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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman and the New Race, by Margaret Sanger
+#2 in our series by Margaret Sanger
+
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+Title: Woman and the New Race
+
+Author: Margaret Sanger
+
+Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8660]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on July 30, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN AND THE NEW RACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred and Distributed Proofeaders.
+
+
+
+
+WOMAN AND THE NEW RACE
+
+BY
+
+MARGARET SANGER
+
+
+With A Preface By Havelock Ellis
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+New York 1920
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+DEDICATED TO
+
+THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,  A MOTHER
+
+WHO GAVE BIRTH TO ELEVEN LIVING CHILDREN
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The modern Woman Movement, like the modern Labour Movement, may be
+said to have begun in the Eighteenth century. The Labour movement
+arose out of the Industrial Revolution with its resultant tendency to
+over-population, to unrestricted competition, to social misery and
+disorder. The Woman movement appeared as an at first neglected
+by-product of the French Revolution with its impulses of general
+human expansion, of freedom and of equality.
+
+Since then, as we know, these two movements have each had a great and
+vigorous career which is still far from completed. On the whole they
+have moved independently along separate lines, and have at times
+seemed indeed almost hostile to each other. That has ceased to be the
+case. Of recent years it has been seen not only that these two
+movements are not hostile, but that they may work together
+harmoniously for similar ends.
+
+One final step remained to be taken--it had to be realised not only
+that the Labour movement could give the secret of success to the woman
+movement by its method and organization, but that on the other hand,
+woman held the secret without which labour is impotent to reach its
+ends. Woman, by virtue of motherhood is the regulator of the
+birthrate, the sacred disposer of human production. It is in the
+deliberate restraint and measurement of human production that the
+fundamental problems of the family, the nation, the whole brotherhood
+of mankind find their solution. The health and longevity of the
+individual, the economic welfare of the workers, the general level of
+culture of the community, the possibility of abolishing from the world
+the desolating scourge of war--all these like great human needs,
+depend, primarily and fundamentally, on the wise limitation of the
+human output. It does not certainly make them inevitable, but it
+renders them possible of accomplishment; without it they have been
+clearly and repeatedly proved to be impossible.
+
+These facts have long been known to the few who view the world
+realistically. But it is not the few who rule the world. It is the
+masses--the ignorant, emotional, volatile, superstitious masses--who
+rule the world. It is they who choose the few supreme persons who
+manage or mismanage the world's affairs. Even the most stupid of us
+must be able to see how it is done now, for during recent years the
+whole process has been displayed before us on the very largest scale.
+
+The lesson has not been altogether in vain. It is furnishing a new
+stimulus to those who are working for the increase of knowledge, and
+of practical action based on knowledge, among the masses, the masses
+who alone possess the power to change the force of the world for good
+or for evil, and by growth in wisdom to raise the human race on to a
+higher level.
+
+That is why the little book by Margaret Sanger, whose right to speak
+with authority on these matters we all recognize, cannot be too widely
+read. To the few who think, though they may here and there differ on
+points of detail, it is all as familiar as A. B. C. But to the
+millions who rule the world it is not familiar, and still less to the
+handful of superior persons whom the masses elect to supreme
+positions. Therefore, let this book be read; let it be read by every
+man and woman who can read. And the sooner it is not only read but
+acted on, the better for the world.
+
+HAVELOCK ELLIS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER
+
+I WOMAN'S ERROR AND HER DEBT
+
+II WOMAN'S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
+
+III THE MATERIAL OF THE NEW RACE
+
+IV TWO CLASSES OF WOMEN
+
+V THE WICKEDNESS OP CREATING LARGE FAMILIES
+
+VI CRIES OF DESPAIR
+
+VII WHEN SHOULD A WOMAN AVOID HAVING CHILDREN?
+
+VIII BIRTH CONTROL--A PARENTS' PROBLEM OR WOMAN'S?
+
+IX CONTINENCE--IS IT PRACTICABLE OR DESIRABLE?
+
+X CONTRACEPTIVES OR ABORTION?
+
+XI ARE PREVENTIVE MEANS CERTAIN?
+
+XII WILL BIRTH CONTROL HELP THE CAUSE OF LABOR?
+
+XIII BATTALIONS OF UNWANTED BABIES THE CAUSE OF WAR
+
+XIV WOMAN AND THE NEW MORALITY
+
+XV LEGISLATING WOMAN'S MORALS
+
+XVI WHY NOT BIRTH CONTROL CLINICS IN AMERICA?
+
+XVII PROGRESS WE HAVE MADE
+
+XVIII THE GOAL
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+WOMAN AND THE NEW RACE
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+WOMAN'S ERROR AND HER DEBT
+
+
+The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt
+of woman against sex servitude. The most important force in the
+remaking of the world is a free motherhood. Beside this force, the
+elaborate international programmes of modern statesmen are weak and
+superficial. Diplomats may formulate leagues of nations and nations
+may pledge their utmost strength to maintain them, statesmen may dream
+of reconstructing the world out of alliances, hegemonies and spheres
+of influence, but woman, continuing to produce explosive populations,
+will convert these pledges into the proverbial scraps of paper; or she
+may, by controlling birth, lift motherhood to the plane of a
+voluntary, intelligent function, and remake the world. When the world
+is thus remade, it will exceed the dream of statesman, reformer and
+revolutionist.
+
+Only in recent years has woman's position as the gentler and weaker
+half of the human family been emphatically and generally questioned.
+Men assumed that this was woman's place; woman herself accepted it. It
+seldom occurred to anyone to ask whether she would go on occupying it
+forever.
+
+Upon the mere surface of woman's organized protests there were no
+indications that she was desirous of achieving a fundamental change in
+her position. She claimed the right of suffrage and legislative
+regulation of her working hours, and asked that her property rights be
+equal to those of the man. None of these demands, however, affected
+directly the most vital factors of her existence. Whether she won her
+point or failed to win it, she remained a dominated weakling in a
+society controlled by men.
+
+Woman's acceptance of her inferior status was the more real because it
+was unconscious. She had chained herself to her place in society and
+the family through the maternal functions of her nature, and only
+chains thus strong could have bound her to her lot as a brood animal
+for the masculine civilizations of the world. In accepting her rôle as
+the "weaker and gentler half," she accepted that function. In turn,
+the acceptance of that function fixed the more firmly her rank as an
+inferior.
+
+Caught in this "vicious circle," woman has, through her reproductive
+ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Whether
+it was the tyranny of a monarchy, an oligarchy or a republic, the one
+indispensable factor of its existence was, as it is now, hordes of
+human beings--human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap
+that ignorance was their natural lot. Upon the rock of an
+unenlightened, submissive maternity have these been founded; upon the
+product of such a maternity have they flourished.
+
+No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no
+privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in
+death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power
+of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural
+resources.
+
+No period of low wages or of idleness with their want among the
+workers, no peonage or sweatshop, no child-labor factory, ever came
+into being, save from the same source. Nor have famine and plague been
+as much "acts of God" as acts of too prolific mothers. They, also, as
+all students know, have their basic causes in over-population.
+
+The creators of over-population are the women, who, while wringing
+their hands over each fresh horror, submit anew to their task of
+producing the multitudes who will bring about the _next_ tragedy of
+civilization.
+
+While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing
+the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly
+creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with
+other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes,
+furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had
+she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste
+and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.
+
+Woman's passivity under the burden of her disastrous task was almost
+altogether that of ignorant resignation. She knew virtually nothing
+about her reproductive nature and less about the consequences of her
+excessive child-bearing. It is true that, obeying the inner urge of
+their natures, _some_ women revolted. They went even to the extreme of
+infanticide and abortion. Usually their revolts were not general
+enough. They fought as individuals, not as a mass. In the mass they
+sank back into blind and hopeless subjection. They went on breeding
+with staggering rapidity those numberless, undesired children who
+become the clogs and the destroyers of civilizations.
+
+To-day, however, woman is rising in fundamental revolt. Even her
+efforts at mere reform are, as we shall see later, steps in that
+direction. Underneath each of them is the feminine urge to complete
+freedom. Millions of women are asserting their right to voluntary
+motherhood. They are determined to decide for themselves whether they
+shall become mothers, under what conditions and when. This is the
+fundamental revolt referred to. It is for woman the key to the temple
+of liberty.
+
+Even as birth control is the means by which woman attains basic
+freedom, so it is the means by which she must and will uproot the evil
+she has wrought through her submission. As she has unconsciously and
+ignorantly brought about social disaster, so must and will she
+consciously and intelligently _undo_ that disaster and create a new
+and a better order.
+
+The task is hers. It cannot be avoided by excuses, nor can it be
+delegated. It is not enough for woman to point to the self-evident
+domination of man. Nor does it avail to plead the guilt of rulers and
+the exploiters of labor. It makes no difference that she does not
+formulate industrial systems nor that she is an instinctive believer
+in social justice. In her submission lies her error and her guilt. By
+her failure to withhold the multitudes of children who have made
+inevitable the most flagrant of our social evils, she incurred a debt
+to society. Regardless of her own wrongs, regardless of her lack of
+opportunity and regardless of all other considerations, _she_ must pay
+that debt.
+
+She must not think to pay this debt in any superficial way. She cannot
+pay it with palliatives--with child-labor laws, prohibition,
+regulation of prostitution and agitation against war. Political
+nostrums and social panaceas are but incidentally and superficially
+useful. They do not touch the source of the social disease.
+
+War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while
+woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her
+reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
+
+Two chief obstacles hinder the discharge of this tremendous
+obligation. The first and the lesser is the legal barrier. Dark-Age
+laws would still deny to her the knowledge of her reproductive nature.
+Such knowledge is indispensable to intelligent motherhood and she must
+achieve it, despite absurd statutes and equally absurd moral canons.
+
+The second and more serious barrier is her own ignorance of the extent
+and effect of her submission. Until she knows the evil her subjection
+has wrought to herself, to her progeny and to the world at large, she
+cannot wipe out that evil.
+
+To get rid of these obstacles is to invite attack from the forces of
+reaction which are so strongly entrenched in our present-day society.
+It means warfare in every phase of her life. Nevertheless, at whatever
+cost, she must emerge from her ignorance and assume her
+responsibility.
+
+She can do this only when she has awakened to a knowledge of herself
+and of the consequences of her ignorance. The first step is birth
+control. Through birth control she will attain to voluntary
+motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, she
+will cease to enslave herself and the mass of humanity. Then, through
+the understanding of the intuitive forward urge within her, she will
+not stop at patching up the world; she will remake it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+WOMAN'S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
+
+Behind all customs of whatever nature; behind all social unrest,
+behind all movements, behind all revolutions, are great driving
+forces, which in their action and reaction upon conditions, give
+character to civilization. If, in seeking to discover the source of a
+custom, of a movement or of a revolution, we stop at surface
+conditions, we shall never discern more than a superficial aspect of
+the underlying truth.
+
+This is the error into which the historian has almost universally
+fallen. It is also a common error among sociologists. It is the
+fashion nowadays, for instance, to explain all social unrest in terms
+of economic conditions. This is a valuable working theory and has done
+much to awaken men to their injustice toward one another, but it
+ignores the forces within humanity which drive it to revolt. It is
+these forces, rather than the conditions upon which they react, that
+are the important factors. Conditions change, but the animating force
+goes on forever.
+
+So, too, with woman's struggle for emancipation. Women in all lands
+and all ages have instinctively desired family limitation. Usually
+this desire has been laid to economic pressure. Frequently the
+pressure has existed, but the driving force behind woman's aspiration
+_toward freedom_ has lain deeper. It has asserted itself among the
+rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent.
+It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child
+abandonment and abortion.
+
+The only term sufficiently comprehensive to define this motive power
+of woman's nature is the _feminine spirit_. That spirit manifests
+itself most frequently in motherhood, but it is greater than
+maternity. Woman herself, all that she is, all that she has ever been,
+all that she may be, is but the outworking of this inner spiritual
+urge. Given free play, this supreme law of her nature asserts itself
+in beneficent ways; interfered with, it becomes destructive. Only when
+we understand this can we comprehend the efforts of the feminine
+spirit to liberate itself.
+
+When the outworking of this force within her is hampered by the
+bearing and the care of too many children, woman rebels. Hence it is
+that, from time immemorial, she has sought some form of family
+limitation. When she has not employed such measures consciously, she
+has done so instinctively. Where laws, customs and religious
+restrictions do not prevent, she has recourse to contraceptives.
+Otherwise, she resorts to child abandonment, abortion and infanticide,
+or resigns herself hopelessly to enforced maternity.
+
+These violent means of freeing herself from the chains of her own
+reproductivity have been most in evidence where economic conditions
+have made the care of children even more of a burden than it would
+otherwise have been. But, whether in the luxurious home of the
+Athenian, the poverty-ridden dwelling of the Chinese, or the crude hut
+of the primitive Australian savage, the woman whose development has
+been interfered with by the bearing and rearing of children has tried
+desperately, frantically, too often in vain, to take and hold her
+freedom.
+
+Individual men have sometimes acquiesced in these violent measures,
+but in the mass they have opposed. By law, by religious canons, by
+public opinion, by penalties ranging all the way from ostracism to
+beheading, they have sought to crush this effort. Neither threat of
+hell nor the infliction of physical punishment has availed. Women have
+deceived and dared, resisted and defied the power of church and state.
+Quietly, desperately, consciously, they have marched to the gates of
+death to gain the liberty which the feminine spirit has desired.
+
+In savage life as well as in barbarism and civilization has woman's
+instinctive urge to freedom and a wider development asserted itself in
+an effort, successful or otherwise, to curtail her family.
+
+"The custom of infanticide prevails or has prevailed," says Westermark
+in his monumental work, _The Origin and Development of the Moral
+Idea_, "not only in the savage world but among the semi-civilized and
+civilized races."
+
+With the savage mother, family limitation ran largely to infanticide,
+although that practice was frequently accompanied by abortion as a
+tribal means. As McLennan says in his "Studies in Ancient History,"
+infanticide was formerly very common among the savages of New Zealand,
+and "it was generally perpetrated by the mother." He notes much the
+same state of affairs among the primitive Australians, except that
+abortion was _also_ frequently employed. In numerous North American
+Indian tribes, he says, infanticide and abortion were not uncommon,
+and the Indians of Central America were found by him "to have gone to
+extremes in the use of abortives."
+
+When a traveller reproached the women of one of the South American
+Indian tribes for the practice of infanticide, McLennan says he was
+met by the retort, "Men have no business to meddle with women's
+affairs."
+
+McLennan ventures the opinion that the practice of abortion so widely
+noted among Indians in the Western Hemisphere, "must have supervened
+on a practice of infanticide."
+
+Similar practices have been found to prevail wherever historians have
+dug deep into the life of savage people. Infanticide, at least, was
+practiced by African tribes, by the primitive peoples of Japan, India
+and Western Europe, as well as in China, and in early Greece and Rome.
+The ancient Hebrews are sometimes pointed out as the one possible
+exception to this practice, because the Mosaic law, as it has come
+down to us, is silent upon the subject. Westermark is of the opinion
+that it "hardly occurred among the Hebrews in historic times. But we
+have reason to believe that at an earlier period, among them, as among
+other branches of the Semitic race, child murder was frequently
+practiced as a sacrificial rite."
+
+Westermark found that "the murder of female infants, whether by the
+direct employment of homicidal means, or exposure to privation and
+neglect, has for ages been a common practice or even a genuine custom
+among various Hindu castes."
+
+Still further light is shed upon the real sources of the practice, as
+well as upon the improvement of the status of woman through the
+practice, by an English student of conditions in India. Captain S.
+Charles MacPherson, of the Madras Army, in the Journal of the Royal
+Asiatic Society for 1852, said: "I can here but very briefly advert to
+the customs and feelings which the practice of infanticide (among the
+Khonds of Orissa) alternately springs from and produces. The influence
+and privileges of women are exceedingly great among the Khonds, and
+are, I believe, greatest among the tribes which practice infanticide.
+Their opinions have great weight in all public and private affairs;
+their direct participation is often considered essential in the
+former."
+
+If infanticide did not spring from a desire within the woman herself,
+from a desire stronger than motherhood, would it prevail where women
+enjoy an influence equal to that of men? And does not the fact that
+the women in question do enjoy such influence, point unmistakably to
+the motive behind the practice?
+
+Infanticide did not go out of fashion with the advance from savagery
+to barbarism and civilization. Rather, it became, as in Greece and
+Rome, a recognized custom with advocates among leaders of thought and
+action.
+
+So did abortion, which some authorities regard as a development
+springing from infanticide and tending to supersede it as a means of
+getting rid of undesired children.
+
+As progress is made toward civilization, infanticide, then, actually
+increased. This tendency was noted by Westermark, who also calls
+attention to the conclusions of Fison and Howitt (in Kamilaroi and
+Kurnai). "Mr. Fison who has lived for a long time among uncivilized
+races," says Westermark, "thinks it will be found that infanticide is
+far less common among the lower savages than among the more advanced
+tribes."
+
+Following this same tendency into civilized countries, we find
+infanticide either advocated by philosophers and authorized by law, as
+in Greece and Rome, or widely practiced in spite of the law, civil and
+ecclesiastical.
+
+The status of infanticide as an established, legalized custom in
+Greece, is well summed up by Westermark, who says: "The exposure of
+deformed or sickly infants was undoubtedly an ancient custom in
+Greece; in Sparta, at least, it was enjoined by law. It was also
+approved of by the most enlightened among the Greek philosophers.
+Plato condemns all those children who are imperfect in limbs as well
+as those who are born of depraved citizens."
+
+Aristotle, who believed that the state should fix the number of
+children each married pair should have, has this to say in _Politics_,
+Book VII, Chapter V:
+
+"With respect to the exposing and nurturing of children, let it be a
+law that nothing mutilated shall be nurtured. And in order to avoid
+having too great a number of children, if it be not permitted by the
+laws of the country to expose them, it is then requisite to define how
+many a man may have; and if any have more than the prescribed number,
+some means must be adopted that the fruit be destroyed in the womb of
+the mother before sense and life are generated in it."
+
+Aristotle was a conscious advocate of family limitation even if
+attained by violent means. "It is necessary," he says, "to take care
+that the increase of the people should not exceed a certain number in
+order to avoid poverty and its concomitants, sedition and other
+evils."
+
+In Athens, while the citizen wives were unable to throw off the
+restrictions of the laws which kept them at home, the great number of
+_hetera_, or stranger women, were the glory of the "Golden Age." The
+homes of these women who were free from the burden of too many
+children became the gathering places of philosophers, poets, sculptors
+and statesmen. The _hetera_ were their companions, their inspiration
+and their teachers. Aspasia, one of the greatest women of antiquity,
+was such an emancipated individuality. True to the urge of the
+feminine spirit, she, like Sappho, the poetess of Lesbia, sought to
+arouse the Greek wives to the expression of their individual selves.
+One writer says of her efforts: "This woman determined to do her
+utmost to elevate her sex. The one method of culture open to women at
+that time was poetry. There was no other form of literature, and
+accordingly she systematically trained her pupils to be poets, and to
+weave into the verse the noblest maxims of the intellect and the
+deepest emotions of the heart. Young pupils with richly endowed minds
+flocked to her from all countries and formed a kind of Woman's
+College.
+
+"There can be no doubt that these young women were impelled to seek
+the society of Sappho from disgust with the low drudgery and
+monotonous routine to which woman's life was sacrificed, and they were
+anxious to rise to something nobler and better."
+
+Can there be any doubt that the unfortunate "citizen wives" of Athens,
+bound by law to their homes, envied the brilliant careers of the
+"stranger women," and sought all possible means of freedom? And can
+there be any doubt that they acquiesced in the practice of infanticide
+as a means to that end? Otherwise, how could the custom of destroying
+infants have been so thoroughly embedded in the jurisprudence, the
+thought and the very core of Athenian civilization?
+
+As to the Spartan women, Aristotle says that they ruled their husbands
+and owned two-fifths of the land. Surely, had they not approved of
+infanticide for some very strong reasons of their own, they would have
+abolished it.
+
+Athens and Sparta must be regarded as giving very strong indications
+that the Grecian women not only approved of family limitation by the
+destruction of unwanted children, but that at least part of their
+motive was personal freedom.
+
+In Rome, an avowedly militaristic nation, living by conquest of weaker
+states, all sound children were saved. But the weakly or deformed were
+drowned. Says Seneca: "We destroy monstrous births, and we also drown
+our children if they are born weakly or unnaturally formed." Wives of
+Romans, however, were relieved of much of the drudgery of child
+rearing by the slaves which Rome took by the thousands and brought
+home. Thus they were free to attain an advanced position and to become
+the advisors of their husbands in politics, making and unmaking
+political careers.
+
+When we come to look into the proverbial infanticide of the Chinese,
+we find the same positive indications that it grew out of the
+instinctive purpose of woman to free herself from the bondage of too
+great reproductivity.
+
+"In the poorest districts of China," says Westermark, "female infants
+are often destroyed by their parents immediately after their birth,
+chiefly on account of poverty. Though disapproved of by educated
+Chinese, the practice is treated with forbearance or indifference by
+the man of the people and is acquiesced in by the mandarins."
+
+"When seriously appealed to on the subject," says the Rev. J.
+Doolittle in _Social Life of the Chinese_, "though all deprecate it as
+contrary to the dictates of reason and the instincts of nature, many
+are ready boldly to apologize for it and declare it to be necessary,
+especially in the families of the excessively poor."
+
+Here again the wide prevalence of the custom is the first and best
+proof that women are driven by some great pressure within themselves
+to accede to it. If further proof were necessary, it is afforded by
+the testimony of Occidentals who have lived in China, that Chinese
+midwives are extremely skillful in producing early abortion. Abortions
+are not performed without the consent and usually only at the demand
+of the woman.
+
+In China, as in India, the religions of the country condemned, even as
+they to-day condemn, infanticide. Both foreign and native governments
+have sought to make an end of the custom. But in both countries it
+still prevails. Nor are these Eastern countries substantially
+different from their Western neighbors.
+
+The record of Western Europe is summarized by Oscar Helmuth Werner,
+Ph.D., in his book, _"The Unmarried Mother in German Literature."_
+"Infanticide," says Dr. Werner, "was the most common crime in Western
+Europe from the Middle Ages down to the end of the Eighteenth
+Century." This fact, of course, means that it was even more largely
+practiced by the married than the unmarried, the married mothers being
+far greater in number.
+
+"Another problem which confronted the church," he says in another
+place, "was the practice of exposure and killing of children by legal
+parents." A sort of final word from Dr. Werner is this: "Infanticide
+by legal parents has practically ceased in civilized countries, but
+abortion, its substitute, has not."
+
+How desperately woman desired freedom to develop herself as an
+individual, apart from motherhood, is indicated by the fact that
+infanticide was "the most common crime of Western Europe," in spite of
+the fact that some of the most terrible punishments ever inflicted by
+law were meted out to those women who sought this means of escape from
+the burden of unwanted children. Dr. Werner shows that in Germany, for
+instance, in the year 1532, it was the law that those guilty of
+infanticide were "to be buried alive or impaled. In order to prevent
+desperation, however, they shall be drowned if it is possible to get
+to a stream or river, in which they shall be torn with glowing tongs
+beforehand."
+
+Notwithstanding the fact that at one time in Germany, the punishment
+was that of drowning in a sack containing a serpent, a cat and a
+dog--in order that the utmost agony might be inflicted--one sovereign
+alone condemned 20,000 women to death for infanticide, without
+noticeably reducing the practice.
+
+To-day, in spite of the huge numbers of abortions and the
+multiplication of foundlings' homes and orphans' asylums, infanticide
+is still an occasional crime in all countries. As to woman's share in
+the practice, let us add this word from Havelock Ellis, taken from the
+chapter on "Morbid Psychic Phenomena" in his book, _Man and Woman_:
+
+"Infanticide is the crime in which women stand out in the greatest
+contrast to men; in Italy, for example, for every 100 men guilty of
+infanticide, there are 477 women." And he remarks later that when a
+man commits this crime, "he usually does it at the instance of some
+woman."
+
+Infanticide tends to disappear as skill in producing abortions is
+developed or knowledge of contraceptives is spread, and only then. One
+authority, as will be seen in a later chapter, estimates the number of
+abortions performed annually in the United States at 1,000,000, and
+another believes that double that number are produced.
+
+"Among the Hindus and Mohammedans, artificial abortion is extremely
+common," says Westermark. "In Persia every illegitimate pregnancy ends
+with abortion. In Turkey, both among the rich and the poor, even
+married women very commonly procure abortion after they have given
+birth to two children, one of which is a boy."
+
+The nations mentioned are typical of the world, except those countries
+where information concerning contraceptives has enabled women to limit
+their families without recourse to operations.
+
+It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to
+the horrors of abortion and infanticide. The Roman Catholic church,
+which has fought these practices from the beginning, has been unable
+to check them; and no more powerful agency could have been brought
+into play. It took that church, even in the days of its unlimited
+power, many centuries to come to its present sweeping condemnation of
+abortion. The severity of the condemnation depended upon the time at
+which the development of the foetus was interfered with. An
+illuminating resume of the church's efforts in this direction is given
+by Dr. William Burke Ryan in his authoritative and exhaustive study
+entitled "_Infanticide; Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History"_.
