’s list of parenting problems.
Nor did contraception. But Sanger finally achieved a legal victory, in 1937, with U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, which ruled that doctors could prescribe birth control. Not long after that, Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau merged with the American Birth Control League to become the Birth Control Federation of America. Its leaders, now mostly no longer feminist activists but male doctors, deemed the phrase “birth control” too radical; in 1942, the organization became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Sanger was furious, warning, “We will get no further because of the title; I assure you of that.”59
By the start of the baby boom, confessions of amateur parents had become a stupendously popular genre, and not just in Parents’ Magazine. In The Egg and I, a memoir published in 1945, the same week as Stuart Little, Betty MacDonald offered up a parody. MacDonald wrote about motherhood by writing about raising chickens. She told the story of her husband’s decision to buy a chicken farm in the Pacific Northwest, dragging his reluctant bride from a comfortable life in the city to a miserable, hardscrabble existence in the country. She discovered that she was bad at raising chickens. At first she just hated the hens and cocks. Then things got worse. “I Learn to Hate Even Baby Chickens” she titled one of her chapters. In the end, she wrote, “I hated everything about the chicken but the egg.” The Egg and I sold over a million copies and became the best-selling nonfiction title of 1946, even before it was made into a film. “Was there something in my background which kept me from becoming properly adjusted to the chicken,” MacDonald wondered, “or was there just too wide a gulf separating a woman and a chicken?”
Although nowhere revealed in the memoir, MacDonald’s life as a farm wife had ended badly; long before writing the book, she had divorced her husband and moved to New York. The book ends with an emphatic last line: “The hen is the boss.”60
By now, Littledale had divorced, too. In 1941, she and her husband were badly hurt when the airplane they were flying in crashed in Georgia. Littledale woke up tangled in a pine tree. Both of her husband’s legs were broken. They waited six hours, in the dark, in pouring rain, for a rescue party.61 “Someway, that accident shook me out of my way of living and I have never been able to go back to it,” Littledale wrote to her sister. Harold Littledale spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The couple divorced in 1944.62
“What Can We Do About Marriage?” Littledale asked in an essay she published in 1947, noting that the divorce rate had risen to nearly three in five. Predictably, she attributed the rising rate to the lack of parental education. If only more people would read her magazine, more marriages would be happier. Parents’ Magazine had, by then, four hundred thousand subscribers.63
During the Second World War, Planned Parenthood touted controlling family size as part of the war effort.64 Birth control continued to gain religious support. In 1947, more than thirty-five hundred Jewish and Protestant clergy signed a resolution in support of Planned Parenthood.65 In the 1950s, Planned Parenthood was run by men interested in population control. Barry Goldwater and his wife were active supporters.66 By 1956, Sanger, who had retired to Tucson, wrote to the national director, “If I told you or wrote you that the name Planned Parenthood would be the end of the movement, it was and has proven true. The movement was then a fighting, forward, no fooling movement, battling for the freedom of the poorest parents and for women’s biological freedom and development. The P.P.F. has left all this behind.”67 Sanger was bitter, but she was right. Birth control in the first half of the twentieth century, as the historian David Kennedy once argued, was a liberal reform turned to conservative ends.68
In 1955, at the urging of Mary Steichen Calderone, a public health physician who served as Planned Parenthood’s medical director, the organization began to wrestle with the subject of abortion. (Abortion had been legal until 1821, when Connecticut became the first state to make abortion after quickening—at about four months—a crime. By the middle of the twentieth century, abortion was illegal throughout the United States, with limited exceptions. It was, never
theless, widely practiced.) “If there was even a communicable disease that affected that many people in this country,” Calderone said, “we would do something about it.”69 Calderone organized a conference and conducted a study. In an article published in 1960, she remarked on the difference between a legal abortion and an illegal one: three hundred dollars and knowing the right person.
Calderone left Planned Parenthood in 1964 to found the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, Inc. (She wanted to teach people how to talk about sex because, as she once said, “People don’t have much of a vocabulary. Or a concept of anything, except fucking.”)70 Alan F. Guttmacher, chief of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Hospital and clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia, became president of Planned Parenthood in 1962.71 Guttmacher had three priorities: improving Planned Parenthood’s relationship with the black community, securing federal support for family planning programs for the poor, and liberalizing abortion law.
In 1940, Planned Parenthood had organized a National Negro Advisory Committee—black doctors, nurses, and public health officials who wanted to reduce maternal death and infant mortality rates among black women and infants through child spacing.72 Guttmacher hoped to strengthen these alliances, and to build new ones. In 1962, he sent the director of a clinic in Harlem (over whose opening, three decades before, W.E.B. DuBois had presided) to meet with Malcolm X. Malcolm X suggested that Planned Parenthood ought to call its service “family planning instead of birth control.” (The meeting notes read, “His reason for this was that people, particularly Negroes, would be more willing to plan than to be controlled.”)73 In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr., who had joined a Planned Parenthood committee as a young minister, was given the Margaret Sanger Human Rights Award. In his acceptance speech, he drew parallels between the birth control and civil rights movements—“There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts”—and celebrated Sanger for having “launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions.”74 In 1967, after a leader of the Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP called Planned Parenthood a racist project, the chairman of the national organization clarified that the NAACP supported family planning.75 The next year, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Cleveland was set on fire.76
Up to that point, birth control had been mainly privately funded; clinics affiliated with Planned Parenthood ran on donations, grants, and fees-for-service. “I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility,” Dwight Eisenhower said in 1959. “That’s not our business.” But by 1965, Eisenhower had reversed his position on family planning, serving with Harry Truman as a co-chairman of a Planned Parenthood committee.77 Meanwhile, the last legal obstacles to contraception were overcome. After Estelle Griswold, executive director of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut, opened a birth control clinic in New Haven, she was arrested and fined under the provisions of a Connecticut statute banning the use of contraceptives; in 1965, the Supreme Court declared that ban unconstitutional. The next year, Guttmacher testified before Congress, “We really have the opportunity now to extend free choice in family planning to all Americans, regardless of social status and to demonstrate to the rest of the world how it can be done. It’s time we get on with the job.”
