The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  Three months later, the nurse received a phone call just as she was preparing for bed. It was Jake, in full distress, begging her to come attend to his desperately ill wife. She had sought the services of a five-dollar abortionist who left her severely injured. The nurse was loath to return, but she took the subway downtown and climbed up the three flights of stairs. She found Sadie in a coma. Within ten minutes of her arrival, Sadie was dead. Jake was inconsolable, mad with grief.

  “My God! My God! My God!” he wailed, pulling at his hair, pacing in circles through the tiny rooms.5

  The nurse folded Sadie’s thin hands over her breast and took to her own pacing through the city streets, walking for hours before she returned home uptown. From her own apartment window, she watched the sun rise and throw its glow onto the rooftops stretched before her. She felt a dawn breaking inside her, too. The nurse realized she “was finished with palliatives and superficial cures; [she] was resolved to seek out the root of evil, to do something to change the destiny of mothers whose miseries were as vast as the sky.” The nurse flung her bag from her hands, tore off her uniform, and swore off nursing forever. She resolved to dedicate herself henceforth to what she saw as the true underlying cause of Sadie’s misery: “uncontrolled breeding.”6

  Sadie’s tragedy is Margaret Sanger’s favorite vignette relating how she transformed from a part-time nurse into a full-time birth control crusader. In Sadie Sachs’s story, Sanger artfully brings to life the suffering of an individual woman in order to move her audience, though the even more finely tuned protagonist of the story is Sanger herself—Sadie is the foil for Sanger’s self-birth. This origin story is almost certainly apocryphal, likely a composite of various women Sanger treated when she worked as a nurse.

  But what’s more revealing than the somewhat self-aggrandizing vignette is the moralizing that frames it when she repeats the story in her second autobiography. Sanger makes clear that the poverty of the tenements disgusted her. “I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor, and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found,” she divulges. When in the Lower East Side, among “the submerged, untouched classes… the utmost depression came over me… I seemed to be breathing a different air, to be in another world and country where the people had habits and customs alien to anything I had ever heard about.”7 Sanger grew up working class in rural New York, one of eleven children. She frames the immigrant Lower East Side as a place utterly beyond the pale of her prior experience.

  By regularly and forcefully locating her own birth as a contraception activist in the tenements, Margaret Sanger set the stakes of her work and legacy. She laid out the twin imperatives of her mission for birth control: enabling women’s autonomy and preventing “uncontrolled breeding” among the poor and so-called unfit. These goals were intertwined, not merely adjacent. Sanger positioned birth control as a method of eugenics. She saw contraception as a technological asset and the “entering wedge” in the nefarious eugenics movement that aimed to strengthen the nation by regulating the alleged hereditary quality of its people. For Sanger, the arc of the universe was long, and it bent toward population cleansing, an endpoint contraception could hasten. “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or those who will become defectives,” she explained. The “unfit” was a wildly capacious category, comprising the physically and mentally disabled, impoverished, ill, queer, alcoholic, and criminal, among others. Sanger believed that a full “one-fourth” of the US population was unfit, and progress depended upon preventing them from bearing children.8

  This is the central tension of Margaret Sanger’s white feminism: sexual autonomy for the so-called fit, reproductive violence for the so-called unfit. It has made her one of the most enduringly controversial feminists in history. And yet her birth control movement accelerated despite the internal contradictions of feminist eugenics.

  Sanger’s movement grew because she introduced a new strategy that became a standard feature of white feminism in the twentieth century. Her nineteenth-century predecessors had cloaked their supremacy in the soft folds of civilization. Women like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Alice Fletcher attempted to reform racial groups they saw as their inferiors by offering pathways to assimilation and opportunities for conversion. These were all forms of discipline yoked to state, capitalist, and religious power, guided by the belief that white culture was inherently superior. But they were forms of control extended with a soft smile and a sympathetic tear. Sanger helped inaugurate a different mode, one in which the cloak of sentimentality fell off, baring the wolf beneath. She insisted that “stupid, cruel sentimentalism” merely encouraged the proliferation of the mentally, physically, and financially unfit into the future, creating much needless suffering.9 To her, eugenics was a modern, scientific version of reform that would neutralize social ills at their source, creating a more successful society.

