Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler Page A

a time, its ebbs and flows through her bloodstream would cause convulsions, sweating, and violent mood swings. 3
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    Indeed, Margaret’s disposition deteriorated not only under the influence of the drug but beneath the weight of news she was hearing from friends all over the world. Hugh de Selincourt died in London in 1951, followed by Bessie Drysdale and then Robert Dickinson in New York and Kit Hepburn in Hartford. Ethel Byrne suffered a heart attack at Truro, and Edith How-Martyn, a stroke in Australia. With her own husband dying in New Hampshire, Juliet Rublee, frantic as ever, warned Margaret that the secret of long life is in recognizing the importance of the magic word of “moderation” in all activities. “Happiness is the great thing. Enjoying things brings & keeps youth and beauty,” she wrote. She encouraged Margaret to defy her illness through communication with “the cosmic forces,” as the two women referred to them.
    Margaret took the advice and enrolled in a Rosicrucian mail-order course in self-realization, complete with daily exercises intended to help her acquire “spiritual insight and first-hand spiritual experience.” This regimen may well have sustained her by providing justification for her conviction that she would not yet die, as so many of her friends were doing, because she embodied the aspirations of all women on earth, and as their chosen agent of liberation, still had important work left to do in spreading the message and technology of contraception. Just as Anne Higgins had so long ago triumphed over adversity through the redeeming power of faith—just as she herself had once been rescued from the grief of Peggy’s death with Rosicrucian homilies—so she now determined to try to make mind triumph over matter by reconsecrating her historic social mission and special destiny. A measure of her increasing self-absorption can be found in a letter she wrote to Ethel at this time requesting that her sister agree to a movie treatment being developed by a group of women in Hollywood. The proposed script would obliterate the dramatic role Ethel had played in the events surrounding the historic Brownsville Clinic trial and instead portray Margaret as the valiant hunger striker of 1916, an alteration allegedly necessary to give the plot dramatic unity. Ethel, bemused, ignored the request, and the movie project never got off the ground.
    It was perhaps only the delusions of another old friend that helped lift Margaret, at least partially, out of her own. Since the death of Havelock Ellis, Françoise Cyon had been living almost totally in the past. Friendship’s Odyssey , an elegiac 1946 memoir of her life with Ellis, had totally repudiated the Wantley circle and especially condemned Hugh de Selincourt for his sexual excesses, causing him considerable anguish. The distant and complicated relationship was nonetheless still on her mind when Hugh died, and she wrote to Margaret of her hopes that he and Ellis might reconcile their differences “on the other side.” Margaret had no patience whatsoever for this kind of remorse. As soon as she felt better during the summer of 1951, she decided to make a trip to London, where she occupied herself with meetings and paid a condolence call on Hugh’s widow and daughter, but never even told Françoise she was in town. 4
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    Little had become of the International Committee on Planned Parenthood during Margaret’s long illness and absence. Scarcely any new funds had been raised or programs initiated, and Frank Lorimer, who might have lent the group credibility, had resigned. Yet, indigenous activities by family planning organizations in some twenty-five countries indicated the need of an independent coordinating body to serve as clearinghouse for information and education. The Indian government, in particular, was looking for family planning aid from abroad and under the auspices of the World