Woman of Valor (12 page)

By this time Goldman herself was out of the country, having fallen victim to the red purges of World War I. Deported in 1919, she lived in exile in the south of France and later in Canada, where she died in 1940. There she wrote a long and reasonably candid memoir under the careful editorial eye of Alexander Berkman, who challenged her to treat other women's accomplishments fairly. The book acknowledged Margaret's achievement in distributing practical birth control information to women, but its somewhat gratuitous flattery was never reciprocated. Margaret continued to popularize Goldman's claim for the revolutionary potential of women's control over their own bodies but never admitted any debt to her. She would deliberately disparage Goldman in her own memoirs and lie outright about their association in a 1935 letter to a new supporter of birth control. As she courted establishment money during the 1930s, she may have felt the need to be prudent about advertising her early association with industrial radicalism and violence, but since she never disassociated herself from Flynn or Tresca, the Goldman disavowal must also have been personally motivated. Margaret's deceit was testimony to the intense rivalry that had developed over the years between two women who both thrived on public attention and acclaim. “She never liked me personally and has belittled my work in her book, to say nothing of the manner in which she greeted me the other night when I went up to give her a word of welcome,” Margaret claimed in refusing to support Goldman's efforts to reinstate her United States citizenship in 1934. “One can get slapped just once too often, and I am through.”
²⁰

Margaret recognized that the extraordinary publicity she first generated for birth control had been, in some measure, at Goldman's expense. Emma had long advocated the principle of family limitation in her lectures and had actually supplied practical knowledge to many women during clandestine encounters that followed her speeches, when she sometimes distributed a leaflet describing condoms and womb veils. Yet it was also true that she would only dare to challenge the Comstock laws publicly after Margaret was first arrested for doing so, and she would then infuriate the Sangers by advising that Margaret had insufficient public recognition or experience to carry the cause on her own.

This slight would rankle even more as Margaret's reputation grew, and as she came to identify Goldman with the stormy sentiments of these prewar years when she herself abandoned her husband and children, ostensibly in pursuit of a greater good for all women. Having paid the price of her former friend's theories in deeds, not just in words, Margaret would simply claim them as her own.
²¹

T
he political and cultural ferment of 1913 effectively destroyed the Sanger marriage. Bill's roots in Socialist politics were deeper than Margaret's, and though he too flirted for a time with the IWW, he tired of its extremism more quickly than she and retreated from the confusion of politics to the subjective, interior world of his art. By quitting his job, he staged his own personal revolt against the “wage slavery” that had become a fashionable object of scorn on the left. Margaret never forgave him for this decision—as she never excused the insolvency of his earlier real estate dealings in Hastings. Though the romantic side of his nature had once seemed so attractive, she thought he was selfish to pursue the purity of artistic expression and leave his family without a secure means of support. He argued, in reasonable defense, that he had subordinated himself and his art to her needs for long enough, but these were not the terms on which their marriage had been premised. The lesson Margaret took from childhood was that men were worthy only as providers, and she seems to have quickly punished her husband's profligacy with sexual infidelity, the only real weapon she had available to her.

It is impossible to determine exactly whose indiscretions came first—or which were more significant to the ultimate dissolution of the relationship—but it is clear that the marriage would not survive. Whatever her inclinations, Michael Higgins's daughter was fundamentally unsuited to be the wife of an artist, and she may have finally defeated her father, as well as Bill, when she abandoned the husband who had come to resemble him in so many ways.
¹

Bill Sanger virtually unraveled under the pressure of the radical assault on his family life, his politics, and even more critically, perhaps, on his art. Though it had failed miserably as a labor tactic, the Paterson Pageant of 1913 represented the ascendancy of rebellion as a cultural fad. Its effect on New York's intellectual and artistic life was much like that of the historic Armory Show that preceded it by just a few months, showcasing Post-Impressionist, Cubist and other Abstract painters, and permanently changing the way we look at art today. In the most fashionable haunts of the Village, a link was drawn between the two. One evening at Mabel Dodge's celebrated salon, John Reed compared the disintegrative effects of both Cubism and the I.W.W., while Bill Haywood antagonized many of the assembled professionals from the art world by celebrating a future when the energies of workers would be released to develop a people's art, free of formality and restraint.
²

