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Abroad!
When Margaret Sanger sailed for Europe in the spring of 1920, much had changed since she was last abroad in 1915. World War I increased interest in population issues and eugenics, opening up the discussion of sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use. In this environment, Sanger’s birth control message resonated with a wider audience, and as press coverage of her activities increased, she gained both respect and notoriety.
Just a few years old, Sanger’s birth control campaign had been recast and made more relevant by the war. “The world,” she pointed out in 1921, “is searching for a method or a means to settle the problems of population and, during the last five years, Birth Control has gradually become recognized as the most scientific method toward this end. The idea,” she claimed, “has gathered momentum in such a startling way that now it has become the most important question of the day.”1 She added that “whether we like it or not, the consequence of the war has thrust internationalism upon us. Our ‘splendid isolation’ is a myth.”2
Having begun the movement in 1914 with a feminist declaration of women’s rights, including reproductive rights, Sanger had now rolled the cause into a Malthusian argument to contain uncontrolled population growth. “The plan is Birth Control applied to the world,” Sanger wrote, “just as it is applied to families—a limitation of numbers in accordance with our ability to provide.”3 The challenge for Sanger and the growing group of like-minded activists, scientists, and intellectuals was how to convince influential leaders and governments of the urgency and necessity of birth control at a time when most of the postwar world was in recovery and seeking to reverse declining economies and population losses.
Sanger’s strategy was to expand the rationales for birth control, raising the “program from the plane of the emotional to the plane of the scientific.”4 In her monthly, the Birth Control Review (BCR), launched in 1917, and in her first two books, Woman and the New Race (1920) and especially its follow-up, The Pivot of Civilization (1922), Sanger aimed to persuade scientists, eugenicists, economists, and other professionals to view birth control as the chief mechanism for world change. She tried to balance this approach by also speaking to the needs of the individual and appealing to what she considered the movement’s greatest strength: its universality. Speaking to an international audience in 1922, Sanger declared, “It seems to me that the subject of Birth Control is particularly an individual issue. … It makes no difference, whatever may be the race, colour of the skin, economic principles, theories or religious creeds, Birth Control is of interest to every individual, and it seems to me that is the thing we must work upon. Recognizing that, we have in a way an easier avenue of approach than other movements, which are divided by class, creeds, and dogmas.”5 When she surveyed war-torn Germany in 1920, and Asia and the Middle East in 1922, Sanger proceeded with the conviction that there was a basic human inclination to control childbearing and a societal desire to ease the pressures of population and aggressive expansionism.
For Sanger, the trips she took in these postwar years reinforced her conviction that “the new internationalism can only come as the out growth of a dynamic, living, functional practice,” which “progressively lessens and obliterates the cause of wars and social catastrophes.”6 In her view, her duty was “to mobilize the forces of intelligence and true statesmanship in all countries, to establish ‘spheres of influence,’ to awaken the consciousness and the conscience of all serious minded people to this great world problem, and to unite with the rapidly growing movements in other lands.”7
By the time Sanger embarked on her trips abroad in the 1920s, she was knowledgeable and confident in her views. She traveled abroad not to seek guidance, as she had in 1914–15, but to propagandize and provide expertise. She was not wedded to a strict itinerary, but was able instead to react to situations she encountered and capitalize on her increasing prominence.
The 1920 trip, somewhat hastily arranged, grew out of Sanger’s desire to improve her mental and physical health. A generous check from close friend and benefactor Juliet Barrett Rublee enabled her to book passage to England, an intellectual, social, and sexual retreat for her. But during her stay in England, her tour of Germany (where she was trying to track down a new contraceptive), and her short visit to the Netherlands, Sanger was effectively propagandizing for birth control. Her friend syndicalist Milly Rocker noted that shortly after Sanger’s visit to Berlin, its “Syndikalist Women Association” held a birth control meeting attended by more than two thousand men and women. Dutch physician and birth control clinic pioneer Johannes Rutgers detected a new public awareness of birth control and suggested that Sanger’s skills might be better utilized in Europe than in puritanical America. Sanger did briefly consider extending her European trip, but ran out of money.8
Shortly after returning to the United States in the fall of 1920, Sanger hatched plans to hold an international birth control conference in New York. In 1921 she headed back to Europe to recruit speakers and to attend the International Congress on Contraceptives in Amsterdam, where she listened to physicians, neo-Malthusian leaders, and birth control activists discuss contraceptive techniques.9 Back in New York, Sanger oversaw the First American Birth Control Conference, which featured British economist and onetime member of Parliament Harold Cox as the keynote speaker. She strategically scheduled the conference for November 11–13, 1921, to capitalize on the timing of the Second International Congress on Eugenics in New York and the beginning of the Washington Naval Conference in Washington, D.C. This timing helped to draw the attention of the many foreign observers and reporters then encamped on the East Coast. She garnered additional press coverage when a police raid interrupted the final session held at New York’s Town Hall, resulting in Sanger’s arrest and unleashing a wave of publicity that reached overseas.
But Sanger’s ideas were circulating abroad even before this. In February 1921, she wrote to her British friend Hugh de Selincourt that “ministers of the governments of Japan, & Mexico” were informing her that her “message is changing the thought of the people of these countries more surely than Darwin changed the thoughts of the centuries.” Mexico, she bragged, issued an invitation to visit, and a Japanese magazine asked her to write a series of articles. The Mexican trip never panned out, but an invitation from Kaizō (Reconstruction), a socialist publication in Japan, set in motion Sanger’s first official world tour.10
From Japanese visitors passing through New York, Sanger had learned of the growing tension in Japan between militarism and movements for individual liberty. Many “young, liberal intellectuals” in Japan had fixed on population control as the only way to prevent Japan from engaging in aggressive imperialist behavior and war. Sanger met several Japanese visitors through her friend and neighbor artist Gertrude Boyle, who was married to Japanese poet Takeshi Kanno. But the most influential of Sanger’s Japanese contacts was Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto, a rising feminist and socialist voice in Japan. The two became friends when Ishimoto was in New York in 1919–20. She described for Sanger the complex and changing landscape of modern Japan. Inspired by Sanger’s activism, Ishimoto returned to Japan and in the summer of 1921 formed the first birth control league there.11 She also helped lay the groundwork for Sanger’s first trip to Japan.
Both within and outside of Japan, concern had grown over the size of its population, which increased from about forty million people in the 1890s to nearly fifty-seven million in 1922. In the United States, xenophobic fears, which fueled late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Asian immigration restriction, reemerged during and after the war, focused mostly on Japan. The Western press was rife with suspicions about Japan’s ultimate aims and ambitions as the nation grew beyond its means of subsistence. Sanger echoed a common sentiment in 1921 when she told a reporter that the “Japanese average eight to a family. Overpopulation is the root of the ‘yellow peril.’” Yet a flourishing liberal movement in Japan, linking together working-class, labor, and women’s groups, was exerting pressure on the government to consider ways to stem population growth. The pursuit of individual and political rights in Japan drew Sanger’s attention to the fact that it was becoming more receptive to progressive reforms.12 For Sanger, Japan was the next barrier to breach.
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