  Nor did she shirk from the grim implications of her eugenic vision, warning that “possibly drastic and Spartan methods” may prove necessary to stop the dangerous breeding unleashed by the pattern of benevolence.10 Her approach inaugurated a shift in white feminist politics as a whole toward a model that sought to rid modernity of people deemed unworthy. In the nineteenth century, civilizing was the key strategy of white feminism, and it promised that anyone could be made useful to white society. But now in the twentieth, the strategy became cleansing, and with it came harsh consequences for those deemed to jeopardize the progress of civilization.

  One morning in 1929, a Black boy named Johnny still too young for school took his two-year-old brother by the hand and walked him a few houses down Third Street in southeast Washington, DC. Their mother’s job as a domestic servant required her to leave at six o’clock in the morning, so Johnny dropped the toddler off at a neighbor’s who watched over him.11 As they approached the neighbor’s door, she slid her front window open.

  “I can’t take your brother today, I’m sick,” she told him. “Go home.”

  Once back inside, the toddler began to cry. He usually had his breakfast at the neighbor’s. When Johnny opened the icebox and found it empty, devoid even of ice, he, too, began to cry. How would he feed his brother? Remembering that some people in the neighborhood received milk delivery in the mornings, he stepped outside. Directly opposite, a fresh milk bottle gleamed from the step of the only white family on the block. Johnny watched the milkman disappear around the corner, and he ventured across the street. Cradling the quart of milk in his arms, he ran back toward his house when a policeman appeared, immediately suspicious.

  “Hey, you there. Hey, you there!” the policeman called out. Johnny didn’t say a word. “Caught you stealing, huh? Caught you stealing,” the policeman declared, convinced the boy’s silence confessed guilt.

  “No, I’m not stealing,” the boy protested. “My little brother is hungry.”

  “I don’t care if he is hungry, you can’t steal milk.” Grabbing him by the neck, he steered Johnny down to Fifth Street and into the police station, where he instructed the booking agent to jail the child.

  “Please call Dr. Boulding,” Johnny pleaded. “She knows me and she will help.” Dr. Dorothy Boulding had served her medical internship at Howard University’s Freedmen’s Hospital, a position that regularly dispatched her to Johnny’s neighborhood—which was also her own. Though she was now a clinical instructor in obstetrics at Howard Medical School and was soon to become the head physician in charge of all women students at Howard, she was still widely available in the neighborhood. When she received the call at her Howard office, she hopped back into her roadster—a gift from a wealthy uncle when she graduated medical school—and headed down to the Fifth Street precinct. She found Johnny behind the counter and the booking agent and the policeman standing watch.

  “They’re going to put me in jail!”
Johnny exclaimed to Dr. Boulding.

  “What about this?” she entreated.

  “Well, he’s been stealing. We caught him stealing a bottle of milk.”

  “I wasn’t stealing, I was getting some milk for my baby brother!” Johnny again explained.

  “Do you mean to tell me that you would arrest a little boy who’s trying to help his baby brother who’s hungry?” Dr. Boulding inquired of the officer in her polite but commanding tone.

  “Well, I don’t care whether or not there’s anything in the house,” the policeman retorted.