+Dr. Ryan says: "Theologians of the church of Rome made a distinction
+between the inanimate and the animate foetus to which the soul is
+added by the creation of God, and adopted the opinions of some of the
+old philosophers, more particularly those of Aristotle, as to
+animation in the male and female, but the canon law altogether
+negatived the doctrine of the Stoics, for Innocent II condemned the
+following proposition:
+
+"'It seems probable that the foetus does not possess a rational soul
+as long as it is in the womb, and only begins to possess it when born,
+and consequently in no abortion is homicide committed.' Sextus V
+inflicted severe penalties for the crime of abortion at any period;
+these were in some degree mitigated by Gregory XIV, who, however,
+still held that those producing the abortion of an animated foetus
+should be subject to them, viz., and excommunication reserved to the
+bishop and also an 'irregularity' reserved to the Pope himself for
+absolution."
+
+To-day, the Roman church stands firmly upon the proposition that
+"directly intended, artificial abortion must be regarded as wrongful
+killing, as murder." [Footnote: Pastoral Medicine] But it required a
+long time for it to reach that point, in the face of the demand for
+relief from large families.
+
+As it was with the fight of the church against abortion, so it is with
+the effort to prevent abortion in the United States to-day. All
+efforts to stop the practice are futile. Apparently, the numbers of
+these illegal operations are increasing from year to year. From year
+to year more women will undergo the humiliation, the danger and the
+horror of them, and the terrible record, begun with the infanticide of
+the primitive peoples, will go on piling up its volume of human misery
+and racial damage, until society awakens to the fact that a
+fundamental remedy must be applied.
+
+To apply such a remedy, society must recognize the terrible lesson
+taught by the innumerable centuries of infanticide and foeticide. If
+these abhorrent practices could have been ended by punishment and
+suppression, they would have ceased long ago. But to continue
+suppression and punishment, and let the matter rest there, is only to
+miss the lesson--only to permit conditions to go from bad to worse.
+
+What is that lesson? It is this: woman's desire for freedom is born of
+the feminine spirit, which is the absolute, elemental, inner urge of
+womanhood. It is the strongest force in her nature; it cannot be
+destroyed; it can merely be diverted from its natural expression into
+violent and destructive channels.
+
+The chief obstacles to the normal expression of this force are
+undesired pregnancy and the burden of unwanted children. These
+obstacles have always been and always will be swept aside by a
+considerable proportion of women. Driven by the irresistible force
+within them, they will always seek wider freedom and greater
+self-development, regardless of the cost. The sole question that society
+has to answer is, how shall women be permitted to attain this end?
+
+Are you horrified at the record set down in this chapter? It is well
+that you should be. You cannot help society to apply the fundamental
+remedy unless you know these facts and are conscious of their fullest
+significance.
+
+Society, in dealing with the feminine spirit, has its choice of
+clearly defined alternatives. It can continue to resort to violence in
+an effort to enslave the elemental urge of womanhood, making of woman
+a mere instrument of reproduction and punishing her when she revolts.
+Or, it can permit her to choose whether she shall become a mother and
+how many children she will have. It can go on trying to crush that
+which is uncrushable, or it can recognize woman's claim to freedom,
+and cease to impose diverting and destructive barriers. If we choose
+the latter course, we must not only remove all restrictions upon the
+use of scientific contraceptives, but we must legalize and encourage
+their use.
+
+This problem comes home with peculiar force to the people of America.
+Do we want the millions of abortions performed annually to be
+multiplied? Do we want the precious, tender qualities of womanhood, so
+much needed for our racial development, to perish in these sordid,
+abnormal experiences? Or, do we wish to permit woman to find her way
+to fundamental freedom through safe, unobjectionable, scientific
+means? We have our choice. Upon our answer to these questions depends
+in a tremendous degree the character and the capabilities of the
+future American race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE MATERIALS OF THE NEW RACE
+
+
+Each of us has an ideal of what the American of the future should be.
+We have been told times without number that out of the mixture of
+stocks, the intermingling of ideas and aspirations, there is to come a
+race greater than any which has contributed to the population of the
+United States. What is the basis for this hope that is so generally
+indulged in? If the hope is founded upon realities, how may it be
+realized? To understand the difficulties and the obstacles to be
+overcome before the dream of a greater race in America can be
+attained, is to understand something of the task before the women who
+shall give birth to that race.
+
+What material is there for a greater American race? What elements make
+up our present millions? Where do they live? How do they live? In what
+direction does our national civilization bend their ideals? What is
+the effect of the "melting pot" upon the foreigner, once he begins to
+"melt"? Are we now producing a freer, juster, more intelligent, more
+idealistic, creative people out of the varied ingredients here?
+
+Before we can answer these questions, we must consider briefly the
+races which have contributed to American population.
+
+Among our more than 100,000,000 population are Negroes, Indians,
+Chinese and other colored people to the number of 11,000,000. There
+are also 14,500,000 persons of foreign birth. Besides these there are
+14,000,000 children of foreign-born parents and 6,500,000 persons
+whose fathers or mothers were born on foreign soil, making a total of
+46,000,000 people of foreign stock. Fifty per cent of our population
+is of the native white strain.
+
+Of the foreign stock in the United States, the last general census,
+compiled in 1910, shows that 25.7 per cent was German, 14 per cent was
+Irish, 8.5 per cent was Russian or Finnish, 7.2 was English, 6.5 per
+cent Italian and 6.2 per cent Austrian. The Abstract of the same
+census points out several significant facts. The Western European
+strains in this country are represented by a majority of native-born
+children of foreign-born or mixed parentage. This is because the
+immigration from those sources has been checked. On the other hand,
+immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Russia and
+Finland, increased 175.4 per cent from 1900 to 1910. During that
+period, the slums of Europe dumped their submerged inhabitants into
+America at a rate almost double that of the preceding decade, and the
+flow was still increasing at the time the census was taken. So it is
+more than likely that when the next census is taken it will be found
+that following 1910 there was an even greater flow from Spain, Italy,
+Hungary, Austria, Russia, Finland, and other countries where the iron
+hand of economic and political tyrannies had crushed great populations
+into ignorance and want. These peoples have not been in the United
+States long enough to produce great families. The census of 1920 will
+in all probability tell a story of a greater and more serious problem
+than did the last.
+
+Over one-fourth of all the immigrants over fourteen years of age,
+admitted during the two decades preceding 1910, were illiterate. Of
+the 8,398,000 who arrived in the 1900-1910 period, 2,238,000 could not
+read or write. There were 1,600,000 illiterate foreigners in the
+United States when the 1910 census was taken. Do these elements give
+promise of a better race? Are we doing anything genuinely constructive
+to overcome this situation?
+
+Two-thirds of the white foreign stock in the United States live in
+cities. Four-fifths of the populations of Chicago and New York are of
+this stock. More than two-thirds of the populations of Boston,
+Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Newark, Jersey
+City, Providence, Worcester, Scranton, Paterson, Fall River, Lowell,
+Cambridge, Bridgeport, St. Paul, Minneapolis and San Francisco are of
+other than native white ancestry. Of the fifty principal cities of the
+United States there are only fourteen in which fifty per cent of the
+population is of unmixed native white parentage.
+
+Only one state in the Union--North Carolina--has less than one per
+cent of the white foreign stock. New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
+Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Illinois,
+Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana and Utah have more than
+fifty per cent foreign stock. Eleven states, including those on the
+Pacific Coast, have from 35 to 50 per cent. Maine, Ohio and Kansas
+have from 25 to 35 per cent. Maryland, Indiana, Missouri and Texas
+have from 15 to 25 per cent. These proportions are increasing rather
+than decreasing, owing to the extraordinarily high birth rate of the
+foreign strains.
+
+A special analysis of 1915 vital statistics for certain states, in the
+World Almanac for 1918, shows that foreign-born mothers gave birth to
+nearly 62 per cent of the children born in Connecticut, nearly 58 per
+cent in Massachusetts, nearly 33 per cent in Michigan, nearly 58 per
+cent in Rhode Island, more than 43 per cent in New Hampshire, more
+than 54 per cent in New York and more than 38 per cent in
+Pennsylvania.
+
+All these figures, be it remembered, fail to include foreign stock of
+the second generation after landing. If the statistics for children
+who have native parents but foreign-born grandparents, or who have one
+foreign-born parent, were given, they would doubtless leave but a
+small percentage of births from stocks native to the soil for several
+generations.
+
+Immigrants or their children constitute the majority of workers
+employed in many of our industries. "Seven out of ten of those who
+work in our iron and steel industries are drawn from this class," says
+the National Geographic Magazine (February, 1917), "seven out of ten
+of our bituminous coal miners belong to it. Three out of four who work
+in packing towns were born abroad or are children of those who were
+born abroad; four out of five of those who make our silk goods, seven
+out of eight of those employed in woolen mills, nine out of ten of
+those who refine our petroleum, and nineteen out of twenty of those
+who manufacture our sugar are immigrants or the children of
+immigrants." And it might have shown a similarly high percentage of
+those in the ready-made clothing industries, railway and public works
+construction of the less skilled sort, and a number of others.
+
+That these foreigners who have come in hordes have brought with them
+their ignorance of hygiene and modern ways of living and that they are
+handicapped by religious superstitions is only too true. But they also
+bring in their hearts a desire for freedom from all the tyrannies that
+afflict the earth. They would not be here if they did not bear within
+them the hardihood of pioneers, a courage of no mean order. They have
+the simple faith that in America they will find equality, liberty and
+an opportunity for a decent livelihood. And they have something else.
+The cell plasms of these peoples are freighted with the potentialities
+of the best in Old World civilization. They come from lands rich in
+the traditions of courage, of art, music, letters, science and
+philosophy. Americans no longer consider themselves cultured unless
+they have journeyed to these lands to find access to the treasures
+created by men and women of this same blood. The immigrant brings the
+possibilities of all these things to our shores, but where is the
+opportunity to reproduce in the New World the cultures of the old?
+
+What opportunities have we given to these peoples to enrich our
+civilization? We have greeted them as "a lot of ignorant foreigners,"
+we have shouted at, bustled and kicked them.
+
+Our industries have taken advantage of their ignorance of the
+country's ways to take their toil in mills and mines and factories at
+starvation wages. We have herded them into slums to become diseased,
+to become social burdens or to die. We have huddled them together like
+rabbits to multiply their numbers and their misery. Instead of saying
+that we Americanize them, we should confess that we animalize them.
+The only freedom we seem to have given them is the freedom to make
+heavier and more secure their chains. What hope is there for racial
+progress in this human material, treated more carelessly and brutally
+than the cheapest factory product?
+
+Nor are all our social handicaps bound up in the immigrant.
+
+There were in the United States, when the Federal Industrial Relations
+Committee finished its work in 1915, several million migratory
+workers, most of them white, many of them married but separated from
+their families, who were compelled, like themselves, to struggle with
+dire want.
+
+There were in 1910 more than 2,353,000 tenant farmers, two-thirds of
+whom lived and worked under the terrible conditions which the
+Industrial Relations Commission's report showed to prevail in the
+South and Southwest. These tenant farmers, as the report showed, were
+always in want, and were compelled by the very terms of the prevailing
+tenant contracts to produce children who must go to the fields and do
+the work of adults. The census proved that this tenancy was on the
+increase, the number of tenants in all but the New England and Middle
+Atlantic States having increased approximately 30 per cent from 1900
+to 1910.
+
+Moreover, there were in the United States in 1910, 5,516,163
+illiterates. Of these 1,378,884 were of pure native white stock. In
+some states in the South as much as 29 per cent of the population is
+illiterate, many of these, of course, being Negroes.
+
+There is still another factor to be considered--a factor which because
+of its great scope is more ominous than any yet mentioned. This is the
+underpaid mass of workers in the United States--workers whose
+low wages are forcing them deeper into want each day. Let Senator
+Borah, not a radical nor even a reformer, but a leader of the
+Republican party, tell the story. "Fifty-seven per cent of the
+families in the United States have incomes of $800 or less," said
+he in a speech before the Senate, August 24, 1917, "Seventy per cent
+of the families of our country have incomes of $1,000 or less. Tell me
+how a man so situated can have shelter for his family; how he can provide
+food and clothing. He is an industrial peon. His home is scant and pinched
+beyond the power of language to tell. He sees his wife and children on the
+ragged edge of hunger from week to week and month to month. If sickness
+comes, he faces suicide or crime. He cannot educate his children;
+he cannot fit them for citizenship; he cannot even fit them as soldiers
+to die for their country.
+
+"It is the tragedy of our whole national life--how these people live
+in such times as these. We have not yet gathered the fruits of such an
+industrial condition in this country. We have been saved thus far by
+reason of the newness of our national life, our vast public lands now
+almost exhausted, our great natural resources now fast being seized
+and held, but the hour of reckoning will come."
+
+Senator Borah was thinking, doubtless, of open revolution, of
+bloodshed and the destruction of property. In a far more terrible
+sense, the reckoning which he has referred to is already upon us. The
+ills we suffer as the result of the conditions now prevailing in the
+United States are appalling in their sum.
+
+It is these conditions that produce the 3,000,000 child laborers of
+the United States; child slaves who undergo hardships that blight them
+physically and mentally, leaving them fit only to produce human beings
+whose deficiencies and misfortunes will exceed their own.
+
+From these same elements, living under these same conditions come the
+feebleminded and other defectives. Just how many feebleminded there
+are in the United States, no one knows, because no attempt has ever
+been made to give public care to all of them, and families are more
+inclined to conceal than to reveal the mental defects of their
+members. Estimates vary from 350,000 at the present time to nearly
+400,000 as early as 1890, Henry H. Goddard, Ph. D., of the Vineland,
+N. J., Training School, being authority for the latter statement. Only
+34,137 of these unfortunates were under institutional care in the
+United States in 1916, the rest being free to propagate their kind--piling
+up public burdens for future generations. The feebleminded are
+notoriously prolific in reproduction. The close relationship between
+poverty and ignorance and the production of feebleminded is shown by
+Anne Moore, Ph.D., in a report to the Public Education Association of
+New York in 1911. She found that an overwhelming proportion of the
+classified feebleminded children in New York schools came from large
+families living in overcrowded slum conditions, and that only a small
+percentage were born of native parents.
+
+Sixty thousand prostitutes go and come anew each year in the United
+States. This army of unfortunates, as social workers and scientists
+testify, come from families living under like conditions of want.
+
+In the New York City schools alone in December, 1916, 61 per cent of
+the children were suffering from undernourishment and 21 per cent in
+immediate danger of it. These facts, also the result of the conditions
+outlined, were discovered by the city Bureau of Child Hygiene.
+
+Another item in the sordid list is that of venereal disease. In his
+pamphlet entitled "_The Venereal Diseases_," issued in 1918, Dr.
+Hermann M. Biggs head of the New York State Department of Health
+quoted authorities who gave estimates of the amount of syphilis and
+gonorrhea in the United States. One says that 60 per cent of the men
+contract one disease or the other at some time. Another said that 40
+per cent of the population of New York City had syphilis, one of the
+most terrible of all maladies. Poverty, delayed marriage,
+prostitution--a brief and terrible chain accounts for this scourge.
+
+Finally, there is tuberculosis, bred by bad housing conditions and
+contributed to in frightful measure by poor food and unhealthy
+surroundings during the hours of employment. Dr. Frederick L. Hoffman,
+director of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of
+Tuberculosis and foremost statistical authority upon tuberculosis in
+the United States, says: "We know of 2,000,000 tubercular persons in
+the United States."
+
+Does this picture horrify the reader? This is not the whole truth. A
+few scattered statistics lack the power to reflect the broken lives of
+overworked fathers, the ceaseless, increasing pain of overburdened
+mothers and the agony of childhood fighting its way against the
+handicaps of ill health, insufficient food, inadequate training and
+stifling toil.
+
+Can we expect to remedy this situation by dismissing the problem of
+the submerged native elements with legislative palliatives or treating
+it with careless scorn? Do we better it by driving out of the
+immigrant's heart the dream of liberty that brought him to our shores?
+Do we solve the problem by giving him, instead of an opportunity to
+develop his own culture, low wages, a home in the slums and those
+pseudo-patriotic preachments which constitute our machine-made
+"Americanization"?
+
+Every detail of this sordid situation means a problem that must be
+solved before we can even clear the way for a greater race in America.
+Nor is there any hope of solving any of these problems if we continue
+to attack them in the usual way.
+
+Men have sentimentalized about them and legislated upon them. They
+have denounced them and they have applied reforms. But it has all been
+ridiculously, cruelly futile.
+
+This is the condition of things for which those stand who demand more
+and more children. Each child born under such conditions but makes
+them worse--each child in its own person suffers the consequence of
+the intensified evils.
+
+If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must
+keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as
+well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our
+capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation
+into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals
+as are the ideal of a democracy.
+
+The intelligence of a people is of slow evolutional development--it
+lags far behind the reproductive ability. It is far too slow to cope
+with conditions created by an increasing population, unless that
+increase is carefully regulated.
+
+We must, therefore, not permit an increase in population that we are
+not prepared to care for to the best advantage--that we are not
+prepared to do justice to, educationally and economically. We must
+popularize birth control thinking. We must not leave it haphazardly to
+be the privilege of the already privileged. We must put this means of
+freedom and growth into the hands of the masses.
+
+We must set motherhood free. We must give the foreign and submerged
+mother knowledge that will enable her to prevent bringing to birth
+children she does not want. We know that in each of these submerged
+and semisubmerged elements of the population there are rich factors of
+racial culture. Motherhood is the channel through which these cultures
+flow. Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the
+time and the number of children who shall result from the union,
+automatically works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth
+weaklings; refuses to bring forth slaves; refuses to bear children who
+must live under the conditions described. It withholds the unfit,
+brings forth the fit; brings few children into homes where there is
+not sufficient to provide for them. Instinctively it avoids all those
+things which multiply racial handicaps. Under such circumstances we
+can hope that the "melting pot" will refine. We shall see that it will
+save the precious metals of racial culture, fused into an amalgam of
+physical perfection, mental strength and spiritual progress. Such an
+American race, containing the best of all racial elements, could give
+to the world a vision and a leadership beyond our present imagination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+TWO CLASSES OF WOMEN
+
+
+Thus far we have been discussing mainly one class in America--the
+workers. Most women who belong to the workers' families have no
+accurate or reliable knowledge of contraceptives, and are, therefore,
+bringing children into the world so rapidly that they, their families
+and their class are overwhelmed with numbers. Out of these numbers, as
+has been shown, have grown many of the burdens with which society in
+general is weighted; out of them have come, also, the want, disease,
+hard living conditions and general misery of the workers.
+
+The women of this class are the greatest sufferers of all. Not only do
+they bear the material hardships and deprivations in common with the
+rest of the family, but in the case of the mother, these are
+intensified. It is the man and the child who have first call upon the
+insufficient amount of food. It is the man and the child who get the
+recreation, if there is any to be had, for the man's hours of labor
+are usually limited by law or by his labor union.
+
+It is the woman who suffers first from hunger, the woman whose
+clothing is least adequate, the woman who must work all hours, even
+though she is not compelled, as in the case of millions, to go into a
+factory to add to her husband's scanty income. It is she, too, whose
+health breaks first and most hopelessly, under the long hours of work,
+the drain of frequent childbearing, and often almost constant nursing
+of babies. There are no eight-hour laws to protect the mother against
+overwork and toil in the home; no laws to protect her against ill
+health and the diseases of pregnancy and reproduction. In fact there
+has been almost no thought or consideration given for the protection
+of the mother in the home of the workingman.
+
+There are no general health statistics to tell the full story of the
+physical ills suffered by women as a result of too great
+reproductivity. But we get some light upon conditions through the
+statistics on maternal mortality, compiled by Dr. Grace L. Meigs, for
+the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor. These
+figures do not include the deaths of women suffering from diseases
+complicated by pregnancy.
+
+"In 1913, in this country at least 15,000 women, it is estimated, died
+from conditions caused by childbirth; about 7,000 of these died from
+childbed fever and the remaining 8,000 from diseases now known to be
+to a great extent preventable or curable," says Dr. Meigs in her
+summary, "Physicians and statisticians agree that these figures are a
+_great underestimate_."
+
+Think of it--the needless deaths of 15,000 women a "great
+underestimate"! Yet even this number means that virtually every hour
+of the day and night two women die as the result of childbirth in the
+healthiest and supposedly the most progressive country in the world.
+
+It is apparent that Dr. Meigs leaves out of consideration the many
+thousands of deaths each year of women who become pregnant while
+suffering from tuberculosis. Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, addressing the
+forty-fourth annual convention of the American Public Health
+Association, in Cincinnati in 1916, called attention to the fact that
+some authors hold that "65 per cent of the women afflicted with
+tuberculosis, even when afflicted only in the relatively early and
+curable stages, die as the result of pregnancy which could have been
+avoided and their lives saved had they but known some means of
+prevention." Nor were syphilis, various kidney and heart disorders and
+other diseases, often rendered fatal by pregnancy, taken into account
+by Dr. Meigs' survey.
+
+Still, leaving out all the hundreds of thousands of women who die
+because pregnancy has complicated serious diseases, Dr. Meigs finds
+that "in 1913, the death rate per 100,000 of the population from all
+conditions caused by childbirth was little lower than that from
+typhoid fever. This rate would be almost quadrupled if only the group
+of the population which can be affected, women of child-bearing ages,
+were considered. In 1913, childbirth caused more deaths among women 15
+to 44 years old than any disease except tuberculosis."
+
+From what sort of homes come these deaths from childbirth? Most of
+them occur in overcrowded dwellings, where food, care, sanitation,
+nursing and medical attention are inadequate. Where do we find most of
+the tuberculosis and much of the other disease which is aggravated by
+pregnancy? In the same sort of home.
+
+The deadly chain of misery is all too plain to anyone who takes the
+trouble to observe it. A woman of the working class marries and with
+her husband lives in a degree of comfort upon his earnings. Her
+household duties are not beyond her strength. Then the children begin
+to come--one, two, three, four, possibly five or more. The earnings of
+the husband do not increase as rapidly as the family does. Food,
+clothing and general comfort in the home grow less as the numbers of
+the family increase. The woman's work grows heavier, and her strength
+is less with each child. Possibly--probably--she has to go into a
+factory to add to her husband's earnings. There she toils, doing her
+housework at night. Her health goes, and the crowded conditions and
+lack of necessities in the home help to bring about disease--especially
+tuberculosis. Under the circumstances, the woman's chances of
+recovering from each succeeding childbirth grow less. Less too are
+the chances of the child's surviving, as shown by tables in another
+chapter. Unwanted children, poverty, ill health, misery, death--these
+are the links in the chain, and they are common to most of the
+families in the class described in the preceding chapter.
+
+Nor is the full story of the woman's sufferings yet told. Grievous as
+is her material condition, her spiritual deprivations are still
+greater. By the very fact of its existence, mother love demands its
+expression toward the child. By that same fact, it becomes a necessary
+factor in the child's development. The mother of too many children, in
+a crowded home where want, ill health and antagonism are perpetually
+created, is deprived of this simplest personal expression. She can
+give nothing to her child of herself, of her personality. Training is
+impossible and sympathetic guidance equally so. Instead, such a mother
+is tired, nervous, irritated and ill-tempered; a determent, often,
+instead of a help to her children. Motherhood becomes a disaster and
+childhood a tragedy.
+
+It goes without saying that this woman loses also all opportunity of
+personal expression outside her home. She has neither a chance to
+develop social qualities nor to indulge in social pleasures. The
+feminine element in her--that spirit which blossoms forth now and then
+in women free from such burdens--cannot assert itself. She can
+contribute nothing to the wellbeing of the community. She is a
+breeding machine and a drudge--she is not an asset but a liability to
+her neighborhood, to her class, to society. She can be nothing as long
+as she is denied means of limiting her family.
+
+In sharp contrast with these women who ignorantly bring forth large
+families and who thereby enslave themselves, we find a few women who
+have one, two or three children or no children at all. These women,
+with the exception of the childless ones, live full-rounded lives.
+They are found not only in the ranks of the rich and the well-to-do,
+but in the ranks of labor as well. They have but one point of basic
+difference from their enslaved sisters--they are not burdened with the
+rearing of large families.
+
+We have no need to call upon the historian, the sociologist nor the
+statistician for our knowledge of this situation. We meet it every day
+in the ordinary routine of our lives. The women who are the great
+teachers, the great writers, the artists, musicians, physicians, the
+leaders of public movements, the great suffragists, reformers, labor
+leaders and revolutionaries are those who are not compelled to give
+lavishly of their physical and spiritual strength in bearing and
+rearing large families. The situation is too familiar for discussion.
+Where a woman with a large family is contributing directly to the
+progress of her times or the betterment of social conditions, it is
+usually because she has sufficient wealth to employ trained nurses,
+governesses, and others who perform the duties necessary to child
+rearing. She is a rarity and is universally recognized as such.
+
+The women with small families, however, are free to make their choice
+of those social pleasures which are the right of every human being and
+necessary to each one's full development. They can be and are, each
+according to her individual capacity, comrades and companions to their
+husbands--a privilege denied to the mother of many children. Theirs is
+the opportunity to keep abreast of the times, to make and cultivate a
+varied circle of friends, to seek amusements as suits their taste and
+means, to know the meaning of real recreation. All these things remain
+unrealized desires to the prolific mother.