Bill could scarcely conceal his contempt for this sort of reductionism. Nor was he ever really comfortable with the dissonant clashing of forms and colors of now well-known Modernists who frequented the Dodge evenings, such as John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, Max Weber, Arthur Davies, and Charles Demuth. He continued to paint in two distinct styles, without a great deal of critical acclaim or financial success. One was an intense, schooled realism that captured the pathos of urbanism and industrialism and reflected the influence of George Bellows and the emerging Ashcan school of painters, the other, by contrast, an appealing Impressionist mode that offered a safe, romanticized retreat from the discordance of contemporary life. If he sheltered his work from the influence of the new iconoclasm, however, he could not safeguard his marriage.
³

In Dodge's drawing room discussion strayed from the more familiar terrain of politics to art, literature, education, and psychology. As a measure of what some have called bohemia's eclecticism, and others have dismissed bitterly as its sheer confusion of principle, the fortunes of this eccentric, industrial heiress underwrote much of the era's rhetoric of rebellion. Here Margaret encountered a world of new and unconventional ideas. There was discussion of Nietzsche, whose attack on established religion and morality had just been translated and was embraced uncritically, while his less tasteful views about racial supremacy and female inferiority were apparently ignored. There was talk of the new psychoanalytic theory, with the pioneering New York analyst and translator, A. A. Brill, elaborating on the unconscious and licensing a libertarian conduct, despite Freud's contrary views on the inevitability of human sexual repression and restraint. And there were lectures by the young Will Durant on the pathbreaking research of the British sexual psychologist, Havelock Ellis, into the diversity and range of human sexual expression. In sum, there was an unapologetic celebration of freedom in love.

Mabel Dodge, by her own admission, gathered ideas and people with the intense determination of a society matron accustomed to collecting fine furniture or porcelains. She became a “species of head hunter,” as she put it, and the heads she brought together in conversation in her lower Fifth Avenue apartment presaged many issues that have since been central to this country's political, intellectual, and cultural life. Still, while some of the evenings were devoted to disciplined exposition and debate of new ways of thinking and communicating, they were, at the same time, a spirited bacchanalia. Her sumptuous salon featured the latest in painting and decoration assembled amid elegant, if eccentric for the time, white furnishings and draperies. There was always a lavish buffet of fine food and wine, and for Margaret, this constellation of rebellious sentiment and bourgeois comfort proved a thoroughly seductive experience. But not for Bill: “Madame Pompadeau Dodge's—her salon—Oh! Gosh! how nauseating!” he wrote her frantically. “The I.W.W. in the parlor!…Parlor Discussion, Parlor Artists, Parlor Socialists, Parlor Revolutionists, Parlor Anarchists—I know where art & revolution is…you bet.”
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He also began to rave over the duplicity of once trusted comrades, whom he now suspected of embracing their revolutionary ideas only to justify stealing away his wife. Away from New York, trying to paint in peace, he insisted: “You don't need their intellectual dope…. You are a salon all by yourself.” The Village became for him nothing more than a “hellhole of free love, promiscuity and prostitution masquerading under the mantle of revolution,” or, as he put it in another letter, a “saturnalia of sexualism, deceit, fraud and Jesuitism let loose.” Elsewhere he added: “If Revolution means promiscuity, they can call me a conservative and make the most of it.” He was willing to embrace the concept of Margaret's right to independence as an abstraction, and he soberly paraphrased the Swedish feminist Ellen Key and the French writer George Sand in his increasingly frantic letters. But understandably, perhaps, he only saw his wife's sudden interest in new personal experiences as a rejection of him, not as a positive affirmation of herself, a response which provoked her added resentments.

Bill destroyed all of Margaret's letters to him, so we must intuit her thoughts from his long and vitriolic responses, which she gathered together and saved, but they make clear that the avant-garde of the Dodge salon provided her a sympathetic forum for challenging established patterns of submissiveness in her marriage. Long-stored resentments apparently tumbled forth about money, child care, household management, and what in one case she referred to directly as Bill's “overbearing” personality. By the time she assembled these complaints, however, she also had ample reason to be defensive about her own behavior. Bill either discovered on his own, or she herself told him about, the one love affair from this period of her life that is clearly documented—a liaison with a man by the name of Walter Roberts, who was for a time an editor at
American Parade
. It began during the summer of 1913, while she was vacationing with her children in the still quaint fishing village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where New York artists and literati escaped the city heat. Bill was commuting back and forth from New York, and the writer Hutchins Hapgood later remembered him from that summer as “a sweet gentle painter who lacked ego and ambition,” and to whom his “pretty wife…seemed to grant little value.”

