A New Truth Emerges
Be not ashamed, women, your privilege encloses the
rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of
the soul.
—Walt Whitman
This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of
human society to-day, nor the last. My aim has been to emphasize, by
the use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the
need of a new approach to individual and social problems. Its central
challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is
based upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of
Sex. Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of
Birth Control.
It may be objected that in the following pages I have rushed in where
academic scholars have feared to tread, and that as an active
propagandist I am lacking in the scholarship and documentary
preparation to undertake such a stupendous task. My only defense is
that, from my point of view at least, too many are already studying
and investigating social problems from without, with a sort of
Olympian detachment. And on the other hand, too few of those who are
engaged in this endless war for human betterment have found the time
to give to the world those truths not always hidden but practically
unquarried, which may be secured only after years of active service.
Of late, we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning
ladies and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone
out to work—for a week or a month—among the proletariat. But can we
thus learn anything new of the fundamental problems of working men,
working women, working children? Something, perhaps, but not those
great central problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been told that only
those who themselves have suffered the pangs of starvation can truly
understand Hunger. You might come into the closest contact with a
starving man; yet, if you were yourself well-fed, no amount of
sympathy could give you actual insight into the psychology of his
suffering. This suggests an objective and a subjective approach to all
social problems. Whatever the weakness of the subjective (or, if you
prefer, the feminine) approach, it has at least the virtue that its
conclusions are tested by experience. Observation of facts about you,
intimate subjective reaction to such facts, generate in your mind
certain fundamental convictions,—truths you can ignore no more than
you can ignore such truths as come as the fruit of bitter but valuable
personal experience.
Regarding myself, I may say that my experience in the course of the
past twelve or fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me
certain convictions that demand expression. For years I had believed
that the solution of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined
programmes of political and legislative action. At first, I
concentrated my whole attention upon these, only to discover that
politicians and law-makers are just as confused and as much at a loss
in solving fundamental problems as anyone else. And I am speaking
here not so much of the corrupt and ignorant politician as of those
idealists and reformers who think that by the ballot society may be
led to an earthly paradise. They may honestly desire and intend to do
great things. They may positively glow—before election—with
enthusiasm at the prospect they imagine political victory may open to
them. Time after time, I was struck by the change in their attitude
after the briefest enjoyment of this illusory power. Men are elected
during some wave of reform, let us say, elected to legislate into
practical working existence some great ideal. They want to do big
things; but a short time in office is enough to show the political
idealist that he can accomplish nothing, that his reform must be
debased and dragged into the dust, so that even if it becomes enacted,
it may be not merely of no benefit, but a positive evil. It is
scarcely necessary to emphasize this point. It is an accepted
commonplace of American politics. So much of life, so large a part of
all our social problems, moreover, remains untouched by political and
legislative action. This is an old truth too often ignored by those
who plan political campaigns upon the most superficial knowledge of
human nature.
My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when,
as an organizer for a political group in New York, I attended by
chance a meeting of women laundry-workers who were on strike. We
believed we could help these women with a legislative measure and
asked their support. "Oh! that stuff!" exclaimed one of these
women. "Don't you know that we women might be dead and buried if we
waited for politicians and lawmakers to right our wrongs?" This set
me to thinking—not merely of the immediate problem—but to asking
myself how much any male politician could understand of the wrongs
inflicted upon poor working women.
I threw the weight of my study and activity into the economic and
industrial struggle. Here I discovered men and women fired with the
glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a
Utopian world,—it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of
those with whom I came in closest contact. The next step, the
immediate step, was another matter, less romantic and too often less
encouraging. In their ardor, some of the labor leaders of that period
almost convinced us that the millennium was just around the corner.
Those were the pre-war days of dramatic strikes. But even when most
under the spell of the new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives
of the strikers, with their puny babies and their broods of under-fed
children, made us stop and think of a neglected factor in the march
toward our earthly paradise. It was well enough to ask the poor men
workers to carry on the battle against economic injustice. But what
results could be expected when they were forced in addition to carry
the burden of their ever-growing families? This question loomed large
to those of us who came into intimate contact with the women and
children. We saw that in the final analysis the real burden of
economic and industrial warfare was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children, the very babies—the coming
generation. In their wan faces, in their undernourished bodies, would
be indelibly written the bitter defeat of their parents.
The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers
could no longer, for me, at least, ring with conviction. Something
more than the purely economic interpretation was involved. The bitter
struggle for bread, for a home and material comfort, was but one phase
of the problem. There was another phase, perhaps even more
fundamental, that had been absolutely neglected by the adherents of
the new dogmas. That other phase was the driving power of instinct, a
power uncontrolled and unnoticed. The great fundamental instinct of
sex was expressing itself in these ever-growing broods, in the
prosperity of the slum midwife and her colleague the slum undertaker.
In spite of all my sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor, I was
driven to ask whether this urging power of sex, this deep instinct,
was not at least partially responsible, along with industrial
injustice, for the widespread misery of the world.
To find an answer to this problem which at that point in my experience
I could not solve, I determined to study conditions in Europe. Perhaps
there I might discover a new approach, a great illumination. Just
before the outbreak of the war, I visited France, Spain, Germany and
Great Britain. Everywhere I found the same dogmas and prejudices
among labor leaders, the same intense but limited vision, the same
insistence upon the purely economic phases of human nature, the same
belief that if the problem of hunger were solved, the question of the
women and children would take care of itself. In this attitude I
discovered, then, what seemed to me to be purely masculine reasoning;
and because it was purely masculine, it could at best be but half
true. Feminine insight must be brought to bear on all questions; and
here, it struck me, the fallacy of the masculine, the all-too-masculine, was brutally exposed. I was encouraged and strengthened in
this attitude by the support of certain leaders who had studied human
nature and who had reached the same conclusion: that civilization
could not solve the problem of Hunger until it recognized the titanic
strength of the sexual instinct. In Spain, I found that Lorenzo
Portet, who was carrying on the work of the martyred Francisco Ferrer,
had reached this same conclusion. In Italy, Enrico Malatesta, the
valiant leader who was after the war to play so dramatic a role, was
likewise combating the current dogma of the orthodox Socialists. In
Berlin, Rudolph Rocker was engaged in the thankless task of puncturing
the articles of faith of the orthodox Marxian religion. It is quite
needless to add that these men who had probed beneath the surface of
the problem and had diagnosed so much more completely the complex
malady of contemporary society were intensely disliked by the
superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian School.
The gospel of Marx had, however, been too long and too thoroughly
inculcated into the minds of millions of workers in Europe, to be
discarded. It is a flattering doctrine, since it teaches the laborer
that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of
circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and
his child's misery. Not without significance was the additional
discovery that I made. I found that the Marxian influence tended to
lead workers to believe that, irrespective of the health of the poor
mothers, the earning capacity of the wage-earning fathers, or the
upbringing of the children, increase of the proletarian family was a
benefit, not a detriment to the revolutionary movement. The greater
the number of hungry mouths, the emptier the stomachs, the more
quickly would the "Class War" be precipitated. The greater the
increase in population among the proletariat, the greater the
incentive to revolution. This may not be sound Marxian theory; but it
is the manner in which it is popularly accepted. It is the popular
belief, wherever the Marxian influence is strong. This I found
especially in England and Scotland. In speaking to groups of
dockworkers on strike in Glasgow, and before the communist and co-operative guilds throughout England, I discovered a prevailing
opposition to the recognition of sex as a factor in the perpetuation
of poverty. The leaders and theorists were immovable in their
opposition. But when once I succeeded in breaking through the surface
opposition of the rank and file of the workers, I found that they were
willing to recognize the power of this neglected factor in their
lives.
So central, so fundamental in the life of every man and woman is this
problem that they need be taught no elaborate or imposing theory to
explain their troubles. To approach their problems by the avenue of
sex and reproduction is to reveal at once their fundamental relations
to the whole economic and biological structure of society. Their
interest is immediately and completely awakened. But always, as I
soon discovered, the ideas and habits of thought of these submerged
masses have been formed through the Press, the Church, through
political institutions, all of which had built up a conspiracy of
silence around a subject that is of no less vital importance than that
of Hunger. A great wall separates the masses from those imperative
truths that must be known and flung wide if civilization is to be
saved. As currently constituted, Church, Press, Education seem to-day
organized to exploit the ignorance and the prejudices of the masses,
rather than to light their way to self-salvation.
Such was the situation in 1914, when I returned to America,
determined, since the exclusively masculine point of view had
dominated too long, that the other half of the truth should be made
known. The Birth Control movement was launched because it was in this
form that the whole relation of woman and child—eternal emblem of the
future of society—could be more effectively dramatized. The amazing
growth of this movement dates from the moment when in my home a small
group organized the first Birth Control League. Since then we have
been criticized for our choice of the term "Birth Control" to
express the idea of modern scientific contraception. I have yet to
hear any criticism of this term that is not based upon some false and
hypocritical sense of modesty, or that does not arise out of a semi-prurient misunderstanding of its aim. On the other hand: nothing
better expresses the idea of purposive, responsible, and self-directed
guidance of the reproductive powers.
Those critics who condemn Birth Control as a negative, destructive
idea, concerned only with self-gratification, might profitably open
the nearest dictionary for a definition of "control." There they
would discover that the verb "control" means to exercise a
directing, guiding, or restraining influence;—to direct, to regulate,
to counteract. Control is guidance, direction, foresight. it implies
intelligence, forethought and responsibility. They will find in the
Standard Dictionary a quotation from Lecky to the effect that, "The
greatest of all evils in politics is power without control." In what
phase of life is not "power without control" an evil? Birth
Control, therefore, means not merely the limitation of births, but the
application of intelligent guidance over the reproductive power. It
means the substitution of reason and intelligence for the blind play
of instinct.
