No Regrets: Dr. Benjamin Reitman and the
Remarkable Women Who Loved Him. A Biographical Memoir by Mecca Reitman Carpenter
reviewed by Paul A. Buelow
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Urban@h-net.msu.edu (June, 1999)
Mecca Reitman Carpenter. No Regrets: Dr. Benjamin Reitman and the
Remarkable Women Who Loved Him. A Biographical Memoir. Lexington,
Mass.: Southside Press, 1996. xx + 212 pp. Geneological chart,
illustrations, notes, selected readings, and index. $19.95 (paper),
ISBN 0-9650584-0-9.
Reviewed for H-Urban by Paul A. Buelow <pab@uic.edu>, Department of
History, University of Illinois at Chicago
Mecca Reitman Carpenter's book, No Regrets: Dr. Ben Reitman and
the Women Who Loved Him, is a careful and loving biographical
memoir of her father, the colorful and controversial subject of two
other recent studies (Roger Bruns, The Damndest Radical [1987] and
Suzanne Poirier Chicago's War on Syphilis, 1937-1940 [1995]).
The abandonment of his father and the poverty of his mother made Ben
Reitman's childhood difficult. From his youth he experienced life
in poor neighborhoods of Chicago, making acquaintance with
prostitutes and criminals in the vice districts south of Van Buren
Street and learning to "ride the rails" as part of the "hobo"
culture with which he became identified. He spent much of his life
in and with that culture, both serving its population as a medical
doctor and gathering material from it for his sociological studies,
The Second-Oldest Profession (1932) and Sister of the Road (Box
Car Bertha) (1937). He also spent considerable time in anarchist
circles through his connection with Emma Goldman. Through his adult
life he pursued women.
A scientist at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona and
a health writer and teacher, Carpenter has produced a book that gets
at the life of Ben Reitman from a more personal connection than a
standard biography. She uses his voluminous correspondence in an
effort, as she says, to separate "Ben Reitman, the man, from my
father, the family legend" (p. 3). Readers interested in sociology,
in urban history, and in public health will benefit from this work,
but because the work is centered on Ben's relationships with women,
those interested in psychology, gender studies, and women's studies
will find more substance. Carpenter chronicles seven of those
relationships, some of which overlapped others. The first and fifth
were legal marriages, the former ended by divorce; the latter, after
a decade of separation, by his death.
Benjamin Lewis Reitman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1879 to
Jewish parents. His father deserted the family when Ben was a year
old, and Ben later asserted that his father's behavior was a
precedent for his own. Ben, his older brother, and their mother
eventually settled in the red-light district on Chicago's near south
side. "Street education" for Ben consisted of running errands for
neighbors, becoming acquainted with the poor, transients, criminals,
prostitutes, pimps, con men, and drunks. His first arrest occurred
at an early age, for stealing coal from train cars.
Though he had quit school very early, Ben's intelligence recommended
him to a medical school professor, who encouraged him to take up
medical studies. Graduating in 1904 after a bumpy ride through
medical school, he practiced medicine only irregularly until about
1918, spending some of the intervening time on hobo "tramps" around
the country. In 1901, he met, married, then almost immediately
abandoned his first wife and child. A divorce ended this marriage
in 1905, but his wife, who had difficulty with mental illness, kept
in touch with him, sometimes coming to his medical office to ask for
money. Years later, his grown daughter by this marriage learned to
know him and corresponded with him.
While organizing social programs for homeless men in 1908, Reitman
met "Red Emma" Goldman, the internationally-known labor agitator and
proponent of anarchy, free love, birth control, and women's rights.
To Emma, ten years his senior, Ben was a "handsome brute" (p. 27).
From him, Emma received a full complement of unfettered sexuality.
This behavior fit well with a philosophy of free love, and perhaps
not coincidentally with the distribution of birth control
information. Sadly, when Emma discovered the "other women" in Ben's
life, her free love philosophy proved no shield to feelings of
anguish at betrayal. Yet she returned to their bed repeatedly over
a period of almost a decade.
By 1917, Reitman turned away from Emma and had taken up with a
younger anarchist worker, Anna Martindale, with whom he had a son.
According to Carpenter, "Not only was Anna a freelover by choice,
she was a woman ready to have Ben's child" (p. 47). When she
realized the extent of Ben's womanizing, Anna became unhappy in the
relationship but did not protest. Her own espousal of free love
proved, as it did to Emma Goldman, a barrier to expectations of
fidelity.
Ben spent six months in jail, with a $1,000 fine, for distributing
birth-control literature, in 1918. He served as the prison's
unofficial doctor, while also, according to his own report, enjoying
sexual union with female prisoners, guards, visitors, and a few of
the male homosexuals. "Yes," he writes, "I took my fun where I
found it and denied myself nothing" (pp. 53, 54). One woman who
contributed toward his fine was Rose Siegel, an occasional lover
from Ben's New York City days with Emma Goldman. Shortly after Anna
died at age 45 of complications stemming from an abortion (Ben did
not perform this particular procedure), Ben married 38-year-old
Rose, but did not live with her long. He later commented, "I
married Rose because she waited 20 years for me and my mother
wanted
me to do it. I never really loved Rose." She returned to
school-teaching in New York City, and he took up with other women.
One of these other women was Eileen O'Connor, a 45-year-old medical
secretary in Buffalo, New York. Reading about Dr. Reitman's
projected book, "Living with Social Outcasts," she began
corresponding with him and eventually left Buffalo to work with him
in Chicago. Filled with sincerity and hope, she conflated help on
his book project with the promise of a relationship with a wonderful
man. When they met she prayed silently, "Oh God, let me never fail
him." Eileen seems to have been a conquest-by-mail. She served as
a secretary to Ben as well. The author comments, "Of all my
father's voluminous correspondence, his early letters to Eileen have
the greatest power to make me angry at my father's exploitive
behavior" (pp. 89, 90).
Medina Oliver, the author's mother, was a nursing student in her
late 20s who had met Ben while studying briefly in Chicago. While
on a trip to New York (to see his wife Rose), he became intimate
with Medina. She conceived the idea that Ben would be the ideal
father for her children, despite the knowledge that she would most
probably remain at most a "minor character" in his life. Further,
writes Mecca, "There's no question that my mother loved my father
and thought he was her destiny for motherhood. Despite their many
differences, the qualities she admired in him were ones she wanted
for her children" (pp. 97-99).
Medina became pregnant by Ben and delivered her first child at Cook
County Hospital. Later she moved into Reitman's cottage. Eileen,
who had miscarried the baby Ben had fathered, was jealous, but so
devoted to Ben that she continued to serve him. Rose, kept informed
of all these developments by Reitman himself, "thought that [Medina]
had stolen Ben from her." The situation is reminiscent of a soap
opera plot. However, Ben remained married to Rose, and the author
speculates by way of explanation, "As long as he was married to
Rose, neither my mother nor Eileen could claim him" (p. 172). Medina
eventually bore four daughters to Ben Reitman, the last shortly
after his death.
The aspect of this book dealing with Dr. Reitman's work in public
health portrays him as an unselfish and dedicated reformer who
worked at times for the Chicago Department of Health, and who also
began a private organization, the Chicago Society for the Prevention
of Venereal Disease. In his lifetime the city had high local rates
of sexually-transmitted diseases. Beginning about the time of World
War I, government efforts against VD emphasized education, case
reporting, morals court action against offenders, and the operation
of free clinics. Reitman, whose practice and habits gave him
first-hand knowledge of the people most at risk for
sexually-transmitted diseases, took a different tack. He advised
that the only way to solve the problem was to encourage
sexually-active men and women to use prophylaxis. Asserting that
the "sex urge cannot be controlled" (p. 64), he predicted with
prescience that "a time will come when condoms will be on exhibit in
high schools" (p. 154). He wrote in 1938, "We must make sex safe,
foolproof" (p. 148). His candor and the substance of his advice
proved too much for the public temper. In the 1930s, those in
authority found this kind of talk too close to endorsing illicit
sexual behavior.
Interesting on several levels, in sum this book is the story of Ben
Reitman's life with women. If the title, No Regrets, expresses
his feeling on the subject, it clashes with what he wrote about at
least one of his affairs, "Someone once said, 'Find them, F them,
Feed them and Leave them.' But that don't work. People I work and
play with have a habit of moving into my life. And they don't move
out so easy" (p. 96). Perhaps a key to Reitman's thought is
provided in the dedication to his The Second Oldest Profession,
where he wrote of Emma Goldman, "She taught me that men and women
will never be free until they learn not to exploit or be exploited."
Yet looking more deeply, one is tempted to ask, In the life of Ben
Reitman and his lovers, which of them was free, and what would this
sought-after freedom mean? Were there really no regrets?
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net@H-Net.MSU.EDU.
|
