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Sylvia Plath was one of the greatest American poets of this century. She was
born in 1932 in Massachusetts, and spent her early childhood near the beach
at Winthrop. Her father, a professor of biology at BU, died when she was
about ten, and her ambivalent relationship with him then and throughout her
life strongly influenced her poetry.
Plath's mother moved with her daughter and son to Wellesley, where Plath
got a good education and was accepted at Smith College. She seems to have
been always torn between being on the one hand the "golden girl," hard-
working, A-achieving, beautiful, beau-attracting, mother-pleasing; and on
the other, a solemn character in touch with the darker side of life. In her
junior year at college (1953) she won a student summer editorship at
Mademoiselle Magazine in NYC. It was a 50s dream come true. And yet Plath
was "trapped" in the more restrictive aspects of that dream; it was all too
unreal, she sensed the hollowness of it; she became very depressed and
attempted suicide shortly after returning home, and nearly succeeded. She
had a complete breakdown and was institutionalized for several months. (Her
novel The Bell Jar is based on this period.)
She recovered to return to Smith, graduate, and then went on to study in
England on a fellowship, ending up marrying the swarthily handsome British
poet Ted Hughes (whose poetic ambitions she consistently put ahead of her
own), returning to the States to teach for a year at Smith, and eventually
having two children - all in true storybook fashion. But the marriage failed,
as did her psychic state, and in February 1963 she made another suicide
attempt and this time she succeeded.
Plath wrote her most brilliant poetry during the few months before her
death when she was separated from her husband, living through a horrendous
winter in a London flat with two small children. She would rise at 4 and
write in the blue light of dawn until the milkman rattled his bottles. Hers
is a complicated mythology, filled with classical and Germanic images and
images of moon and flowers and bees, drawing on her relationship with her
father, her keenly ironic sense of death and of having been abandoned by
men, first her father and now her husband. Since her death, some feminists
have tried to "claim" her; and some of her best poems have do such
affinities. Her poetry has been described as self-centered. But its genius
is beyond dispute. If she had lived and remained well she would surely have
left a much larger body of great poetry.
Dorian
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"No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body."
-- Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger was a modern pioneer in introducing the use of birth control.
She was born in 1883 in Corning, New York. Her work as a public health nurse
made her acutely aware of the importance of "family limitation." She
studied in London with Havelock Ellis, then returned to the U.S. to begin a
one-woman campaign to make contraception acceptable (at the time, dispensing
even any information about it was illegal; it was considered obscene).
Sanger was indicted in 1915 for sending birth control information through
the mails and arrested in 1916 for conducting a birth-control clinic. But
gradually she did gain support. She opened a clinic in New York in 1923
that continued into the 70s. She also organized conferences on birth
control and set up a National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth
Control, and traveled and lectured (and set up clinics) internationally.
For Sanger, birth control was not a "single issue" but part of a broad
program for social revolution. According to Dale Spender, birth control
"may be acceptable in most quarters today,...But in Margaret Sanger's day,
it was one of *the* most radical and outrageous demands....It was a source
of freedom for women, argued Sanger, which would give her time, energy, and
resources 'not to enhance the masculine spirit' nor 'to preserve a man-made
world,' but to create a world in which women were fully represented and in
which their values and concerns would prevail - at least half the time."
Sanger died in 1966.
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| A double-sided Xerox of type-written pages was handed to be by a woman at the
March rally in '89. I started to open and read it; she asked me to read it
later. We chatted at bit, and she wandered on.
I have edited out the parts I felt were too inflammatory for Womannotes. I
don't care to edit another woman's herstory, but I could not stand this topic
going down a rat hole.
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_ABORTION_SPEAK-OUT,_20th_ANNIVERSARY,_WOMEN'S_HISTORY_MONTH,_3/3/89_
Elizabeth Most
There is a world of difference between intellectual knowledge and
personal experience.
I grew up in the 20's and was lucky that my older sister was a nurse
who believed girls should know about their bodies, and she taught me about
menstruation. Then, the day I found myself bleeding, I forgot all I had
learned, and was terrified and screamed for my mother. She came running, and
when she saw me she laughed. I was mortified. I hadn't expected menstruation
to be like that. At first I had to wash my own cloths. Then it was also awful
to buy Kotex (you didn't say sanitary napkins aloud). It came in a box already
wrapped in plain paper, but to me it was obvious, and I felt everyone looked at
me.
While I was growing up, the opposition to contraception was much more
formidable and widespread than the present [...]. The great crusader in my day
was Margaret Sanger who coined the term "birth control." In 1912 she was a
public health nurse on the lower East Side, and was shaken by the misery of
young wives, old at thirty-fix, from unchecked childbirths. Many pleaded with
her to tell how to prevent another child; rich women seemed to know, they said.
A doctor laughed, "You can't have your cake and eat it. Let Joe sleep on the
roof." She saw lines of women waiting for an abortion. She heard there were
100,000 abortions a year in New York. Police simply looked away.
Some forms of contraception were used through the ages. There were
magic potions, and also various sponges, douches and suppositories. Margaret
Sanger learned of the diaphragm in 1915 in Holland where it had been devised by
their first woman doctor, Aletta Jacobs. There Sanger learned the techniques
of fitting it, and returned to the United States, hoping to introduce it as a
scientific medical procedure. But the medical profession was not ready. Not
until 1937, when birth control had been euphemistically renamed "family
planning," it was officially accepted as a part of medical practice.
Margaret Sanger had to battle Anthony Comstock of the U.S. Post-Office
who must have been the Joe McCarthy of his day. He got an obscenity law passed
back in 1873 that made it illegal to send any birth control information through
the mails. Then Comstock had women decoys tell heartrending stories and beg for
contraceptive help. A soft-hearted mid-western physician who responded was
sentenced to 10 years of prison and came out a broken man. This bad law had a
good life of 97 years. Congress rescinded it in 1970.
Dr. Mary Hatton of Grosvenor Hospital gave a TB patient a diaphragm in
1916 and was forced to resign. In Brownsville in 1917 Margaret Sanger opened
the first birth control clinic in the U.S. It was raided, the records
confiscated, and she was jailed for maintaining a "public nuisance." You may
remember that Massachusetts and Connecticut made it a crime _to_use_
contraception, and Planned Parenthood held a weekly clinic in the bordertown of
Portchester, N.Y. until 1965 to fit New England women with a diaphragm.
To come back to myself. In the 30's I thought I was a modern, free
woman. I knew about birth control and planned to use it. When I as married a
week I went to the Margaret Sanger clinic, the one facility to get a
diaphragm. In a group we were explained about our insides, and were shown a
model which we touched to "get a feel of the passageway." But alone with the
doctor I was clumsy and stupid. Flesh was different from plastic. The result
was that it was even more difficult at home, and I had to go back for further
instruction. Luckily, this doctor was more patient and even praised me for
returning. It is still a problem that a woman's sex is inside her body, to
some extent a mystery, and each woman must take on the awkward task of
self-discovery.
Well, later I was much involved with the subject of birth control,
worked for the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau and Planned Parenthood. I
thought I knew all the ins and outs, all the problems of contraception and
abortion, knew statistics about populations around the world... and then I
wandered into a meeting in this very hall in March, 1969, and heard a dozen
women describe their own illegal abortions before an audience of men and women.
[...]
I started out by saying there is a world of difference between
intellectual knowledge and personal experience. When it comes to abortion and
childbirth, it is the woman who experiences them. It is the woman who should
have the choice.
* * *
[pasted in the bottom right corner, is a MADD return label:]
Elizabeth Most
[...]
New York, New York 10001
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