When Sex Changed: Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars

By Layne Parish Craig

In When Sex Changed, Layne Parish Craig analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain.

Discussion of contraception and related topics (including feminism, religion, and eugenics) changed the way that writers depicted women, marriage, and family life. Tracing this shift, Craig compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, reflected in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, to concern about the movement’s race and class implications suggested in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications, as in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.

While these texts emphasized birth control’s potential to transform marriage and family life and emancipate women from the “slavery” of constant childbearing, birth control advocates also used less-than-liberatory language that excluded the poor, the mentally ill, non-whites, and others. Ultimately, Craig argues, the debates that began in these early political and literary texts—texts that document both the birth control movement’s idealism and its exclusionary rhetoric—helped shape the complex legacy of family planning and women’s rights with which the United States and the United Kingdom still struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813570396

Book preview

When Sex Changed

Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars

Layne Parish Craig

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data

Craig, Layne Parish.

When sex changed : birth control politics and literature between the world wars / Layne Parish Craig.

pages cm. — (American Literatures Initiative)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-6211-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8135-6210-0 (pbk. :alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8135-6212-4 (e-book)

1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Women and literature. 4. Birth control in literature. 5. Feminism and literature. 6. Eugenics in literature. 7. Birth control—Social aspects—United States. 8. Birth control—Social aspects—Great Britain. I. Title.

PS228.W65C73 2013

810.9’9287—dc23

2013006014

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2013 by Layne Parish Craig

All rights reserved

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A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

For Matt Craig

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Setting Motherhood Free

1. The Thing You Are!: The Woman Rebel in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland Saga

2. Six Sons at Eton: Birth Control and the Medical Model in Joyce and Woolf

3. That Means Children to Me: The Birth Control Review in Harlem

4. Unbridled Lust and Calamitous Error: Religion, Eugenics, and Contraception in 1930s Family Sagas

5. She Takes Good Care That the Matter Will End There: The Artist’s Douche Bag in Three Guineas and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Conclusion: Birth Control’s Afterlives

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Thanks are owed to many people who helped develop When Sex Changed through its many incarnations. I appreciate the kind, consistent, and constructive feedback of Elizabeth Cullingford and Lisa Moore on early versions of these ideas. The helpful suggestions of my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, in particular Catherine Bacon, Michelle Lee, Aména Möinfar, Laura Smith, and Caroline Wigginton, appear throughout these pages. Crystal Kurzen and Matt Craig were always available to read drafts and offer ideas, and Erin Hurt talked me through the ups and downs of writing.

Thank you to the Department of English at the University of Austin for postdoctoral support as I transformed my dissertation into this book and for giving me the opportunity to teach the wonderful students in my Fall 2010 Literature of Birth Control course, whose excitement helped me see the project through new eyes. Thank you to the staff of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, particularly Molly Schwarzburg, without whom I would not have seen some of the primary sources that add so much to the book. Thank you to my writing group at Fitchburg State University for their input on the final version of chapter 5 and to my colleagues at Texas Christian University for their generous encouragement. Many, many thank yous to Katie Keeran and Rutgers University Press for their support in bringing this book to publication.

I have had the good fortune to be able to build upon the work of a committed activist and scholarly community surrounding the history and rhetoric of reproductive rights. The work of Esther Katz, Peter Engelman, and the participants in the Margaret Sanger Papers Project, of Loretta Ross and the members of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, of Dorothy Roberts, Ellen Chesler, Jael Silliman, and many others, has not only contributed to my thinking and research but also inspired me to strive to chronicle the women’s experiences discussed in this book with an attitude of respect and commitment that I see reflected in so much work on this topic.

Finally, I owe an unending debt of gratitude to my family. Thank you, Mona and Jeff Parish, Justin Parish, Esther Fairless, and Jim and Justine Parish for your constant, sometimes inexplicable, enthusiasm and encouragement. And thank you a million times to Matt Craig for making my every day worthwhile and to Allis Craig for making everything more fun.

