Coalition Work is Messy: Lessons from a History of Compromise and Influence
Samira Mehta
Credit: Eric Lee/Forward
Samira Mehta is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion. She is also the Principal Investigator on Jewish of Color: Histories and Futures, funded by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
In 1943, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America founded their National Clergymen’s Committee, a multifaith endeavor to support the organization’s agenda. (They were appropriately named: “Clergymen” is both the term that was used historically and a profoundly accurate term—even though a couple of Protestant denominations were ordaining women at this time, none of the clergy initially appointed to the committee were women.) Planned Parenthood’s goal was to change the image of birth control in the United States. At the time, it implied consequence-free sex and feminist commitments, and it seemed to run counter to the family; early birth control activists had included people with strong feminist and anarchist commitments, like Emma Goldman. The organization sought to make birth control into a respectable tool supporting motherhood and enhancing the American family. This was why they had already changed their name from the National Birth Control League to Planned Parenthood, a name that linked birth control to the creation of carefully planned families, rather than suggesting more hedonistic pursuits.
To further enhance this sense of respectability, the Clergymen’s Committee worked with the National Council of Churches, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the World Council of Churches. This endeavor was largely successful: Under the watch of these clergymen, birth control moved from being thought of as the terrain of radicals to being a conversation for respectable married mothers, for experts in early childhood development, for gynecologists and pediatricians, and for ministers and rabbis.
The National Clergymen’s Committee was a coalition project in two senses. First, it was a coalition between clergy and birth control activists; both understood that they had a shared goal that they could reach more effectively by working together. Second, the committee itself was a religious coalition: It took a multifaith approach to the questions of morality raised by the birth control movement and treated both Protestant and Jewish voices as moral authorities in American society. Today, when coalition work between Jews and non-Jews often feels challenging, I want to argue that this history has important lessons to teach us. We can start by recognizing that our American Jewish predecessors made a real difference in an American political movement that has had overwhelmingly positive effects for maternal and pediatric health and (even if their original goals were not entirely feminist) for women’s economic, professional, sexual, and psychological advancement. And today, the vast majority of American Jews believe in the use of birth control, and many do support birth control for explicitly feminist reasons. We should be proud of this work and allow it to inspire us to pursue new opportunities for interfaith activism and work. Our history as American Jews, along with our sense of Jewish ethics (and perhaps our professional ethics—as doctors, as lawyers, as educators, as civil servants) and our commitments to human rights, can give us the courage to do hard and frightening things.
Another lesson comes from all the ways this history is not necessarily what we wish it was. Remember how I noted that Planned Parenthood had a National Clergymen’s Committee? Well, most of those men assumed that women went to the workplace because they had more children than they could afford on their husbands’ salaries. They then reasoned that if a couple could use birth control to make sure that they had a more affordable two children, rather than four, then women would stay home to raise those children. As a feminist who is dedicated to women having the choices to shape their own lives, that reality is not my favorite thing. But even though none of these men imagined that women would use birth control to go to law school, women did it anyway. The past was complicated, and it has had complicated results, and some of those results are, in fact, very good, to the point that I have come to find hope in this complicated story. If all of these imperfect people—people who meant well, but were a little sexist and a little racist—could create a tool that did so much to liberate women, we should accept that we too might be imperfect in our own activism. People in the past created more justice even though they were often what we’d call, by today’s standards, “a hot mess.” Recognizing this should take off some of the pressure we put on ourselves. It can allow us to move forward with the hope that we too are bending towards justice even when it feels like we are blundering towards it instead.
Lastly, this story reminds us that coalition work is especially hard when you are a minority group because you so rarely get to set the terms on which the work is done. Rabbi Sidney Goldstein, a member of the committee and an associate rabbi at New York City’s Free Synagogue (known today as the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue) was repeatedly called a minister—today we’d call this a microaggression. Sometimes I imagine all of the things that aren’t in the historical record: the educating that he must have done, even though he might have preferred for his Christian colleagues to take it upon themselves to learn more about Judaism. He showed up and served on the committee’s executive board, even when another board member’s outreach vision was more prominent than his. (More about this later.) But here is the thing: Jews could not have changed the birth control story in this country alone—we are simply not a big enough or powerful enough group to do that. We had to work in coalition then, and if we want to make the important changes in the world that our tradition demands of us, if we want to relieve the enormity of the world’s grief, we must work with bigger and more powerful groups. As we do that, there will be moments that hurt our feelings and exhaust us. We will feel misunderstood. We will be made to feel unwelcome by people’s ignorance of aspects of our culture that matter to us or by their simplified view of us. We will have to explain ourselves over and over again when it does not feel like it should be our job to do that explaining. Each of us will have to decide for ourselves how much of that we can stand to do, and every community will have to decide as a group what it can take. But nothing will get done if we do not show up despite the discomfort and exhaustion. And that is hard, and it is unfair, but it is so often what coalition politics asks of minority groups.
Minority Groups Rarely Get to Set the Terms
Reproductive rights and reproductive justice spaces today are often liberal or progressive spaces, and in those spaces, as in many other left-leaning spaces, Jews often find themselves pushed to align with anti-Zionist positions if they want to be accepted in those spaces. This reality can be uncomfortable: For instance, many Jews share progressive values around reproductive justice (or universal health care or environmentalism or immigration) and also identify as Zionists. Anti-Zionist Jews, when inhabiting spaces that are not clearly connected to Israeli or Middle Eastern politics, do not feel that they should be asked to state a clear position on Israel just because they are Jews. In short, regardless of your position on Israel, this is a tough moment to be a member of the Jewish left, because, as it turns out, our non-Jewish leftist allies do not, in the end, understand either Jewish culture or antisemitism as well as we hoped that they did.
The reproductive health movement is a place where we can understand that, as a minority religion and ethnicity, Jews did not get to set the ground rules for the broader movement that they were joining—we were simply too small a group to be powerful in that way. But by the same token, because, as a group, Jews are a very small subset of the American population, if we want to effect social change, we need to do so in coalition with other groups, including groups that may not understand or precisely share Jewish values and sensibilities. Our history in the reproductive health movement reveals examples of how Jews have navigated this reality.
History, like the Present, was Messy
Many, if not all of us, would prefer that our history come in the form of neat, uncomplicated narratives. We would also prefer leaders and alliances, both in the past and in our own moment, that fit the exact profile we have in mind for them. But both the past and the present continually disappoint us.
As I was writing my book on the history of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish advocacy for access to birth control, God Bless the Pill, several things crystalized for me with new clarity: yes, history is very messy, and acknowledging that messiness helps us understand both how the world we live in came to be and that we should expect our present to be messy. Most importantly, how we negotiate the challenges we face will depend a great deal on our goals in any particular moment. In my work, no figure made this more clear than Margaret Sanger and the questions that swirl around her identity as a eugenicist. Sanger was not Jewish, but her example is worth considering here, both as a complex historical figure and as the kind of person with whom many Jews of her time made common cause.
Margaret Sanger was a tireless advocate for women’s health care, and she was perhaps most responsible for the founding of Planned Parenthood. She opened the country’s first birth control clinic (which was promptly shut down by the police); she went to jail for her attempts to provide women with birth control; and she was part of the lawsuit that resulted in American federal law treating birth control devices and information as medical rather than pornographic items. She was also the organizing energy behind the development and FDA approval of the birth control pill. Despite all of this, when I brought the draft of a book chapter about Sanger to my writing group, one of the women there commented that when she read Sanger’s name, she flinched.
Why did she feel this way? Margaret Sanger was also a eugenicist.
