This past Thursday's salon evening – our
last before we break for the summer and head out West with the wine women and
philosophy roadshow - was entitled
"Stepping Up, Speaking Out, Standing Apart." Drawing on insights
gleaned from our current Philosophy Club series, "Rebel with a
Cause," participants explored what it takes and what it breaks to put one's vision for a better world ahead of all
else. To help us with this work we focused in on a woman who certainly did just
this: American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger (1879-1966). Our chosen
'conversational' format for the evening was soapbox oratory - a 'step up, speak
out, stand apart' form of address that Margaret Sanger enthusiastically
embraced in the name of her cause – legal and easily accessible birth control
for all women – and employed, albeit with butterflies in her gut, in a variety
of ways throughout her life.
Because Club members had already spent four
weeks exploring the trope of the female rebel, they were counted on to act as
co-hosts for the evening. At an informal level, this meant helping anyone who
hadn't been part of the session to understand more about how we had worked this
trope: through the lens of 'The Master's Tools' as elaborated by Audre Lorde;
through the notion of 'world-traveling' as suggested by Maria Lugones; and
through the lives and works of three other rebel women – 18th
Century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, French woman of letters Colette, and
surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.
On a slightly more formal note, and in
preparation for the evening, Philosophy Club members had been asked to read excerpts from Ellen
Chesler's 1992 biography of Margaret Sanger, Woman of Valor; a chapter
from Margaret Sanger's An Autobiography, (1938) in which she reflects
back on the period of her life – 1914 – when she produced her radical magazine
promoting birth control, The Woman Rebel; and a selection of editorials
that appeared in this magazine, along with details of Sanger's indictment for
'Misuse of Mails' that followed the publication and distribution of it, as
discussed by Esther Katz.
Out of this rich body of material, Club
members were expected to pick up on a concept or to select a passage that spoke
to Margaret Sanger's cause-related brand of rebelliousness, and that equally
spoke to them. Then, they were to craft a short oratory piece out of it. In
delivering the resulting piece, they were encouraged to experiment with the
soapbox that sat in the middle of the room – to stand on it, sit on it, refuse
it, do a handstand on it, whatever!...Just so long as they experienced what it
felt like to negotiate a place for themselves in relation to that soapbox and
to the assembled crowd, and to take note of the feelings that accompanied that
negotiation. But that is to slightly jump ahead. First, before we starting
using that soapbox, we had to
familiarize ourselves with the history of this egalitarian and
generally improvised form of communication.
Also known as street-corner oratory, the two
or three decades preceding World War I are considered to have been the heyday
of soapbox oratory in both the UK and North America. In England, the
consolidating of the North-East corner of London's Hyde Park as 'Speaker's
Corner' in 1872 paved the way for a lively soapboxing culture that continues to
this day: this former site of the gallows, where public hangings had been sure
to draw a sizable crowd, giving way to the educating and entertaining perogatives of
free speech. Though largely a platform for political and religious
proselytizers, basically anybody with some bone to pick and some semblance of
an elevated platform from which to do that picking (wooden crates in which soap
was delivered just happening to be cheap and readily available, hence the
adaption of the term 'soapbox') was welcome to participate. And because crowd
heckling was an equally important part of the formula, this was a form of
entertainment that everybody could get involved in.
In a previous salon evening devoted to the
art of conversation and the value of asking good questions (see blog entry on February 11, 2012), we had looked at how the Golden Age of Salon Culture in France, and to a
greater extent the growth of Coffee House Culture in England, had loosened the
hold of the ruling classes over freedom of expression, and had acted as both training
ground and semi-public forum for the exchange of ideas and opinions. If these
institutions marked the beginnings of the democratization of talk, the
evolution of soapbox oratory marked its pinnacle. To soapbox or to listen to
someone soapboxing required no official venue, no entrance fee, no formal
credentials. Here was an art form that was aimed at the masses and that,
moreover, represented the concerns of the masses. For accompanying the
burgeoning of street corner oratory both in the UK and in North America was the
burgeoning of trade unionism, of anti-religious sentiment, of calls for
universal suffrage, of radical politics, of educational reform, of activism aimed
at improving the lot of the disenfranchised and the disadvantaged...In short,
it was an out with the old and an in with the new era. In the UK, this meant
breaking free of the straight-laced yoke of Victorianism. In the USA, this
meant an insistence that the First Amendment, as constitutional rhetoric,
translated into the right to free speech, as practiced on the factory floor and
the busy street corner. In Canada, this meant severing the umbilical cord with
England and the emergence of national identity, national health, and national
heroines like Nellie McClung...But more on her next week! 
