Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler Read Free Book Online Page A

certainly undermined the objectives of the revolutionary labor struggle, and by housing her abstract arguments in a practical political framework focused wholly on one issue, she implicitly challenged the value of even a more moderate agenda of progressive social reform.
    As a result the book is abundant in contradiction. At one point it dogmatically attributes virtually all distinctions between native-born and immigrant Americans to their differential fertility rates and seems to implicate the victims of poverty and despair in their own oppression. Only pages later, however, it celebrates the ethnic and racial diversity of America and roundly condemns the intolerable conditions under which immigrants were made to live and work in this country, blaming their deficiencies on such environmental factors as slum housing, low wages, and inadequate health insurance, rather than simply on fertility. In Margaret’s defense, however, this kind of intellectual tension was emblematic of the times. Her failure to resolve the relative importance of individual initiative and social renewal at once reflected, and also helped advance, a growing postwar disenchantment with collectivist solutions to social problems. 17
    Yet the book’s political framework probably had little to do with its popular success. More important than Margaret’s bold claims for birth control as a social tonic was her romantic paean to a new sexual morality. The book closes with a peroration in behalf of woman’s freedom from the bonds of pregnancy and the release of her long dormant “physical and psychic nature.” It celebrates the right of women to make love, as well as to do good, and this dimension of its argument, far more than its politics, underlay its commercial and critical appeal. Sales may also have been helped by a deceptive advertising campaign implying that the book contained technical birth control advice. The hardcover edition sold out immediately, and after several new printings, it was reissued by Truth Publishing, a soft-cover trade house that was also marketing Margaret’s Family Limitation pamphlet.
    The book did not entirely please Ellis, who wrote a rather tepid introduction, applauding Margaret’s attempt to link the goals of the contemporary movements for women and for labor, but expressing some wariness about the boldness of her larger vision. In private, he urged her to adopt a still more cautious tone in the future, one that reflected the disillusion of a generation of European intellectuals whose confidence in the human condition, and in the possibility of any measure of reform, had been shattered by the chaos and devastation of World War I. He accused her of identifying birth control as “the sole guardian of civilisation,” when he had meant it at most as “a condition of progress.” 18
    This criticism may have prompted her decision to embark almost immediately on a second book. The Pivot of Civilization makes a more concerted effort to abandon dogmatism in favor of a dispassionate approach to the birth control question. In so doing, it reflects not only Ellis’s critique, but the clear influence of Wells, whom Margaret had met in the interim, and who lent her a great deal of both intellectual and commercial credibility by writing a flattering introduction.
    Able books had been written justifying birth control from the woman’s point of view, Wells suggested, but this one offered the larger perspective of what birth control meant to “the public good.” Indeed, Pivot presents a Wellsian world where a better life can be had for all without the necessity of violence and class warfare, because the great proletarian masses achieve self-direction and self-control by limiting their fertility voluntarily. On the grounds that labor servitude springs from numbers, Margaret characterized her ideas as an extension of the principles of trade unionists, who were seeking to limit the