+
+Women who have a knowledge of contraceptives are not compelled to make
+the choice between a maternal experience and a marred love life; they
+are not forced to balance motherhood against social and spiritual
+activities. Motherhood is for them to choose, as it should be for
+every woman to choose. Choosing to become mothers, they do not thereby
+shut themselves away from thorough companionship with their husbands,
+from friends, from culture, from all those manifold experiences which
+are necessary to the completeness and the joy of life.
+
+Fit mothers of the race are these, the courted comrades of the men
+they choose, rather than the "slaves of slaves." For theirs is the
+magic power--the power of limiting their families to such numbers as
+will permit them to live full-rounded lives. Such lives are the
+expression of the feminine spirit which is woman _and all of her_--not
+merely art, nor professional skill, nor intellect--but all that woman
+is, or may achieve.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE WICKEDNESS OF CREATING LARGE FAMILIES
+
+
+The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing
+into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day
+is breeding too many children. These statements may startle those who
+have never made a thorough investigation of the problem. They are,
+nevertheless, well considered, and the truth of them is abundantly
+borne out by an examination of facts and conditions which are part of
+everyday experience or observation.
+
+The immorality of large families lies not only in their injury to the
+members of those families but in their injury to society. If one were
+asked offhand to name the greatest evil of the day one might, in the light
+of one's education by the newspapers, or by agitators, make any one of a
+number of replies. One might say prostitution, the oppression of labor,
+child labor, or war. Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into
+prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly
+cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her
+mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a
+prostitute. Labor is oppressed because it is too plentiful; wages go up
+and conditions improve when labor is scarce. Large families make plentiful
+labor and they also provide the workers for the child-labor factories as
+well as the armies of unemployed. That population, swelled by
+overbreeding, is a basic cause of war, we shall see in a later chapter.
+Without the large family, not one of these evils could exist to any
+considerable extent, much less to the extent that they exist to-day. The
+large family--especially the family too large to receive adequate care--is
+the one thing necessary to the perpetuation of these and other evils and
+is therefore a greater evil than any one of them.
+
+First of the manifold immoralities involved in the producing of a
+large family is the outrage upon the womanhood of the mother. If no
+mother bore children against her will or against her feminine
+instinct, there would be few large families. The average mother of a
+baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so
+far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral
+when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the
+propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against "race suicide."
+The wrong is as great as if the enslaving force were the unbridled
+passions of her husband. The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived
+of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, is in itself
+enough to condemn large families as immoral.
+
+The outrage upon the woman does not end there, however. Excessive
+childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the
+most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America
+hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who
+have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering
+their children, incapable of enjoying life.
+
+"Every physician," writes Dr. Wm. J. Robinson in _Birth Control or The
+Limitation of Offspring_, "knows that too frequent childbirth, nursing
+and the sleepless nights that are required in bringing up a child
+exhaust the vitality of thousands of mothers, make them prematurely
+old, or turn them into chronic invalids."
+
+The effect of the large family upon the father is only less disastrous
+than it is upon the mother. The spectacle of the young man, happy in
+health, strength and the prospect of a joyful love life, makes us
+smile in sympathy. But this same young man ten years later is likely
+to present a spectacle as sorry as it is familiar. If he finds that
+the children come one after another at short intervals--so fast indeed
+that no matter how hard he works, nor how many hours, he cannot keep
+pace with their needs--the lover whom all the world loves will have
+been converted into a disheartened, threadbare incompetent, whom all
+the world pities or despises. Instead of being the happy, competent
+father, supporting one or two children as they should be supported, he
+is the frantic struggler against the burden of five or six, with the
+tragic prospect of several more. The ranks of the physically weakened,
+mentally dejected and spiritually hopeless young fathers of large
+families attest all too strongly the immorality of the system.
+
+If its effects upon the mother and the wage-earning father were not
+enough to condemn the large family as an institution, its effects upon
+the child would make the case against it conclusive. In the United
+States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve
+months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or
+indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting
+from poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother.
+
+The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner's family
+and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by
+a number of studies of the infant death rate. One of the clearest of
+these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr.
+Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress.
+[Footnote: Problems in Eugenics, London, 1913.] Taking 26,000 births
+from unselected marriages, and omitting families having one and two
+children, Geissler got this result:
+
+                     Deaths During
+                     First Year.
+   1st born children    23%
+   2nd  "    "          20%
+   3rd  "    "          21%
+   4th  "    "          23%
+   5th  "    "          26%
+   6th  "    "          29%
+   7th  "    "          31%
+   8th  "    "          33%
+   9th  "    "          36%
+  10th  "    "          41%
+  11th  "    "          51%
+  12th  "    "          60%
+
+Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance
+to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and
+less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live
+twelve months.
+
+This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go
+farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a
+year die before they reach the age of five.
+
+Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the
+immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of
+proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find
+difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most
+merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members
+is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant
+mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the
+ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the
+health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes
+of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this
+condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that
+the child who must struggle for health in competition with other
+members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to
+meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted
+for.
+
+The probability of a child handicapped by a weak constitution, an
+overcrowded home, inadequate food and care, and possibly a deficient
+mental equipment, winding up in prison or an almshouse, is too evident
+for comment. Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and
+institution for the feebleminded cries out against the evils of too
+prolific breeding among wage-workers.
+
+We shall see when we come to consider the relation of voluntary
+motherhood to the rights of labor and to the prevention of war that
+the large family of the worker makes possible his oppression, and that
+it also is the chief cause of such human holocausts as the one just
+closed after the four and a half bloodiest years in history. No such
+extended consideration is necessary to indicate from what source the
+young slaves in the child-labor factories come. They come from large
+impoverished families--from families in which the older children must
+put their often feeble strength to the task of supporting the younger.
+
+The immorality of bringing large families into the world is recognized
+by those who are combatting the child-labor evil. Mary Alden Hopkins,
+writing in Harper's Weekly in 1915, quotes Owen R. Lovejoy, general
+secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, as follows:
+
+"How many are too many? ... Any more than the mother can look after
+and the father make a living for ... Under present conditions as soon
+as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go
+to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by. In doing
+this, they not only injure their tender growing bodies, but
+indirectly, they drag down the father's wage ... The home becomes a
+mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with
+weariness and minds drunk with sleep." And if they survive the
+factory, they marry to perpetuate and multiply their ignorance,
+weakness and diseases.
+
+What have large families to do with prostitution? Ask anyone who has
+studied the problem. The size of the family has a direct bearing on
+the lives of thousands of girls who are living in prostitution.
+Poverty, lack of care and training during adolescence, overcrowded
+housing conditions which accompany large families are universally
+recognized causes of "waywardness" in girls. Social workers have cried
+out in vain against these conditions, pointing to their inevitable
+results.
+
+In the foreword to "Downward Paths," A. Maude Royden says: "Intimately
+connected with this aspect of the question is that of home and
+housing, especially of the child. The age at which children are first
+corrupted is almost incredibly early, until we consider the nature of
+the surroundings in which they grow up. Insufficient space, over-crowding,
+the herding together of all ages and both sexes--these things break
+down the barriers of a natural modesty and reserve. Where decency
+is practically impossible, unchastity will follow, and follow
+almost as a matter of course." And the child who has no place to play
+except in the street, who lacks mother care, whose chief emotional
+experience is the longing for the necessities of life? We know too
+well the end of the sorry tale. The forlorn figures of the shadows
+where lurk the girls who sell themselves that they may eat and be
+clothed rise up to damn the moral dogmatists, who mouth their
+sickening exhortations to the wives and mothers of the workers to
+breed, breed, breed.
+
+The evidence is conclusive as regards the large family of the
+wage-worker. Social workers, physicians and reformers cry out to stop the
+breeding of these, who must exist in want until they become permanent
+members of the ranks of the unfit.
+
+But what of the family of the wealthy or the merely well-to-do? It is
+among these classes that we find the women who have attained to
+voluntary motherhood. It is to these classes, too, that the "race
+suicide" alarmists have from time to time addressed specially
+emphasized pleas for more children. The advocates of more prolific
+breeding urge that these same women have more intelligence, better
+health, more time to care for children and more means to support them.
+They therefore declare that it is the duty of such women to populate
+the land with strong, healthy, intelligent offspring--to bear children
+in great numbers.
+
+It is high time to expose the sheer foolishness of this argument. The
+first absurdity is that the women who are in comfortable circumstances
+could continue to be cultured and of social value if they were the
+mothers of large families. Neither could they maintain their present
+standard of health nor impart it to their children.
+
+While it is true that they have resources at their command which ease
+the burden of child-bearing and child rearing immeasurably, it is also
+true that the wealthy mother, as well as the poverty-stricken mother,
+must give from her own system certain elements which it takes time to
+replace. Excessive childbearing is harder on the woman who lacks care
+than on the one who does not, but both alike must give their bodies
+time to recover from the strain of childbearing. If the women in
+fortunate circumstances gave ear to the demand of masculine
+"race-suicide"[A] fanatics they could within a few years be down to the
+condition of their sisters who lack time to cultivate their talents
+and intellects. A vigorous, intelligent, fruitfully cultured
+motherhood is all but impossible if no restriction is placed by that
+motherhood upon the number of children.
+
+[Footnote A: Interesting and perhaps surprising light is thrown upon
+the origin of the term "race suicide" by the following quotation from
+an article by Harold Bolce in the Cosmopolitan (New York) for May,
+1909:
+
+"'The sole effect of prolificacy is to fill the cemeteries with tiny
+graves, sacrifices of the innocents to the Moloch of immoderate
+maternity.' Thus insists Edward A. Ross, Professor of Sociology in the
+University of Wisconsin; and he protests against the 'dwarfing of
+women and the cheapening of men' as regards the restriction of the
+birth rate as a 'movement at bottom salutary, and its evils minor,
+transient and curable.' This is virile gospel, and particularly
+significant coming from the teacher who invented the term 'race
+suicide,' which many have erroneously attributed to Mr. Roosevelt."]
+
+Wage-workers and salaried people have a vital interest in the size of
+the families of those better situated in life. Large families among
+the rich are immoral not only because they invade the natural right of
+woman to the control of her own body, to self-development and to
+self-expression, but because they are oppressive to the poorer elements of
+society. If the upper and middle classes of society had kept pace with
+the poorer elements of society in reproduction during the past fifty
+years, the working class to-day would be forced down to the level of
+the Chinese whose wage standard is said to be a few handfuls of rice a
+day.
+
+If these considerations are not enough to halt the masculine advocate
+of large families who reminds us of the days of our mothers and
+grandmothers, let it be remembered that bearing and rearing six or
+eight children to-day is a far different matter from what it was in
+the generations just preceding. Physically and nervously, the woman of
+to-day is not fitted to bear children as frequently as was her mother
+and her mother's mother. The high tension of modern life and the
+complicating of woman's everyday existence have doubtless contributed
+to this result. And who of us can say, until a careful scientific
+investigation is made, how much the rapid development of tuberculosis
+and other grave diseases, even among the well-nurtured, may be due to
+the depletion of the physical capital of the unborn by the too
+prolific childbearing of preceding generations of mothers?
+
+The immorality of bringing into being a large family is a wrong-doing
+shared by three--the mother, the father and society. Upon all three
+falls the burden of guilt. It may be said for the mother and father
+that they are usually ignorant. What shall be said of society? What
+shall be said of us who permit outworn laws and customs to persist in
+piling up the appalling sum of public expense, misery and spiritual
+degradation? The indictment against the large unwanted family is
+written in human woe. Who in the light of intelligent understanding
+shall have the brazenness to stand up and defend it?
+
+One thing we know--the woman who has escaped the chains of too great
+reproductivity will never again wear them. The birth rate of the
+wealthy and upper classes will never appreciably rise. The woman of
+these classes is free of her most oppressive bonds. Being free, we
+have a right to expect much of her. We expect her to give still
+greater expression to her feminine spirit--we expect her to enrich the
+intellectual, artistic, moral and spiritual life of the world. We
+expect her to demolish old systems of morals, a degenerate prudery,
+Dark-Age religious concepts, laws that enslave women by denying them
+the knowledge of their bodies, and information as to contraceptives.
+These must go to the scrapheap of vicious, cast-off things. Hers is
+the power to send them there. Shall we look to her to strike the first
+blow which shall wrench her sisters from the grip of the dead hand of
+the past?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+CRIES OF DESPAIR AND SOCIETY'S PROBLEMS
+
+
+Before we pass to a further consideration of our subject, shall we not
+pause to take a still closer look at the human misery wrought by the
+enslavement of women through unwilling motherhood? Would you know the
+appalling sum of this misery better than any author, any scientist,
+any physician, any social worker can tell you? Hear the story from the
+lips of the women themselves. Learn at first hand what it means to
+make a broken drudge of a woman who might have been the happy mother
+of a few strong children. Learn from the words of the victims of
+involuntary motherhood what it means to them, to their children and to
+society to force the physically unfit or the unwilling to bear
+children. When you have learned, stop to ask yourself what is the
+worth of the law, the moral code, the tradition, the religion, that
+for the sake of an outworn dogma of submission would wreck the lives
+of these women, condemn their progeny to pain, want, disease and
+helplessness. Ask yourself if these letters, these cries of despair,
+born of the anguish of woman's sex slavery are not in themselves
+enough to stop the mouths of the demagogues, the imperialists and the
+ecclesiastics who clamor for more and yet more children? And if the
+pain of others has no power to move your heart and stir your hands and
+brain to action, ask yourself the more selfish question: Can the
+children of these unfortunate mothers be other than a burden to
+society--a burden which reflects itself in innumerable phases of cost,
+crime and general social detriment?
+
+"For our own sakes--for our children's sakes--" plead the mothers,
+"help us! Let us be women, rather than breeding machines."
+
+The women who thus cry out are pleading not only for themselves and
+their children, but for society itself. Their plea is for us and
+ours--it is the plea for happier conditions, for higher ideals, for a
+stronger, more vigorous, more highly developed race.
+
+The letters in this chapter are the voices of humble prophets crying
+out to us stop our national habit of human waste. They are warnings
+against disaster which we now share and must continue to share as it
+grows worse, unless we heed the warning and put our national house in
+order.
+
+Each and every unwanted child is likely to be in some way a social
+liability. It is only the wanted child who is likely to be a social
+asset. If we have faith in this intuitive demand of the unfortunate
+mothers, if we understand both its dire and its hopeful significance,
+we shall dispose of those social problems which so insistently and
+menacingly confront us today. For the instinct of maternity to protect
+its own fruits, the instinct of womanhood to be free to give something
+besides surplus of children to the world, cannot go astray. The rising
+generation is always the material of progress, and motherhood is the
+agency for the improvement and the strengthening and guiding of that
+generation.
+
+The excerpts contained in this chapter are typical of the letters
+which come to me by the thousands. They tell their own story,
+simply--sometimes ungrammatically and illiterately, but nevertheless
+irresistibly. It is the story of slow murder of the helpless by a
+society that shields itself behind ancient, inhuman moral creeds--which
+dares to weigh those dead creeds against the agony of the living
+who pray for the "mercy of death."
+
+Can a mother who would "rather die" than bear more children serve
+society by bearing still others? Can children carried through nine
+months of dread and unspeakable mental anguish and born into an
+atmosphere of fear and anger, to grow up uneducated and in want, be a
+benefit to the world? Here is what the mother says:
+
+"I have read in the paper about you and am very interested in Birth
+Control I am a mother of four living children and one dead the oldest
+10 and baby 22 months old. I am very nervous and sickly after my
+children. I would like you to advise me what to do to prevent from
+having any more as I would rather die than have another. I am keeping
+away from my husband as much as I can, but it causes quarrels and
+almost separation. All my babies have had marasmus in the first year
+of their lives and I almost lost my baby last summer. I always worry
+about my children so much. My husband works in a brass foundry it is
+not a very good job and living is so high that we have to live as
+cheap as possible. I've only got 2 rooms and kitchen and I do all my
+work and sewing which is very hard for me."
+
+Shall this woman continue to be forced into a life of unnatural
+continence which further aggravates her ill health and produces
+constant discord? Shall she go on having children who come into being
+with a heritage of ill health and poverty, and who are bound to become
+public burdens? Or would it be the better policy to let motherhood
+follow its instinct to save itself, its offspring and society from
+these ills?
+
+Or shall women be forced into abortion, as is testified by the mother
+whose daughters are mothers, and who, in the hope of saving them from
+both slavery and the destruction of their unborn children, wrote the
+letter which follows:
+
+"I have born and raised 6 children and I know all the hardships of
+raising a large family. I am now 53 years old and past having children
+but I have 3 daughters that have 2 children each and they say they
+will die before they will have any more and every now and again they
+go to a doctor and get rid of one and some day I think it will kill
+them but they say they don't care for they will be better dead than
+live in hell with a big family and nothing to raise them on. It is for
+there sakes I wish you to give me that information."
+
+What could the three women mentioned in this letter contribute to the
+wellbeing of the future American race? Nothing, except by doing
+exactly what they wish to do--refusing to bear children that they do
+not want and cannot care for. Their instinct is sound--but what is to
+be said of the position of society at large, which forces women who
+are in the grip of a sound instinct to seek repeated abortions in
+order to follow that instinct? Are we not compelling women to choose
+between inflicting injury upon themselves, their children and the
+community, and undergoing an abhorrent operation which kills the
+tenderness and delicacy of womanhood, even as it may injure or kill
+the body?
+
+Will the offspring of a paralytic, who must perforce neglect the
+physical care and training of her children, enhance the common good by
+their coming? Here is a letter from a paralytic mother, whose days and
+nights are tortured by the thought of another child, and whose reason
+is tottering at the prospect of leaving her children without her care:
+
+"I sent for a copy of your magazine and now feel I must write you to
+see if you can help me.
+
+"I was a high school girl who married a day laborer seven years ago.
+In a few months I will again be a mother, the fourth child in less
+than six years. While carrying my babies am always partly paralyzed on
+one side. Do not know the cause but the doctor said at last birth we
+must be 'more careful,' as I could not stand having so many children.
+Am always very sick for a long time and have to have chloroform.
+
+"We can afford help only about 3 weeks, until I am on my feet again,
+after confinement. I work as hard as I can but my work and my children
+are always neglected. I wonder if my body does survive this next birth
+if my reason will.
+
+"It is terrible to think of bringing these little bodies and souls
+into the world without means or strength to care for them. And I can
+see no relief unless you give it to me or tell me where to get it. I
+am weaker each time and I know that this must be the last one, for it
+would be better for me to go, than to bring more neglected babies into
+the world. I can hardly sleep at night for worrying. Is there an
+answer for women like me?"
+
+In another chapter, we have gotten a glimpse of the menace of the
+feebleminded. Here is a woman who is praying for help to avoid adding
+to the number of mentally helpless:
+
+"My baby is only 10 months old and the oldest one of four is 7, and
+more care than a baby, has always been helpless. We do not own a roof
+over our heads and I am so discouraged I want to die if nothing can be
+done. Can't you help me just this time and then I know I can take care
+of myself. Ignorance on this all important subject has put me where I
+am. I don't know how to be sure of bringing myself around. I beg of
+you to help me and anything I can do to help further your wonderful
+work I will do. Only help me this once, no one will know only I will
+be blessed.
+
+"I not only have a terrible time when I am confined but caring for the
+oldest child it preys so on my mind that I fear more defective
+children. Help me please!"
+
+The offspring of one feebleminded man named Jukes has cost the public
+in one way and another $1,300,000 in seventy-five years. Do we want
+more such families? Is this woman standing guard for the general
+welfare? Had she been permitted the use of contraceptives before she
+was forced to make a vain plea for abortion, would she not have
+rendered a service to her fellow citizens, as well as to herself?
+
+Millions are spent in the United States every year to combat
+tuberculosis. The national waste involved in illness and deaths from
+tuberculosis runs up into the billions. Is it then good business, to
+say nothing of the humane aspects of the situation, to compel the
+writer of the following letter to go on adding to the number of the
+tubercular? Which is the guardian of public welfare here--the mother
+instinct which wishes to avoid bearing tubercular children, or the
+statute which forbids her to know how to avoid adding to the census of
+"white plague" victims? The letter reads:
+
+"Kindly pardon me for writing this to you, not knowing what trouble
+this may cause you. But I've heard of you through a friend and realize
+you are a friend of humanity. If people would see with your light, the
+world would be healthy. I married the first time when I was eighteen
+years old, a drinking man. I became mother to five children. In 1908
+my husband died of consumption. I lost two of my oldest children from
+the same disease, one at 16 and the other at 23. The youngest of them
+all, a sweet girl of nineteen, now lies at ---- sanatorium expecting
+to leave us at any time. The other sister and brother look very
+poorly.
+
+"I have always worked very hard, because I had to. In 1913 I married
+again, a good man this time, but a laboring man, and our constant fear
+and trouble is what may happen if we bring children into the world.
+I'm forty-six years old this month and not very well any more, either.
+So a godsend will be some one who can tell me how to care for myself,
+so I can be free from suffering and also not bring mortals to earth to
+suffer and die."
+
+Not even the blindest of all dogmatists can ignore the danger to the
+community of to-day and the race of to-morrow in permitting an insane
+woman to go on bearing children. Here is a letter which tells a
+two-sided story--how mother instinct, even when clouded by periodic
+insanity, seeks to protect itself and society, and how society
+prevents her from attaining that end:
+
+"There is a woman in this town who has six children and is expecting
+another. Directly after the birth of a child, she goes insane, a
+raving maniac, and they send her to the insane asylum. While she is
+gone, her home and children are cared for by neighbors. After about
+six months, they discharge her and she comes home and is in a family
+way again in a few months. Still the doctors will do nothing for her.
+
+"She is a well-educated woman and says if she would not have any more
+children, she is sure she could be entirely free from these insane
+spells.
+
+"If you will send me one of your pamphlets, I will give it to her and
+several others equally deserving.
+
+"Hoping you will see fit to grant my request, I remain, etc."
+
+The very word "syphilis" brings a shudder to anyone who is familiar
+with the horrors of the malady. Not only in the suffering brought to
+the victim himself and in the danger of infecting others, but in the
+dire legacy of helplessness and disease which is left to the offspring
+of the syphilitic, is this the most destructive socially, of all
+"plagues." Here is a letter, which as a criticism of our present
+public policy in regard to national waste and to contraceptives,
+defies comment:
+
+"I was left without a father when a girl of fourteen years old. I was
+the oldest child of five. My mother had no means of support except her
+two hands, so we worked at anything we could, my job being nurse girl
+at home while mother worked most of the time, as she could earn more
+money than I could, for she could do harder work.
+
+"I wasn't very strong and finally after two years my mother got so
+tired and worn out trying to make a living for so many, she married
+again, and as she married a poor man, we children were not much better
+off. At the age of seventeen I married a man, a brakeman on
+the ---- Railroad, who was eleven years older than I. He drank some and
+was a very frail-looking man, but I was very ignorant of the world and did
+not think of anything but making a home for myself and husband. After
+eleven months I had a little girl born to me. I did not want more
+children, but my mother-in-law told me it was a terrible sin to do
+anything to keep from having children and that the Lord only sent just
+what I could take care of and if I heard of anything to do I was told
+it was injurious, so I did not try.
+
+"In eleven months again, October 25, I had another little puny girl.
+In twenty-three months, Sept. 25th, I had a seven-lb. boy. In ten
+months, July 15, I had a seven-months baby that lived five hours. In
+eleven months, June 20, I had another little girl. In seventeen
+months, Nov. 30, another boy. In nine months a four months'
+miscarriage. In twelve months another girl, and in three and a half
+years another girl.
+
+"All of these children were born into poverty; the father's health was
+always poor, and when the third girl was born he was discharged from
+the road because of his disability, yet he was still able to put
+children into the world. When the oldest child was twelve years old
+the father died of concussion of the brain while the youngest child
+was born two months after his death.
+
+"Now, Mrs. Sanger, I did not want those children, because even in my
+ignorance I had sense enough to know that I had no right to bring
+those children into such a world where they could not have decent
+care, for I was not able to do it myself nor hire it done. I prayed
+and I prayed that they would die when they were born. Praying did no
+good and to-day I have read and studied enough to know that I am the
+mother of seven living children and that I committed a crime by
+bringing them into the world, their father was syphilitic (I did not
+know about such things when I was a girl). One son is to be sent to
+Mexico, while one of my girls is a victim of the white slave traffic.
+
+"I raised my family in a little college town in ---- and am well known
+there, for I made my living washing and working for the college people
+while I raised my little brood. I often wondered why those educated
+well-to-do people never had so many children. I have one married
+daughter who is tubercular, and she also has two little girls, only a
+year apart. I feel so bad about it, and write to ask you to send me
+information for her. Don't stop your good work; don't think it's not
+appreciated; for there are hundreds of women like myself who are not
+afraid to risk their lives to help you to get this information to poor
+women who need it."
+
+There is no need to go on repeating these cries. These letters have
+come to me by the thousands. There are enough of them to fill many
+volumes--each with its own individual tragedy, each with its own
+warning to society.
+
+Every ill that we are trying to cure to-day is reflected in them. The
+wife who through an unwilling continence drives her husband to
+prostitution; habitual drunkenness, which prohibition may or may not
+have disposed of as a social problem; mothers who toil in mills and
+whose children must follow them to that toil, adding to the long train
+of evils involved in child labor; mothers who have brought eight, ten,
+twelve or fifteen undernourished, weakly children into the world to
+become public burdens of one sort or another--all these and more, with
+the ever-present economic problem, and women who are remaining
+unmarried because they fear a large family which must exist in want;
+men who are living abnormal lives for the same reason. All the social
+handicaps and evils of the day are woven into these letters--and out
+of each of them rises these challenging facts: First, oppressed
+motherhood knows that the cure for these evils lies in birth control;
+second, society has not yet learned to permit motherhood to stand
+guard for itself, its children, the common good and the coming race.