  The booking agent displayed more empathy and agreed to release the boy into her care. Dr. Boulding insisted on taking the milk with them, paying the seventeen cents the police requested. She took Johnny home, where they found his little brother distraught, howling and thrashing about in his bed. A plan took shape in Dr. Boulding’s mind. “There’s something wrong with this town,” she realized. “Any time a child goes hungry, and the mother has to work and leave a child home like this, we need some place for children.”12

  Johnny’s troubles—or, in another telling she gave the boy’s name as Georgie—were Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee’s story of how she came to launch the Southeast Settlement House in 1929. Dr. Boulding, who married Howard University dentist Dr. Claude Ferebee in 1930, came from a prominent Boston family that specialized in law. Though her father’s parents were born enslaved, her grandfather escaped to Philadelphia and later became a Virginia politician. Her uncle George Lewis Ruffin was the first Black graduate of Harvard Law School, and another seven of her relatives worked as attorneys. But Dorothy’s calling was in public health, and she finished as the top student out of her class of 136 at Tufts Medical School in 1924.13 Through the tool of medicine, she felt she could serve the needs of Black communities much less prosperous than her own and who were almost universally excluded from existing social services on account of their race. Her notion of public health was vast, encompassing nutrition, sex education, medical care, and child-rearing in a project of health equity. She maintained a private practice in addition to her instructional and administrative duties at Howard Medical School. Despite these professional pressures, she threw herself into the task of establishing a funded daycare for poor Black families in her neighborhood.

  Savvily, Ferebee approached the board of directors of a well-resourced white daycare around the block, proposing they join forces and establish an integrated program, such as she had seen in Boston. “It was as if I had thrown a bomb into the room,” she recalled. Everyone erupted at once: it was simply impossible to admit Black children to the Friendship House. “Well, will you help us?” she pivoted. Now her request for funds seemed like a conciliation, and a wealthy white woman immediately offered $1,000; her peers chimed in with smaller contributions. Ferebee already had secured $5,000 from a local seed agency, which was later reorganized as United Way, and had set her sights on an empty house on G Street. She organized a board of directors, negotiated down the landlord’s price, and opened the Southeast Settlement House offering daycare and after-school programs, the first institution of its kind in the city serving Black youth. She served as president of its board of directors until 1942. By the time of Ferebee’s death in 1980, the organization served more than twelve thousand people a year drawing on an annual budget of more than $2 million.14

  As Ferebee saw it, middle-class Black women like her had a “responsibility for promoting the physical, mental, and spiritual advance of the race.”15 She was among those of the educated Black middle class who endorsed the era’s doctrine of racial uplift, in which they assigned themselves the duty of lifting up the Black poor into a higher stage of civilization. This was a charitable ideology shaped by no small amount of elitism. Uplift doctrine had particular appeal for Black women reformers of the professional classes, who began forming hundreds of Black women’s clubs around the country in the 1890s. While Black clubwomen embraced, and indeed developed, respectability politics, their societies were not mere counterparts of the apolitical, self-advancing white women’s club movement that Alice Fletcher had helped launch in the 1870s. These clubs were overtly political, often devoted to large-scale reforms in childcare, housing, antilynching, healthcare, voting rights, and fair wages that reflected their understanding of the web of challenges facing the millions of Black people living in poverty.

  Both Sanger and Ferebee understood that racism left the Black poor in dire need of healthcare, including contraception. When Sanger committed to bringing birth control to Black southern women in the 1940s, she and Ferebee would work together directly on the ill-fated Negro Project. Yet they had distinct agendas. Almost from the beginning of the birth control movement, these two feminist approaches existed side by side. Sanger embraced contraception as a technology that would transform the quality of the world’s people, securing “fit” women’s sexual autonomy and limiting the reproduction of the “unfit.” Ferebee folded contraception into the broader goal of health justice, which included supporting poor women’s reproductive choices and improving the living conditions of their children.

  These two approaches were each a mixed bag: each celebrated women’s sexuality, but also incorporated eugenics to one degree or another. Yet only one, Sanger’s movement for the right not to give birth, has gone down in history as a significant feminist achievement, and it’s the one that most fully incorporated eugenics into its agenda. The other, Ferebee’s project for the ability to prevent pregnancy, but also for the right of poor women to have children and to parent them in safe environments—an approach Black activist Loretta Ross termed reproductive justice in the 1990s—barely gets a footnote.16 But the history of birth control activism includes both Sanger’s movement to prevent pregnancies as well as the counterhistory of reproductive justice. When we only remember the former, we participate in the white feminist fantasy that sex difference is the single axis on which the world turns, obliterating all other dimensions of social power that profoundly shape public health and reproductive choices.

  In the early twentieth century, New York became the nation’s center of trade and finance, and its robust economy depended on cheap labor. Southern and Eastern Europeans streamed into the city, and its population more than doubled between 1890 and 1920. Among the immigrants were 1.5 million Yiddish-speaking Jews fleeing organized massacres within the Russian empire. By 1900, two-thirds of New York City’s population lived in the tenements; 2.3 million people were facing living situations like Sadie’s and Jake’s. Jacob Riis had exposed to the world the dire conditions of the Lower East Side tenements in his famous 1888 book How the Other Half Lives, including the bone-chilling 10 percent infant mortality rate.17

  Reformers like Sanger were desperate to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Many saw capitalism as the source of this severe social inequality. Sanger, the daughter of a free-spirited socialist, initially took this perspective and became quite active in the left-wing branches of the labor movement, including the Industrial Workers of the World. But her experiences as a nurse in the tenements she so hated impelled her to envision another culprit.

  Sanger insisted that the central problem facing New York’s immigrant class and the nation as a whole was not capitalism, but endless births that drained women’s strength and produced “low-quality” babies, prone to defect. Civilization turned on one singular pivot for Sanger: the biological merit of its population. And birth control was the lever to manipulate it. For Sanger, many different types of people were unworthy of having children. In her words, the unfit included the following:

  the physically disabled morons

  idiots imbeciles

  the feebleminded the insane

  psychopaths diseased slum populations

  unemployables the criminal

  the epileptic the chronically poor

  the sick the alcoholic

  Eugenicists and race scientists had invented the new terms “moron,” “imbecile,” and “idiot” to diagnose distinct levels of m
ental incapacity, terms that are now common today as everyday insults—a symptom of eugenicists’ successes. Their term “feebleminded” was a broad diagnosis of mental and sometimes physical disability that was also applied to queer and poor women. As Sanger’s list implies, “unfit” was also a capacious category, a melting pot gone rancid.

  Eugenics and feminism may seem to be opposed agendas, but they take ready shelter together under the umbrella of white feminist thought, which reduces complex social hierarchies to the single dynamic of sex. Following this model, Sanger embraced a single-axis solution to broad political and economic inequality: improving the biological worth of the population by regulating the women who could give birth. “A Nation rises or sinks on the physical quality of its citizens,” she believed.18 Enabling women to have fewer children, and enabling the nation to eliminate the so-called unfit were two paths to the same destination: progress by way of a distinctly biological approach.

  Unlike many other white eugenicists, however, Sanger was firm that unfit was not in itself a racial marker, that all races had fit and unfit members.19 For Sanger, mental and physical disability were her targets. She believed, however, these traits concentrated among impoverished communities with high birth rates—a conviction that unmistakably and disproportionately brought immigrants and people of color under Sanger’s regulatory gaze, even as she fought racism in other forms.

  Sanger went to extraordinary measures to bring birth control to poor women, services that, regardless of Sanger’s intentions, were desperately wanted. In 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in the storefront of a Brooklyn tenement building, distributing pessary cervical caps she imported from Europe. She was promptly arrested and cannily played her trial and jail time into media events that attracted considerable support. She also secured a significant legal victory: physicians could now prescribe contraception to married women. Birth control, under the supervision of the medical profession, was now available—but only for married women who could afford a doctor and only in New York state. For the next five decades, Sanger built the birth control movement to extend this victory across the United States, creating organizations forceful enough to take on both the medical establishment and the national hierarchy of the Catholic Church.