Now, there is quite a bit of historical context that needs to accompany that statement. Margaret Sanger was a nurse who was alive and working in the 1910s and 1920s, when eugenics was considered science. Almost all educated people at the time believed in the scientific validity of eugenics, and in that era, the field of eugenics included much more than the race- and disability-based prejudices that we associate with the term “eugenics” today. In this time, eugenics was, in many ways, the science of making “better” or healthier babies with an eye towards creating a “better” and healthier population. There were absolutely people for whom this meant more white babies and fewer non-white babies, but not everyone shared those race-based goals. Either way, eugenics also included advocacy for many services that we take for granted today, including prenatal care, maternal and infant nutrition, pediatric care and interventions, physical education, literacy programs, and all sorts of other initiatives designed to support the physical, mental, and educational development of children. It also raised issues that our society continues to debate; for instance, eugenics cautioned against couples who were likely to have undesirable inheritable conditions having children, which is not necessarily terribly different from genetic testing today. That said, in the early part of the twentieth century, medicine did not have a good understanding of what kinds of problems were likely to be genetic, and some eugenicists argued that “moral problems” were inheritable.
All signs suggest that Margaret Sanger did not support race-based eugenics. She was profoundly committed to women having control of their own bodies and this was her overwhelming priority. She most likely opened clinics in Black neighborhoods because she wanted Black women to have the same access to contraception that white women had. That said, she was a white American alive before the Civil Rights Movement; she held racist views. She was inclined to think she knew better what was good for the women at her clinics than they did themselves. And she was willing to court and form partnerships with race-based eugenicists if she thought such a partnership would advance a birth control agenda. Sanger was an extremely self-confident person, and there were times when she partnered with eugenicists, intending to effectively outflank them to get their money without having to cave to their agenda. But she was not always correct in that assessment.
I think there are several lessons that we, the Jewish community, can learn from Sanger’s example, both as she appears in the historical record and as she is remembered. This is an important distinction because the popular image of her lacks much of the nuance and context of the historical record.
First, as a historian, I want to start by recognizing that real good—access to birth control—came out of the actions of a woman and a movement that were messy, complicated, and not always what we today wish they had been. But the fact that the movement was not perfect does not mean that we have to disown it. We can celebrate the good of the birth control movement, despite the problematic aspects of its history, and then we must recognize those problematic aspects so that we can avoid replicating them in the present or future and correct our own courses where necessary.
Second, even though, as a historian, I do not think it is fair for Margaret Sanger to be demonized as a horrible eugenicist—she was no worse than any else alive in her time and was much better than many—as an activist, I recognize that there are times when rehabilitating her reputation is simply not terribly important. In 2020, the New York Planned Parenthood removed Sanger’s name from their flagship clinic because of her ties to eugenics, which had by that time become well known. I do not necessarily think this was fair to who she actually was and what she accomplished, but I do think it was the right choice. Many communities of color, and many liberal white people, have a caricature of Sanger in their minds as a terrible racist, and regardless of its accuracy, that reputation can become a barrier to care. If taking Sanger’s name off the clinic will help it reach its goals, then compromising on the historical principle of understanding her in her context is the way to go. I cannot demand that those communities share my opinion about how to think about multifaceted historical figures, and I do not believe in sacrificing public health to historical principle.
Lastly, and conversely, Sanger serves us as a warning not to be careless about the alliances we make. Regardless of her own positions, Sanger was willing to partner with eugenicists, and she was often wrong when she thought that she could mitigate either concretely or reputationally the harm that they did. Her choices likely did strengthen the worst sort of eugenics and cause harm in the moment, and in our own day, her associations with eugenicists are harming the reputation of a movement about which she cared deeply. This reality must be part of our assessment of Sanger’s work and her legacy.
In this article, I am arguing, more than anything, that, as Jews, we need to be willing to be part of coalitions in order to make change. I am also arguing that coalition politics requires compromise—we must work with people on the things that we agree about and not walk away from or cancel our partnerships over disagreement on other issues. We must make common cause when and where we can, and, ideally, through that collaboration, we can build trust and learn about one another’s perspectives when and where we disagree. But Margaret Sanger’s example reminds us that one can go too far. Sanger fought for birth control largely to give women bodily autonomy. If she had given more weight to the reality that eugenicists initially opposed birth control—precisely because it left reproductive control in the hands of women—she might have thought differently about working with them. We need to think carefully before getting into bed, however metaphorically, with the wrong people. But as true as that is, we also need to remember that compromise is part of coalition work, and coalitions are necessary.
