A leaf off Feminism
- Shubhankar Nath
- History
- June 13, 2021
I know, it is uncanny for a male to give any take on Feminism. After all, aren’t men supposed to be vexed by the word? And women supposed to spite men for the same? Isn’t this supposed be an antagonizing topic for all right wingers? We often see women’s issues singularly as a matter of social reforms. But the stepping up of the female empowerment has much to do with the scientific advancement that does not look glorious. Let’s read about two females who are not any Hollywood Celebrity-Placard-Activist.
The boon of Motherhood
Both the sexes are not equal. Here, I said it! Biologically. Females have been given the boon of Motherhood and with that a lot of physiological tools to support the role. This goes beyond just a flip of chromosome. I could go on about the brilliance of Human Biology but maybe that’s for another blog.
But the point is Motherhood is extremely costly on the female body. We have taken modern science so granted that we have forgotten that just a century ago, pregnancies were as lethal as breast cancer is today. Even now, conception post 40 becomes very risky.
In New York, summer of 1921, while Adolf Hitler was just a failed artist ranting in Munich’s drinking dens, two women in their forties met, together who would do more to the change the lives of women in the next century than anybody else. Their cause, however, was undeniably political. It was to give women the control over their own fertility while still letting them the enjoy the act.
The Wild One
Margret Sanger was a feminist heroine. She was self-promoting, often disloyal and might have been a racist too. Her father was a free thinking Irish radical, but a strict patriarch at home, in a small town in New York state. Her mother a devout catholic, had no fewer than eighteen pregnancies in twenty-two years and died of cervical cancer. Margert was trained as a nurse and watched young working-class women die of botched abortions in the slums of Manhattan. I know, slums of Manhattan is a tough one to digest.
After the world war, she became an anarchist and a socialist. She later focused her work on more practical issues - birth control. She was confronted by a fierce critic - Anthony Comstock. He was a postal inspector and boasted as an advocate to fight vice. He found vice everywhere - from medical textbooks to plays by George Bernard Shaw. He passed a law to prohibit circulation of any obscene or lewd material. He burned down anything that stood his way. And Sanger’s campaign on contraception options came right at his crosshairs.
Fearing prison, she fled to Britain and even had a brief affair with H.G. Wells. It is in Europe that she had the exposure of all sorts of contraceptive theories used since ancient times, some subtle like wet tea leaves to some outlandish like crocodile dung. But none were reliable and safe.
The Wealthy One
Katharine Dexter McCormick was a from a wealthy aristocratic family of US. The town of Dexter is named after their family. She was one of the first women to get a science degree from MIT. She was a suffragist and married another wealthy radical McCormick (nothing like the Lannister’s here). Unfortunately, her husband fell ill with Schizophrenia. And given that it is a hereditary disease, she decided not to have any children. She threw herself into a double life of a full-time caretaker and a voice for women’s campaign.
Before the World War, equal voting rights would have a radical thought. But the war required women also to contribute as working class. This transformed the role of Women politically. In this way could Hitler be called a Feminist too? Katharine became the chair of National Council of Defense which was in-charge of all Red Cross supplies.
The Mafia Duo
Both of them clicked. There were women across faiths and class who wrote to them like - “I had sixteen children, of whom six are living - I am thirty seven but look fifty” and others more desperate like “If you don’t help me, I ’m going to chop up a glass and swallow it tonight”. And by help, they meant contraceptives, not more advice.
Mrs. McCormick started taking trips to Europe and smuggling diaphragms to the States in her luggage. She hired Swiss women to sew thousands of diaphragms and hide them under female clothes to be transported under the noses of US and French customs. As it was the Probation period in US, she used bootleggers to transport contraceptive along with booze and deliver (not the booze) them to women through Sanger’s clinic. They both were quite the Mafia duo but not the life taking kind.
Sanger married a rich oil Baron and money was no problem. Both formidable women in their seventies funded nearly two million dollars to a brilliant mammalian egg researcher Gregory Pincus. He was famous for fertilizing rabbit eggs in test tubes. Kinda Dr. Frankenstein!
Progesterone is a key hormone in fertilization, which ensures that the body does not produce multiple pregnancies. Pincus and his team produced a drug much more stronger than natural Progesterone that could be taken orally. It was simply called ’the pill’ and was commercially available by 1960s after long trials and protests. By 1965, it was estimated that a quarter of all married women under forty-five in US were taking it; by 1985 worldwide around eight million women. It still continues to be a controversial topic and religious sacrilege in many parts but if there is more impactful story of female liberty, I am all ears.
