The city jail was nice and clean and warm. The girls, who were not locked in cells, scampered around talking over their troubles and complaints with Dr. Equi, and receiving condolence and wholesome advice in return.
The seven of us were tried together the next day. Two lawyers took upon themselves the responsibility of defending us, and they were splendid. We were all found guilty. The men were fined ten dollars, which the Judge said they need not pay; the women were not fined at all.
The papers made a great to-do about the affair but it was not a type of publicity of my choosing and did little to bring the goal nearer. The year 1916 was filled with such turmoil, some of it useful, some not. The ferment was working violently. Everybody began starting things here and there. Many radicals, some of whom I did not even know, were distributing leaflets, getting themselves arrested and jailed. Meetings were being held in New York on street corners, at Union Square, Madison Square.
You had to keep a steady head, to be about your business, to make careful decisions, to waste the least possible time on trivialities; it was always a problem to prevent emotional scatter-brains from disturbing the clear flow of the stream. The public, quite naturally, could not be expected to distinguish between purposeful activities and any others carried on in the name of the movement.
Emma Goldman and her campaign manager, Ben Reitman, belatedly advocated birth control, not to further it but strategically to utilize in their own program of anarchism the publicity value it had achieved. Earlier she had made me feel she considered it unimportant in the class struggle. Suddenly, when in 1916 it had demonstrated the fact that it was important, she delivered a lecture on the subject, was arrested, and sentenced to ten days.
Ben Reitman, who used to go up and down the aisles at meetings shouting out Emma Goldman’s _Mother Earth_ in a voice that never needed a megaphone, was also arrested when the police found on the table of her lecture hall in Rochester several books on birth control. One of these was by Dr. Robinson, who had hastily published a volume purporting to give contraceptive information. The unwary purchaser discovered when he came to the section supposed to give him the facts for which he had paid his money that the pages were blank and empty.