There is room to negotiate the terms
I opened this essay with the example of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s National Clergymen’s Committee. Despite the fact that Rabbi Sidney Goldstein was a key member of the group and that the group was called the clergymen’s committee, almost all of the meeting minutes and much of the correspondence consistently refer to the men involved as ministers. In some ways, this should not surprise us. The Reform movement’s prayerbook had once referred to rabbis as ministers; using this title was one of the many ways in which liberal Jews had adapted and assimilated to the broader, Christian, American society. Choices like this one helped Jews be players in the American religious landscape. But by the time the clergymen’s committee was convened, the term was no longer in use in Jewish settings, having disappeared from the Reform prayerbook with the 1940 edition of the Union Prayer Book.
We cannot know how someone like Rabbi Goldstein might have felt about the use of the Protestant title “minister” as a substitute for the more generic “clergy.” It might have seemed totally normal to him, and it might have grated on him every time he heard it—we just can’t know. (For a contemporary example, think about how American Jews react to Christmas. Some people love to live vicariously through all of the public expressions of Christianity, and others spend the entire season grouchy.) Either way, the use of the Christian term “minister” was likely not used to exclude Rabbi Goldstein, yet it was not his title. What we do know is that at no place in the written record did Rabbi Goldstein object to the word. We have to assume he accepted that terminology as the cost of doing business.
There were other places, however, where Rabbi Goldstein pushed back, especially in regard to the committee’s strategy. The Protestant ministers on the committee wanted the group to argue for the legalization of birth control by defining it in moral terms: Birth control strengthens marriage, allows every child to be a wanted child, and protects maternal health. They assumed that this approach would work because they believed they could define morality for the entire country. That assumption was arguably grounded in religious demographics; while there were more Catholics in the United States than any particular kind of Protestant, there were more Protestants total in the country than Catholics or members of any other religion, as continues to be the case. Goldstein understood that Jews were a tiny minority in American society, and while he believed that Jewish law supports the use of birth control, he assumed that non-Jews would not particularly care what Judaism teaches about contraception, and it would thus have little to contribute to a strategy based on moral arguments.
And so, he instead based his arguments for birth control on the idea of human rights and on American law. Humans, he argued, have the right to the best medical care that science could offer. In addition, he argued that no one religion should be able to shape the law. His argument was not that Judaism says that birth control was acceptable, but rather, that the separation of church and state meant that religious objections to birth control on the part of larger and more powerful religions should not limit the rights of doctors and patients to the best science could offer, nor should the teachings of one religion have more weight in American law than the teaching of other religions. Because there might be moments when Jewish moral approaches to birth control would deviate from the Protestant norms, an argument based in the right to the best available medical knowledge, or based on religious freedom—the right of a religious group, including a minority religion, to decide for itself what was morally acceptable around birth control and contraception—would, in the long run, serve Jews better than shaping the public discourse at that particular moment.
Goldstein did not win the debate; his Christian colleagues continued to try to shape the moral discourse rather than moving to a religious freedom or medical rights model. What Goldstein did achieve was to make sure that those two frameworks were part of the broader debate. He did this by advocating for his view using a “yes, and,” approach and not an “instead of” approach. And because of Rabbi Goldstein’s advocacy, religious freedom arguments stayed on the table and were ultimately used by American Jews seeking to protect abortion rights, for instance in 1982 by the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism and as recently as 2022 in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The birth control movement is a place, today, where Jews need to think about how they might need to navigate the compromises that coalition politics necessitate, especially for groups in the minority. It is also a place where the history of Jewish involvement has given us a road map to what coalition politics can look like. Yes, sometimes any individual coalition will require compromises that feel intolerable and we may need to decide to bow out. In the end, each individual person and organization will need to make judgement calls about what compromises they are willing to make to work in coalition on key social issues. But we need to both realize that some compromise is necessary to be part of a larger movement and do our best to refrain from quickly judging the choices that others make. Thinking about the birth control movement can give us examples of how complicated our history and our alliances have been in the past. It can show us that it is possible to proceed even at moments like our own.