+And one reading such letters, and realizing their significance, is
+constrained to wonder how long such a situation can exist.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WHEN SHOULD A WOMAN AVOID HAVING CHILDREN?
+
+
+Are overburdened mothers justified in their appeals for contraceptives
+or abortions? What shall we say to women who write such letters as
+those published in the preceding chapter? Will anyone, after reading
+those letters, dare to say to these women that they should go on
+bringing helpless children into the world to share their increasing
+misery?
+
+The women who thus cry for aid are the victims of ignorance. Awakening
+from that ignorance, they are demanding relief. Had they been
+permitted a knowledge of their sex functions, had they had some
+guiding principle of motherhood, those who at this late day are asking
+for contraceptives would have swept aside all barriers and procured
+them long ago. Those who are appealing for abortions would never have
+been in such a situation.
+
+To say to these women that they should continue their helpless
+breeding of the helpless is stupid brutality. The facts set forth
+earlier in this book, and the cries of tortured motherhood which echo
+through the letters just referred to, are more than ample evidence
+that there are times when it is woman's highest duty to refuse to bear
+children.
+
+There has seemed to be a great deal of disagreement among the medical
+authorities who have attempted to say when a woman should not have
+children. This disagreement has been rendered even more confusing by a
+babel of voices from the ranks of sociologists. Within the past few
+years, however, so much light has been shed upon the subject that it
+is now comparatively easy for the student to separate the well-founded
+conclusions from those which are of doubtful value, or plainly
+worthless. The opinions which I summarize here are not so much my own,
+originally, as those of medical authorities who have made deep and
+careful investigations. There is, however, nothing set forth here
+which I have not in my own studies tested and proved correct. In
+addition to carrying the weight of the best medical authority, a fact
+easily confirmed by the first specialist you meet, they are further
+reinforced by the findings of the federal Children's Bureau, and other
+organizations which have examined infant mortality and compiled rates.
+
+To the woman who wishes to have children, we must give these answers
+to the question when not to have them.
+
+Childbearing should be avoided within two or three years after the
+birth of the last child. Common sense and science unite in pointing
+out that the mother requires at least this much time to regain her
+strength and replenish her system in order to give another baby proper
+nourishment after its birth. Authorities are insistent upon their
+warnings that too frequent childbearing wrecks the woman's health.
+Weakness of the reproductive organs and pelvic ailments almost
+certainly result if a woman bears children too frequently.
+
+By all means there should be no children when either mother or father
+suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis,
+cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the
+case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic
+deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing.
+
+Thousands of volumes have been written by physicians upon the danger
+to mothers and offspring of having children when one or both parents
+are suffering from the diseases mentioned above. As authorities have
+pointed out in all these books, the jails, hospitals for the insane,
+poorhouses and houses of prostitution are filled with the children
+born of such parents, while an astounding number of their children are
+either stillborn or die in infancy.
+
+These facts are now so well known that they would need little
+discussion here, even if space permitted. Miscarriages, which are
+particularly frequent in cases of syphilis and pelvic deformities, are
+a great source of danger to the health and even to the life of the
+mother. Where either parent suffers from gonorrhea, the child is in
+danger of being born blind. Tuberculosis in the parent leaves the
+child's system in such condition that it is likely to suffer from the
+disease. Childbearing is also a grave danger to the tubercular mother.
+A tendency to insanity, if not insanity itself, may be transmitted to
+the child, or it may be feebleminded if one of the parents is insane
+or suffers from any mental disorder. Drunkenness in the parent or
+parents has been found to be the cause of feeblemindedness in the
+offspring and to leave the child with a constitution too weak to
+resist disease as it should.
+
+No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy
+themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally
+defective. No matter how much they desire children, no man and woman
+have a right to bring into the world those who are to suffer from
+mental or physical affliction. It condemns the child to a life of
+misery and places upon the community the burden of caring for it,
+probably for its defective descendants for many generations.
+
+Generally speaking, no woman should bear a child before she is twenty-two
+years old. It is better still that she wait until she is twenty-five.
+High infant mortality rates for mothers under twenty-two attest
+this fact. It is highly desirable from the mother's standpoint to
+postpone childbearing until she has attained a ripe physical and
+mental development, as the bearing and nursing of infants interferes
+with such development. It is also all important to the child; the
+offspring of a woman who is twenty-five or somewhat older has the best
+chance of good physical and mental equipment.
+
+In brief, a woman should avoid having children unless both she and the
+father are in such physical and mental condition as to assure the
+child a healthy physical and mental being. This is the answer that
+must be made to women whose children are fairly sure of good care,
+sufficient food, adequate clothing, a fit place to live and at least a
+fair education.
+
+A distinctly different and exceedingly important side of the problem
+must be considered when the women workers, the wives and the mothers
+of workers, wish to know when to avoid having children. Such a woman
+must answer her own question. What anyone else may tell her is far
+less important than what she herself shall reply to a society that
+demands more and more children and which gives them less and less when
+they arrive.
+
+What shall this woman say to a society that would make of her body a
+reproductive machine only to waste prodigally the fruit of her being?
+Does society value her offspring? Does it not let them die by the
+hundreds of thousands of want, hunger and preventable disease? Does it
+not drive them to the factories, the mills, the mines and the stores
+to be stunted physically and mentally? Does it not throw them into the
+labor market to be competitors with her and their father? Do we not
+find the children of the South filling the mills, working side by side
+with their mothers, while the fathers remain at home? Do we not find
+the father, mother and child competing with one another for their
+daily bread? Does society not herd them in slums? Does it not drive
+the girls to prostitution and the boys to crime? Does it educate them
+for free-spirited manhood and womanhood? Does it even give them during
+their babyhood fit places to live in, fit clothes to wear, fit food to
+eat, or a clean place to play? Does it even permit the mother to give
+them a mother's care?
+
+The woman of the workers knows what society does with her offspring.
+Knowing the bitter truth, learned in unspeakable anguish, what shall
+this woman say to society? The power is in her hands. She can bring
+forth more children to perpetuate these conditions, or she can
+withhold the human grist from these cruel mills which grind only
+disaster.
+
+Shall she say to society that she will go on multiplying the misery
+that she herself has endured? Shall she go on breeding children who
+can only suffer and die? Rather, shall she not say that until society
+puts a higher value upon motherhood she will not be a mother? Shall
+she not sacrifice her mother instincts for the common good and say
+that until children are held as something better than commodities upon
+the labor market, she will bear no more? Shall she not give up her
+desire for even a small family, and say to society that until the
+world is made fit for children to live in, she will have no children
+at all?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+BIRTH CONTROL--A PARENTS' PROBLEM OR WOMAN'S?
+
+
+The problem of birth control has arisen directly from the effort of
+the feminine spirit to free itself from bondage. Woman herself has
+wrought that bondage through her reproductive powers and while
+enslaving herself has enslaved the world. The physical suffering to be
+relieved is chiefly woman's. Hers, too, is the love life that dies
+first under the blight of too prolific breeding. Within her is wrapped
+up the future of the race--it is hers to make or mar. All of these
+considerations point unmistakably to one fact--it is woman's duty as
+well as her privilege to lay hold of the means of freedom. Whatever
+men may do, she cannot escape the responsibility. For ages she has
+been deprived of the opportunity to meet this obligation. She is now
+emerging from her helplessness. Even as no one can share the suffering
+of the overburdened mother, so no one can do this work for her. Others
+may help, but she and she alone can free herself.
+
+The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot
+be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a
+measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. 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.
+
+It does not greatly alter the case that some women call themselves
+free because they earn their own livings, while others profess freedom
+because they defy the conventions of sex relationship. She who earns
+her own living gains a sort of freedom that is not to be undervalued,
+but in quality and in quantity it is of little account beside the
+untrammeled choice of mating or not mating, of being a mother or not
+being a mother. She gains food and clothing and shelter, at least,
+without submitting to the charity of her companion, but the earning of
+her own living does not give her the development of her inner sex
+urge, far deeper and more powerful in its outworkings than any of
+these externals. In order to have that development, she must still
+meet and solve the problem of motherhood.
+
+With the so-called "free" woman, who chooses a mate in defiance of
+convention, freedom is largely a question of character and audacity.
+If she does attain to an unrestricted choice of a mate, she is still
+in a position to be enslaved through her reproductive powers. Indeed,
+the pressure of law and custom upon the woman not legally married is
+likely to make her more of a slave than the woman fortunate enough to
+marry the man of her choice.
+
+Look at it from any standpoint you will, suggest any solution you
+will, conventional or unconventional, sanctioned by law or in defiance
+of law, woman is in the same position, fundamentally, until she is
+able to determine for herself whether she will be a mother and to fix
+the number of her offspring. This unavoidable situation is alone
+enough to make birth control, first of all, a woman's problem. On the
+very face of the matter, voluntary motherhood is chiefly the concern
+of the woman.
+
+It is persistently urged, however, that since sex expression is the
+act of two, the responsibility of controlling the results should not
+be placed upon woman alone. Is it fair, it is asked, to give her,
+instead of the man, the task of protecting herself when she is,
+perhaps, less rugged in physique than her mate, and has, at all
+events, the normal, periodic inconveniences of her sex?
+
+We must examine this phase of her problem in two lights--that of the
+ideal, and of the conditions working toward the ideal. In an ideal
+society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the man
+as well as the woman. The hard, inescapable fact which we encounter
+to-day is that man has not only refused any such responsibility, but
+has individually and collectively sought to prevent woman from
+obtaining knowledge by which she could assume this responsibility for
+herself. She is still in the position of a dependent to-day because
+her mate has refused to consider her as an individual apart from his
+needs. She is still bound because she has in the past left the
+solution of the problem to him. Having left it to him, she finds that
+instead of rights, she has only such privileges as she has gained by
+petitioning, coaxing and cozening. Having left it to him, she is
+exploited, driven and enslaved to his desires.
+
+While it is true that he suffers many evils as the consequence of this
+situation, she suffers vastly more. While it is true that he should be
+awakened to the cause of these evils, we know that they come home to
+her with crushing force every day. It is she who has the long burden
+of carrying, bearing and rearing the unwanted children. It is she who
+must watch beside the beds of pain where lie the babies who suffer
+because they have come into overcrowded homes. It is her heart that
+the sight of the deformed, the subnormal, the undernourished, the
+overworked child smites first and oftenest and hardest. It is _her_
+love life that dies first in the fear of undesired pregnancy. It is
+her opportunity for self expression that perishes first and most
+hopelessly because of it.
+
+Conditions, rather than theories, facts, rather than dreams, govern
+the problem. They place it squarely upon the shoulders of woman. She
+has learned that whatever the moral responsibility of the man in this
+direction may be, he does not discharge it. She has learned that,
+lovable and considerate as the individual husband may be, she has
+nothing to expect from men in the mass, when they make laws and decree
+customs. She knows that regardless of what ought to be, the brutal,
+unavoidable fact is that she will never receive her freedom until she
+takes it for herself.
+
+Having learned this much, she has yet something more to learn. Women
+are too much inclined to follow in the footsteps of men, to try to
+think as men think, to try to solve the general problems of life as
+men solve them. If after attaining their freedom, women accept
+conditions in the spheres of government, industry, art, morals and
+religion as they find them, they will be but taking a leaf out of
+man's book. The woman is not needed to do man's work. She is not
+needed to think man's thoughts. She need not fear that the masculine
+mind, almost universally dominant, will fail to take care of its own.
+Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the
+feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a
+human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its
+activities.
+
+Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by
+that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that
+within her which struggles for expression. Her eyes must be less upon
+what is and more clearly upon what should be. She must listen only
+with a frankly questioning attitude to the dogmatized opinions of
+man-made society. When she chooses her new, free course of action, it must
+be in the light of her own opinion--of her own intuition. Only so can
+she give play to the feminine spirit. Only thus can she free her mate
+from the bondage which he wrought for himself when he wrought hers.
+Only thus can she restore to him that of which he robbed himself in
+restricting her. Only thus can she remake the world.
+
+The world is, indeed, hers to remake, it is hers to build and to
+recreate. Even as she has permitted the suppression of her own
+feminine element and the consequent impoverishment of industry, art,
+letters, science, morals, religions and social intercourse, so it is
+hers to enrich all these.
+
+Woman must have her freedom--the fundamental freedom of choosing
+whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will
+have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers--and
+before it can be his, it is hers alone.
+
+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. That
+right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to
+knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision.
+
+Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers
+and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The
+quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to
+live.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+CONTINENCE--IS IT PRACTICABLE OR DESIRABLE?
+
+
+Thousands of well-intentioned people who agree that there are times
+and conditions under which it is woman's highest duty to avoid having
+children advocate continence as the one permissible means of birth
+control. Few of these people agree with one another, however, as to
+what continence is. Some have in mind absolute continence. Others urge
+continence for periods varying from a few weeks to many years. Still
+others are thinking of Karezza, or male continence, as it is sometimes
+called.
+
+The majority of physicians and sex psychologists hold that the
+practice of absolute continence is, for the greater part of the human
+race, an absurdity. Were such continence to be practiced, there is no
+doubt that it would be a most effective check upon the birth rate. It
+is seldom practiced, however, and when adhered to under compulsion the
+usual result is injury to the nervous system and to the general
+health. Among healthy persons, this method is practicable only with
+those who have a degree of mentally controlled development as yet
+neither often experienced nor even imagined by the mass of humanity.
+
+Absolute continence was the ideal of the early Christian church for
+all of its communicants, as shall be seen in another chapter. We shall
+also see how the church abandoned this standard and now confines the
+doctrine of celibacy to the unmarried, to the priesthood and the nuns.
+
+Celibacy has been practiced in all ages by a few artists,
+propagandists and revolutionists in order that their minds may be
+single to the work which has claimed their lives and all the forces of
+their beings may be bent in one direction. Sometimes, too, such
+persons have remained celibate to avoid the burden of caring for a
+family.
+
+The Rev. Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798 issued the first of
+those works which exemplified what is called the Malthusian doctrine,
+also advocated celibacy or absolute continence until middle age.
+Malthus propounded the now widely recognized principle that population
+tends to increase faster than the food supply and that unlimited
+reproduction brings poverty and many other evils upon a nation. His
+theological training naturally inclined him to favor continence--not
+so much from its practicability, perhaps, as because he believed that
+it was the only possible method.
+
+We would be ignoring a vital truth if we failed to recognize the fact
+that there are individuals who through absorption in religious zeal,
+consecration to a cause, or devotion to creative work are able to live
+for years or for a lifetime a celibate existence. It is doubtless true
+that the number of those who are thus able to transmute their sex
+forces into other creative forms is increasing. It is not with these,
+however, that we are concerned. Rather it is with the mass of
+humanity, who practice continence under some sort of compulsion.
+
+What is the result of forcing continence upon those who are not fitted
+or do not desire to practice it? The majority opinion of medical
+science and the evidence of statistics are united on this point.
+Enforced continence is injurious--often highly so.
+
+"Physiology," writes Dr. J. Rutgers in _Rassenverbesserung_, "teaches
+that every function gains in power and efficiency through a certain
+degree of control, but that the too extended suppression of a desire
+gives rise to pathological disturbances and in time cripples the
+function. Especially in the case of women may the damage entailed by
+too long continued sexual abstinence bring about deep disturbances."
+
+All this, be it understood, refers to persons of mature age. For young
+men and women under certain ages, statistics and the preponderance of
+medical opinion agree that continence is highly advisable, in many
+cases seemingly altogether necessary to future happiness. The famous
+Dr. Bertillon, of France, inventor of the Bertillon system of
+measurements for the human body, has made, perhaps, the most
+exhaustive of all studies in this direction. He demonstrates a large
+mortality for the boy who marries before his twentieth year. When
+single, the mortality of French youths averages only 14 per thousand;
+among married youths it rises to 100 per thousand. Which shows that it
+is six or eight times more perilous for a youth to be incontinent than
+continent up to that age. Dr. Bertillon's conclusions are that men
+should marry between their twenty-fifth and thirtieth years, and that
+women should marry when they have passed twenty. With the single
+exception of young men and women below the ages noted, Dr. Bertillon's
+statistics tell a very different story. And where it relates to
+celibates, it is a shocking one.
+
+"Dr. Bertillon shows that in France, Belgium and Holland married men
+live considerably longer than single ones," writes Dr. Charles R.
+Drysdale, in summing up the matter in "_The Population Question_" "and
+are much less subject to becoming insane, criminal or vicious." From
+the same studies we learn that the conjugal state is also more
+favorable to the health of the woman over twenty years of age, in the
+three countries covered.
+
+An analysis of criminal records showed that more than twice as many
+unmarried men and women had been held for crimes of all kinds than
+married persons. Rates based upon 10,000 cases of insanity among men
+and women in the same countries showed 3.95 per thousand for male
+celibates against 2.17 for married men. For single women the rate was
+3.4 against but 1.9 for married women. Insanity was reduced one-half
+among women by marriage.
+
+More startling still is the evidence of the mortality statistics.
+Bertillon found that the death rates of bachelors and widowers
+averaged from nearly two to nearly three times as high as those of
+married men of the same ages. Dr. Mayer, in his _Rapports Conjugaux_,
+showed that the death rates among the celibate religious orders
+studied were nearly twice as high as those of the laity.
+
+Can anyone knowing the facts ask that we recommend continence as a
+birth-control measure?
+
+Virtually all of the dangers to health involved in absolute continence
+are involved also in the practice of continence broken only when it is
+desired to bring a child into the world. In the opinion of some
+medical authorities, it is even worse, because of the almost constant
+excitation of unsatisfied sex desire by the presence of the mate.
+People who think that they believe in this sort of family limitation
+have much to say about "self-control." Usually they will admit that to
+abstain from all but a single act of sexual intercourse each year is
+an indication of high powers of self-restraint. Yet that one act,
+performed only once a year, might be sufficient to "keep a woman with
+one child in her womb and another at her breast" during her entire
+childbearing period. That would mean from eighteen to twenty-four
+children for each mother, provided she survived so many births and
+lactations. Contraceptives are quite as necessary to these
+"self-controlled" ones who do not desire children every year
+as to those who lead normal, happy love lives.
+
+From the necessity of contraceptives and from the dangers of this
+limited continence certain persons are, of course, relieved. They are
+the ones whose mental and spiritual development is so high as to make
+this practice natural to them. These individuals are so exceedingly
+rare, however, that they need not be discussed here. Moreover, they
+are capable of solving their own problems.
+
+Few who advocate the doctrine of absolute continence live up to it
+strictly. I met one woman who assured me that she had observed it
+faithfully in the thirteen years since her youngest child was born.
+She had such a loathing for sexual union, however, that it was
+doubtless the easiest and best thing for her to do.
+
+Loathing, disgust or indifference to the sex relationship nearly
+always lies behind the advocacy to continence except for the conscious
+purpose of creating children. In other words, while one in ten
+thousand persons may find full play for a diverted and transmuted sex
+force in other creative functions, the rest avoid the sex union from
+repression. These are two widely different situations--one may make
+for racial progress and the happiness of the few individuals capable
+of it; the other poisons the race at its fountain and brings nothing
+but the discontent, unhappiness and misery which follow enforced
+continence. For all that, an increasing number of persons, mostly
+women, are advocating continence within marriage.
+
+Sexual union is nearly always spoken of by such persons as something
+in itself repugnant, disgusting, low and lustful. Consciously or
+unconsciously, they look upon it as a hardship, to be endured only, to
+bring "God's image and likeness" into the world. Their very attitude
+precludes any great probability that their progeny will possess an
+abundance of such qualities.
+
+Much of the responsibility for this feeling upon the part of many
+thousands of women must be laid to two thousand years of Christian
+teaching that all sex expression is unclean. Part of it, too, must be
+laid to the dominant male's habit of violating the love rights of his
+mate.
+
+The habit referred to grows out of the assumed and legalized right of
+the husband to have sexual satisfaction at any time he desires,
+regardless of the woman's repugnance for it. The law of the state
+upholds him in this regard. A husband need not support his wife if she
+refuses to comply with his sexual demands.
+
+Of the two groups of women who regard physical union either with
+disgust and loathing, or with indifference, the former are the less
+numerous. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of them. I have
+listened to their stories often, both as a nurse in obstetrical cases
+and as a propagandist for birth control. An almost universal cause of
+their attitude is a sad lack of understanding of the great beauties of
+the normal, idealistic love act. Neither do they understand the
+uplifting power of such unions for both men and women. Ignorance of
+life, ignorance of all but the sheer reproductive function of mating,
+and especially a wrong training, are most largely responsible for this
+tragic state of affairs. When this ignorance extends to the man in
+such a degree as to permit him to have the all too frequent coarse and
+brutal attitude toward sex matters, the tragedy is only deepened.
+
+Truly the church and those "moralists" who have been insisting upon
+keeping sex matters in the dark have a huge list of concealed crimes
+to answer for. The right kind of a book, a series of clear, scientific
+lectures, or a common-sense talk with either the man or woman will
+often do away with most of the repugnance to physical union. When the
+repugnance is gone, the way is open to that upliftment through sex
+idealism which is the birthright of all women and men.
+
+When I have had the confidence of women indifferent to physical union,
+I have found the fault usually lay with the husband. His idea of
+marriage is too often that of providing a home for a female who would
+in turn provide for his physical needs, including sexual satisfaction.
+Such a husband usually excludes such satisfaction from the category of
+the wife's needs, physical or spiritual.
+
+This man is not concerned with his wife's sex urge, save as it
+responds to his own at times of his choosing. Man's code has taught
+woman to be quite ashamed of such desires. Usually she speaks of
+indifference without regret; often proudly. She seems to regard
+herself as more chaste and highly endowed in purity than other women
+who confess to feeling physical attraction toward their husbands. She
+also secretly considers herself far superior to the husband who makes
+no concealment of his desire toward her. Nevertheless, because of this
+desire upon the husband's part, she goes on "pretending" to mutual
+interest in the relationship.
+
+Only the truth, plainly spoken, can help these people. The woman is
+condemned to physical, mental and spiritual misery by the ignorance
+which society has fixed upon her. She has her choice between an
+enforced continence, with its health-wrecking consequences and its
+constant aggravation of domestic discord, and the sort of prostitution
+legalized by the marriage ceremony. The man may choose between
+enforced continence and its effects, or he may resort to an unmarried
+relationship or to prostitution. Neither of these people--the one
+schooled directly or indirectly by the church and the other trained in
+the sex ethics of the gutter--can hope to lift the other to the
+regenerating influences of a pure, clean, happy love life. As long as
+we leave sex education to the gutter and houses of prostitution, we
+shall have millions of just such miserable marriage failures.
+
+Such continence as is involved in dependence upon the so-called "safe
+period" for family limitation will harm no one. The difficulty here is
+that the method is not practical. It simply does not work. The woman
+who employs this method finds herself in the same predicament as the
+one who believes that she is not in danger of pregnancy when she does
+not respond passionately to her husband. That this woman is more
+likely to conceive than the emotional one, is a well-known fact. The
+woman who refuses to use contraceptives, but who rejects sex
+expression except for a few days in the month, is likely to learn too
+soon the fallacy of her theory as a birth-control method.
+
+For a long time the "safe period" was suggested by physicians. It was
+also the one method of birth control countenanced by the
+ecclesiastics. Women are learning from experience and specialists are
+discovering by investigation that the "safe period" is anything but
+safe for all women. Some women are never free from the possibility of
+conception from puberty to the menopause. Others seemingly have "safe
+periods" for a time, only to become pregnant when they have begun to
+feel secure in their theory. Here again, continence must give way, as
+a method of birth control, to contraceptives.
+
+In the same category as the "safe period," as a method of birth
+control, must be placed so-called "male continence." The same practice
+is also variously known as "Karezza," "Sedular Absorption" and
+"Zugassent's Discovery." Those who regard it as a method of family
+limitation are likely to find themselves disappointed.
+
+As a form of continence, however, if it can be called continence, it
+is asserted to bring none of the long course of evils which too often
+follow the practice of lifelong abstinence, or abstinence broken only
+when a child is desired.
+
+Its devotees testify that they avoid ill effects and achieve the
+highest possible results. These results are due, probably, to two
+factors.
+
+First, those who practice Karezza are usually of a high mental and
+spiritual development and are, therefore, capable of an exalted degree
+of self-control without actual repression. Second, they have the
+benefit of that magnetic interchange between man and woman which makes
+for physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. This stimulation becomes
+destructive irritation in ordinary forms of continence.
+
+The Oneida Community, a religious group comprising about 130 men and
+150 women, which occupied a part of an old Indian reservation in the
+state of New York, were the chief exponents of "male continence." The
+practice was a religious requirement with them and they laid great
+stress upon three different functions which they attributed to the
+sexual organs. They held that these functions were urinary,
+reproductive and amative, each separate and distinct in its use from
+the others. Cases are cited in which both men and women are said to
+have preserved their youth and their sexual powers to a ripe old age,
+and to have prolonged their honeymoons throughout married life. The
+theory, however, interesting as it may be when considered as
+"continence," is not to be relied upon as a method of birth control.