By Margaret's published recollection, her Provincetown holiday that year was memorable only because she spent much of it brooding over the specter of Sadie Sachs and the dilemma of Comstock's censorship of her articles in
The Call
. Leaving the children in Ethel's care, she crossed the harbor to Boston to continue research she had begun in New York on contraceptive technology. She consulted all available medical texts, but owing to the profession's continued reticence on the subject, found virtually no agreement on a preferred method. Indeed, the array of options discussed and debated by physicians confirmed her view that the dissemination of simple but reliable information was desperately needed.
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Neither of these accounts, however, reveals a third unhappy development that obviously consumed at least some of her time that summer and exhausted her emotional energy. According to Grant Sanger, his adored baby sister Peggy had come down with polio during the hot summer of 1910 and been left with a weakened and foreshortened leg. Grant remembered clearly that the rambunctious child walked with a limp, but Margaret resolutely refused to acknowledge the severity of her daughter's condition. During their summer at Provincetown, it became apparent that Peggy would have to be fitted with a brace, yet nothing was done, and in a frenzied letter the following year, Bill admonished Margaret to pay attention to the “little limb,” implying that she was being negligent.
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In the meanwhile, the unexpected death of Henrietta Sanger from cancer in September of 1913 seems to have effected a brief rapprochement in her son's marriage. Desperate to hold on to all he valued, and free of obligations to the elderly mother who had been helping to care for the children, Bill prevailed upon Margaret to accompany him to Paris, where he hoped to restore their relationship and pursue his painting in an atmosphere free of the corrosive immorality of New York. The trip was financed with the final payments on the mortgage they still held from the sale of the Hastings house. “I want to help you in your work loved one—you must help me to help you,” he wrote poignantly, though with a condescension that may well have infuriated her by this time. “Sidestep New York…. The reaction for you was inevitable, as you admitted. Your
finer
sensibilities only escaped its ravages in time. If you can cut out the
Nirvana bunk
…you might cast your sunshine once again.”
⁷

The Sangers traveled to the Continent via Scotland, where Margaret had an assignment to report for
The Call
on municipal ownership of housing and utilities in Glasgow, a city which, despite this commendable experiment, she found squalid and unappealing. In Paris she apparently continued her research on contraception. Through Bill Haywood and Jessie Ashley, who were also traveling there, she met the French syndicalists, long known to her through Emma Goldman, and learned firsthand of their theories in favor of state-supported policies of family limitation. Victor Dave, a prominent French Socialist and lone survivor of the nineteenth century Communards, argued in favor of scientific fertility regulation as a dimension of social reconstruction. Margaret believed that his enthusiasm derived from a long-established tradition of contraceptive use among the French peasantry, which took root in the anticlerical fervor of the Revolution and was then sustained by Napoleonic codes mandating equal division of property among children. To keep their family holdings together as much as possible, French women defied church edict and passed along birth control secrets from one generation to another. The syndicalist desire to shape peasant economy and ingenuity into official state policy suddenly seemed a more practical solution to the disturbing problems of poverty and unemployment than the besieged efforts of labor activists in the United States. Here, moreover, was a program that identified women as principal agents of social and economic change.

“A whole year had been given over to inactive incoherent brooding…. With this background I had practically reached the exploding point. I could not contain my ideas, I wanted to get on with what I had to do in the world,” she later wrote. By the eve of the new year, she and the children were back on a steamship headed for home, while Bill stayed behind, alone, to find himself as a painter.
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“I shall never forget the expression in your face when I threw the last kiss. I'm sure I mean something in your life,” he wrote immediately upon her departure. “I feel now that nobody can take you away from me.” Yet, the same letter acknowledged his emerging recognition that they had been torn irreparably asunder. He groped for words:

Back in New York Margaret assured him that she was “settling down to systematic work,” and he accommodated to their predicament and to his loneliness by convincing himself that she needed “seclusion” to work out her “lines of intellectual development.” He encouraged her to hire a nursemaid while she went to work herself and somehow also found time to begin her intended writing on contraception and women's issues, and he promised to work hard in Paris, in return, “to make the future more secure.” But the only exchange of money between them appears to have come from either her salary or the mortgage installments from the Hastings house. As she continued to support her husband, the inherent contradiction between his prattle about her independence and his continued insistence that she remain faithful to him began to annoy her. He insisted: