Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler Read Free Book Online

and commercial ownership altogether. 14
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    Margaret returned from London to New York in the fall of 1920 to confront the glare of publicity that issued from publication of her first book, Woman and the New Race . Conceived during the postwar frenzy over dissent, and edited by the fervidly idealistic Billy Williams, it was written in the extreme, exhortatory style characteristic of the radicals. Probably because of this, the manuscript, first titled “The Modern Woman Movement” was rejected by the Macmillan publishing house and resold to Brentano’s, which gave it the new title, an allusion not to distinctions of color but to “race” in its generic sense, as in “the human race.”
    The book tells women to give up on the solutions that men had proposed to alleviate their misery—to believe in themselves, instead, and their own ability to effect change. “The basic freedom of the world is woman’s freedom,” Margaret wrote, her prose polished by the gifted Williams’s pen:
    A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. 15
    Some years earlier Havelock Ellis had cautioned Margaret against the recklessness of the writing in The Woman Rebel . “It is no use…smashing your head against a brick wall, for not one rebel, or even many rebels, can crush law by force,” he told her. “It needs skill even more than strength.” Woman and the New Race was a self-conscious attempt to shape herself in her mentor’s image—to take a more instrumental approach to social change. Essentially it wed Ellis’s own formulations from The Task of Social Hygiene to feminist theory and to the practical goal of establishing a network of scientific birth control clinics, which would empower women in their own right.
    Woman and the New Race maintains that through all of recorded history women had exhibited an “elemental” claim to freedom through their defiant, clandestine use of contraception, abortion and infanticide. The universality of these practices demonstrated a recognition that uncontrolled fertility is not only a personal burden, but also the root of widespread social pathology. The intelligent judgments of women, however, were rarely reflected in the laws of church and state, institutions where men traditionally dominate and subordinate women, so as to increase the size of the population. By this reasoning, Margaret argued, men suppress the expression of an innate “feminine spirit.” Antagonisms of gender, as much as conflicts of class, were the root of social malaise. 16
    Margaret acknowledged that women themselves often became victims of masculine thinking. “War, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap,” she wrote. “They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.” The availability of modern, scientific birth control, in her view, had suddenly presented women an unavoidable challenge to protect and promote their own freedom and to advance society’s well-being by propagating individuals capable of meeting the rigorous demands of modern life.
    Margaret attempted to reconcile her new vision of a society purified by the efforts of women with the social ideals that had fueled her energies as a radical. She did not intend birth control to replace “any of the idealistic movements and philosophies of the workers…. It is not a substitute—it precedes…. It can and it must be the foundation upon which any permanently successful improvement in condition is attained.” Yet she could not have it both ways. By identifying birth control as a panacea, she