GEBURT-KONTROL and OREME FROYEN: Reproductive Politics between Radical and Reform at the 46 Amboy St. Clinic

• In Event: Feminist Perspectives on the Body

Abstract

In October 1916, avid spectators crowded outside a Brooklyn storefront in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville as high drama unfolded inside: police raided an illegal birth control clinic, interrogated the patients inside, seized the records of the hundreds of others who had sought contraceptive information — many of them neighborhood residents — and arrested the three defiant women organizers. The subsequent trial of Margaret Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and Jewish labor organizer and Yiddish translator Fania Mindell has long been regarded as a pivotal moment in the politics of birth control. In this paper, I examine the short-lived clinic itself as well as the trial that followed in a new light, revealing the uneasy convergence among cacophonous political visions and strategies that enabled this moment of apparent consensus, from Yiddish anarchism to neighborhood-based Jewish housewife consumer organizing to paternalistic Progressive-era medical reform. I demonstrate how this concentrated episode simultaneously expanded and constrained future possibilities for the negotiation of categories of sexuality, motherhood, and reproductive politics — in public and private, in English and in Yiddish, in Jewish and in multiethnic spheres, and inside and outside of heterosexual marriage. Central to this shift was the mediating role of Yiddish-English translation in making some Jewish working-class immigrant women’s bodies legible to an English-speaking audience of Progressive reformers and the American legal system, even as the same process accorded Jewish immigrant women translators themselves positional and financial power. This historical moment presents us with a microcosm of the ways that “Yiddish” and “American” political spheres closely intertwined and informed each other in the early twentieth century United States, in a joint debate over the management, meaning, and potential liberation of women’s bodies, sexuality, and motherhood.

Author

• Cassandra Euphrat Weston, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor