Not so did Chicago respond. Some members of the powerful Women’s City Club had privately asked me to speak, but when the matter was brought up before their board, the unofficial invitation was officially canceled. Here again were conservatives enjoying the benefits of birth control for themselves but unwilling to endorse it for the less fortunate of their sex. When they did not listen, I tried to reach the women of the stockyards directly.
So many hundreds of letters had come to me—not only in English, but also in Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, and Yiddish—clamoring for information, that I had every reason to suppose what I had to say was going to be welcome on Halsted Street. I was incredulous when I met an unforeseen resistance.
Hull House and similar settlements had been established to help the poor to help themselves. But I found that although social agencies had originally striven to win confidence by opening milk stations and day nurseries, this aim had been somewhat obscured in the interests of sheer efficiency. Many welfare workers had come to treat individuals merely as cases to be cataloged, arrogantly proclaiming they knew “what was best for the poor”; a type had developed, and those who belonged to it were lacking in human sympathy. Instead they expanded their own egos through domination. Their desire to build up prestige and secure a position of importance in the community had formed a civic barrier, a wall, in fact, around the stockyards district, preventing any new concepts, people, or organizations from coming in without official permission. The stockyards women were literally imprisoned in their homes from advanced ideas unless they went out into other sections of the city.
Because this ridiculous situation had arisen in Chicago, no hall could be had in the immediate neighborhood. I could have held no meeting there had it not been for Fania Mindell, one of the many idealists of that time who threw themselves into the fight for the oppressed as an aftermath of their own sufferings and repressions in Russia. She had a devoted and self-sacrificing nature which made her work, slave, toil for the love of doing it. She made all the arrangements, producing an audience of fifteen hundred from the labor and stockyards environs.
These first lectures in Chicago and elsewhere attracted women in swarms, paying their twenty-five cents to fill the auditoriums; I remember that one offered her wedding ring as the price of admission, to be redeemed on pay day. They brought their children, and more than once I had to lift my voice above the persistent cooing and gurgling of a front-row baby. There was a natural understanding between infants. If one were given a bottle, another began to cry. A third in the back joined the chorus, or a small boy on the side aisle whispered shrilly, “I wantta go home!” I just ached to see those many babies, because I knew what their mothers had come for—definite help to stop having more—and it could not be given them.
Often at these meetings I saw some woman sitting down near the platform holding a bunch of wild flowers, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, or butter-and-eggs, waiting to present me with the little bouquet, to tell me that since she had received my pamphlet, she had “kept out of trouble.” No matter how phrased, the gratitude was genuine.
Over and over again someone popped up in front of me, and extended a hand, “I used to subscribe to the Woman Rebel. I got all your pamphlets from England.”
When I asked, “What’s your name?” with the answer, like a flash, came the number of children and the locality, and the story sent me years earlier. And, “Didn’t you live in Des Moines?” I continued. Seldom was it the wrong place. In this way I came across dozens of “friends” who had been among the original two thousand.
I was advised by Dr. Mabel Ullrich of Minneapolis not to go there because the Twin Cities were the most conservative in America. “You won’t get six people,” she prophesied.
“Do you think I’ll get six?”