In effect, the soapbox was where you honed
your skills as an effective speaker and where you cut your teeth if you wanted
to become a leader. In the days before the radio became a feature in every
home, it afforded you and your cause a certain degree of visibility and a grass
roots kind of following. In a sense, yesterday's soapboxers are today's
bloggers...Which brought us back to the present, and that soapbox sitting in the
middle of our salon, and our Philosophy Club members taking courage in hand and
one by one stepping up, speaking out, standing apart.
Appropriately - given that
we were using this forum to learn all we could about Margaret Sanger - we had a
club member who miraculously found herself channelling the dogged and tenacious
proponent of 'family limitation' as she struggled to reconcile herself to
having little time for her own family given the extraordinary demands of her vocational cause. Moved by the plight of poor working class women whose
health and that of their existing children was severely jeopardized by their
inability to limit additional pregnancies, Sanger drew on her experience
as a young working nurse in the slums of New York to make a convincing case for
both legal and affordable contraception and her own self-sacrifice.
Fast-forward to Margaret Sanger at 78, and
two club members who had remodeled the soapbox into a Punch and Judy style stage
in order to re-enact, with puppets, her famous 1957 TV interview with a
chain-smoking Mike Wallace. Wallace's hounding of an ailing Margaret Sanger was
relentless and her answers to his leading and pointed questions were tentative at best, incriminating at worst. If that interview has gone down in history as one of this pioneering woman's
lesser moments, our club members' brilliant re-enactment of the interview constituted one of wwp's finer moments. So too did a beautifully delivered
rendition of one of Sanger's spirited editorials in
her inaugural issue of The Woman Rebel, in which she urged women to revolt against repressive laws denying them freedom over their own bodies. In between these
stand out moments we were equally awed by a call to celebrate rather than
repudiate the contradictions inherent in Sanger's personality and political
choices; by an ode to Sanger as an inspirational working class heroine; by an
impassioned critique of the kind of slandering and scapegoating that Sanger has
been subjected to in recent years by pro-lifers, among others, who have twisted
her words and robbed them of their original context in order to denounce her;
by a clever analysis of Sanger's ability to ride between camps and rally a wide
range of supporters to her cause; by a consideration of the message of hope
that Sanger brings to women who are being personally demonized today for
believing in, and fighting for, a cause that will be seen as part of 'natural'
and 'common-sense' thinking tomorrow; and by a rousing tribute to the Sangers
of the world who give women the courage and means to empower themselves and others.
Taking this message of empowerment to heart,
those attending the salon who had not participated in the Philosophy Club were invited to try out the soapbox and give voice to
their own concerns. A stirring soliloquy to package-less broccoli – yes,
broccoli! - will live on forever in the memories of those of us lucky to
witness it. On this verdant note, a few final words from Margaret Sanger which speak to her contentiousness as a public figure and the wide range of emotions she evoked:
“I
have been called in turn a vile person, a person with a barnyard philosophy, a
God-send, the greatest woman of the
century, the counterpart of Abraham Lincoln and a horrible creature...Rather conflicting
epithets, but I go on doing what I believe to be right, carrying a message of help, as I believe it to
be.”
In the spirit of Margaret Sanger we'll be carrying our 'Rebel with a Cause' series to its rightful conclusion this coming Thursday, when we turn our attention to Canadian suffrage campaigner Nellie McClung.
