Letters Between Ida Tarbell and Margret Sanger Regarding: Birth Control
October 10th
1 9 2 1
Miss Ida Tarbell
120 East 19th Street
New York City
My dear Miss Tarbell:
During the past few years a number of economists, doctors, and social workers have urged me to arrange for a wider investigation of the subject of Birth Control in the United States. This request, together with the thousands of letters asking for contraceptive information which come to me through the mail, makes it impossible for me to ignore the demand any longer. I am arranging, therefore, with the help of a Committee, a National Conference to be held in New York City November 11th, 12th and 13th.
Harold Cox, former Member of Parliament and Editor of the Edinburgh Review, will come from England to speak at the Mass Meeting which will be held at the Town Hall on the last evening of the Conference. We have received, already, promises from delegates representing twenty-three States that they will be present to attend the different sessions.
From these meetings, we hope to form an American Birth Control League to stimulate sufficient interest and leadership so that organizers and speakers may be sent out over the country to form branches in the several States. We want to go first to those States where there are no laws restricting contraceptive information and establish clinics, and later into the other States to do Legislative work.
We are most anxious to have you become affiliated with this group and to have your permission to add your name to the Conference Committee. I realize, however, that you would not be willing to have your name used for any project with which you are not thoroughly familiar, so I am writing to ask if you will designate a convenient time that Miss Clara Louise Rowe, who is in charge of the detailed arrangements for the Conference, may call to see you and explain our program in full.
Hoping that you will see your way clear to granting this interview, I am
Yours very sincerely,
[SANGER SIGNATURE]
Chairman
MS:SD
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mrs. Margaret Sanger, Chairman,
117 West 46 St., New York.
Dear Mrs. Sanger:
Pardon me for being so slow in replying to your letter of October 10. I have been in Washington on the Unemployment Conference and only just returned.
I do appreciate your desire to have my name on the First American Birth Control Conference Committee, but I am convinced that I have no useful place on such a Committee as that. Your Committee, to be effective should be in the hands of (1) physicians (2) men and women who have had the experience of breeding and rearing families and (3) of social workers - broad minded nurses who have come in direct contact in families with the problems that uncontrolled birth gives. I belong in no one of these classes. I have not sufficient back ground of experience to enable me to decide wisely whether the very obvious evils of the lack of control are not more than offset by the far reaching evils of control.
My chief study of these problems has been in France, and the experience of France seems to me a bad argument for your cause. I do not mean to say that birth control necessarily would work out in the way that it seems to me to have done in France, that with a large sense of social and moral responsibility among men and women there might not be a different result. I think it is possible; but, at all events, I don't feel competent to serve on your Committee, chiefly because I do not belong in any one of the three classes of those from which its membership, in my opinion, should be drawn.
But, please believe me, my dear Mrs. Sanger, I admire the courage and the conviction that you are putting into the matter. You have got an admirable committee, I should say. The greater number of them, from my point of view, have a right to be there; but I have not.
Very sincerely yours,
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 28, 1935
Miss Ida M. Tarbell,
120 East 19 Street,
New York, N. Y.
Dear Miss Tarbell:
Mrs. Harriman has referred your letter of January 12th to me, and I am truly sorry that you do not feel you can attend the dinner as an honor guest.
I appreciate the reasons you mentioned, but feel that the question of Birth Control involves so much of our social structure and lies at the root of so many to the social evils we are trying to overcome - that it can be regarded from the social economic as well as the personal view point. Your distinguished position in American life leads me to hope that eventually you may feel sufficiently familiar with the broad humanitarian causes involved in this question to lend the movement the valuable contribution of your name among its sponsors. I am taking the liberty of sending you, with my compliments, a copy of "My Fight for Birth Control" together with some other literature that I hope may interest you, and I would feel honored to answer any questions that may exist in your mind regarding any phase of this subject.
Sincerely yours,
[Sanger signature]
Margaret Sanger
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 15, 1935
Dear Mrs. Sanger:
:
Please do not think that my silence means that I do not appreciate your letter of January 28th. I appreciated it too much to answer it in a hurry and it come to my desk at a moment when I was too engrossed with a piece of work that had to meet a time limit to give it the consideration that it deserves.
Again, the copy of your book "My Fight for Birth Control" is here and I want to read it before writing you. It has been impossible for me to do so and I fear it will be for some little time so buried am I in my work. Believe me this is not lack of interest. I have tried to make it a rule not to go along with any undertaking of importance, particularly [one] important to the family, unless I had studied it sufficiently to feel sure of my ground. I have never given the birth control movement that careful consideration. I have left it for those that were placed really to know what they were talking about. There are considerations tied up with the development of character - ethical considerations - which I would have to satisfy. Reason won't do it I am afraid. Somehow I have foggy intuitions which hold me back from what would be the easy way for me and that is to go along with you and the superior woman in the movement. I can't do it until I have thought or felt my way out and I [fear] that I have not the experience ever to do that.
Forgive this long and unsatisfactory letter. I shall read your book as soon as I have time, do it leisurely and think it over. I have always been hampered in life by the slowness of my conclusions. Possibly that comes from what I am afraid is the truth I am merely an observer of life, not an actor in it.
I am quite convinced that the movement will go ahead, that it does not need me and believe me, dear Mrs. Sanger, for you I have both respect and admiration.
Faithfully yours
Mrs. Margaret Sanger
1343 H. Street N.W.
Washington, D. C.