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb sold two million copies, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, reiterating the Catholic Church’s prohibition on both abortion and contraception, and Lyndon Johnson appointed a Committee on Population and Family Planning. The next year, Richard Nixon asked Congress to increase federal funding for family planning. In the House, Texas congressman George H. W. Bush said, “We need to make family planning a household word. We need to take the sensationalism out of the topic so it can no longer be used by militants who have no knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program, but rather are using it as a political stepping stone.”78 Nixon signed Title X into law in 1970.79 “No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition,” Nixon said then.80
By now, George Hecht had joined this fight, too. In July of 1970, Hecht wrote an article in Parents titled “Smaller Families: A National Imperative.” He sent a copy to Guttmacher, writing to him on the letterhead of a new organization that he’d just founded, “I have recently incorporated the Association for Two-Child Families, Inc. under an association of this kind, rather than as Publisher of Parents’ Magazine. I have to be more cautious when writing letters on Parents’ Magazine stationery.” Hecht invited Guttmacher to join him in writing to major publishers, including S. I. Newhouse, of Condé Nast, to complain about magazine stories urging people to have more babies. But Hecht was cautious—and unwilling to formally ally Parents magazine with Planned Parenthood, or even to write to Guttmacher on the magazine’s stationery—because Guttmacher had begun campaigning for the legalization of abortion. Planned Parenthood, so closely aligned with the sensibility and agenda of Parents in the 1940s and ’50s, had become controversial, and Hecht, however much he supported Guttmacher—he personally sent Planned Parenthood pamphlets to Parents readers—was unwilling to jeopardize his magazine.81
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Parents Magazine was still reaching fifteen million readers, nearly all of them women. The magazine lost its apostrophe somewhere along the way, as well as its purchase on American life, but it still reliably produced confessions of amateur mothers—“Parents is for every woman who lives and parents in her own authentic way”—and parental education, along with a column called “Fatherhood 101,” that could be read at the magazine’s website.82
“Remember when everyone was talking about momism, silver-cord mothers, smothering mothers?” Clara Savage Littledale once asked. “Now it’s father’s turn.”83 If it’s not one thing, it’s another. She had wearied of it. She died in 1956, having worked, until the day she died, for a magazine that sold the heebie-jeebies.
Margaret Sanger died in 1966, just when questions about parenthood were beginning to dominate American politics. In 1967, Guttmacher edited a book called The Case for Legalized Abortion Now. As a young intern in the 1920s, Guttmacher had watched a woman die of a botched abortion, and had never forgotten it. At Mount Sinai, he performed abortions until the hospital told him to stop. Laws liberalizing abortion in the 1960s and early 1970s were urged by doctors and lawyers and supported by clergy. Between 1967 and 1970, some restrictions on abortions were lifted by legislators in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington. Governor Ronald Reagan signed the California law. By 1970, the National Clergy Consultation Service, established to help women find doctors who could conduct abortions safely, offered services in twenty-six states.
Not much involved in any of this agitation were women. Betty Friedan endorsed the liberalization of abortion laws at a meeting of the National Organization of Women in 1966, but women’s rights activists only really began to join this effort in 1969, the year NARAL was founded.84 The conventional narrative—that American politics were poisoned by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade—is not borne out by the evidence: a partisan realignment over matters of life and death began before Roe. In 1969, in The Emerging Republican Majority, Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips offered a blueprint for crushing the Democrats’ New Deal coalition by recruiting southerners and Catholics to the GOP. At the time, prominent Democrats, including Edward Kennedy, were vocally opposed to abortion. Nixon’s advisers urged him to reconsider his position on abortion and family planning. In 1970, the year he signed Title X, Nixon had ruled that doctors on military bases could perform abortions. In 1971, Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo recommending that the president reverse that ruling as part of a strategy to ensure that George McGovern (the candidate Nixon wanted to run against) would defeat Edward Muskie for the Democratic n
omination. Observing that abortion was “a rising issue and a gut issue with Catholics,” Buchanan advised Nixon to publicly reverse the Department of Defense. Buchanan wrote, “If the President should publicly take his stand against abortion, as offensive to his own moral principles,…then we can force Muskie to make the choice between his tens of millions of Catholic supporters and his liberal friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post.” A week later, Nixon issued a statement to the DOD reversing his position and borrowing the language of the Catholic Church to speak of his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.”
“Favoritism toward things Catholic is good politics,” a Nixon strategist wrote in “Dividing the Democrats,” a memo to H. R. Haldeman in 1971. “There is a trade-off, but it leaves us with the larger share of the pie.” When Nixon supporters balked, Buchanan held firm. Asked whether Nixon might perhaps go back to his original position, Buchanan said that would be stupid: “He will cost himself Catholic support and gain what, Betty Friedan?”
Abortion wasn’t a partisan issue until Republicans made it one. In August 1972, a Gallup poll reported that 68 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats agreed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun clipped the Washington Post story reporting this survey and put it in his Roe case file.85
