In the midst of the whine and freak out by the right over the access of women to medications for their health, we should not forget the issue of a woman’s personal safety. Women of my generation (early 40s) know that pregnancy means health issues, whether the pregnancy was planned or not. However, for many women it also means persecution.
A dear friend of mine, poet Laura Hope-Gill, has just authored an essay on her blog about her maternal grandmother, a Catholic, who was in a prisoner in the Courtyard of the Happy Way in the early 1940s – a prisoner of the Japanese while living in China.
Amongst the horrors of living in the prison camp were the extreme measures that women had to go to in order to prevent pregnancy. Please read on.
Her grandparents met in England and fell in love while both lived abroad in China. They lived a charmed life.
They married and enjoyed parties at Shing Moon, my grandmother wearing black burma silk evening gowns and hobnobbing with the British "dirty little foreigners" who enjoyed the high life of the Empire's global reach. She befriended the niece of Emperor Pu Yi and frequently joined her for tea within the labyrinthian compound of The Forbidden City. Theirs was a life of luxury.
However, the life of the privileged couple from Great Britain was about to change.
After the Japanese seized Nanking, my grandparents ignored the warnings and invitations to evacuate sent from the British Crown and moved north . . . As the violence neared, my grandfather stood with the Chinese and built makeshift clinics for those wounded in the relentless shellings.
The war did not touch my family directly until one afternoon, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. The Japanese commandante entered their home, pissed on the carpet and declared the family's home and everyone in it property of the Rising Sun. Three days later, they were marched 100 miles to a prison camp called The Courtyard of the Happy Way.
As Laura writes,
1200 prisoners lived for three years in the small compound. They devised jobs, schooling, sports programs and food rations in order to maintain civility and normalcy. There were councils and black markets. A group of Trappist monks formed alliances through the barbed wire electric fences with local farmers who appeared to pray with them while rolling fresh eggs under the fences into the monk's woolen robes. All aspects of "civilized life" continued even in the ever-present terror of captivity by bayonet and constant surveillance.
The grinding routine of the camp continued, with moments of comfort a needed security.
For the women and the men, both married and un-married, other aspects of life continued, the private ones where love and desire found purchase in the quiet, unbayonetted spaces of the night. Of course people made love in the prison camp. It was solace. It was peace and comfort as well as hope that the human heart could transcend the nightmare of war.
Yet within that nightmare of war and solace of comfort was the
fear of pregnancy.
My grandmother was near her death when she at last started to tell me the details of the internment. I sat with her for hours. Among the details she shared was the issue of contraception. She told me she used a gin bottle cap as a barrier method. Of all the stories of scorpions appearing on her children's arms and legs, and how she'd stay up all night swatting the deadly creatures from their tender, jaundiced skin, of the stories of the guards lining the children up against a wall and aiming their weapons at them as ways of ensuring the adults would follow every rule, the imagined sensation of a metal circle pressing up against a cervix and possibly turning to injure the man during intercourse is a profound metaphor for what life in a prison camp reveals about how humans cope with restriction.
My grandmother was Catholic. Being pregnant in a prison camp where healthcare was minimal was a deathly option. Bringing a baby into a confined and freezing world where electric barbed wire defined the perimeter and where rotten vegetables were the only food, and of this there was a criminally limited supply for the 1200 prisoners: these realities made contraception a necessary "sin."
But she would insert the gin bottle cap. It was the only method available. This is a measure many people adopted when they were cut off from the usual supply of birth control. They would try anything.
As Laura notes, despite threats and harm, “women will maintain control of their reproductive destinies.”
Thus, if we have to listen to the misogynistic diatribes of pundits and radio hate mongers derisively telling women to just stick an aspirin between their knees, then they should also have to deal with some of the history of desperation.
Please read Laura’s essay in full. I do not do it justice here. She can also respond to your posts there, as she just registered as a member of DK today and thus cannot post right away.
About the author: Laura Hope-Gill, Poet Laureate of the Blue Ridge Parkway; founder of The Healing Seed Center for Geopoetics; Creative Marketing Director Grateful Steps Publishing House and Bookshop; Director of Asheville Wordfest Books: The Soul Tree and Look Up Asheville.