+
+Summing it all up, then, continence may meet the needs of a few
+natures, but it does not meet the needs of the masses. To enforce
+continence upon those whose natures do not demand it, is an injustice,
+the cruelty and the danger of which has been underestimated rather
+than exaggerated. It matters not whether this wrong is committed by
+the church, through some outworn dogma; by the state, through the laws
+prohibiting contraceptives, or by society, through the conditions
+which prevent marriage when young men and women reach the age at which
+they have need of marriage.
+
+The world has been governed too long by repression. The more
+fundamental the force that is repressed the more destructive its
+action. The disastrous effects of repressing the sex force are written
+plainly in the health rates, the mortality statistics, the records of
+crime and the entry books of the hospitals for the insane. Yet this is
+not all the tale, for there are still the little understood hosts of
+sexually abnormal people and the monotonous misery of millions who do
+not die early nor end violently, but who are, nevertheless, devoid of
+the joys of a natural love life.
+
+As a means of birth control, continence is as impracticable for most
+people as it is undesirable. Celibate women doubtless have their place
+in the regeneration of the world, but it is not they, after all, who
+will, through experience and understanding recreate it. It is mainly
+through fullness of expression and experience in life that the mass of
+women, having attained freedom, will accomplish this unparalleled
+task.
+
+The need of women's lives is not repression, but the greatest possible
+expression and fulfillment of their desires upon the highest possible
+plane. They cannot reach higher planes through ignorance and
+compulsion. They can attain them only through knowledge and the
+cultivation of a higher, happier attitude toward sex. Sex life must be
+stripped of its fear. This is one of the great functions of
+contraceptives. That which is enshrouded in fear becomes morbid. That
+which is morbid cannot be really beautiful.
+
+A true understanding of every phase of the love life, and such an
+understanding alone, can reveal it in its purity--in its power of
+upliftment. Force and fear have failed from the beginning of time.
+Their fruits are wrecks and wretchedness. Knowledge and freedom to
+choose or reject the sexual embrace, according as it is lovely or
+unlovely, and these alone, can solve the problem. These alone make
+possible between man and woman that indissoluble tie and mutual
+passion, and common understanding, in which lies the hope of a higher
+race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CONTRACEPTIVES OR ABORTION?
+
+
+Society has not yet learned the significance of the age-long effort of
+the feminine spirit to free itself of the burden of excessive
+childbearing. It has been singularly blind to the real forces
+underlying the cause of infanticide, child abandonment and abortion.
+It has permitted the highest and most powerful thing in woman's nature
+to be hindered, diverted, repressed and confused. Society has
+permitted this inner urge of woman to be rendered violent by
+repression until it has expressed itself in cruel forms of family
+limitation, which this same society has promptly labeled "crimes" and
+sought to punish. It has gone on blindly forcing women into these
+"crimes," deaf alike to their entreaties and to the lessons of
+history.
+
+As we have seen in the second chapter of this book, child abandonment
+and infanticide are by no means obsolete practices. As for abortion,
+it has not decreased but increased with the advance of civilization.
+The reader will recall that one authority says that there are
+1,000,000 abortions in the United States every year, while another
+estimates double that number.
+
+Most of the women of the middle and upper classes in America seem
+secure in their knowledge of contraceptives as a means of birth
+control. Under present conditions, when the laws in most states regard
+this knowledge, howsoever it be imparted, as illicit, and the federal
+statutes prohibit the sending of it through the mails, even the women
+in more fortunate circumstances sometimes have difficulty in getting
+scientific information. Nevertheless, so strong is their purpose that
+they do obtain it and use it, correctly or incorrectly.
+
+The great majority of women, however, belong to the working class.
+Nearly all of these women will fall into one of two general groups--the
+ones who are having children against their wills, and those who,
+to escape this evil, find refuge in abortion. Being given their choice
+by society--to continue to be overburdened mothers or to submit to a
+humiliating, repulsive, painful and too often gravely dangerous
+operation, those women in whom the feminine urge to freedom is
+strongest choose the abortionist. One group goes on bringing children
+to birth, hoping that they will be born dead or die. The women of the
+other group strive consciously by drastic means to protect themselves
+and the children already born.
+
+"Our examinations," says Dr. Max Hirsch, an authority on the subject,
+"have informed us that the largest number of abortions (in the United
+States) are performed on married women. This fact brings us to the
+conclusion that contraceptive measures among the upper classes and the
+practice of abortion among the lower class, are the real means
+employed to regulate the number of offspring."
+
+Thus a high percentage of women in comfortable circumstances escape
+overbreeding by the use of contraceptives. A similarly high percentage
+of women not in comfortable circumstances are forced to submit to
+forced maternity, because their only alternative at present is
+abortion. When accidental conception takes place, some women of both
+classes resort to abortion if they can obtain the services of an
+abortionist.
+
+When society holds up its hands in horror at the "crime" of abortion,
+it forgets at whose door the first and principal responsibility for
+this practice rests. Does anyone imagine that a woman would submit to
+abortion if not denied the knowledge of scientific, effective
+contraceptives? Does anyone believe that physicians and midwives who
+perform abortions go from door to door soliciting patronage? The
+abortionist could not continue his practice for twenty-four hours if
+it were not for the fact that women come desperately begging for such
+operations. He could not stay out of jail a day if women did not so
+generally approve of his services as to hold his identity an open but
+seldom-betrayed secret.
+
+The question, then, is not whether family limitation should be
+practiced. It _is_ being practiced; it has been practiced for ages and
+it will always be practiced. The question that society must answer is
+this: Shall family limitation be achieved through birth control or
+abortion? Shall normal, safe, effective contraceptives be employed, or
+shall we continue to force women to the abnormal, often dangerous
+surgical operation?
+
+This question, too, the church, the state and the moralist must
+answer. The knowledge of contraceptive methods may yet for a time be
+denied to the woman of the working class, but those who are
+responsible for denying it to her, and she herself, should understand
+clearly the dangers to which she is exposed because of the laws which
+force her into the hands of the abortionist.
+
+To understand the more clearly the difference between birth control by
+contraceptives and family limitation through abortion it is necessary
+to know something of the processes of conception. Knowledge of these
+processes will also enable us to comprehend more thoroughly the
+dangers to which woman is exposed by our antiquated laws, and how much
+better it would be for her to employ such preventive measures as would
+keep her out of the hands of the abortionist, into which the laws now
+drive her.
+
+In every woman's ovaries are imbedded millions of ovules or eggs. They
+are in every female at birth, and as the girl develops into womanhood,
+these ovules develop also. At a certain age, varying slightly with the
+individual, the ripest ovule leaves the nest or ovary and comes down
+one of the tubes connecting with the womb and passes out of the body.
+When this takes place, it is said that the girl is at the age of
+puberty. When it reaches the womb the ovule is ready for the process
+of conception--that is, fertilization by the male sperm.
+
+At the time the ovule is ripening, the womb is preparing to receive
+it. This preparation consists of a reinforced blood supply brought to
+its lining. If fertilization takes place, the fertilized ovule or ovum
+will cling to the lining of the womb and there gather its nourishment.
+If fertilization does not take place, the ovum passes out of the body
+and the uterus throws off its surplus blood supply. This is called the
+menstrual period. It occurs about once a month or every twenty-eight
+days.
+
+In the male organs there are glands called testes. They secrete a
+fluid called the semen. In the semen is the life-giving principle
+called the sperm.
+
+When intercourse takes place, if no preventive is employed, the semen
+is deposited in the woman's vagina. The ovule is not in the vagina,
+but is in the womb, farther up, or perhaps in the tube on its way to
+the womb. As steel is attracted to the magnet, the sperm of the male
+starts on its way to seek the ovum. Several of these sperm cells
+start, but only one enters the ovum and is absorbed into it. This
+process is called fertilization, conception or impregnation.
+
+If no children are desired, the meeting of the male sperm and the ovum
+must be prevented. When scientific means are employed to prevent this
+meeting, one is said to practice birth control. The means used is
+known as a contraceptive.
+
+If, however, a contraceptive is not used and the sperm meets the ovule
+and development begins, any attempt at removing it or stopping its
+further growth is called abortion.
+
+There is no doubt that women are apt to look upon abortion as of
+little consequence and to treat it accordingly. An abortion is as
+important a matter as a confinement and requires as much attention as
+the birth of a child at its full term.
+
+"The immediate dangers of abortion," says Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, in his
+book, "_The Practice of Obstetrics_," "are hemorrhage, retention of an
+adherent placenta, sepsis, tetanus, perforation of the uterus. They
+also cause sterility, anemia, malignant diseases, displacements,
+neurosis, and endometritis."
+
+In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very
+serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient.
+
+It is only the women of wealth who can afford the best medical skill,
+care and treatment both at the time of the operation and afterwards.
+In this way they escape the usual serious consequences.
+
+The women whose incomes are limited and who must continue at work
+before they have recovered from the effects of an abortion are the
+great army of sufferers. It is among such that the deaths due to
+abortion usually ensue. It is these, too, who are most often forced to
+resort to such operations.
+
+If death does not result, the woman who has undergone an abortion is
+not altogether safe from harm. The womb may not return to its natural
+size, but remain large and heavy, tending to fall away from its
+natural position. Abortion often leaves the uterus in a condition to
+conceive easily again and unless prevention is strictly followed
+another pregnancy will surely occur. Frequent abortions tend to cause
+barrenness and serious, painful pelvic ailments. These and other
+conditions arising from such operations are very likely to ruin a
+woman's general health.
+
+While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as
+justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds
+of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a
+disgrace to civilization.
+
+The effects of such operations upon a woman, serious as they may be,
+are nothing as compared to the injury done her general health by drugs
+taken to produce the same result. Even such drugs as are prescribed by
+physicians have harmful effects, and nostrums recommended by druggists
+are often worse still.
+
+Even more drastic may be the effect upon the unborn child, for many
+women fill their systems with poisonous drugs during the first weeks
+of their pregnancy, only to decide at last, when drugs have failed, as
+they usually do, to bring the child to birth.
+
+There are no statistics, of course, by which we may compute the amount
+of suffering to mother and child from the use of such drugs, but we
+know that the total of physical weakness and disease must be
+astounding. We know that the woman's own system feels the strain of
+these drugs and that the embryo is usually poisoned by them. The child
+is likely to be rickety, have heart trouble, kidney disorder, or to be
+generally weak in its powers of resistance. If it does not die before
+it reaches its first year, it is probable that it will have to
+struggle against some of these weaknesses until its adolescent period.
+
+It needs no assertion of mine to call attention to the grim fact that
+the laws prohibiting the imparting of information concerning the
+preventing of conception are responsible for tens of thousands of
+deaths each year in this country and an untold amount of sickness and
+sorrow. The suffering and the death of these women is squarely upon
+the heads of the lawmakers and the puritanical, masculine-minded
+person who insist upon retaining the abominable legal restrictions.
+
+Try as they will they cannot escape the truth, nor hide it under the
+cloak of stupid hypocrisy. If the laws against imparting knowledge of
+scientific birth control were repealed, nearly all of the 1,000,000 or
+2,000,000 women who undergo abortions in the United States each year
+would escape the agony of the surgeon's instruments and the long trail
+of disease, suffering and death which so often follows.
+
+"He who would combat abortion," says Dr. Hirsch, "and at the same time
+combat contraceptive measures may be likened to the person who would
+fight contagious diseases and forbid disinfection. For contraceptive
+measures are important weapons in the fight against abortion.
+
+"America has a law since 1873 which prohibits by criminal statute the
+distribution and regulation of contraceptive measures. It follows,
+therefore, that America stands at the head of all nations in the huge
+number of abortions."
+
+There is the case in a nutshell. Family limitation will always be
+practiced as it is now being practiced--either by birth control or by
+abortion. We know that. The one means health and happiness--a
+stronger, better race. The other means disease, suffering, death.
+
+The woman who goes to the abortionist's table is not a criminal but a
+martyr--a martyr to the bitter, unthinkable conditions brought about
+by the blindness of society at large. These conditions give her the
+choice between the surgeon's instruments and the sacrificing of what
+is highest and holiest in her--her aspiration to freedom, her desire
+to protect the children already hers. These conditions--not the
+woman--outface society with this question:
+
+"Contraceptives or Abortion--which shall it be?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+ARE PREVENTIVE MEANS CERTAIN?
+
+
+There are several means of preventing conception which are both
+certain and harmless. What those means are the state laws forbid me to
+say. If I should defy the state laws and name those contraceptives,
+the federal laws would forbid this book's going through the mails. Nor
+can I, without coming into conflict with the laws, tell _why_ these
+means are reliable. It is difficult to discuss the subject without
+using franker language than the statutes permit, and I do not wish to
+violate the law in this particular book.
+
+"Can I rely upon this? Is it certain? Will it prevent absolutely?"
+Such questions, always asked by women who seek advice concerning
+contraceptives, testify both to their fear of involuntary motherhood
+and their doubt as to any and all means offered for their deliverance.
+
+Doubt as to the certainty of contraceptives arises from two sources.
+One is the uninformed element in the medical profession. A physician
+who belongs to this element may object to birth control upon general
+grounds, or he may repeat old-fashioned objections to cover his
+ignorance of contraceptives. For, strange as it may seem, there is an
+amazing ignorance among physicians of this supremely important
+subject. The uninformed objector often assumes to speak with the voice
+of authority, asserting that there are no thoroughly dependable
+contraceptives that are not injurious to the user.
+
+The other source of distrust is the experience of the woman herself.
+Having no place to go for scientific advice, she gathers her
+information from neighbors and friends. One offers this suggestion,
+another offers that, each urging the means that she has found
+successful and condemning others. All this is very confusing and
+extremely disturbing to the woman who, for one reason or another, is
+living in constant fear of pregnancy.
+
+It is not at all surprising that such a state of affairs exists. There
+has been so much secrecy about the whole subject and so much
+dependence upon amateurish and nonprofessional advice that it is
+almost impossible for anyone to procure reliable information or to
+recognize it when given. This is especially true in the United States
+where there are both federal and state laws to punish those who
+disseminate knowledge of birth-control methods.
+
+Even under present conditions, however, there is a certain amount of
+reliable information concerning methods of birth control. We know that
+there are several methods of prevention which are not only dependable,
+but which can be used without injury either to the man or the woman.
+Knowledge of what these methods are and how to apply them should be
+available to every married man and woman. It is safe to predict that
+in a very few years they will be available.
+
+Some methods are more dependable than others, just as there are some
+more simple of adjustment than others. Some are cheap and less
+durable; others are expensive and last for years. There are some which
+for a quarter of a century have stood the test of certainty in
+Holland, France, England and the United States among the wealthier
+classes, as the falling birth rate among these classes indicates. And
+just as the reliable, primitive wheelbarrow is antiquated beside the
+latest airplane, so, as scientific investigators turn their attention
+more and more to this field, will the awkward, troublesome methods of
+the past give way to the simpler, more convenient methods of the
+morrow.
+
+Although the law forbids information concerning reliable means of
+contraception, it is hardly likely that it can be invoked to prevent
+warnings against widely practiced methods which are NOT reliable. The
+employment of such methods leads not only to disappointment but often
+to ill health.
+
+One of the most common practices of this kind is that of nursing one
+baby too long in the hope of preventing the birth of the next. The
+"poor whites" of the South and many of the foreign-born women of the
+United States pin their hopes to this method. Often they persist in
+nursing a child until it is eighteen months old--almost always until
+they become pregnant again.
+
+Prolonged nursing hurts both child and mother, it is said. In the
+child it causes a tendency to brain disease, probably through
+disordered digestion and nutrition. In the mother it causes a strong
+tendency to deafness and blindness. If a child is nursed after it is
+twelve months old, it is generally pale, flabby and unhealthy, often
+rickety, one authority points out, while the mother is usually
+nervous, emaciated and hysterical. If pregnancy occurs under these
+conditions, the mother not only injures her own health but that of the
+next child, often developing in it a weakness of constitution which it
+never overcomes.
+
+Moreover, prolonged nursing has been found to be unreliable as a
+contraceptive. We know this upon good authority. It should not be
+depended upon at all.
+
+In the same class is the so-called "safe period" referred to in
+another chapter. For many women there is never any "safe period."
+Others have "safe periods" for a number of years, only to find
+themselves pregnant because these periods have ceased without warning.
+
+One of the most frequent of all the mistakes made in recommending
+contraceptives is the advice to use an antiseptic or cold-water
+douche. This error seems to be surprisingly persistent. I am
+particularly surprised to hear from women that such douches have been
+prescribed by physicians. Any physician who knows the first rudiments
+of physiology and anatomy must also know that necessary and important
+as an antiseptic douche is as a cleanser and hygienic measure, it is
+assuredly not to be advised as a means of preventing conception.
+
+A woman may, and often does, become pregnant before she can make use
+of a douche. This is particularly likely to happen if her uterus is
+low. And the woman who does much walking, who stands for long hours or
+who uses the sewing machine a great deal is likely to have a low
+uterus. It is then much easier for the spermatazoa to enter almost
+directly into the womb than it would otherwise be, and the douche, no
+matter how soon it is used, is likely to be ineffective. The tendency
+of the uterus to drop under strain goes far to explain why some women
+who have depended upon the douche for years suddenly find themselves
+pregnant. Do not depend upon the douche. As a cleansing agent, it is a
+necessary part of every woman's toilet, but it is not a preventive.
+
+Even if the douche were dependable, the absence of sanitary
+convenience from households in remote districts and the difficulty of
+using a douche in crowded tenements would prevent many women from
+making use of it.
+
+Despite the unreliability of some methods and the harmfulness of some
+others, there _are_ methods which are both harmless and certain. This
+much the woman who is seeking means of limiting her family may be told
+here. _In using any method_, whatsoever, all depends upon the care
+taken to use it properly. No surgeon, no matter how perfect his
+instruments, would expect perfect results from the simplest operation
+did he not exercise the greatest possible care. Common sense, good
+judgment and taking pains are necessary in the use of all
+contraceptives.
+
+More and more perfect means of preventing conception will be developed
+as women insist upon them. Every woman should make it plain to her
+physician that she expects him to be informed upon this subject. She
+should refuse to accept evasive answers. An increasing demand upon
+physicians will inevitably result in laboratory researches and
+experimentation. Such investigation is indeed already beginning and we
+may expect great progress in contraceptive methods in the near future.
+We may also expect more authoritative opinions upon preventive methods
+and devices. When women confidently and insistently demand them, they
+will have access to contraceptives which are both certain and
+harmless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+WILL BIRTH CONTROL HELP THE CAUSE OF LABOR?
+
+
+Labor seems instinctively to have recognized the fact that its
+servitude springs from numbers. Seldom, however, has it applied its
+knowledge logically and thoroughly. The basic principle of craft
+unionism is limitation of the number of workers in a given trade. This
+has been labor's most frequent expedient for righting its wrongs.
+Every unionist knows, as a matter of course, that if that number is
+kept small enough, his organization can compel increases of wages,
+steady employment and decent working conditions. Craft unionism has
+succeeded in attaining these insofar as it has been able to apply this
+principle. It has failed insofar as it has been unable to apply it.
+
+The weakness of craft unionism is that it does not carry its principle
+far enough. It applies its policy of limitation of numbers only to the
+trade. In his home, the worker, whether he is a unionist or
+non-unionist, goes on producing large numbers of children to compete
+with him eventually in the labor market.
+
+"The history of labor," says Teresa Billington-Greig in the _Common
+Sense of The Population Question_, "is the history of an ever
+unsuccessful effort upon the part of man to bring his productive
+ability as a worker up to his reproductive ability. It has been a
+losing battle all the way."
+
+The small percentage of highly skilled, organized workers lead in the
+struggle for better conditions. Craft unions, by limiting the number
+of men available for any one trade, manage to procure better pay,
+shorter hours and other advantages for their members.
+
+Disaster, in the form of famine, pestilence, tidal waves, earthquakes
+or war, sometimes limits the number of available workers. Then those
+who live in parts of the world that are not affected, or who stay at
+home during wars, reap a temporary advantage. These advantages,
+however, are quickly offset by increased prices, or by competition for
+jobs when soldiers return from war. This form of limitation of numbers
+works to the advantage of labor as long as it is available, but great
+disasters are not constantly in operation while the worker's
+reproductive ability is. So in a few years they have lost what
+nature's destructiveness won for them.
+
+The great mass of the workers--including children and women--are
+unskilled and unorganized. Not only that, they are for some
+considerable part of the time seeking employment. They are, of course,
+poorly paid. Thus, through their low wages and their seeking of
+employment, they always come into direct competition with one another
+and with the skilled and organized workmen. As their families live in
+want and are often diseased, they create the chief social problems of
+the day. They bring children into the world as fast as women can bear
+them. With each child they increase their own misery and provide
+another worker to force down wages and prolong hours, through
+competition for employment.
+
+This has been the way of labor from the beginning. It is labor's way
+in every country.
+
+Having discovered that there is no relief in legislation, labor
+organizes to limit its numbers in certain trades. Meanwhile the women
+of the working class go on breeding more workers to wipe out in the
+future the advantages gained for the present. In Paris, for instance,
+the proletarian quarters of the city show a birth rate more than three
+times as high as the birth rate in the well-to-do sections.
+
+"Dr. Jacques Bartillon furnishes us with statistics which prove that
+the birth rate in any quarter of Paris is in inverse ratio to its
+degree of affluence," says G. Hardy in _How to Prevent Pregnancy_.
+"The rich Champs-Elysees has a birth rate a third of that Bellerville
+or of the Buttes-Chaumont. From 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
+fifty, Menimontant gives 116 births; the Champs-Elysees thirty-four
+births.
+
+"It is the same in Berlin. For 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
+that of fifty, a very poor quarter gives 157 births; a rich quarter
+gives 47 births."
+
+And so it is the world over. The very word "proletarian," as Hardy
+points out, means "producer of children."
+
+The children thus carelessly produced undermine the health of the
+mother, deepen the family's poverty, destroy the happiness of the
+home, and dishearten the father; all this in addition to being future
+competitors in the labor market. Too often their increasing number
+drives the mother herself into industry, where her beggarly wages tend
+to lower the level of those of her husband.
+
+The first sickening feature of this general situation is the high
+infant mortality among the children of the workers. Many children come
+merely to sap the strength of the mother, suffer and die, leaving to
+show for their coming and going only an increased burden of sorrow and
+debt. The lower the family income, the more of these babies die before
+they are a year old.
+
+A survey of infant mortality in Johnstown, Pa., by the federal
+Children's Bureau, gave these typical results for the year 1911:
+
+                          Infant Mortality
+  Father's Earnings            Rate
+  Under $521.................. 197.3
+  $521 to $624................ 193.1
+  $625 to $779................ 163.1
+  $780 to $899................ 168.4
+  $900 to $1,199.............. 142.3
+  $1,200 or over.............. 102.
+  Ample........................ 88.
+
+These figures do not represent the total income of all families.
+Neither will money buy as much in 1920 as it did in 1911. Seventy per
+cent of the people of the United States have incomes of less than
+$1,000. This means that from 142 to 197 children born into such
+families die before they are one year old. The births and deaths of
+these children represent just so much useless burden of anguish and
+sorrow to the workers.
+
+Despite this high infant death rate, the workers of the United States
+still have more children than they can care for. There are enough of
+them left over to provide 3,000,000 child laborers, who by working for
+a pittance crowd their parents out of employment and force the
+families deeper into poverty.
+
+When all is said and done, the workers who produce large families have
+themselves to blame for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed
+grasping for jobs, for the strike breakers, for the policemen who beat
+up and arrest strikers and for the soldiers who shoot strikers down.
+All these come from the families of workingmen. Their fathers and
+mothers are workers for wages. Out of the loins of labor they come
+into the world and compel surplus labor to betray labor that is
+employed.
+
+Nor is this all. When a workman of superior strength and skill,
+protected by his union, manages to maintain a large or moderate sized
+family in a degree of comfort, there always comes a time when he must
+strike to preserve what he has won. If he is not beaten by unorganized
+workers who seek his job, he still has to face the possibility of
+listening to the cries of several hungry children. If the strike is a
+long one, these cries often down the promptings of loyalty and class
+interest--often they defeat him when nothing else could.
+
+Is it any wonder that under handicaps like these labor becomes
+confused and flounders? It has been offered a multitude of
+remedies--political reforms, wage legislation, statutory regulation of
+hours, and so on. It has been invited to embrace craft and industrial
+unionism, syndicalism, anarchism, socialism as panaceas for its
+liberation. Except in a few countries, it has not attained to
+aggressive power, but has been a tool for unscrupulous politicians.
+
+Even with the temporary advantages gained by the wiping out of
+millions of workers in the Great War, labor's problem remains
+unsolved. It has now, as always, to contend with the crop of young
+laborers coming into the market, and with the ever-present "labor-saving"
+machine which, instead of relieving the worker's situation,
+makes it all the harder for him to escape. Fewer laborers are needed
+to-day for a given amount of production and distribution than before
+the invention of these machines. Yet, owing to the increase in the
+number of the workers, labor finds itself enslaved instead of
+liberated by the machine.
+
+"Hitherto," says John Stuart Mill, "it is questionable if all the
+mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any
+human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same
+life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of
+manufacturers and others to make fortunes."
+
+That, in a few words, sums up the greater part of labor's progress. We
+blame capitalism and its wasteful, brutal industrial system for all
+our social problems, but our numbers were vast and our bondage
+grievous before modern industry came into existence. We may curse the
+trusts, but our subjection was accomplished before the trusts had
+emerged from the brain of evolution. We may blame public officials and
+individual employers, but our burdens were crushing before these were
+born. We look now here, now there, for the cause of our
+condition--everywhere but at the one to blame. We fight again and
+again for our rights, only to be conquered by our own kind, our
+own children, our brother's, our neighbor's.
+
+Let us carry to its logical conclusion the principle of limitation
+which has been partially applied by labor unions. The way to get rid
+of labor problems, unemployment, low wages, the surplus, unwanted
+population, is to stop breeding. They come from our own ranks--from
+our own families. The way to get better wages, shorter hours, a new
+system for the advancement of labor, is to make labor's numbers fewer.
+Let us not wait for war, famine and plague to do it. Let us cease
+bringing unwanted children into the world to suffer a while, add to
+our burdens and die. Let us cease bringing others into the world to
+compete with us for a living. Let the women workers practice birth
+control.
+
+What are the concrete things which the worker can gain at once through
+birth control? First, a small family can live much better than a large
+one upon the wages now received. Workers could be better fed, clothed
+and educated. Again, fewer children in the families of the workers
+would tend to check the rise in the prices of food, which are forced
+up as the demand increases. Within a few years it would reduce the
+number of workers competing for jobs. The worker could the more easily
+force society to give him more of the product of his labor--or all of
+it. And while these things are taking place, the slums, with their
+disease, their moral degradation and all their sordid accompaniments,
+would automatically disappear. No worker would need to live in such
+tenements--hence they would be modernized or torn down. At the same
+time, the few children that were being born to the workers would be
+stronger, healthier, more courageous. They would be fit human
+beings--not miserable victims of murderous conditions.
+
+Birth control does not propose to replace any of the idealistic
+movements and philosophies of the workers. It is not a substitute, it
+precedes. It is of itself a principle that lifts the heaviest of the
+burdens that afflict labor. It can and it must be the foundation upon
+which any permanently successful improvement in conditions is
+attained. It is, therefore, a necessary prelude in all effective
+propaganda.
+
+A few years of systematic agitation for birth control would put labor
+in a position to solve all its problems. Labor, organized or
+unorganized, must take heed of this fact. Groups and parties working
+for a new social order must include it in their programmes. No social
+system, no workers' democracy, no Socialist republic can operate
+successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth
+control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree.
+
+In Spain I saw a bull fight. It was in the great arena at Barcelona.
+As bull after bull went down, his magnificent, defeated strength
+bleeding away through wounds inflicted by his weak but skillful
+assailant, I thought of the world of workers and their oppressors.
+
+As each bull was sent into the arena, he was confronted by one
+assailant and twenty _confusers_. There was but one enemy for him to
+face, but there were twenty brilliant flags, each of a different
+color, to distract his attention from the man who held the weapon. No
+sooner was his real antagonist in danger, than one of the confusers
+fluttered a flag before his anger-maddened eyes. With one toss of his
+horns he could have ripped the life from the toreador, but his
+confusers were always there with the flags. One after another he
+charged them, only to spend the force of his lunges in the empty air.
+He found that as he was about to toss one of his confusers into the
+air, he was confronted by another flag, which he charged with equal
+futility.
+
+Finally, utterly bewildered and exhausted, too spiritless to meet the
+attack, he falls under the sword thrust of the toreador. And the sun
+shines in the deep blue overhead, the band plays, the ten thousand
+gayly-clad spectators shout, while the victim is dragged out to make
+room for another.
+
+It is the drama of labor.
+
+It will be the drama of labor until labor finds its real enemy. That
+enemy is the reproductive ability of the working class which gluts the
+channels of progress with the helpless and weak, and stimulates the
+tyrants of the world in their oppression of mankind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII  BATTALIONS OF UNWANTED BABIES THE CAUSE OF WAR
+
+
+In every nation of militaristic tendencies we find the reactionaries
+demanding a higher and still higher birth rate. Their plea is, first,
+that great armies are needed to defend the country from its possible
+enemies; second, that a huge population is required to assure the
+country its proper place among the powers of the world. At bottom the
+two pleas are the same.
+
+As soon as the country becomes overpopulated, these reactionaries
+proclaim loudly its moral right to expand. They point to the huge
+population, which in the name of patriotism they have previously
+demanded should be brought into being. Again pleading patriotism, they
+declare that it is the moral right of the nation to take by force such
+room as it needs. Then comes war--usually against some nation supposed
+to be less well prepared than the aggressor.
+
+Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians
+violently denounce the politicians of other countries. There is a long
+beating of tom-toms by the press and all other agencies for
+influencing public opinion. Facts are distorted and lies invented
+until the common people cannot get at the truth. Yet, when the war is
+over, if not before, we always find that "a place in the sun," "a path
+to the sea," "a route to India" or something of the sort is at the
+bottom of the trouble. These are merely other names for expansion.
+
+The "need of expansion" is only another name for overpopulation. One
+supreme example is sufficient to drive home this truth. That the Great
+War, from the horror of which we are just beginning to emerge, had its
+source in overpopulation is too evident to be denied by any serious
+student of current history.
+
+For the past one hundred years most of the nations of Europe have been
+piling up terrific debts to humanity by the encouragement of unlimited
+numbers. The rulers of these nations and their militarists have
+constantly called upon the people to breed, breed, breed! Large
+populations meant more people to produce wealth, more people to pay
+taxes, more trade for the merchants, more soldiers to protect the
+wealth. But more people also meant need of greater food supplies, an
+urgent and natural need for expansion.
+
+As shown by C.V. Drysdale's famous "War Map of Europe," the great
+conflict began among the high birth rate countries--Germany, with its
+rate of 31.7, Austria-Hungary with 33.7 and 36.7, respectively, Russia
+with 45.4, Serbia with 38.6. Italy with her 38.7 came in, as the world
+is now well informed through the publication of secret treaties by the
+Soviet government of Russia, upon the promise of territory held by
+Austria. England, owing to her small home area, is cramped with her
+comparatively low birth rate of 26.3. France, among the belligerents,
+is conspicuous for her low birth rate of 19.9, but stood in the way of
+expansion of high birth rate Germany. Nearly all of the persistently
+neutral countries--Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland
+have low birth rates, the average being a little over 26.
+
+Owing to the part Germany played in the war, a survey of her birth
+statistics is decidedly illuminating. The increase in the German birth
+rate up to 1876 was great. Though it began to decline then, the
+decline was not sufficient to offset the tremendous increase of the
+previous years. There were more millions to produce children, so while
+the average number of births per thousand was somewhat smaller, the
+net increase in population was still huge. From 41,000,000 in 1871,
+the year the Empire was founded, the German population grew to
+approximately 67,000,000 in 1918. Meanwhile her food supply increased
+only a very small per cent. In 1910, Russia had a birth rate even
+higher than Germany's had ever been--a little less than 48 per
+thousand. When czarist Russia wanted an outlet to the Mediterranean by
+way of Constantinople, she was thinking of her increasing population.
+Germany was thinking of her increasing population when she spoke as
+with one voice of a "place in the sun."
+
+"For some decades," said the Royal Prussian Journal, in an article
+quoted by the Malthusian (London) of April 15, 1911, "the great growth
+of German population has been almost entirely forced into the towns,
+since of the four millions of increase in five years, only a few can
+find places in agriculture, as most properties are too small to permit
+of letting off a portion. And as regards the larger farms, the
+tendency of modern, cheaper machine methods is rather to produce a
+saving of the more costly manual labor."
+
+"For some time past Germany has no longer been in the position of
+feeding her own population, and large quantities of food as
+raw-materials have to be imported, for which exports have to be exchanged.
+It is doubtful whether even this can for long keep pace with the
+present rate of increase of population."
+
+There were other utterances which just as frankly acknowledged that,
+having produced surplus population, Germany proposed to procure by
+means of war the expansion necessary to care for it. Adelyne More, in
+"Uncontrolled Breeding," a study of the birth rate in its relation to
+war, quoted the Berliner Post: "Can a great and rapidly growing nation
+like Germany always renounce all claims to further development or to
+the expansion of its political power? The final settlement with France
+and England, the expansion of our colonial possessions, in order to
+create new German homes for the overflow of our population--these are
+problems which must be faced in the near future." This was published
+in 1913.
+
+Just as frank was the recognition of the true cause of international
+conflicts by a number of British authorities.
+
+In "Uncontrolled Breeding," the author quotes the British National
+Commission's report on The Declining Birth Rate: "The pressure of
+population in any country brings, as a chief historic consequence,
+overflows and migrations not only for peaceful settlement, but for
+conquest and for the subjugation and exploitation of weaker peoples.
+This always remains a chief cause of international disputes."
+
+The militaristic claim for Germany's right to new territory was simply
+a claim to the right of life and food for the German babies--the same
+right that a chick claims to burst its shell. If there had not been
+other millions of people claiming the same right, there would have
+been no war. But there were other millions.
+
+The German rulers and leaders pointed out the fact that expansion
+meant more business for German merchants, more work for German workmen
+at better wages, and more opportunities for Germans abroad. They also
+pointed out that lack of expansion meant crowding and crushing at
+home, hard times, heavy burdens, lack of opportunity for Germans, and
+what not. In this way, they gave the people of the Empire a startling
+and true picture of what would happen from overcrowding. Once they
+realized the facts, the majority of Germans naturally welcomed the
+so-called war of defense.
+
+The argument was sound. Once the German mothers had submitted to the
+plea for overbreeding, it was inevitable that imperialistic Germany
+should make war. Once the battalions of unwanted babies came into
+existence--babies whom the mothers did not want but which they bore as
+a "patriotic duty"--it was too late to avoid international conflict.
+The great crime of imperialistic Germany was its high birth rate.
+
+It has always been so. Behind all war has been the pressure of
+population. "Historians," says Huxley, "point to the greed and
+ambition of rulers, the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the
+debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars
+which have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the
+causes of the decay of states and the foundering of old civilizations,
+and thereby point their story with a moral. But beneath all this
+superficial turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited
+multiplication."
+
+Robert Thomas Malthus, formulator of the doctrine which bears his
+name, pointed out, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the
+relation of overpopulation to war. He showed that mankind tends to
+increase faster than the food supply. He demonstrated that were it not
+for the more common diseases, for plague, famine, floods and wars,
+human beings would crowd each other to such an extent that the misery
+would be even greater than it now is. These he described as "natural
+checks," pointing out that as long as no other checks are employed,
+such disasters are unavoidable. If we do not exercise sufficient
+judgment to regulate the birth rate, we encounter disease, starvation
+and war.
+
+Both Darwin and John Stuart Mill recognized, by inference at least,
+the fact that so-called "natural checks"--and among them war--will
+operate if some sort of limitation is not employed. In his _Origin of
+Species_, Darwin says: "There is no exception to the rule that every
+organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, if not destroyed,
+that the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair."
+Elsewhere he observes that we do not permit helpless human beings to
+die off, but we create philanthropies and charities, build asylums and
+hospitals and keep the medical profession busy preserving those who
+could not otherwise survive. John Stuart Mill, supporting the views of
+Malthus, speaks to exactly the same effect in regard to the
+multiplying power of organic beings, among them humanity. In other
+words, let countries become overpopulated and war is inevitable. It
+follows as daylight follows the sunrise.
+
+When Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant were on trial in England
+in 1877 for publishing information concerning contraceptives, Mrs.
+Besant put the case bluntly to the court and the jury:
+
+"I have no doubt that if natural checks were allowed to operate right
+through the human as they do in the animal world, a better result
+would follow. Among the brutes, the weaker are driven to the wall, the
+diseased fall out in the race of life. The old brutes, when feeble or
+sickly, are killed. If men insisted that those who were sickly should
+be allowed to die without help of medicine or science, if those who
+are weak were put upon one side and crushed, if those who were old and
+useless were killed, if those who were not capable of providing food
+for themselves were allowed to starve, if all this were done, the
+struggle for existence among men would be as real as it is among
+brutes and would doubtless result in the production of a higher race
+of men.
+
+"But are you willing to do that or to allow it to be done?"
+
+We are not willing to let it be done. Mother hearts cling to children,
+no matter how diseased, misshapen and miserable. Sons and daughters
+hold fast to parents, no matter how helpless. We do not allow the weak
+to depart; neither do we cease to bring more weak and helpless beings
+into the world. Among the dire results is war, which kills off, not
+the weak and the helpless, but the strong and the fit.
+
+What shall be done? We have our choice of one of three policies. We
+may abandon our science and leave the weak and diseased to die, or
+kill them, as the brutes do. Or we may go on overpopulating the earth
+and have our famines and our wars while the earth exists. Or we can
+accept the third, sane, sensible, moral and practicable plan of birth
+control. We can refuse to bring weak, the helpless and the unwanted
+children into the world. We can refuse to overcrowd families, nations
+and the earth. There are these ways to meet the situation, and only
+these three ways.
+
+The world will never abandon its preventive and curative science; it
+may be expected to elevate and extend it beyond our present
+imagination. The efforts to do away with famine and the opposition to
+war are growing by leaps and bounds. Upon these efforts are largely
+based our modern social revolutions.
+
+There remains only the third expedient--birth control, the real cure
+for war. This fact was called to the attention of the Peace Conference
+in Paris, in 1919, by the Malthusian League, which adopted the
+following resolution at its annual general meeting in London in June
+of that year:
+
+"The Malthusian League desires to point out that the proposed scheme
+for the League of Nations has neglected to take account of the
+important questions of _the pressure of population_, which _causes the
+great international economic competition_ and rivalry, and of the
+_increase of population_, which is put forward as a justification for
+_claiming increase of territory_. It, therefore, wishes to put on
+record its belief that the League of Nations will only be able to
+fulfill its aim _when it adds a clause_ to the following effect:
+
+"'That each Nation desiring to enter into the League of Nations shall
+pledge itself _so to restrict its birth rate_ that its people shall be
+able to live in comfort _in their own dominions without need_ for
+territorial expansion, and that it shall recognize that _increase of
+population shall not justify_ a demand either for increase of
+territory or for the compulsion of other Nations to admit its
+emigrants; so that when all Nations in the League have shown their
+ability to live on their own resources without international rivalry,
+they will be in a position to fuse into an international federation,
+and territorial boundaries will then have little significance.'"
+
+As a matter of course, the Peace Conference paid no attention to the
+resolution, for, as pointed out by Frank A. Vanderlip, the American
+financier, that conference not only ignored the economic factors of
+the world situation, but seemed unaware that Europe had produced more
+people than its fields could feed. So the resolution amounted to so
+much propaganda and nothing more.
+
+This remedy can be applied only by woman and she will apply it. She
+must and will see past the call of pretended patriotism and of glory
+of empire and perceive what is true and what is false in these things.
+She will discover what base uses the militarist and the exploiter make
+of the idealism of peoples. Under the clamor of the press, permeating
+the ravings of the jingoes, she will hear the voice of Napoleon, the
+archtype of the militarists of all nations, calling for "fodder for
+cannon."
+
+"Woman is given to us that she may bear children," said he. "Woman is
+our property, we are not hers, because she produces children for
+us--we do not yield any to her. She is, therefore, our possession as the
+fruit tree is that of the gardener."
+
+That is what the imperialist is _thinking_ when he speaks of the glory
+of the empire and the prestige of the nation. Every country has its
+appeal--its shibboleth--ready for the lips of the imperialist. German
+rulers pointed to the comfort of the workers, to old-age pensions,
+maternal benefits and minimum wage regulations, and other material
+benefits, when they wished to inspire soldiers for the Fatherland.
+England's strongest argument, perhaps, was a certain phase of liberty
+which she guarantees her subjects, and the protection afforded them
+wherever they may go. France and the United States, too, have their
+appeals to the idealism of democracy--appeals which the politicians of
+both countries know well how to use, though the peoples of both lands
+are beginning to awake to the fact that their countries have been
+living on the glories of their revolutions and traditions, rather than
+the substance of freedom. Behind the boast of old-age pensions,
+material benefits and wage regulations, behind the bombast concerning
+liberty in this country and tyranny in that, behind all the slogans
+and shibboleths coined out of the ideals of the peoples for the uses
+of imperialism, woman must and will see the iron hand of that same
+imperialism, condemning women to breed and men to die for the will of
+the rulers.
+
+Upon woman the burden and the horrors of war are heaviest. Her heart
+is the hardest wrung when the husband or the son comes home to be
+buried or to live a shattered wreck. Upon her devolve the extra tasks
+of filling out the ranks of workers in the war industries, in addition
+to caring for the children and replenishing the war-diminished
+population. Hers is the crushing weight and the sickening of soul. And
+it is out of her womb that those things proceed. When she sees what
+lies behind the glory and the horror, the boasting and the burden, and
+gets the vision, the human perspective, she will end war. She will
+kill war by the simple process of starving it to death. For she will
+refuse longer to produce the human food upon which the monster feeds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+WOMAN AND THE NEW MORALITY
+
+
+Upon the shoulders of the woman conscious of her freedom rests the
+responsibility of creating a new sex morality. The vital difference
+between a morality thus created by women and the so-called morality of
+to-day, is that the new standard will be based upon knowledge and
+freedom while the old is founded upon ignorance and submission.
+
+What part will birth control play in bringing forth this new standard?
+What effect will its practice have upon woman's moral development?
+Will it lift her to heights that she has not yet achieved, and if so,
+how? Why is the question of morality always raised by the objector to
+birth control? All these questions must be answered if we are to get a
+true picture of the relation of the feminine spirit to morals. They
+can best be answered by considering, first, the source of our present
+standard of sex morals and the reasons why those standards are what
+they are; and, second, the source and probable nature of the new
+morality.
+
+We get most of our notions of sex morality from the Christian
+church--more particularly from the oldest existing Christian church, known
+as the Roman Catholic. The church has generally defined the "immoral
+woman" as one who mates out of wedlock. Virtually, it lets it go at
+that. In its practical workings, there is nothing in the church code
+of morals to protect the woman, either from unwilling submission to
+the wishes of her husband, from undesired pregnancy, nor from any
+other of the outrages only too familiar to many married women. Nothing
+is said about the crime of bringing an unwanted child into the world,
+where often it cannot be adequately cared for and is, therefore,
+condemned to a life of misery. The church's one point of insistence is
+upon the right of itself to legalize marriage and to compel the woman
+to submit to whatever such marriage may bring. It is true that there
+are remedies of divorce in the case of the state, but the church has
+adhered strictly to the principle that marriage, once consummated, is
+indissoluble. Thus, in its operation, the church's code of sex morals
+has nothing to do with the basic sex rights of the woman, but
+enforces, rather, the assumed property rights of the man to the body
+and the services of his wife. They are man-made codes; their vital
+factor, as they apply to woman, is submission to the man.
+
+Closely associated with and underlying the principle of submission,
+has been the doctrine that the sex life is in itself unclean. It
+follows, therefore, that all knowledge of the sex physiology or sex
+functions is also unclean and taboo. Upon this teaching has been
+founded woman's subjection by the church and, largely through the
+influence of the church, her subjection by the state to the needs of
+the man.
+
+Let us see how these principles have affected the development of the
+present moral codes and some of their shifting standards. When we have
+finished this analysis, we shall know why objectors to birth control
+raise the "morality" question.
+
+The church has sought to keep women ignorant upon the plea of keeping
+them "pure." To this end it has used the state as its moral policeman.
+Men have largely broken the grip of the ecclesiastics upon masculine
+education. The ban upon geology and astronomy, because they refute the
+biblical version of the creation of the world, are no longer
+effective. Medicine, biology and the doctrine of evolution have won
+their way to recognition in spite of the united opposition of the
+clerics. So, too, has the right of woman to go unveiled, to be
+educated, and to speak from public platforms, been asserted in spite
+of the condemnations of the church, which denounced them as
+destructive of feminine purity. Only in sex matters has it succeeded
+in keeping the bugaboo alive.
+
+It clings to this last stronghold of ignorance, knowing that woman
+free from sexual domination would produce a race spiritually free and
+strong enough to break the last of the bonds of intellectual darkness.
+
+It is within the marriage bonds, rather than outside them, that the
+greatest immorality of men has been perpetrated. Church and state,
+through their canons and their laws, have encouraged this immorality.
+It is here that the woman who is to win her way to the new morality
+will meet the most difficult part of her task of moral house cleaning.
+
+In the days when the church was striving for supremacy, when it needed
+single-minded preachers, proselyters and teachers, it fastened upon
+its people the idea that all sexual union, in marriage or out of it,
+is sinful. That idea colors the doctrines of the Church of Rome and
+many other Christian denominations to this hour. "Marriage, even for
+the sake of children was a carnal indulgence" in earlier times, as
+Principal Donaldson points out in "_The Position of Women Among the
+Early Christians._" [Footnote: Contemporary Review, 1889.] It was held
+that the child was "conceived in sin," and that as the result of the
+sex act, an unclean spirit had possession of it. This spirit can be
+removed only by baptism, and the Roman Catholic baptismal service even
+yet contains these words: "Go out of him, thou unclean spirit, and
+give place unto the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete."
+
+In the _Intellectual Development of Europe_, John William Draper,
+speaking of the teaching of celibacy among the Early Fathers,
+[Footnote: 2-Vol. 1, page 426.] says: "The sinfulness of the marriage
+relation and the preeminent value of chastity followed from their
+principles. If it was objected to such practices that by their
+universal adoption the human species would soon be extinguished and no
+man would remain to offer praises to God, these zealots, remembering
+the temptations from which they had escaped, with truth replied that
+there would always be sinners enough in the world to avoid that
+disaster, and that out of their evil work, good would be brought.
+Saint Jerome offers us the pregnant reflection that though it may be
+marriage that fills the earth, it is virginity that replenishes
+heaven."
+
+The early church taught that there were enough children on earth. It
+needed missionaries more than it needed babies, and impressed upon its
+followers the idea that the birth wails of the infant were a protest
+against being born into so sordid a world.
+
+Thus are we presented with one of the enormous inconsistencies of the
+church in sex matters. The teachings of the "Early Fathers" were
+effect the advocacy of an attempt to enforce birth control through
+absolute continence, while later it reverted, as it reverts to-day, to
+the Mosaic injunction to "be fruitful and multiply."
+
+The very force of the sex urge in humanity compelled the church to
+abandon the teaching of celibacy for its general membership. Paul, who
+preferred to see Christians unmarried rather than married, had
+recognized the power of this force. In the seventh chapter of the
+First Epistle to the Corinthians (according to the Douay translation
+of the Vulgate, which is accepted by the Church of Rome), he said:
+
+"8--But I say unto you the unmarried and the widows; it is good if
+they continue even as I.
+
+"9--But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry, for it is
+better to marry than to be burnt."
+
+When the church became a political power rather than a strictly
+religious institution, it needed a high birth rate to provide laymen
+to support its increasingly expensive organization. It then began to
+exploit the sex force for its own interest. It reversed its position
+in regard to children. It encouraged marriage under its own control
+and exhorted women to bear as many children as possible. The world was
+just as sordid and the birth wails of the infants were just as
+piteous, but the needs of the hierarchy had changed. So it modified
+the standard of sex morality to suit its own requirements--marriage
+now became a sacrament.
+
+Shrewd in changing its general policy from celibacy to marriage, the
+church was equally shrewd in perpetuating the doctrine of woman's
+subjection for its own interest. That doctrine was emphatically stated
+in the Third Chapter of the First Epistle of Peter and the Fifth
+Chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians. In the Douay version of
+the latter, we find this:
+
+"22--Let women be subject to their husbands as to the Lord.
+
+"23--Because the husband is the head of the wife; as Christ is the
+head of the Church.
+
+"24--Therefore, as the Church is subject to Christ, so let the wives
+be to their husbands in all things."
+
+These doctrines, together with the teaching that sex life is of itself
+unclean, formed the basis of morality as fixed by the Roman church.
+
+Nor does the St. James version of the Bible, generally used by
+Protestant churches to-day, differ greatly in these particulars from
+the accepted Roman Catholic version, as a comparison will show.
+
+If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand
+years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for woman. Its
+greatest outrage upon her was to forbid her to control the function of
+motherhood under any circumstances, thus limiting her life's work to
+bringing forth and rearing children. Coincident with this, the
+churchmen deprived her of her place in and before the courts, in the
+schools, in literature, art and society. They shut from her heart and
+her mind the knowledge of her love life and her reproductive
+functions. They chained her to the position into which they had thrust
+her, so that it is only after centuries of effort that she is even
+beginning to regain what was wrested from her.
+
+"Christianity had no favorable effect upon women," says Donaldson,
+"but tended to lower their character and contract the range of their
+activity. At the time when Christianity dawned upon the world, women
+had attained great freedom, power and influence in the Roman empire.
+Tradition was in favor of restriction, but by a concurrence of
+circumstances, women had been liberated from the enslaving fetters of
+the old legal forms. They enjoyed freedom of intercourse in society.
+They walked in the public thoroughfares with veils that did not hide
+their faces. They dined in the company of men. They studied literature
+and philosophy. They took part in political movements. They were
+allowed to defend their own law cases if they liked, and they helped
+their husbands in the government of provinces and the writing of
+books."
+
+And again: "One would have imagined that Christianity would have
+favored the extension of woman's freedom. In a very short time women
+are seen only in two capacities--as martyrs and deaconesses (or nuns).
+Now what the early Christians did was to strike the male out of the
+definition of man, and human being out of the definition of woman. Man
+was a human being made to serve the highest and noblest purposes;
+woman was a female, made to serve only one."
+
+Thus the position attained by women of Greece and Rome through the
+exercise of family limitation, and in a considerable degree of
+voluntary motherhood, was swept away by the rising tide of
+Christianity. It would seem that this pernicious result was
+premeditated, and that from the very early days of Christianity, there
+were among the hierarchy those who recognized the creative power of
+the feminine spirit, the force of which they sought to turn to their
+own uses. Certain it is that the hierarchy created about the whole
+love life of woman an atmosphere of degradation.
+
+Fear and shame have stood as grim guardians against the gate of
+knowledge and constructive idealism. The sex life of women has been
+clouded in darkness, restrictive, repressive and morbid. Women have
+not had the opportunity to know themselves, nor have they been
+permitted to give play to their inner natures, that they might create
+a morality practical, idealistic and high for their own needs.
+
+On the other hand, church and state have forbidden women to leave
+their legal mates, or to refuse to submit to the marital embrace, no
+matter how filthy, drunken, diseased or otherwise repulsive the man
+might be--no matter how much of a crime it might be to bring to birth
+a child by him.
+
+Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes
+exceed the unlawful ones a million to one. She has had nothing to say
+as to whether she shall have strength sufficient to give a child a
+fair physical and mental start in life; she has had as little to do
+with determining whether her own body shall be wrecked by excessive
+child-bearing. She has been adjured not to complain of the burden of
+caring for children she has not wanted. Only the married woman who has
+been constantly loved by the most understanding and considerate of
+husbands has escaped these horrors. Besides the wrongs done to women
+in marriage, those involved in promiscuity, infidelities and rapes
+become inconsequential in nature and in number.
+
+Out of woman's inner nature, in rebellion against these conditions, is
+rising the new morality. Let it be realized that this creation of new
+sex ideals is a challenge to the church. Being a challenge to the
+church, it is also, in less degree, a challenge to the state. The
+woman who takes a fearless stand for the incoming sex ideals must
+expect to be assailed by reactionaries of every kind. Imperialists and
+exploiters will fight hardest in the open, but the ecclesiastic will
+fight longest in the dark. He understands the situation best of all;
+he best knows what reaction he has to fear from the morals of women
+who have attained liberty. For, be it repeated, the church has always
+known and feared the spiritual potentialities of woman's freedom.
+
+And in this lies the answer to the question why the opponent of birth
+control raises the moral issue. Sex morals for women have been
+one-sided; they have been purely negative, inhibitory and repressive. They
+have been fixed by agencies which have sought to keep women enslaved;
+which have been determined, even as they are now, to use woman solely
+as an asset to the church, the state and the man. Any means of freedom
+which will enable women to live and think for themselves first, will
+be attacked as immoral by these selfish agencies.
+
+What effect will the practice of birth control have upon woman's moral
+development? As we have seen in other chapters, it will break her
+bonds. It will free her to understand the cravings and soul needs of
+herself and other women. It will enable her to develop her love nature
+separate from and independent of her maternal nature.
+
+It goes without saying that the woman whose children are desired and
+are of such number that she can not only give them adequate care but
+keep herself mentally and spiritually alive, as well as physically
+fit, can discharge her duties to her children much better than the
+overworked, broken and querulous mother of a large, unwanted family.
+
+Thus the way is open to her for a twofold development; first, through
+her own full rounded life, and next, through her loving, unstrained,
+full-hearted relationship with her offspring. The bloom of mother love
+will have an opportunity to infuse itself into her soul and make her,
+indeed, the fond, affectionate guardian of her offspring that
+sentiment now pictures her but hard facts deny her the privilege of
+being. She will preserve also her love life with her mate in its
+ripening perfection. She will want children with a deeper passion, and
+will love them with a far greater love.
+
+In spite of the age-long teaching that sex life in itself is unclean,
+the world has been moving to a realization that a great love between a
+man and woman is a holy thing, freighted with great possibilities for
+spiritual growth. The fear of unwanted children removed, the assurance
+that she will have a sufficient amount of time in which to develop her
+love life to its greatest beauty, with its comradeship in many
+fields--these will lift woman by the very soaring quality of her innermost
+self to spiritual heights that few have attained. Then the coming of
+eagerly desired children will but enrich life in all its avenues,
+rather than enslave and impoverish it as do unwanted ones to-day.
+
+What healthier grounds for the growth of sound morals could possibly
+exist than the ample spiritual life of the woman just depicted? Free
+to follow the feminine spirit, which dwells in the sanctuary of her
+nature, she will, in her daily life, give expression to that high
+idealism which is the fruit of that spirit when it is unhampered and
+unviolated. The love for her mate will flower in beauty of deeds that
+are pure because they are the natural expression of her physical,
+mental and spiritual being. The love for desired children will come to
+blossom in a spirituality that is high because it is free to reach the
+heights.
+
+The moral force of woman's nature will be unchained--and of its own
+dynamic power will uplift her to a plane unimagined by those holding
+fast to the old standards of church morality. Love is the greatest
+force of the universe; freed of its bonds of submission and unwanted
+progeny, it will formulate and compel of its own nature observance to
+standards of purity far beyond the highest conception of the average
+moralist. The feminine spirit, animated by joyous, triumphant love,
+will make its own high tenets of morality. Free womanhood, out of the
+depths of its rich experiences, will observe and comply with the inner
+demands of its being. The manner in which it learns to do this best
+may be said to be the moral law of woman's being. So, in whatever
+words the new morality may ultimately be expressed, we can at least be
+sure that it will meet certain needs.
+
+First of all, it will meet the physical and psychic requirements of
+the woman herself, for she cannot adequately perform the feminine
+functions until these are met. Second, it will meet the needs of the
+child to be conceived in a love which is eager to bring forth a new
+life, to be brought into a home where love and harmony prevail, a home
+in which proper preparation has been made for its coming.
+
+This situation implies in turn a number of conditions. Foremost among
+them is woman's knowledge of her sexual nature, both in its physiology
+and its spiritual significance. She must not only know her own body,
+its care and its needs, but she must know the power of the sex force,
+its use, its abuse, as well as how to direct it for the benefit of the
+race. Thus she can transmit to her children an equipment that will
+enable them to break the bonds that have held humanity enslaved for
+ages.
+
+To achieve this she must have a knowledge of birth control. She must
+also assert and maintain her right to refuse the marital embrace
+except when urged by her inner nature.
+
+The truth makes free. Viewed in its true aspect, the very beauty and
+wonder of the creative impulse will make evident its essential purity.
+We will then instinctively idealize and keep holy that physical-spiritual
+expression which is the foundation of all human life, and in that
+conception of sex will the race he exalted.
+
+What can we expect of offspring that are the result of "accidents"--who
+are brought into being undesired and in fear? What can we hope for
+from a morality that surrounds each physical union, for the woman,
+with an atmosphere of submission and shame? What can we say for a
+morality that leaves the husband at liberty to communicate to his wife
+a venereal disease?
+
+Subversion of the sex urge to ulterior purposes has dragged it to the
+level of the gutter. Recognition of its true nature and purpose must
+lift the race to spiritual freedom. Out of our growing knowledge we
+are evolving new and saner ideas of life in general. Out of our
+increasing sex knowledge we shall evolve new ideals of sex. These
+ideals will spring from the innermost needs of women. They will serve
+these needs and express them. They will be the foundation of a moral
+code that will tend to make fruitful the impulse which is the source,
+the soul and the crowning glory of our sexual natures.
+
+When women have raised the standards of sex ideals and purged the
+human mind of its unclean conception of sex, the fountain of the race
+will have been cleansed. Mothers will bring forth, in purity and in
+joy, a race that is morally and spiritually free.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+LEGISLATING WOMAN'S MORALS
+
+
+One of the important duties before those women who are demanding birth
+control as a means to a New Race is the changing of our so-called
+obscenity laws. This will be no easy undertaking; it is usually much
+easier to enact statutes than to revise them. Laws are seldom exactly
+what they seem, rarely what their advocates claim for them. The
+"obscenity" statutes are particularly deceptive.
+
+Enacted, avowedly, to protect society against the obscene and the
+lewd, they make no distinction between the scientific works of human
+emancipators like Forel and Ellis and printed matter such as they are
+ostensibly aimed at. Naturally enough, then, detectives and
+narrow-minded judges and prosecutors who would chuckle over pictures that
+would make a clean-minded woman shudder, unite to suppress the
+scientific works and the birth-control treatises which would enable
+men and women to attain higher physical, mental, moral and spiritual
+standards.
+
+Woman, bent upon her freedom and seeking to make a better world, will
+not permit the indecent and unclean forces of reaction to mask
+themselves forever behind the plea that it is necessary to keep her in
+ignorance to preserve her purity. In the birth-control movement, she
+has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal
+interference, all knowledge pertaining to her sex nature. This is the
+third and most important of the epoch-making battles for general
+liberty upon American soil. It is most important because it is to
+purify the very fountain of the race and make the race completely
+free.
+
+The first and most dramatic of the three great struggles for liberty
+reached its apex, as we know, in the American Revolution. It had for
+its object the right to hold such political beliefs as one might
+choose, and to act in accordance with those beliefs. If this political
+freedom is now lost to us, it is because we did not hold strongly
+enough to those liberties fought for by our forefathers.
+
+Nearly a hundred years after the Revolution the battle for religious
+liberty came to a climax in the career of Robert G. Ingersoll. His
+championship of the much vaunted and little exercised freedom of
+religious opinion swept the blasphemy laws into the lumber room of
+outworn tyrannies. Those yet remaining upon the statute books are
+invoked but rarely, and then the effort to enforce them is ridiculous.
+
+Within a few years the tragic combination of false moral standards and
+infamous obscenity laws will be as ridiculous in the public mind as
+are the now all but forgotten blasphemy laws. If the obscenity laws
+are not radically revised or repealed, few reactionaries will dare to
+face the public derision that will greet their attempts to use them to
+stay woman's progress.
+
+The French have a saying concerning "mort main"--the dead hand. This
+hand of the past reaches up into the present to smother the rising
+flame of modern ideals, to reforge our chains when we have broken
+them, to arrest progress. It is the hand of such as have lived on
+earth but have not loved humanity. At the call of those who fear
+progress and freedom, it rises from the gloom of forgotten things to
+oppress the living.
+
+It is the dead hand that holds imprisoned within the obscenity laws
+all direct information concerning birth control. It is the dead hand
+that thus compels millions of American women to remain in the bondage
+of maternity.
+
+Previous to the year 1868, the obscenity laws of the various states in
+the Union contained no specific prohibition of information concerning
+contraceptives. In that year, however, the General Assembly of New
+York passed an act which specifically included the subject of
+contraceptives. The act made it exactly as great an offense to give
+such information as to exhibit the sort of pictures and writings at
+which the legislation was ostensibly aimed.
+
+In 1873, the late Anthony Comstock, who with a list of contributors,
+most of whom did not realize the real effects of his work, constituted
+the so-called Society for the Suppression of Vice, succeeded in
+obtaining the passage of the federal obscenity act. This act was
+presented as one to prevent the circulation of pornographic literature
+and pictures among school children. As such, it was rushed through
+with two hundred sixty other acts in the closing hours of the
+Congress. This act made it a crime to use the mails to convey
+contraceptives or information concerning contraceptives. Other acts
+later made the original law applicable to express companies and other
+common carriers, as well as to the mails.
+
+With this precedent established--a precedent which a majority of the
+congressmen could hardly have understood because of the hasty passage
+of the act--Comstock secured the enactment of state laws to the same
+effect. Meanwhile, the provisions regarding contraceptives had been
+dropped from the amended New York State law of 1872. In 1873, however,
+a new section, said to have been drafted by Comstock himself, was
+substituted for the one enacted in 1872, and that section is
+essentially the substance of the present law. None of these acts made
+it an offense to prevent conception--all of them provided punishment
+for anyone disseminating information concerning the prevention of
+conception. In the federal statutes, the maximum penalties were fixed
+at a fine of $5,000 or five years imprisonment, or both. The usual
+maximum penalty under a state law is a fine of $1,000 or one year's
+imprisonment, or both.
+
+Comstock has passed out of public notice. His body has been entombed
+but the evil that he did lives after him. His dead hand still reaches
+forth to keep the subject of prevention of conception where he placed
+it--in the same legal category with things unclean and vile. Forty
+years ago the laws were changed and the chief work of Comstock's life
+accomplished. Those laws still live, legal monuments to ignorance and
+to oppression. Through those laws reaches the dead hand to bring to
+the operating table each year hundreds of thousands of women who
+undergo the agony of abortion. Each year this hand reaches out to
+compel the birth of hundreds of thousands of infants who must die
+before they are twelve months old.
+
+Like many laws upon our statute books, these are being persistently
+and intelligently violated. Few members of the well-to-do and wealthy
+classes think for a single moment of obeying them. They limit their
+families to one, two or three well-cared-for children. Usually the
+prosecutor who presents the case against a birth-control advocate,
+trapped by a detective hired by the Comstock Society, has no children
+at all or a small family. The family of the judge who passes upon the
+case is likely to be smaller still. The words "It is the law" sums it
+all up for these officials when they pass sentence in court. But these
+words, so magical to the official mind, have no weight when these same
+officials are adjusting their own private lives. They then obey the
+higher laws of their own beings--they break the obsolete statutes for
+themselves while enforcing them for others.
+
+This is not the situation with the poorer people of the United States,
+however. Millions of them know nothing of reliable contraceptives.
+When women of the impoverished strata of society do not break these
+laws against contraceptives, they violate those laws of their inner
+beings which tell them not to bring children into the world to live in
+want, disease and general misery. They break the first law of nature,
+which is that of self preservation. Bound by false morals, enchained
+by false conceptions of religion, hindered by false laws, they endure
+until the pressure becomes so great that morals, religion and laws
+alike fail to restrain them. Then they for a brief respite resort to
+the surgeon's instruments.
+
+For many years the semi-official witch hunting of the Comstock
+organization had a remarkable and a deadly effect. Everyone, whether
+it was novelist, essayist, publicist, propagandist or artist, who
+sought to throw definite light upon the forbidden subject of sex, or
+upon family limitation, was prosecuted if detected. Among the many
+books suppressed were works by physicians designed to warn young men
+and women away from the pitfalls of venereal diseases and sexual
+errors. The darkness that surrounded the whole field of sex was made
+as complete as possible.
+
+Since then the feeling of the awakened women of America has
+intensified. The rapidity with which women are going into industry,
+the increasing hardship and poverty of the lower strata of society,
+the arousing of public conscience, have all operated to give force and
+volume to the demand for woman's right to control her own body that
+she may work out her own salvation.
+
+Those who believe in strictly legal measures, as well as those who
+believe both in legal measures and in open defiance of these brutal
+and unjust laws, are demanding amendments to the obscenity statutes,
+which shall remove information concerning contraceptives from its
+present classification among things filthy and obscene.
+
+An amendment typical of those offered is that drawn up for the New
+York statutes under the direction of Samuel McClure Lindsey, of
+Columbia University. The words and sentences in italics are those
+which it proposed to add:
+
+"(Section 1145.) Physicians' instruments _and information_. An article
+or instrument used or applied by physicians lawfully practicing, or by
+their direction or prescription, for the cure or prevention of
+disease, is not an article of indecent or immoral nature or use,
+within this article. The supplying of such articles to such physicians
+or by their direction or prescription, is not an offense under this
+article. _The giving by a duly licensed physician or registered nurse
+lawfully practicing, of information or advice in regard to, or the
+supplying to any person of any article or medicine for the prevention
+of, conception is not a violation of any provision of this article._"
+
+This proposed amendment should without doubt include midwives as well
+as nurses. There are thousands of women who never see a nurse or a
+physician. Under this section, even as it now stands, physicians have
+a right to prescribe contraceptives, but few of them have claimed that
+right or have even known that it has existed. It does exist, however,
+and was specifically declared by the New York State Court of Appeals,
+as we shall see when we consider that court's opinion in the Sanger
+case, farther on in the book. It can do no harm to make the intent of
+the law as regards physicians plainer, and it would be an immense step
+forward to include nurses and midwives in the section. With this
+addition it would remove one of the most serious obstacles to the
+freedom and advancement of American womanhood. Every woman interested
+in the welfare of women in general should make it her business to
+agitate for such a change in the obscenity laws.
+
+The above provision would take care of the case of the woman who is
+ill, or who is plainly about to become ill, but it does not take care
+of the vast body of women who have not yet ruined their health by
+childbearing and who are not yet suffering from diseases complicated
+by pregnancy. If this amendment had been attached to the laws in all
+the states, there would still remain much to be done.
+
+Shall we go on indefinitely driving the now healthy mother of two
+children into the hands of the abortionist, where she goes in
+preference to constant ill health, overwork and the witnessing of
+dying and starving babies? It is each woman's duty to herself and to
+society to hasten the repeal of all laws against the communication of
+birth-control information now that she has the vote, she should use
+her political influence to strike, first of all, at these restrictive
+statutes. It is not to her credit that a district attorney, arguing
+against a birth control advocate, is able to show that women have made
+no effort to wipe out such laws in states where they have had the
+ballot for years.
+
+It is time that women assert themselves upon this fundamental right,
+and the first and best use they can make of the ballot is in this
+direction. These laws were made by men and have been instruments of
+martyrdom and death for unnumbered thousands of women. Women now have
+the opportunity to sweep them into the trash heap. They will do it at
+once unless, like men, they use the ballot for those political honors
+which many years of experience have taught men to be hollow.
+
+It is only a question of how long it will take women to make up their
+minds to this result. The law of woman's being is stronger than any
+statute, and the man-made law must sooner or later give way to it. Man
+has not protected woman in matters most vital to her--but she is
+awaking and will sooner or later realize this and assert herself. If
+she acts in mass now, it will be another cheering evidence that she is
+moving consciously toward her goal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+WHY NOT BIRTH-CONTROL CLINICS IN AMERICA
+
+[Footnote: This chapter, in substance, and largely in language,
+appeared under the present title in the March, 1920, issue of American
+Medicine (New York) and is incorporated in this book by courtesy of
+that publication.]
+
+
+The absurd cruelty of permitting thousands of women each year to go
+through abortions to prevent the aggravation of diseases for which
+they are under treatment assuredly cannot be much longer ignored by
+the medical profession. Responsibility for the inestimable damage done
+by the practice of permitting patients suffering from certain ailments
+to become pregnant, because of their ignorance of contraceptives, when
+the physician knows that if pregnancy goes to its full term it will
+hasten the disease and lead to the patient's death, must in all
+fairness be laid at his door.
+
+What these diseases are and what dangers are involved in pregnancy are
+known to every practitioner of standing. Specialists have not been
+negligent in pointing out the situation. Eager to enhance or protect
+their reputations in the profession, they continually call out to one
+another: "Don't let the patient bear a child--don't let pregnancy
+continue."
+
+The warning has been sounded most often, perhaps, in the cases of
+tubercular women. "In view of the fact that the tubercular process
+becomes exacerbated either during pregnancy or after childbirth, most
+authorities recommend that abortion be induced as a matter of routine
+in all tubercular women," says Dr. J. Whitridge Williams,
+obstetrician-in-chief to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in his treatise
+on _Obstetrics_. Dr. Thomas Watts Eden, obstetrician and gynecologist
+to Charing Cross Hospital and member of the staffs of other notable
+British hospitals, extends but does not complete the list in this
+paragraph on page 652 of his _Practical Obstetrics_: "Certain of the
+conditions enumerated form absolute indications for the induction of
+abortion. These are nephritis, uncompensated valvular lesions of the
+heart, advanced tuberculosis, insanity, irremediable malignant tumors,
+hydatidiform mole, uncontrollable uterine hemorrhage, and acute
+hydramnios."
+
+We know that abortion, when performed by skilled hands, under right
+conditions, brings almost no danger to the life of the patient, and we
+also know that particular diseases can be more easily combatted after
+such an abortion than during a pregnancy allowed to come to full term.
+But why not adopt the easier, safer, less repulsive course and prevent
+conception altogether? Why put these thousands of women who each year
+undergo such abortions to the pain they entail and in whatever danger
+attends them?
+
+Why continue to send home women to whom pregnancy is a grave danger
+with the futile advice: "Now don't get this way again!" They are sent
+back to husbands who have generations of passion and passion's claim
+to outlet. They are sent back without being given information as to
+how to prevent the dangerous pregnancy and are expected, presumably,
+to depend for their safety upon the husband's continence. The wife and
+husband are thrown together to bring about once more the same
+condition. Back comes the patient again in a few months to be aborted
+and told once more not to do it again.
+
+Does any physician believe that the picture is overdrawn? I have known
+of many such cases. A recent one that came under my observation was
+that of a woman who suffered from a disease of the kidneys. Five times
+she was taken to a maternity hospital in an ambulance after falling in
+offices or in the street. One of the foremost gynecologists of America
+sent her out three times without giving her information as to the
+contraceptive means which would have prevented a repetition of this
+experience.
+
+Why does this situation exist? We do not question the good intent nor
+the high purposes of these physicians. We know that they observe a
+high standard of ethics and that they are working for the uplift of
+the race. But here is a situation that is absurd--hideously absurd.
+What is the matter?
+
+Several factors contribute to this state of affairs. First, the
+subject of contraception has been kept in the dark, even in medical
+colleges and in hospitals. Abortion has been openly discussed as a
+necessity under certain conditions, but the subject of contraception,
+as any physician will admit, has not yet been brought to the front. It
+has escaped specialized attention in the laboratories and the research
+departments. Thus there has been no professional stamp of approval by
+great bodies of experimenters. The result is that the average
+physician has felt that contraceptive methods are not yet established
+as certainties and has, for that reason, refused to direct _their
+use_.
+
+Specialists are so busy with their own particular subjects and general
+practitioners are so taken up with their daily routine that they
+cannot give to the problem of contraception the attention it must
+have. Consultation rooms in charge of reputable physicians who have
+specialized in contraception, assisted by registered nurses--in a
+word, clinics designed for this specialty, would meet this crying
+need. Such clinics should deal with each woman individually, taking
+into account her particular disease, her temperament, her mentality
+and her condition, both physical and economic. Their sole function
+should be to prevent pregnancy. In accomplishing this purpose, a
+higher standard of hygiene is attained. Not only would a burden be
+removed from the physician who sends a woman to such a clinic, but
+there would be an improvement in the woman's general condition which
+would in a number of ways reflect itself in benefit to her family.
+
+All this for the diseased woman. But every argument that can be made
+for preventive medicine can be made for birth-control clinics for the
+use of the woman who has not yet lost her health. Sound and vigorous
+at the time of her marriage, she could remain so if given advice as to
+by what means she could space her children and limit their number.
+When she is not given such information, she is plunged blindly into
+married life and a few years is likely to find her with a large
+family, herself diseased and damaged, an unfit breeder of the unfit,
+and still ignorant!
+
+What are the fruits of this woeful ignorance in which women have been
+kept? First, a tremendous infant mortality--hundreds of thousands of
+babies dying annually of diseases which flourish in poverty and
+neglect.
+
+Next, the rapid increase of the feebleminded, of criminal types and of
+the pathetic victims of toil in the child-labor factories. Another
+result is the familiar overcrowding of tenements, the forcing of the
+children into the street, the ensuing prostitution, alcoholism and
+almost universal physical and moral unfitness.
+
+Those abhorrent conditions point to a blunder upon the part of those
+to whom we have entrusted the care of the health of the individual,
+the family and the race. The medical profession, neglecting the
+principle involved in preventive medicine, has permitted these
+conditions to come about. If they were unavoidable, we should have to
+bear with them, but they are not unavoidable, as shown by facts and
+figures from other countries where contraceptive information is
+available.
+
+In Holland, for instance, where the information concerning
+contraceptives has been accessible to the people, through clinics and
+pamphlets, since 1881, the general death rate and the infant mortality
+rate have fallen until they are the lowest in Europe. Amsterdam and
+The Hague have the lowest infant mortality rates of any cities in the
+world.
+
+It is good to know that the first of the birth-control clinics of
+Holland followed shortly after a thorough and enthusiastic discussion
+of the subject at an international medical congress in Amsterdam in
+1878. The Dutch Neo-Malthusian League was founded in 1881. The first
+birth-control clinic in the world was opened in 1885 by Dr. Aletta
+Jacobs in Amsterdam. So great were the results obtained that there has
+been a remarkable increase in the wealth, stamina, stature and
+longevity of the people, as well as a gradual increase in the
+population.
+
+These clinics must not be confused with the white enameled rooms which
+we associate with the term in America. They are ordinary offices with
+the necessary equipment, or rooms in the homes of the nurses, fitted
+out for the work. They are places for consultation and examination,
+opened by specially trained nurses who have been instructed by Dr. J.
+Rutgers, of The Hague, secretary of the Neo-Malthusian League, who has
+devoted his life to this work. There have been more than fifty nurses
+trained specially for this work by Dr. Rutgers. As a nurse completes
+her course of training, she establishes herself in a community and her
+place of consultation is called a clinic.
+
+The general results of this service are best judged by tables included
+in the _Annual Summary of Marriages, Births and Deaths in England,
+Wales, Etc., for 1912_. [Footnote: (See table on page 208.)]
+
+In Amsterdam, the birth rate dropped from 37.1 for the period of
+1881-85 to 24.7 for 1906 and 23.3 in 1912. During the same periods, the
+death rate fell from 25.1 to 13.1, and in 1912 to 11.2. Infant
+mortality for the same period fell from 203 for each thousand living
+births to 90, and in 1912 to 64. Illegitimate fertility also
+decreased. Results in other cities, as shown by the table at the end
+of this chapter, are exactly similar.
+
+In the Australian Commonwealth, where birth control is taken as a
+matter of course, and information concerning contraceptives is
+available to the masses, the births were so well distributed in 1915
+that while the birth rate was 27.3, there was an infant death rate of
+only 10.7. New Zealand, which is also one of the typical birth-control
+countries, had a birth rate of 25.3 and an infant death rate of only
+9.1 for the same year. These figures are in marked and happy contrast
+with those for the birth registration of the United States, where the
+reports for 1916 show a birth rate of 24.8, but an infant death rate
+of 14.7. A similar comparison may be made with the German Empire in
+1913, where there was a birth rate of 27.5 in 1913 and an infant
+mortality rate of 15. In these countries, birth control information is
+not so generally within the reach of the masses and, consequently, the
+largest percentage of births come to that class least able to bring
+children to full maturity, as indicated in the infant mortality rates.
+
+In conclusion, I am going to make a statement which may at first seem
+exaggerated, but which is, nevertheless, carefully considered. The
+effort toward racial progress that is being made to-day by the medical
+profession, by social workers, by the various charitable and
+philanthropic organizations and by state institutions for the
+physically and mentally unfit, is practically wasted. All these forces
+are in a very emphatic sense marking time. They will continue to mark
+time until the medical profession recognizes the fact that the ever
+increasing tide of the unfit is overwhelming all that these agencies
+are doing for society. They will continue to mark time until they get
+at the source of these destructive conditions and apply a fundamental
+remedy. That remedy is birth control.
+
+-----------------------------------------------
+
+[Footnote: Amsterdam [Malthusian (Birth Control) League started 1881;
+Dr. Aletta Jacobs gave advice to poor women, 1885]:
+
+                    1881-85   1906-10   1912
+
+Birth rate.........  37.1      27.7     23.3 per 1,000 of population
+Death rate.........  25.1      13.1     11.2 per 1,000 of population
+
+INFANTILE MORTALITY:
+
+Deaths in first
+year................ 203        90      64 per thousand living births
+
+
+The Hague [now headquarters of the Neo-Malthusian (Birth Control) League]:
+
+                     1881-85   1906-10   1912
+
+Birth rate........... 38.7     27.5     23.6 per 1,000 of population
+Death rate........... 23.3     13.2     10.9 per 1,000 of population
+
+INFANTILE MORTALITY:
+
+Deaths in first
+year................. 214      99       66 per thousand living births
+
+These figures are the lowest in the whole list of death rates and
+infantile mortalities in the summary of births and deaths in cities in
+this report.
+
+Rotterdam:
+
+                    1881-85   1906-10   1912
+
+Birth rate.......... 37.4      32.0     29.0 per 1,000 of population
+Death rate.......... 24.2      13.4     11.3 per 1,000 of population
+
+INFANTILE MORTALITY:
+
+Deaths in first
+year................ 209       105      79 per thousand living births
+
+Fertility and Illegitimacy Rates:
+
+                      1880-2  1890-2  1900-2   (Legitimate births per
+                                                1,000 married women
+Legitimate fertility.. 306.4   296.5   252.7    aged 15 to 45.)
+
+
+                      1880-2  1890-2  1900-2  (Illegitimate births per
+                                               1,000 unmarried women,
+Illegitimate fertility..16.1   16.3    11.3    aged 15 to 45.)
+
+
+The Hague:
+
+                        1880-2    1890-2    1900-2
+
+Legitimate fertility.... 346.5     303.9     255.0
+Illegitimate fertility... 13.4      13.6       7.7
+
+
+Rotterdam:
+
+                         1880-2   1890-2   1900-2
+
+Legitimate fertility.... 331.4    312.0    299.0
+Illegitimate fertility... 17.4     16.5     13.1]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+PROGRESS WE HAVE MADE
+
+
+The silence of the centuries has been broken. The wrongs of woman and
+the rights of woman have found voices. These voices differ from all
+others that have been raised in woman's behalf. They are not the
+individual protests of great feminine minds, nor the masculine
+remedies for masculine oppression suggested by the stricken
+consciences of a few men. Great voices are heard, both of women and of
+men, but intermingled with them are millions of voices demanding
+freedom.
+
+Let it be repeated that movements mothered by emancipated women are
+often deceptive in character. The demand for suffrage, the agitation
+against child labor, the regulation of working hours for women, the
+insistence upon mothers' pensions are palliatives all. Yet as woman's
+understanding develops and she learns to think at the urgence of her
+own inner nature, rather than at the dictates of men, she moves on
+from these palliatives to fundamental remedies. So at the crest of the
+wave of woman's revolt comes the movement for voluntary motherhood--not
+a separate, isolated movement, but the manifestation of a cosmic
+force--the force that moves the wave itself.
+
+The walls of the cloister have fallen before the cries of a rising
+womanhood. The barriers of prurient puritanism are being demolished.
+Free woman has torn the veil of indecency from the secrets of life to
+reveal them in their power and their purity. Womanhood yet bound has
+beheld and understood. A public whose thoughts and opinions had been
+governed by men and by women engulfed in the old order has been
+shocked awake.
+
+Sneers and jests at birth control are giving way to a reverent
+understanding of the needs of woman. They who to-day deny the right of
+a woman to control her own body speak with the hardihood of invincible
+ignorance or with the folly of those blind ones who in all ages have
+opposed the light of progress. Few there are to insist openly that
+woman remain a passive instrument of reproduction. The subject of
+birth control is being lifted out of the mire into which it was cast
+by puritanism and given its proper place among the sciences and the
+ideals of this generation. With this effort has come an illumination
+of all other social problems. Society is beginning to give ear to the
+promise of modern womanhood: "When you have ceased to chain me, I
+shall by the virtue of a free motherhood remake the world."
+
+It would be miraculous indeed if that victory which has been won, had
+been gained without great toil, insufferable anguish and sacrifice
+such as all persons experience when they dare to brave the conventions
+of the dead past or blaze a trail for a new order.
+
+But where the vision is clear, the faith deep, forces unseen rally to
+assist and carry one over barriers which would otherwise have been
+insurmountable. No part of this wave of woman's emancipation has won
+its way without such vision and faith.
+
+This is the one movement in which pioneering was unnecessary. The cry
+for deliverance always goes up. It is its own pioneer. The facts have
+always stared us in the face. No one who has worked among women can be
+ignorant of them. I remember that ever since I was a child, the idea
+of large families associated itself with poverty in my mind. As I grew
+to womanhood, and found myself working in hospitals and in the homes
+of the rich and the poor, the association between the two ideas grew
+stronger.
+
+In every home of the poor, women asked me the same question. As far
+back as 1900, I began to inquire of my associates among the nurses
+what one could tell these worried women who asked constantly: "What
+can I do?" It is the voice of the elemental urge of woman--it has
+always been there; and whether we have heeded it or neglected it, we
+have always heard it. Out of this cry came the birth control movement.
+
+Economic conditions have naturally made this elemental need more
+plain; sometimes they have lent a more desperate voice to woman's cry
+for freedom. Men and women have arisen since Knowlton and Robert Dale
+Owen, to advocate the use of contraceptives, but aside from these two
+none has come forward to separate it from other issues of _sex_
+freedom. But the birth control movement as a movement for woman's
+_basic_ freedom was born of that unceasing cry of the socially
+repressed, spiritually stifled woman who is constantly demanding:
+"What can I do to avoid more children?"
+
+When it came time to arouse new public interest in birth control and
+organize a movement, it was found expedient to employ direct and
+drastic methods to awaken a slumbering public. The Woman Rebel, a
+monthly magazine, was established to proclaim the gospel of revolt.
+When its mission was accomplished and the words "birth control" were
+on their way to be a symbol of woman's freedom in all civilized
+tongues, it went out of existence.
+
+The deceptive "obscenity law," invoked oftener to repress womanhood
+and smother scientific knowledge than to restrain the distribution of
+verbal and pictorial pornography, was deliberately challenged. This
+course had two purposes. It challenged the constitutionality of the
+law and thereby brought knowledge of contraceptives to hundreds of
+thousands of women.
+
+The first general, organized effort reached in various ways to all
+parts of the United States. Particular attention was paid to the
+mining districts of West Virginia and Montana, the mill towns of New
+England and the cotton districts of the Southern states. Men and women
+from all these districts welcomed the movement. They sent letters
+pledging their loyalty and their active assistance. They participated
+directly and indirectly in the protest which awakened the country.
+
+As time went on, the work was extended to various foreign elements of
+the population, this being made possible by the enthusiastic
+cooperation of workers who speak the foreign languages.
+
+Leagues were formed to organize those who favored changing the laws.
+Lectures were delivered throughout the United States. Articles were
+written by eminent physicians, scientists, reformers and
+revolutionists. Debates were arranged. Newspapers and magazines of all
+kinds, classes and languages gave the subject of birth control serious
+attention, taking one side or the other of the discussion that was
+aroused. New books on the subject began to appear. Books by foreign
+authors were reprinted and distributed in the United States. The Birth
+Control Review, edited by voluntary effort and supported by a stock
+company of women who make contributions instead of taking dividends,
+was founded and continues its work.
+
+After a year's study in foreign countries for the purpose of
+supplementing the knowledge gained in my fourteen years as a nurse, I
+came back to the United States determined to open a clinic. I had
+decided that there could be no better way of demonstrating to the
+public the necessity of birth control and the welcome it would receive
+than by taking the knowledge of contraceptive methods directly to
+those who most needed it.
+
+A clinic was opened in Brooklyn. There 480 women received information
+before the police closed the consulting rooms and arrested Ethel
+Byrne, a registered nurse, Fania Mindell, a translator, and myself.
+The purpose of this clinic was to demonstrate to the public the
+practicability and the necessity of such institutions. All women who
+came seeking information were workingmen's wives. All had children. No
+unmarried girls came at all. Men came whose wives had nursing children
+and could not come. Women came from the farther parts of Long Island,
+from cities in Massachusetts and Connecticut and even more distant
+places. Mothers brought their married daughters. Some whose ages were
+from 25 to 35 looked fifty, but the clinic gave them new hope to face
+the years ahead. These women invariably expressed their love for
+children, but voiced a common plea for means to avoid others, in order
+that they might give sufficient care to those already born. They
+wanted them "to grow up decent."
+
+For ten days the two rooms of this clinic were crowded to their
+utmost. Then came the police. We were hauled off to jail and
+eventually convicted of a "crime."
+
+Ethel Byrne instituted a hunger strike for eleven days, which
+attracted attention throughout the nation. It brought to public notice
+the fact that women were ready to die for the principle of voluntary
+motherhood. So strong was the sentiment evoked that Governor Whitman
+pardoned Mrs. Byrne.
+
+No single act of self-sacrifice in the history of the birth-control
+movement has done more to awaken the conscience of the public or to
+arouse the courage of women, than did Ethel Byrne's deed of
+uncompromising resentment at the outrage of jailing women who were
+attempting to disseminate knowledge which would emancipate the
+motherhood of America.
+
+Courage like hers and like that of others who have undergone arrest
+and imprisonment, or who night after night and day after day have
+faced street crowds to speak or to sell literature--the faith and the
+untiring labors of still others who have not come into public notice--have
+given the movement its dauntless character and assure the final victory.
+
+One dismal fact had become clear long before the Brownsville clinic
+was opened. The medical profession as a whole had ignored the tragic
+cry of womanhood for relief from forced maternity. The private
+practitioners, one after another, shook their heads and replied: "It
+cannot be done. It is against the law," and the same answer came from
+clinics and public hospitals.
+
+The decision of the New York State Court of Appeals has disposed of
+that objection, however, though as yet few physicians have cared to
+make public the fact that they take advantage of the decision. While
+the decision of the lower courts in my own case was upheld, partly
+because I was a nurse and not a physician, the court incidentally held
+that under the laws as they now stand in New York, any physician has a
+right to impart information concerning contraceptives to women as a
+measure for curing or preventing disease. The United States Supreme
+Court threw out my appeal without consideration of the merits of the
+case. Therefore, the decision of the New York State Court of Appeals
+stands. And under that decision, a physician has a right, and it is
+therefore his duty, to prescribe contraceptives in such cases, at
+least, as those involving disease.
+
+It is true that Section 1142 of the Penal Code of New York State does
+not except the medical man, and does not allow him to instruct his
+patient in birth control methods, even though she is suffering from
+tuberculosis, syphilis, kidney disorders or heart disease. Without
+looking farther, the physicians had let that section go at its face
+value. No doctor had questioned either its purpose or its legal scope.
+The medical profession was content to let this apparent limitation
+upon its rights stand, and it remained for a woman to go to jail to
+demonstrate the fact that under another section of the same code--1145--the
+physician had the vital right just described.
+
+It is safe to say that many physicians do not even yet know of their
+legal rights in this matter.
+
+But here is what the New York State Court of Appeals said on January
+8, 1918, in an opinion thus far unquestioned and which is the law of
+the state:
+
+"Secondly, by section 1145 of the Penal Law, physicians are excepted
+from the provisions of this act under circumstances therein mentioned.
+This section reads: 'An article or instrument, used or applied by
+physicians lawfully practicing, or by their direction or prescription,
+for the cure or prevention of disease, is not an article of indecent
+or immoral nature or use, within this article. The supplying of such
+articles to such physicians or by their direction or prescription, is
+not an offense under this article.'
+
+"This exception in behalf of physicians does not permit advertisements
+regarding such matters, nor promiscuous advice to patients
+irrespective of their condition, but it is broad enough to protect the
+physician who in good faith gives such help or advice to a married
+person to cure or prevent disease. 'Disease,' by Webster's
+International Dictionary, is defined to be, 'an alteration in the
+state of the body, or of some of its organs, interrupting or
+disturbing the performance of the vital functions, and causing or
+threatening pain and sickness; illness, disorder.'
+
+"The protection thus afforded the physician would also extend to the
+druggist, or vendor, acting upon the physician's prescription or
+order."
+
+Section 1142, which shamelessly classes contraceptive information with
+abortion and things obscene, still stands, but under the decision of
+the Court of Appeals, it is the law of New York State that physicians
+have the right which they were seemingly denied. Such is probably the
+fact, also, in many other states, for the so-called "obscenity" laws
+are modelled more or less, after the same pattern.
+
+One of the chief results of the Brownsville clinic was that of
+establishing for physicians a right which they neglected to establish
+for themselves, but which they are bound, in the very nature of
+things, to exercise to an increasing degree. Similar tests by women in
+other states would doubtless establish the right elsewhere in America.
+
+We know of some thirty-five arrests of women and men who have dared
+entrenched prejudice and the law to further the cause of birth
+control. The persistent work in behalf of the movement, attended as it
+was by danger of fines and jail sentences, seemed to puzzle the
+authorities. Sometimes they dismissed the arrested persons, sometimes
+they fined them, sometimes they imprisoned them. But the protests went
+on, and through these self-sacrifices, word of the movement went
+constantly to more and more people.
+
+Each of these arrests brought added publicity. Each became a center of
+local agitation. Each brought a part of the public, at least, face to
+face with the issue between the women of America and this barbarous
+law.
+
+Many thousands of letters have been answered and thousands of women
+have been given personal consultations. Each letter and each
+consultation means another center of influence from which the gospel
+of voluntary motherhood spreads.
+
+Forced thus to the front, the problems of birth control and the right
+of voluntary motherhood have been brought more and more to the
+attention of medical students, nurses, midwives, physicians,
+scientists and sociologists. A new literature, ranging all the way
+from discussion of the means of preventing conception to the social,
+political, ethical, moral and spiritual possibilities of birth
+control, is coming into being. Woman's cry for liberty is infusing
+itself into the thoughts and the consciences and the aspirations of
+the intellectual leaders as well as into the idealism of society.
+
+It is but a few years since it was said of The Woman Rebel that it was
+"the first un-veiled head raised in America." It is but a few years
+since men as well as women trembled at the temerity of a public
+discussion in which the subject of sex was mentioned.
+
+But, measured in progress, it is a far cry from those days. The public
+has read of birth control on the first page of its newspapers. It has
+discussed it in meetings and in clubs. It has been a favorite topic of
+discussion at correct teas. The scientist is giving it reverent and
+profound attention. Even the minister, seeking to keep abreast of the
+times, proclaims it from the pulpit. And everywhere, serious-minded
+women and men, those with the vision, with a comprehension of present
+and future needs of society, are working to bring this message to
+those who have not yet realized its immense and regenerating import.
+
+The American public, in a word, has been permeated with the message of
+birth control. Its reaction to that message has been exceedingly
+encouraging. People by the thousands have flocked to the meetings.
+Only the official mind, serving ancient prejudices under the cloak of
+"law and order," has been in opposition.
+
+It is plain that puritanism is in the throes of a lingering death. If
+anyone doubts it, let it be remembered that the same people who, a few
+years ago, formed the official opinion of puritanism have so far
+forsaken puritanism as to flood the country with millions of pamphlets
+discussing sex matters and venereal disease. This literature was
+distributed by the United States Government, by state governments, by
+the Y.M.C.A., the Y.W.C.A., and by similar organizations. It treated
+the physiology of sex far more definitely than has birth-control
+literature. This official educational barrage was at once a splendid
+salute to the right of women and men to know their own bodies and the
+last heavy firing in the main battle against ignorance in the field of
+sex. What remains now is but to take advantage of the victories.
+
+What does it all mean? It means that American womanhood is blasting
+its way through the débris of crumbling moral and religious systems
+toward freedom. It means that the path is all but clear. It means that
+woman has but to press on, more courageously, more confidently, with
+her face set more firmly toward the goal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE GOAL
+
+
+What is the goal of woman's upward struggle? Is it voluntary
+motherhood? Is it general freedom? Or is it the birth of a new race?
+For freedom is not fruitless, but prolific of higher things. Being the
+most sacred aspect of woman's freedom, voluntary motherhood is
+motherhood in its highest and holiest form. It is motherhood
+unchained--motherhood ready to obey its own urge to remake the world.
+
+Voluntary motherhood implies a new morality--a vigorous, constructive,
+liberated morality. That morality will, first of all, prevent the
+submergence of womanhood into motherhood. It will set its face against
+the conversion of women into mechanical maternity and toward the
+creation of a new race.
+
+Woman's rôle has been that of an incubator and little more. She has
+given birth to an incubated race. She has given to her children what
+little she was permitted to give, but of herself, of her personality,
+almost nothing. In the mass, she has brought forth quantity, not
+quality. The requirement of a male dominated civilization has been
+numbers. She has met that requirement.
+
+It is the essential function of voluntary motherhood to choose its own
+mate, to determine the time of childbearing and to regulate strictly
+the number of offspring. Natural affection upon her part, instead of
+selection dictated by social or economic advantage, will give her a
+better fatherhood for her children. The exercise of her right to
+decide how many children she will have and when she shall have them
+will procure for her the time necessary to the development of other
+faculties than that of reproduction. She will give play to her tastes,
+her talents and her ambitions. She will become a full-rounded human
+being.
+
+Thus and only thus will woman be able to transmit to her offspring
+those qualities which make for a greater race.
+
+The importance of developing these qualities in the mothers for
+transmission to the children is apparent when we recall certain
+well-established principles of biology. In all of the animal species below
+the human, motherhood has a clearly discernible superiority over
+fatherhood. It is the first pulse of organic life. Fatherhood is the
+fertilizing element. Its development, compared to that of the mother
+cell, is comparatively new. Likewise, its influence upon the progeny
+is comparatively small. There are weighty authorities who assert that
+through the female alone comes those modifications of form, capacity
+and ability which constitute evolutionary progress. It was the mothers
+who first developed cunning in chase, ingenuity in escaping enemies,
+skill in obtaining food, and adaptability. It was they also who
+attained unfailing discretion in leadership, adaptation to environment
+and boldness in attack. When the animal kingdom as a whole is
+surveyed, these stand out as distinctly feminine traits. They stand
+out also as the characteristics by which the progress of species is
+measured.
+
+Why is all this true of the lower species yet not true of human
+beings? The secret is revealed by one significant fact--the female's
+functions in these animal species are not limited to motherhood alone.
+Every organ and faculty is fully employed and perfected. Through the
+development of the individual mother, better and higher types of
+animals are produced and carried forward. In a word, natural law makes
+the female the expression and the conveyor of racial efficiency.
+
+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. So, in compliance with nature's
+working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we
+can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial
+progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in
+every individual woman. Then and then only can the mother cease to be
+an incubator and be a mother indeed. Then only can she transmit to her
+sons and daughters the qualities which make strong individuals and,
+collectively, a strong race.
+
+Voluntary motherhood also implies the right of marriage without
+maternity. Two utterly different functions are developed in the two
+relationships. In order to give the mate relationship its full and
+free play, it is necessary that no woman should be a mother against
+her will. There are other reasons, of course--reasons more frequently
+emphasized--but the reason just mentioned should never be overlooked.
+It is as important to the race as to the woman, for through it is
+developed that high love impulse which, conveyed to the child, attunes
+and perfects its being.
+
+Marriage, quite aside from parentage, also gives two people invaluable
+experience. When parentage follows in its proper time, it is a better
+parentage because of the mutual adjustment and development--because of
+the knowledge thus gained. Few couples are fitted to understand the
+sacred mystery of child life until they have solved some of the
+problems arising out of their own love lives.
+
+Maternal love, which usually follows upon a happy, satisfying mate
+love, becomes a strong and urgent craving. It then exists for two
+powerful, creative functions. First, for its own sake, and then for
+the sake of further enriching the conjugal relationship. It is from
+such soil that the new life should spring. It is the inherent right of
+the new life to have its inception in such physical ground, in such
+spiritual atmosphere. The child thus born is indeed a flower of love
+and tremendous joy. It has within it the seeds of courage and of
+power. This child will have the greatest strength to surmount
+hardships, to withstand tyrannies, to set still higher the mark of
+human achievement.
+
+Shall we pause here to speak again of the rights of womanhood, in
+itself and of itself, to be absolutely free? We have talked of this
+right so much in these pages, only to learn that in the end, a free
+womanhood turns of its own desire to a free and happy motherhood, a
+motherhood which does not submerge the woman, but which is enriched
+because she is unsubmerged. When we voice, then, the necessity of
+setting the feminine spirit utterly and absolutely free, thought turns
+naturally not to rights of the woman, nor indeed of the mother, but to
+the rights of the child--of all children in the world. For this is the
+miracle of free womanhood, that in its freedom it becomes the race
+mother and opens its heart in fruitful affection for humanity.
+
+How narrow, how pitifully puny has become motherhood in its chains!
+The modern motherhood enfolds one or two adoring children of its own
+blood, and cherishes, protects and loves them. It does not reach out
+to all children. When motherhood is a high privilege, not a sordid,
+slavish requirement, it will encircle all. Its deep, passionate
+intensity will overflow the limits of blood relationship. Its beauty
+will shine upon all, for its beauty is of the soul, whose power of
+enfoldment is unbounded.
+
+When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result
+of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a
+new race. There will be no killing of babies in the womb by abortion,
+nor through neglect in foundling homes, nor will there be infanticide.
+Neither will children die by inches in mills and factories. No man
+will dare to break a child's life upon the wheel of toil.
+
+Voluntary motherhood will not be passive, resigned, or weak. Out of
+its craving will come forth a fierceness of love for its fruits that
+will make such men as remain unawakened stand aghast at its fury when
+offended. The tigress is less terrible in defense of her offspring
+than will be the human mother. The daughters of such women will not be
+given over to injustice and to prostitution; the sons will not perish
+in industry nor upon the battle field. Nor could they meet these all
+too common fates if an undaunted motherhood were there to defend.
+Childhood and youth will be too valuable in the eyes of society to
+waste them in the murderous mills of blind greed and hate.
+
+This is the dawn. Womanhood shakes off its bondage. It asserts its
+right to be free. In its freedom, its thoughts turn to the race. Like
+begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees. The race is
+but the amplification of its mother body, the multiplication of flesh
+habitations--beautified and perfected for souls akin to the mother
+soul.
+
+The relentless efforts of reactionary authority to suppress the
+message of birth control and of voluntary motherhood are futile. The
+powers of reaction cannot now prevent the feminine spirit from
+breaking its bonds. When the last fetter falls the evils that have
+resulted from the suppression of woman's will to freedom will pass.
+Child slavery, prostitution, feeblemindedness, physical deterioration,
+hunger, oppression and war will disappear from the earth.
+
+In their subjection women have not been brave enough, strong enough,
+pure enough to bring forth great sons and daughters. Abused soil
+brings forth stunted growths. An abused motherhood has brought forth a
+low order of humanity. Great beings come forth at the call of high
+desire. Fearless motherhood goes out in love and passion for justice
+to all mankind. It brings forth fruits after its own kind. When the
+womb becomes fruitful through the desire of an aspiring love, another
+Newton will come forth to unlock further the secrets of the earth and
+the stars. There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates
+who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the
+cross. These and the race that is to be in America await upon a
+motherhood that is to be sacred because it is free.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Woman and the New Race, by Margaret Sanger
+
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