Besides the coronavirus pandemic and the election of Joe Biden as president, another topic made 2020 a dramatic year: the relentless attack on past heroes due to bad — and sometimes appalling — behaviors. From the tearing down of statues of Confederate soldiers to the removal of President Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s School of International Affairs to revelations about Alexander Hamilton’s enslavement of African Americans, critics and activists have compellingly argued that racism and other noxious beliefs should disqualify such individuals from any celebratory recognition.
It turns out that many historical figures have what at first appear to be two sides: the heroic reformer and the secret (or even open) racist. When the public learns that yet another hero had a little-known dark side, there is surprise and disappointment. This cycle of exaltation, revulsion and rejection, however, is bad history.
Is there a better way to understand and navigate this challenging issue? Yes. Two additional stories unearthed during 2020 — that of the well-known birth control activist Margaret Sanger and the more obscure suffragist Helen Hamilton Gardener — remind us of the importance of placing past figures within their specific historical context rather than judging them from a modern perspective.
Sanger has been a feminist icon for more than a century. As a nurse working in New York City’s crowded tenements in the early 1900s, Sanger encountered families who kept having children despite dire poverty. Even if a woman did not want additional births, her lack of birth control options meant that continuous pregnancies would ensue.
Providing women with contraception, Sanger believed, empowered them, enabling them to enjoy their sexuality and bear only the number of children they wanted. But doing this work was illegal, thanks to the Comstock laws that deemed birth control “obscene” and prohibited its transport across state lines. Sanger was arrested at least five times.
However, she was dedicated to her cause. It was “sordid,” she wrote, for a woman to be “burdened down with half a dozen unwanted children, helpless, starved, shoddily clothed, dragging at your skirt, yourself a dragged out shadow of the woman you once were.” Who were these burdened women? On the Lower East Side, they were largely poor immigrants — Italians, Jews and others who had fled Europe and Asia. When Sanger worked in Harlem, her intended audience was Black women.
Sanger’s work directly intersected with the post-World War I eugenics movement. Eugenicists believed that large, poor families existed because they passed down defective genes between generations. Such individuals were seen as “unfit” and “defective.” As a solution, eugenicists proposed involuntary sterilization.
Eugenics was no fringe enterprise. Prestigious universities like Harvard had eugenics departments, and beloved Americans, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Helen Keller, openly espoused eugenicist views. In a notorious 1927 case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization by declaring that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
Although her focus was on birth control and empowerment, Sanger was clearly not offended by eugenics. One can easily find many derisive things she said about the poor that are appalling to modern ears. In one 1957 video, Sanger remarks that the “greatest sin” is bringing children into the world who “have disease from their parents” and have “no chance in the world to be a human being, practically.” There are also many statements that appear racist. These remarks recently led Planned Parenthood, the birth control organization that Sanger founded, to appropriately remove her name from its Manhattan Health Clinic and to stop bestowing its Margaret Sanger Award.
But as Sanger’s biographer Ellen Chesler has argued, Sanger’s attraction to eugenics was largely pragmatic. Indeed, the concept of birth control was so disreputable, Sanger purposely aligned with eugenics supporters because their related cause was so much more popular and mainstream. Was this a bad choice? Of course. But there are historical explanations that go beyond bigotry that explain why a progressive activist engaged causes and beliefs that appear morally reprehensible to modern eyes. Indeed, as the historian Ayah Nuriddin has written, Black Americans from multiple socioeconomic classes actually embraced aspects of eugenics as a way to fight racial injustice.
Sanger has a compatriot in Gardener, the suffragist and largely forgotten subject of a new biography, “Free Thinker,” by historian Kimberly A.
Hamlin. While indubitably a hero for her role in getting the 19th Amendment passed in 1919, some of Gardener’s choices taint her legacy.
Gardener was born in Virginia in 1853 but grew up mostly in the Midwest. Nevertheless, she always considered herself a Southerner. Gardener was originally a teacher and elementary school principal but resigned after an affair with a married man became public. The humiliation it caused Gardener turned her into an activist. By 1884, she had begun a career as a writer and lecturer on women’s rights.
Insisting that women were “self-respecting, self-directing human units with brains and bodies sacredly their own,” Gardener pushed for the age of consent to be raised, for married women’s right to refuse their husband’s advances and for access to birth control. She rejected claims that women’s brains were inferior.
But Gardener’s greatest success would come from her work as a behind-the- scenes activist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Hamlin has unearthed a previously unknown story about how Gardener — through a friendship with Wilson and Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty — generated enough political will for the passage of the suffrage amendment. Yet Gardener and her NAWSA colleagues consistently avoided working with Black female suffrage activists.
How can we understand Gardener’s choices? Like Sanger, she was a pragmatist, interested in promoting her activism any way she could. In short, NAWSA feared that any alliance with Black women would offend the Southern congressmen on whose votes for suffrage the organization was relying. Southern racists had enormous resentment toward the 15th Amendment, which gave Black men the right to vote. So reminding them that suffrage would also enfranchise Black women seemed like a bad idea. Moreover, getting the 19th Amendment passed was going to get Black women, at least in theory, the vote anyway. If such an outcome entailed flattering and negotiating with racist Southern politicians, then that was the price she opted to pay.
Gardener could not see that her rejection of Black women’s concerns mirrored the closed-mindedness of men who rejected suffrage. Excluding Black suffragists from White organizations was yet another example of pervasive racism in American society, as recounted by historian Martha S. Jones in “Vanguard.” But if one believes Hamlin’s assessment of how influential Gardener and NAWSA were, it is conceivable that allowing Black women to join NAWSA might have delayed the passage of women’s suffrage for years or even decades. Either way, understanding how Gardener’s activism — like that of Sanger — resulted from complicated historical choices and compromises is crucial.
Future historians will look back on popular and seemingly unobjectionable modern activist movements, such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and possibly take issue with their choices. But when they do, they should remember a key lesson: that activists, and politicians, are neither pure heroes nor pure villains, but imperfect people negotiating complicated circumstances. To quote Hamlin, we must become more familiar with the “complexities, failures and triumphs” of the Helen Hamilton Gardeners of this world “so that we might better understand our own.”
Originally published on washingtonpost.com on December 28th, 2020.