A previous version of chapter 3 appeared in print in the following publication: ‘That Means Children to Me’: The Birth Control Movement in Nella Larsen’s ‘Quicksand,’ in Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative, ed. Angela Laflen and Marcelline Block (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 156–77. This material is published with the permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

In addition, the Kate O’Brien section of chapter 4 is adapted from this article: "Passion’s Possibilities: Kate O’Brien’s Sexological Discourse in Without My Cloak," Éire/Ireland 44, nos. 3–4 (Fall−Winter 2009): 118–39. Thank you to the Irish American Cultural Institute and the editors of Éire/Ireland for their kind permission to republish this material.

Introduction: Setting Motherhood Free

I’ve been talking to the younger generation all afternoon. They are like crude hard green apples: no halo, mildew, or blight. Seduced at 15, life has no holes or corners for them. I admire, but deplore. Such an old maid, they make me feel. And how do you manage not- not- not to have children? I ask. Oh, we read Mary Stopes of course! Figure to yourself my dear Molly—before taking their virginity, the young men of our time produce marked copies of Stopes!

—Virginia Woolf, Letters, vol. 3, 6

Virginia Woolf wrote this scandalized letter to her friend Molly McCarthy in 1923, as she was drafting Mrs. Dalloway, clearly thinking about the social changes wrought to England since her own youth. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf focalizes such changes—to class conventions, gender roles, and sexual expression—through attention to the upheaval wrought by World War I; however, as her conversation with her friends suggests, these changes also reflected the newly visible presence of contraception as a topic for publication and public comment. The Mary Stopes to whom Woolf’s friends look for guidance in avoiding pregnancy is British Mother of Birth Control Marie Carmichael Stopes. Upon its publication in 1918, Stopes’s first book on sex and birth control, Married Love, sold two thousand copies in its first few weeks and went through six editions in a year. Though written as a sex manual for young couples, inspired by Stopes’s experience with her first husband, whose impotence Stopes claims she was unable to recognize after several years of marriage,¹ Married Love was most famous for its section on contraception, the section that would have been marked by Woolf’s friends’ boyfriends.² Virginia Woolf’s old maid-ish reaction to her young friends’ sexual escapades is a striking if perhaps somewhat exaggerated (she was after all eleven years into a childless marriage with Leonard Woolf when she wrote this letter) illustration of the shift in sexual mores that dovetailed with the publication of Stopes’s work. As the words of a writer drafting one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century British literature, her remarks are also a reminder of the new world that authors had to contend with in depicting romance, sex, and childbearing following the advent of Stopes’s work and broad public discussion of birth control. Imagine if Tess d’Urberville or Anna Karenina had been given a marked copy of Stopes before her seduction: this was what Woolf and her contemporaries had to do in crafting plots that reflected the public’s changing awareness of birth control practices.

Stopes’s publication of Married Love dovetailed remarkably with Margaret Sanger’s rise to prominence as an advocate for birth control in the United States. Ironically, as Great Britain and the United States came later to political support for birth control than many Western European countries, it was Sanger’s and Stopes’s voices that shaped international birth control politics and continue to do so today through the family planning organizations Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International. Their campaigns transformed contraceptive practices (which existed, of course, from earliest recorded history) into acts of social activism—for women’s rights, for socialism, for racial uplift—and, during their lifetimes, into acts of family planning promoted by governments that originally tried to silence them. This book traces literary responses to the political ascendance and gradual institutionalization of birth control as a family planning model, examining selected texts from Sanger’s early activist days in the 1910s to the late 1930s, when Stopes and Sanger were established as mainstream philanthropists and foremothers of a younger generation of birth control advocates.

As fertility control became a topic of open discussion in the United States, Great Britain, and even Catholic Ireland, literary representations of women’s fertility needed to account for a wider range of choices and identities surrounding motherhood.³ One obvious example of this shift in representation is the difference between Thomas Hardy’s Tess (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891), whose out-of-wedlock affair results inexorably in pregnancy and tragedy, and James Joyce’s Molly Bloom (Ulysses, 1923), whose fears about a pregnancy by Blazes Boylan are inflected with her memories of a lifetime of fertility planning, including descriptions of her practice of withdrawal and the rhythm method. One way to consider this shift is in terms of its technological implications—just as, for example, twenty-first-century horror films have to account for the loss of the cellular phone when depicting the isolation of their victims, post–birth control era texts depicting unplanned pregnancy have to account for why contraception was not used or failed in order to be accepted as realistic by their audiences. One famously farcical explanation for contraceptive failure occurs on HBO’s Sex and the City, in which Cynthia Nixon’s character Miranda (a character whom Virginia Woolf would certainly admire, but deplore) argues that she didn’t use birth control with her partner Steve Brady because he only has one ball and I have a lazy ovary! In what twisted world does that create a baby?⁴ These workarounds for depicting unplanned pregnancy have interesting implications for twent-ieth-century narrative history; however, as Woolf implies, what may be most interesting about texts published in the years just following the advent of the birth control movement is the ways in which they negotiate not just shifts in the mechanics of sexuality due to an increase in contraception use but also questions raised by new paradigms for sexuality and family life that occurred as a result of public debates over birth control: Who should use it? Who should prescribe it? Toward what social and individual purposes should it be used? How might it change its users’ understandings of their sexual practices and identities? Literature by women and men writing during the interwar era offers answers to these questions that both support and challenge positions Stopes and Sanger articulated as official birth control movement positions.

In her 2006 monograph on literary responses to the American birth control movement, Beth Widmaier Capo offers this call for further study into representations of contraception in twentieth-century literature: While valuable, previous studies of motherhood or abortion in literature reaffirm, through repeated accretion of scholarly attention, the ‘naturalness’ of the pregnant female body. But what of contraception, of the premeditated, conscious decision to control one’s reproductive life? What is missing from current scholarship is an investigation of deliberate attempts to avoid such a state, of woman-with-womb but not woman-as-womb.⁵ In this book, I take up Capo’s injunction to turn scholarly attention to the woman-with-womb as she inhabits literature written as the narrative of birth control’s ascension to its prominent role in the public imagination unfolded. After all, the movement to expand access to birth control in Great Britain and the United States resulted not in new methods of contraception (not until the release of the birth control pill in the early 1960s), but rather in new roles and expectations for the woman-with-womb, in and outside of marriage, embracing or avoiding motherhood. This book will explore how those new roles and expectations coalesced through intersections of political, literary, and popular writing to form a model—or, rather, a series of models—of post–birth control womanhood.

Before and since Capo’s study was published, scholars have directed attention to fertility control discourse in Modernist literature, particularly in the work of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Nella Larsen. Much of this work, however, builds upon an incomplete history of birth control politics that overlooks the historical and textual connections between the British and the American birth control movements. This book argues that between 1915 and 1940, birth control politics carved out an ideological space that spanned the Atlantic, influencing writers in London, New York, Dublin, and Oxford, Mississippi, in remarkably similar ways. Though the narrative of Margaret Sanger looms large in American scholarship on fertility regulation in the twentieth century, similarities between Sanger’s and Stopes’s visions for birth control politics, as well as both writers’ connections in British and American literary communities, suggest that the two women can be read as coshapers of the image of birth control in the Anglo/American literary imagination and that responses to birth control politics by writers on both sides of the Atlantic can thus be read as part of a single, wide-ranging conversation responding to, adopting, and adapting the ideas of the movement’s two famous progenitors.

Birth control history, like Modernism, is marked by physical and imaginative movement; by professional networks, social circles, and reading groups; and by rivalries and the anxieties of influence.⁶ Shifting censorship laws, which regulated content and distribution of texts about fertility, also drew together international communities and were the basis for a peculiar connection between the United States and England, where Sanger fled to avoid arrest for charges of obscenity. In studying birth control through a transatlantic lens, I am reminded of Margaret McFadden’s overview of her work on nineteenth-century feminists’ transatlantic networks: I am interested in how these connections became friendships, cliques, organizations, and also ultimately hierarchies and conflicts.⁷ If birth control can be read as a network, it, like the groupings McFadden analyzes, is a contested, hierarchized network, in which some voices (typically white and middle and upper class) are privileged above others (racialized, immigrant, or working class). The emergence of Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes atop these hierarchies had profound effects on public understandings of birth control and its political implications, effects that in some sense are still unfolding in the contested space of reproductive rights discourse.

Sanger and Stopes: A Brief History of Transatlantic Birth Control Activism

Striking parallels draw together birth control history in the United States and United Kingdom. Both nations’ legalization and endorsement of birth control lagged behind that of their Continental peers: the first fertility control clinic was opened in Amsterdam in 1878, only one year after Annie Besant was arrested for publishing a contraceptive manual in England and five years after the Comstock Laws specifically prohibited the distribution of information on family planning in the United States.⁸ However, by midcentury, American and British family planning organizations were great international exporters of family planning ideology, particularly to developing nations,⁹ and scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom were key developers of the technology that led to the birth control pill.¹⁰ The rapid emergence of birth control into a viable political movement in the United States and United Kingdom was likely due to the celebrity status of co–Mothers of Birth Control Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger, who established their political clout by railing against restrictions on contraceptive use by religious and political authority, while developing a powerful narrative of birth control’s promise focused on feminist, nationalist, and eugenic idealism. Sanger and Stopes’s movement ultimately promoted not only freer access to contraception but also new relationships between the individual and medical and governmental authority, more powerful roles for women in public and private arenas, and new ways of understanding and policing race and nationhood.

A radical leftist in her early career, Margaret Sanger reached international fame after her encounters with the American Comstock Laws regarding her writing about contraceptive techniques.¹¹ In 1913 she wrote a column for the socialist newsletter the Call entitled What Every Girl Should Know. After the column was censored, the Call ran a blank page to call attention to its missing content, with the heading What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; By Order of the U.S. Post Office; pressure by the Call and its readers following the incident prompted the post office to allow the column to run a few weeks later.¹² More publicity followed Sanger’s arrest in 1914 on charges that her magazine the Woman Rebel contained illegal material, including a call for the assassination of John D.Rockefeller; she chose to escape to England rather than face obscenity charges that didn’t focus on her chief interest, birth control. While she was abroad, her husband, William Sanger, was arrested for distributing Sanger’s Family Limitation pamphlet, which did give explicit instructions for contraceptive use, and mainstream publications like the New Republic, Harper’s Weekly, and the New York Times took up his cause, bringing arguments in favor of wider access to contraception to an audience outside of socialist and radical circles.¹³ Sanger’s fame during this period marked the beginning of her long career as a speaker; writer; founder of the Birth Control Review, the American Birth Control League, and Planned Parenthood; and political lobbyist at large for issues related to contraception. It was also during this period in the mid-1910s that Sanger befriended a group of British sexologists, eugenicists, and free love advocates, including Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, Hugh de Selincourt, and Marie Stopes.¹⁴ These encounters had profound effects on the direction and afterlife of her movement.

Like Sanger’s, Marie Stopes’s work in the 1910s made her into the kind of figurehead whose symbolic importance to birth control was as important as her material contributions. Ellen Chesler cites this bit of doggerel from the 1920s as an illustration of Stopes’s ubiquity in English public discourse:

Jeanie, Jeanie, full of hopes,

Read a book by Marie Stopes,

Now to judge by her condition

She must have read the wrong edition.¹⁵

When Sanger met Stopes for the first time in England in 1915, Stopes had already written the manuscript for Married Love and was looking unsuccessfully for a publisher. A. C. Fifield finally agreed to publish the book in 1918, after Stopes’s second husband, Humphrey Roe, put up £500 to assist with the printing expenses. Despite the difficulty Stopes had finding a publisher, the book was an immediate success. Stopes continued writing prolifically on sex and contraception; her 1918 pamphlet Wise Parenthood, a prescriptive guide to selected contraceptive techniques, was unpopular in the medical and religious establishments but a commercial success.¹⁶ Later books like Radiant Motherhood (1920), Enduring Passion (1926), and Sex and the Young (1927) continued the themes—women’s sexual pleasure, the importance of birth spacing to healthy marriages and children, and the eugenic importance of birth control—that Stopes began exploring in Married Love. Like Sanger, Stopes made a career of her association with the politics of contraception, and though historians acknowledge a variety of other activists working alongside these two women, it was their names and voices that permeated and continue to symbolize public discourse on the methods, ethics, and politics of contraception.

The outlines of Stopes and Sanger’s personal relationship can be traced in Sanger’s collected letters. The two met in London following a speech Sanger gave to the British Fabian Society in July 1915, and several days later, Sanger wrote to Stopes that their jolly talk made her feel "there was afterall [sic] a real human being in England."¹⁷ When Sanger returned to the United States, Stopes authored a petition to Woodrow Wilson for her pardon on the charges of obscenity that precipitated her flight to England. In return, Sanger tried to find Stopes an American publisher for Married Love, a difficult project, which led to the 1918 publication of the book in Dr. William J. Robinson’s journal Critic and Guide and then to its immediate censorship in the United States under the Comstock Laws.¹⁸ When Married Love was released, Sanger risked censorship of her own magazine to print a very positive review of the book in the August 1918 issue of her Birth Control Review (the issue was confiscated by the US Post Office, although a November 1918 Birth Control Review article claims that other publications were allowed to distribute reviews of Stopes’s work).¹⁹ The cordial relationship between the two women appeared to continue through the early months of the 1920s: in April 1921, Sanger personally reviewed Stopes’s book Radiant Motherhood, declaring, "Marie Carmichael Stopes brilliantly shows that science need not always be divorced from sentiment. . . . Radiant Motherhood should be read by every intelligent American woman—and man.²⁰ The two met in person when Sanger stayed at Stopes’s home for a weekend in 1920, a trip Sanger later referred to as a beautiful opportunit[y] which you and I had for personal friendship."²¹

This cordiality was strained by June 1921, however, when Sanger began to refer frequently to Stopes and her ego²² in letters from Europe to interim Birth Control Review editor Juliet Barrett Rublee. She cautions Rublee against campaigning to end Married Love’s US censorship: I have talked to many people in England they are afraid to associate with Stopes. Best people advise against boosting her—Say she is brainless as far as real thinking goes—& wins favor only thru sentimental unscientific material.²³ They definitively parted ways in October 1921, when Stopes shared a letter Sanger sent to her criticizing American birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett with Dennett herself. Sanger wrote to Stopes: Your public declaration . . . in support of the Voluntary Parenthood League’s [Dennett’s organization] activities places you in my estimation, for all time, outside the scope of disinterested international adherents to the cause of Birth Control.²⁴ However, even in this heated exchange, Sanger and Stopes emphasize the influence each had on the other’s career. Stopes asks Sanger, Have you forgotten and wiped out 1915 in England and all that followed? referencing their mutual assistance in publicizing and legitimizing the English and American birth control movements. Sanger responds, "I know of no groups who have done more than we [the editors of the Birth Control Review] have done to show my appreciation of your message and your personal help."²⁵ While the interpersonal politics of birth control separated the two women, their sense of themselves as mutual pioneers marks their activities on both sides of the Atlantic as linked both by their personal meetings while Sanger was in England and by their mutual sense of mission and their shared institutional and professional affiliations.

The animosity between Sanger and Stopes was probably caused by rivalry stemming from the close parallels not only between their ideas about sex and contraception but also between their visions of their own careers. Both Sanger and Stopes attempted to establish birth control clinics in London, each wanting to be the first to open one in the British Empire, an honor Stopes claimed with the opening of her Marlborough Road clinic in 1921.²⁶ Both published best-selling books that combined explicit, if somewhat euphemistic, advice about heterosexual sex with advocacy (and in Stopes’s case, explicit instructions) for contraceptive use, often supported by references to concerns about overpopulation and eugenics. Their shared status as founding mothers of the birth control movement seems an obvious reason for their rivalry but has not inspired comparative analysis of their work among scholars of birth control movement rhetoric. Such comparative work seems particularly important because as cocreators of birth control as a social and political movement, Stopes and Sanger crafted a remarkably consistent legacy for reproductive rights discourse, a legacy that encompasses much more than advocacy for diaphragms and smaller families but extends to race and nationhood, sexual freedom and women’s rights, war, privacy, and the medical profession. This legacy—which I will sometimes refer to in this book as the ideology of the birth control movement—is identifiable in part through its reflection in literary depictions of family planning from the era, depictions that, like the work of Stopes and Sanger, return to strikingly similar themes and questions across geographical and cultural distances.

Smaller, Fitter, and More Satisfied: The Post–Birth Control Family

A comparison of quotations from Sanger and Stopes on motherhood reveals that they shared an understanding of fertility control and a way of expressing themselves that contemporary readers might find both inspiring and troubling. In her 1920 monograph Woman and the New Race, Sanger declared, "We must set motherhood free. . . . Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the time and the number of children who shall result from the union, automatically works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth weaklings; refuses to bring forth slaves. . . . It withholds the unfit, brings forth the fit; brings