Medicine: Birth Control Busker

Kitty Marion’s father, a harsh German (Westphalian), would bang her childish head with the knob of his long German pipe, to show her he was family boss. When she was 15, a stocky red-headed youngster, she ran away from the Westphalian home to England. After, drab vicissitudes there she became an actress of small parts, famed in a minor way for her vigorous championing of underdogs. One day she heard Emmeline Pankhurst speak on suffragism. Miss Marion* became a militant suffraget. To break her first plate-glass window she was obliged to throw two bricks, because “I didn’t know how hard you had to heave to really break the glass.” She went to jail, the first of seven such trips. Four jail terms she went on hunger strikes. She kept count of the number of times jailers forcibly rammed food down her throat. The count was 232. Once she gnawed a hole in her prison mattress, made a heap of the stuffings, twisted pages of her cell Bible into tapers, smashed her cell window and reached to the gas light outside for the flame which set her cell on fire.

When the War began she came to the U. S. to be Mrs. Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont’s suffraget aid. While doing that she learned of Margaret Sanger’s trouble with the police over birth control advocacy. Kitty Marion offered to busk the promising but innocuous Birth Control Review at Manhattan’s busiest corners. She has been doing that for the past 13 years.

Last week she ceased her street hawking, because the magazine thereafter was to be sold solely by subscription, and because she had become rheumatic and weary. The American Birth Control League gave her a “gratitude” luncheon, a large bouquet and $500. She wept, a weather-beaten, greying woman of 58, and cried: “Thank goodness, I’ll have no more fights with the police.”

Next week she will be in England sardonically to watch Government officials help unveil a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, their erstwhile suffraget heckler.

The end of this week, at Los Angeles, the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control will conduct a Western States Conference on Birth Control & Population Problems, to whip up interest in the national campaign among people in Oregon, Washington, California, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

*Not her family name, which she abandoned when she escaped from home and which she will not tell.