This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 1. “Birth control is the first important step woman must take toward the goal of her freedom. It is the first step she must take to be man’s equal. It is the first step they must both take toward human emancipation.” -- Margaret Sanger When I went away to college, I made two trips off campus almost as soon as I had dumped my suitcase on my dorm room bed. One was to find the nearest bookstore, where I applied for a job. The other was to find the nearest health clinic where I could get a prescription for the Pill. Both were a success. Young, arrogant, and excited for the future, I took the clinic trip completely for granted. I never questioned my right to that birth control prescription, with or without parental approval, my right to be sexually active, my right to decide when or if I would be willing to get pregnant. Birth control was a thing you did if you were a girl. It was preventative. Like vaccinations. Looking back, now, I realize I was lucky -- certainly to have a family that talked about sex in terms of health instead of morality, but mostly to have come of age at a time when birth control was easily obtained, relatively safe, and reliable. I never thought about it, with my feet up in those stirrups, but my mother didn’t have the benefits of birth control that I did. The Pill had only received FDA approval about 25 years before I decided to lie back on that table. And it took 12 more years to legalize it in every state. So when I walked into that clinic, I was actually part of a brave new world for women everywhere. I wish I had known it. 2. Unlike me, the artist and writer Sabrina Jones did know it. As she explains in the early pages of her recent graphic novel, Our Lady of Birth Control: A Cartoonist's Encounter with Margaret Sanger, her sexual education seems to have begun when “an interesting book appeared at my house.” Jones immediately snuck up to her room to read Our Bodies, Ourselves, which was, and is, the most influential and frankly practical book ever to be written on the topic of women’s health, and one that had the added benefit of being entirely guilt- and shame-free. That book was the beginning of Jones’s own sexual awakening, a journey that eventually led her to the spot that once housed America’s first birth control clinic -- an unremarkable building on an unremarkable street in Brooklyn, N.Y. There was nothing significant about the place, except that one day, 100 years earlier, a woman set up a clinic to hand out information about birth control to the neighborhood’s mostly working-class and immigrant population, and was promptly arrested for obscenity and being a public nuisance. Obscenity. Public Nuisance. Phrases that seem to attach themselves to every feminist who dares to raise her voice. And no one was more daring than Margaret Sanger. “There ought to be a plaque,” thought Jones, standing on that Brooklyn street a century later. But there wasn’t a plaque, so Jones -- a cartoonist and scenic artist -- went home and wrote Our Lady of Birth Control. “Sabrina Jones,” according to RoGallery’s biography, “has been writing and illustrating comics since the Reagan era.” That is, she came of age at a time when the backlash to second-wave feminism was gaining momentum, and when the threat of HIV loomed over every sexual encounter. Alarmed by the political climate, Jones -- a graduate of Pratt Institute in New York -- joined a group of activist artists, Carnival Knowledge, focusing her energies on feminism and social justice. She helped found GirlTalk, a comic about the things women feel safe to say to each other when there aren’t men in the room: “Do we really speak ‘In a Different Voice,’ as Carol Gilligan posits,” Jones asks in her introduction to issue #1, “our speech crimped and curled since elementary school? When men talk, it’s history, when we do, it’s coffee klatch, chitchat, gossip, nagging, shrill, old wives tales -- sorry, I’m ranting.” Jones would also go one to create comics for The Real Cost of Prisons Project, highlighting the disparity between the fates of black and white people in the justice system and the damages of the “War on Drugs.” In 2008, Jones wrote her first full-length graphic biography, Isadora Duncan, about the acclaimed dancer, who defied social expectations. ("100 years ago,” it begins, “Americans liked their statues loosely draped and their daughters laced up tight.”) Our Lady of Birth Control, published last July by Soft Skull Press, is the artist’s tribute to a woman who has affected women’s quality of life possibly more than any other single person; it is also a kind of extended argument for Sanger’s relevancy today. The social attitudes about women she wanted to change, the rights and opportunities she fought so hard for -- these are all issues that are still on the front lines today, something Jones brings to the fore by interspersing throughout the story of Sanger’s life chapters on her own sexual awakening, and the contemporary politics of women’s