Free Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler

first named for her illustrious grandmother, the second, for her mother and great-aunt, two quiet but stalwart women.
    Relations between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were strained from the outset. Margaret was never terribly good at disguising the fact that she found her daughter-in-law Barbara plain and uninspiring and resented what she considered as her slavish attention to family and household responsibilities. The two women could not have been more different in temperament and were never close. But a mutual respect developed between them, especially as the one grew older and increasingly dependent on the other for practical care.
    The distance between them also never interfered with the warmth Margaret demonstrated toward her two spirited granddaughters, whose company in Tucson during and after the war provided her joyful companionship. Margaret lavished the time on these two little girls that she had long ago denied their father and frequently lamented that he was missing from their young childhood, as though she had never once been absent from his own. They called her Mimi (because when they were little she always said, “Come to me, Come to me”) and quickly learned that, although she couldn’t really be depended on to care for them in any responsible or sustained way, she possessed a very special gift. Whenever they were together, she made them feel as though they were the most important two people in the world. In their memory, she remains very much the “grande dame”—often distracted by worldly interests that seemed distant and unimportant to them, but able to charm and captivate as no one else could, whenever she took the time. 10
    By contrast to Stuart, Grant Sanger advanced with considerable ease during the difficult years of the Depression and as a consequence enjoyed more cordial relations with his mother. He shared her enthusiasm for birth control, her interest in politics and public policy, and her keen sense of humor. Once he earned his medical degree, however, they took opposing views on the wisdom of promoting public health programs that included contraception. Like most of his colleagues, Grant feared that government intervention would compromise his professional autonomy and income. In 1939, he wrote a friend at the AMA, suggesting that the organization write birth control into a pending public health bill as a sure way of seeing that it was defeated. “My sons, My sons!” Margaret exclaimed in a penciled comment on her copy of the correspondence.
    Grant met his future wife, Margery Edwina Campbell, while they were both residents at Columbia Presbyterian. Tall, dark, and attractive, Edwina, as she was called, embodied all the qualities Margaret ostensibly admired and wished for in a daughter-in-law. The bright and determined daughter of a wealthy, established family, she’d graduated from Vassar in 1932, a year ahead of Mary McCarthy, with the intention of combining a family and a career. Grant seemed very much in love, and Margaret was pleased when they married after a brief courtship in 1939.
    â€œYou welcomed me very graciously into your family,” Edwina wrote. “I have a feeling that we shall be good friends, and I hope that you will come to think of me as a daughter, and not as that anomolous creature—a daughter-in-law!” Thrilled with the furnishings Margaret provided as a wedding gift, she wrote again with enthusiastic thanks to “Mummy Sanger” about the charms of the new apartment she and Grant had found on Park Avenue and about their busy schedules at the hospital.
    The future seemed unbounded in its promise for the young couple, until the war quickly altered their plans. Two sons, Michael and Peter, were born before Grant went overseas, and Margaret visited them occasionally at the navy base in Coronado, California, which became their home during the war, doting over the boys, amazed by how much the one’s plaintive