I learned that the aristocracy and middle class were very conscious of social status. The used arranged marriages so their offspring would go up on the social scale but never down. The dowry system helped keep the family in the status quo. If the dowry fund was only enough for one daughter, it was disastrous if the first child was a female.
No more children must be born.
But how was this carried out?
I wondered.
No use questioning Madame Leenhardt with whom I lived. She already had five children when her husband had been called up to serve in the First World War.
If it had not been for that war, I probably would have had at least eight children. she told me.
Then Walter wrote that he could not buy Sorel's book in Britain.
The copy he had read had come from a library, but in prowling through various bookstores he had found another book published in Britain called Married Love by Marie Stopes.
This volume contained the practical information that we needed.
He gave me the book when I met him in England before he returned to Bordeaux to complete his doctoral thesis.
About the same time, my mother and a sister arrived from the States to visit British relatives. Between family visits and sight-seeing I snatched secret moments to read Marie Stopes and sending for a device recommended by her.
It was this device that was listed as an indecent article by the Wisconsin legislature when we went to teach in Madison a year after our marriage.
That device and others were banned for display and sale.
But some of us emancipated and sophisticated women had our secret sources.
Gratefully we contributed to a hidden fund that supplied these indecent articles to ignorant and overburdenend women at an unlisted birth control center.
We did not come out in the open, for we knew too much about the struggles of Margaret Sanger with the police in New York when she tried to set up a planned parenthood center.
I wish I had our copy of Married Love.
It bemoaned the blindness of official Britain for not spreading the good news of love without fear, the joy of only wanted children being conceived.
So we were married and had children when we decided to have them.
But this was not the only use of the book.
I mentioned it in a letter to my sister Louise, wife of a San Francisco physician. She wrote back, "Please bring that book when you come to visit in the summer! John wants to read it."
The Book, as it came to be called, passed from hand to hand that summer in San Francisco.
John, who was having offspring with alarming frequency, facetiously claimed that while a medical student he must have been absent the days when contraception was discussed.
He read The Book and passed it on to some needy patients. Sisters and cousins borrowed The Book.
John's father, an outstanding San Francisco physician in the City, heard about it and asked to see it. He also instructed his nurse to read it.
She arrived to return it to me just as I was boarding the ferry boat for the Oakland mole where I would take the Overland train for my home in the East.
She breathlessly explained that she had to snatch The Book from the hands of a bride-to-be!