reproductive rights. Panels showing demonstrations in 1916 are followed by Jones’s account of guiding women to the doors of a barricaded clinic while anti-abortion activists hurled insults at them. Pages on the history of contraception alternate with accounts of contemporary Supreme Court arguments over whether or not access to birth control can or should be mandated. When we consider “life-changing” advances we tend to think of things like electricity or automobiles. Birth control never makes the list. But the ability for women to take a pill and choose when or whether to get pregnant is revolutionary. Pregnancy is no longer an inevitability in a woman’s life; it is something that can be chosen, or not, planned and managed. One pill, and her life is under her own control. It’s difficult to overstate how important that is. 3. “She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.” -- Margaret Sanger One of the strongest aspects of Our Lady of Birth Control is its portrayal of an activist’s evolution. Jones shows us Sanger’s beginnings in a near-destitute working-class family in Corning, N.Y., her mother ill from tuberculosis and Maggie Higgins, eight years old, doing the housework and caring for her younger siblings. Her mother died at 50, having given birth to 11 children and suffered seven miscarriages. Back from boarding school, the teenage Maggie became matron of the household. Most girls escaped similar fates by getting married as soon as they could manage it. After those years tending to her mother, Maggie decided she wanted to be a doctor, was scoffed at, and enrolled in nursing school. She also collected more than a few suitors, and eventually eloped with one of them to become Mrs. Bill Sanger. She insisted that he support her until she finished school. But she did not finish -- not because her husband objected, but because she had caught her mother’s tuberculosis. It didn’t much dampen her determination. Margaret worked as a visiting nurse on New York’s Lower East Side, where she was confronted with the lives of poor women doomed to a cycle of constant pregnancy, childbirth, or miscarriage. Galvanized by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 young women, Sanger started speaking at party meetings on behalf of working-class women. When she was invited as a speaker for a Socialist Party event on the topic “Women and Health,” the one thing every woman in the audience wanted to know was, “How do we avoid having children we can’t afford?” Sanger was spending her days visiting women who were often suffering from unrelenting pregnancies or, worse, dying from complications from their desperate attempts to self-abort. Sabrina Jones’s illustrations are unflinching, as are Sanger’s words: “Looking out at the city, its pains and griefs crowded me, women writhing to bring forth babies, the babies wrapped in newspapers, six-year-olds pinched and pale, scrawny hands scuttling through rags, making lampshades, artificial flowers.” Sanger decided it was not enough just to care for these women. She began researching contraception. 4. “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”  -- Margaret Sanger Sanger’s reputation was constantly under attack while she was alive. But in the years after her death in 1966, Sanger is also remembered as a racist who promoted eugenics -- a word that in the 1920s was considered a respectable science, but carries horrific implications now. Any casual search of Sanger’s name will bring up a series of fairly disturbing quotes: “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” "We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives." Jones does not shy away from Sanger’s controversial reputation. The section of Our Lady titled “False Charges” makes clear that the most egregious statements have long since been clarified -- they are mostly misattributed or taken out of context. “Exterminating the Negro population,” for example, referenced a program she created to bring contraception information to rural African-American communities via black doctors, since the people were unlikely to trust white doctors and would suspect some government attempt at sterilization. And the comment that it would be more merciful to kill a child is hyperbole in a discussion of what Sanger calls “the immorality of large families” -- giving birth to children doomed to short, painful lives of hunger and deprivation before they die, usually before the age of five, of malnutrition and disease. Sanger’s support of eugenics is another matter, however. ”Margaret’s interest in eugenics was based on health, not race,” writes Jones, with an accompanying illustration of Maggie Sanger holding up a happy infant and proclaiming “Fewer, better babies!” In defiance of Jim Crow laws, that first clinic Sanger opened in Brooklyn was open to all races. But hierarchies of health are no less problematic. And although Sanger’s primary concern was always that women be free to choose for themselves when they wanted to become mothers, she clearly did not support “unfit” women having children -- the very poor who could not afford more children, the sick who might pass along their diseases, or the mentally ill. “Since the emergence of the disability rights movement, we may be more inclined to value people with intellectual disabilities,” Jones acknowledges. “But Sanger’s attitudes were characteristic of her time.” It may be indicative of the artist’s conflicted feelings that “False Charges” is the wordiest, least-illustrated chapter in the book. But, like admiring Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant man who wrote our Bill of Rights yet owned people, although we can say of Sanger, “she was a product of her age,” in truth what we admire in both is their vision, their ability to see a better future -- to be, in effect, not of their age. 5. “A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving.” -- Margaret Sanger Sanger’s influence is always with us. She was the founder of Planned Parenthood, the woman who challenged obscenity laws and made it possible to discuss birth control publicly, the woman who found a young ambitious Harvard researcher named Gregory Pincus and convinced him to develop “a magic pill.” In other words, she is directly responsible for my ability to get through college both sexually satisfied and not pregnant. She deserves more than a plaque for that, and Sabrina Jones has given Sanger at least some of what she is due. Jones’s tribute to Sanger is largely joyful; she has an endearing habit throughout the book of drawing her heroine as a smiling snake or harpy, especially when talking about issues of sexual freedom. But the story has a nagging familiarity. Americans remain squeamish about the realities of sex and all too willing to close their eyes to the consequences of their own prudishness. The juxtapositions of chapters on Sanger’s own sexual awakening and her happy encounters with a string of lovers, alongside sections about Jones’s blooming sexuality among dancing hippies, will make readers of a certain age nostalgic. But it is impossible not to see the parallels between the women of Sanger’s era, dying from botched abortions and riddled with syphilis, and the generation Jones and I grew up in, where sex carried the lurking threat of HIV. Or to see the similarities in the determined way society ignored or condemned the suffering women of Sanger’s time, and the continued legislative assault on women’s health clinics now. The sections alternating between Sanger’s rising radicalism and Jones’s own political evolution are telling. Sanger gave speeches. Jones joined a radical artists’ collective that did street fairs: “Know your right to life senators! Squeeze a senator’s balls, and a noisemaker pops out of his home state on the map!” None of the street fairs I’ve ever been to had games like that, dammit. Still…women arrested in front of health clinics? Going to jail for their beliefs? Being accused of indecency? These are also familiar to us, 100 years after that first clinic was opened. We’ve seen women’s health clinics barricaded, their doctors and patients threatened and even murdered. We’ve seen women charged with assault because they gave birth to babies that tested positive for drugs. Women have been denied access to health coverage for birth control and when one woman took her case to court, Rush Limbaugh called her a slut. “A century after Margaret Sanger began her fight for birth control” Jones notes, “a woman is still publicly shamed for advocating it.” It is disturbing, in fact, just how similar the voices raised against Sanger, and those fighting against women’s reproductive rights now, sound. A pessimistic woman might start packing her bags for Canada. But in the end, Jones holds out room for hope. Hers and mine are the generations that enjoy the life Sanger fought so hard for women to have. We aren’t about to give that up. As Jones smilingly points out on the book’s last page, “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” Or the Pill back in the box. All images ©Sabrina Jones

This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 1. “Some writers say, ‘You’ve got to write the book that’s been writing you forever, and then maybe you can go to another topic.’ I’ve never had any other topic but this topic, motherhood.” -- Desiree Cooper, interview in The Rumpus, 2016 “I always kept time for myself,” said my mother once in one of those conversations where we talk about how different the world is now from when I was young -- how free my brother and sister and I were to stay out of doors all day, with little to no supervision. “I wasn’t supposed to do that.” I’m sorry to say the remark didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time. I thought it was one of those throwaway comments mom made that tended to dismiss whatever she did well in the name of modesty. Tell her “Dinner is delicious” and she would say “I don’t think I added enough salt.” It was a habit of hers I picked up and have been fighting ever since. But her comment came back to me while I was reading Desiree Cooper’s engaging and unsettling collection, Know the Mother (Wayne State University Press), published in March. Indeed, I think it would be impossible to read the book without thoughts of one’s own mother constantly intruding. A collection of about 30 very short stories -- some only a page or two, some a paragraph -- Know the Mother is a constellation of stories about women who are mothers. Not, it must be emphasized, a paean to the institution of motherhood, nor stories of children or spouses honoring their mothers. Not stories of bravery or sacrifices or what they gave to their families, although some of that can certainly be found here. Cooper’s fiction is anchored in the women themselves, the ones who are contending with their unexpected transformation from a person into a role. We live in a culture where our identities and our roles are often inextricably entangled, and nowhere is this so clear as in tension between “self” and “mother.” Mothers are supposed to be selfless -- a troubling idea and an unrealistic expectation of any woman. I found myself wondering if my own mother ever felt guilty or defensive about the time she took “for myself.” I hope not, because it is my memory of her in those moments that I am most drawn to, even now. A sense of self-sufficiency is probably the greatest example she ever set. 2. “Why do we wake each night in that spiritless moment between worlds, we mothers and daughters and wives?” asks Cooper in the book’s first story, “Witching Hour.” And why does the night abandon us to twinkling worry, to the rattling breaths of our children, to the hard floor of our long prayers? What fresh dangers tap against the black window? And why do our men snore so easily while the horror gathers? Every story in the book seems to be an answer to these questions. They are not comfortable answers. There is the physicality of motherhood, for one thing, the grueling toll it takes on the body. “I’d never been so beat up -- like physically attacked,” Cooper told The Rumpus of her own experience of childbirth. She brings the full force of that experience to her work: a woman collapsed in pain on her bathroom floor as her water breaks in “Icthyophobe.” Another at work determinedly finishing her phone call while she feels herself miscarrying (“Cartoon Blue”). Yet another waiting up in the dark for her daughter to get home, remembering how suicidal she felt at nine months (“Mourning Chair”): “I prayed all night as I paced by the cabinet of poisonous things, by the drawer of sharpened knives. I thought about throwing myself down the stairs or starting the car in the garage.” Then there is the fact that the moment a woman becomes pregnant she forfeits her sense of self in the eyes of almost everyone around her. Her career is on hold or over, her life is no longer her own, her husband and children and even the government seem to have a claim on her body. “If you wanted to have babies,” says a law firm partner in “Ceiling,” “why did you go to law school?” The scene is shot through with metaphor -- the man’s tie is “burqa blue and the yellow of a runny egg yolk.” The woman feels faint confronting him, “a useless bride, crossed legs as brown as firewood ready to be doused.” Does becoming a mother mean immolation? Lovers change overnight into people with expectations -- they want her to keep the child or not, to submit to this change in her life, to arrange things so they don’t have to. They demand she take it easy, as if a plus sign on a pregnancy test both turns her into an invalid and invalidates anything she might want for herself: Jim steered with one hand, driving into the quiet evening, preoccupied with important things. Kate stared jealously at how easy driving was for him -- like an extension of breathing. Because she had been put on bed rest -- and then had a C-section -- Kate hadn’t been able to drive for months. She tried to remember that feeling of absolute, one-handed control. (“Origins of Sacrifice”) They take choice after choice out of her hands. More than one woman in these stories is prone to dreaming she can fly away into the night sky. 3. Many of Cooper’s women are persons of color, facing the full range of racism -- casual to overt -- that being “not white” brings down upon them, and “identity” starts to feel like a life or death battle. A simple trip to a supermarket with two tired, unruly kids who want Double Stuf Oreos becomes a kind of gauntlet for one exhausted woman, who can almost hear the accusation “welfare mother” from all the people around her. A young black mother takes her baby to a market off the Japanese army base where her husband is stationed, and endures the leering comments of the vendors when they notice her child’s much lighter skin. The women ignored her, clucking like hens. Tears began to rise up instinctively, but Bobbie Jean resisted the urge to back away. This wasn’t the rural South, where uppityness could cost her life. This was postwar Japan, and her husband was protecting both his country and theirs. She had every right to be in the ginza buying a roasted sweet potato. (“In the Ginza”) “You got white GI?” they ask her, as if she were a whore who pulled off a good trick. Even a modern, middle-class, liberal school becomes a locale for the erasure of black women, as one mother discovers when she finds out teachers are ignoring her daughter in “The Disappearing Girl:” I turn off the radio, which I always do when the kids are in the car, just in case something bubbles up from their mysterious lives. Lately, my daughter has become impenetrable. When I hug her, she stiffens. Even though I am her lifeboat, she will not touch me. She is the kind of lonely that cannot be explained, so it becomes someone else’s fault. Mine. “Did you know I am invisible?” Her words come in a scratchy little-girl voice, but she is too old for make-believe. She is stating a fact. My heart is a block of ice. 4. [A]ll mothers are single mothers. Society is structured in such a way that women have to devise, invent, and cobble together motherhood, each and every time, on their own.  -- Desiree Cooper, interview in The Rumpus, 2016 If there is an overarching point Cooper wants to get across, I think it is this: The disconnect between social and cultural ideas of motherhood, and the actual experience of the woman who has become a mother. Her stories are centered on the woman navigating this state of motherhood that is perhaps not unwelcome (some of the women in the stories are happy to be pregnant, some are not), but for which she discovers she is unprepared. Cooper eschews stereotypes and archetypes in favor of the messy, gritty reality of motherhood as it feels to the woman who finds herself facing it. Our mothers are flawed, often afraid, sometimes resentful, generally in awe of this role they have stepped into. They “cobble together motherhood” in spite of us, their children. Their family. The people who stand behind them in the supermarket or sit next to them in the waiting rooms, measuring and judging. Like some of the women in her stories, Desiree Cooper left a law practice to become first a mother, and then a writer. She is a poet, fiction writer, and journalist, and -- as will surprise no one who reads her work -- a community activist on behalf of women. But if she has the eye of a reporter, she has the sensibility, and the pen, of a poet. The most gratifying thing about Know the Mother is the beauty and daring of its language: One night, as I lay awake in the sweltering darkness, the stars called me back to the beginning. I went outside and gazed skyward where Orion hung low and the Milky Way dangled within reach. A current of evolution stirred; suddenly I was certain of my fetal wings. Pressing my bare soles against the damp ground, I angled my crooked spine and pushed up on swollen knees. I was aloft. (“Soft Landing”) It would have been easy to let such themes -- motherhood, and particularly black motherhood -- become a polemic. The author is passionate about women’s reproductive rights and critical of the sacrifices women (especially black single mothers) are expected to make: I do think we’re allowed to raise our voices when it comes to single motherhood, but we’re on that pedestal of “hero” and “Big Mamma.” Just taking it on and making it work and keeping our babies safe and keeping that Sunday dinner going. We’re not allowed to say, “This hurts. This is ridiculous. Some of the rest of y’all need to step up here.  -- Desiree Cooper, interview in The Rumpus, 2016 But Cooper is interested in deeper things, and she is not afraid to push the language to reach for it. She finds in goldfish a metaphor for fear; in a bright dress, a symbol of death. Many of the stories are set at night, in the dark -- sometimes a warm dark, but just as often a fearful thing. In fact, for a book about mothers, there is as much death as life in this collection, as much mourning as celebration of birth. Sometimes, you think you are reading about a dream -- like the woman who flies into the sky at night. Sometimes, you hope you are reading about a nightmare -- like the increasingly violent scenarios of a woman, a gun, and her sleeping children in “Something Falls in the Night.” One of the most beautiful pieces in the collection is the title story, “Know the Mother,” where the narrator -- we are never told if the speaker is male or female -- is sitting by the bedside of his or her mother as she dies, caring for her wasted body (“already, she smells like a garden unearthed”). The language is intense and immediate, which is why, perhaps, these are all very short stories. It would be unbearable to stay in any of them for very long. Taken together, Know the Mother is a welcome antidote to the fetishization of motherhood that tends to reach its obscenely sugar-coated peak in the month of May. Because let’s face it: chocolate and flowers are a wholly inadequate acknowledgment of the woman you are supposed to be honoring. Possibly the best gift you could give your mother for Mother’s Day would be to read Desiree Cooper’s book yourself.