Terrible Virtue

Summary (from the publisher): In the spirit of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank, the provocative and compelling story of one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the twentieth century: Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood—an indomitable woman who, more than any other, and at great personal cost, shaped the sexual landscape we inhabit today.

The daughter of a hard-drinking, smooth-tongued free thinker and a mother worn down by thirteen children, Margaret Sanger vowed her life would be different. Trained as a nurse, she fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception. It was a battle that would pit her against puritanical, patriarchal lawmakers, send her to prison again and again, force her to flee to England, and ultimately change the lives of women across the country and around the world.

This complex enigmatic revolutionary was at once vain and charismatic, generous and ruthless, sexually impulsive and coolly calculating—a competitive, self-centered woman who championed all women, a conflicted mother who suffered the worst tragedy a parent can experience. From opening the first illegal birth control clinic in America in 1916 through the founding of Planned Parenthood to the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s, Margaret Sanger sacrificed two husbands, three children, and scores of lovers in her fight for sexual equality and freedom.

With cameos by such legendary figures as Emma Goldman, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, H. G. Wells, and the love of Margaret’s life, Havelock Ellis, this richly imagined portrait of a larger-than-life woman is at once sympathetic to her suffering and unsparing of her faults. Deeply insightful, Terrible Virtue is Margaret Sanger’s story as she herself might have told it.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this novel from HarperCollins.

 

Told in the first person, this novel follows the life of Margaret Sanger, who worked tirelessly throughout the early twentieth century to give women access to reproductive rights. Indeed, it was Margaret Sanger who first coined the term "birth control," because she believed every woman had a right to control when and how many times she would call herself a mother. This novel opens with young Margaret living in abject poverty, watching her mother slowly killed by pregnancy after pregnancy. This childhood would shape her views and lead her to fight tirelessly, even in the face of criminal charges and neglect of her own children so that no woman would have to watch her children go hungry and her own body waste away, because she had no way of preventing an annual pregnancy.

 

The novel makes it very clear that its narrator Margaret is a feminist and a liberal; "We were committed to sexual equality. We believed that women as well as men had the right, the duty, to use their God-given bodies as well as men had the right, the duty, to use their God-given bodies to live as fully as possible" (46). Although it seems as if many of her social aims were admirable and well-intentioned, she also seems to have alienated and angered many. This is conveyed through the use of letters addressed to Margaret interspersed throughout the text, written by those that knew her. For instance, one colleague writes to her saying, "You needed followers and admirers. No, more than that, you needed lackeys and sycophants. And you had them in droves, though I will never understand the spell you cast" (210). She is also critical of Margaret taking all the credit herself, saying, "To hear you tell it, Margaret Sanger created the birth control movement as single-handedly as the Lord created the universe" (210).Margaret comes across as less than a likeable character.

 

However, aside from disliking the narrator, my main complaint with this book was it relied far more on the narrator providing a litany of her life events than it did on action. It felt as if the author had done immense research on the historical figure of Margaret Sanger and then attempted to weave too much historical fact into a novel. For instance, upon meeting Havelock Ellis, the narrator says, "Later, when he would erase my name from his autobiography for fear of offending his wife [...]" (120). At times I wondered why the author didn't just write a biography rather than awkwardly having her narrator tell the reader extraneous facts throughout this novel. Because of its reliance on telling rather than show, this novel functions more as a fictional autobiography than a novel about a historical character. 

 

Although Margaret Sanger is to be lauded for her accomplishments and I appreciated learning more about her through this novel, the style of its narration ultimately prevented me from fully enjoying this book.

 

Stars: 2