The term "Birth Control" had the immense practical advantage of
compressing into two short words the answer to the inarticulate
demands of millions of men and women in all countries. At the time
this slogan was formulated, I had not yet come to the complete
realization of the great truth that had been thus crystallized. It
was the response to the overwhelming, heart-breaking appeals that came
by every mail for aid and advice, which revealed a great truth that
lay dormant, a truth that seemed to spring into full vitality almost
over night—that could never again be crushed to earth!
Nor could I then have realized the number and the power of the
enemies who were to be aroused into activity by this idea. So
completely was I dominated by this conviction of the efficacy of
"control," that I could not until later realize the extent of the
sacrifices that were to be exacted of me and of those who supported my
campaign. The very idea of Birth Control resurrected the spirit of
the witch-hunters of Salem. Could they have usurped the power, they
would have burned us at the stake. Lacking that power, they used the
weapon of suppression, and invoked medieval statutes to send us to
jail. These tactics had an effect the very opposite to that intended.
They demonstrated the vitality of the idea of Birth Control, and acted
as counter-irritant on the actively intelligent sections of the
American community. Nor was the interest aroused confined merely to
America. The neo-Malthusian movement in Great Britain with its
history of undaunted bravery, came to our support; and I had the
comfort of knowing that the finest minds of England did not hesitate a
moment in the expression of their sympathy and support.
In America, on the other hand, I found from the beginning until very
recently that the so-called intellectuals exhibited a curious and
almost inexplicable reticence in supporting Birth Control. They even
hesitated to voice any public protest against the campaign to crush us
which was inaugurated and sustained by the most reactionary and
sinister forces in American life. It was not inertia or any lack of
interest on the part of the masses that stood in our way. It was the
indifference of the intellectual leaders.
Writers, teachers, ministers, editors, who form a class dictating, if
not creating, public opinion, are, in this country, singularly
inhibited or unconscious of their true function in the community. One
of their first duties, it is certain, should be to champion the
constitutional right of free speech and free press, to welcome any
idea that tends to awaken the critical attention of the great American
public. But those who reveal themselves as fully cognizant of this
public duty are in the minority, and must possess more than average
courage to survive the enmity such an attitude provokes.
One of the chief aims of the present volume is to stimulate American
intellectuals to abandon the mental habits which prevent them from
seeing human nature as a whole, instead of as something that can be
pigeonholed into various compartments or classes. Birth Control
affords an approach to the study of humanity because it cuts through
the limitations of current methods. It is economic, biological,
psychological and spiritual in its aspects. It awakens the vision of
mankind moving and changing, of humanity growing and developing,
coming to fruition, of a race creative, flowering into beautiful
expression through talent and genius.
As a social programme, Birth Control is not merely concerned with
population questions. In this respect, it is a distinct step in
advance of earlier Malthusian doctrines, which concerned themselves
chiefly with economics and population. Birth Control concerns itself
with the spirit no less than the body. It looks for the liberation of
the spirit of woman and through woman of the child. To-day motherhood
is wasted, penalized, tortured. Children brought into the world by
unwilling mother suffer an initial handicap that cannot be measured by
cold statistics. Their lives are blighted from the start. To
substantiate this fact, I have chosen to present the conclusions of
reports on Child Labor and records of defect and delinquency published
by organizations with no bias in favour of Birth Control. The evidence
is before us. It crowds in upon us from all sides. But prior to this
new approach, no attempt had been made to correlate the effects of the
blind and irresponsible play of the sexual instinct with its deep-rooted causes.
The duty of the educator and the intellectual creator of public
opinion is, in this connection, of the greatest importance. For
centuries official moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers,
statesmen and politicians have preached the doctrine of glorious and
divine fertility. To-day, we are confronted with the world-wide
spectacle of the realization of this doctrine. It is not without
significance that the moron and the imbecile set the pace in living up
to this teaching, and that the intellectuals, the educators, the
archbishops, bishops, priests, who are most insistent on it, are the
staunchest adherents in their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility.
It is time to point out to the champions of unceasing and
indiscriminate fertility the results of their teaching.
One of the greatest difficulties in giving to the public a book of
this type is the impossibility of keeping pace with the events and
changes of a movement that is now, throughout the world, striking root
and growing. The changed attitude of the American Press indicates
that enlightened public opinion no longer tolerates a policy of
silence upon a question of the most vital importance. Almost
simultaneously in England and America, two incidents have broken
through the prejudice and the guarded silence of centuries. At the
church Congress in Birmingham, October 12, 1921, Lord Dawson, the
king's physician, in criticizing the report of the Lambeth Conference
concerning Birth Control, delivered an address defending this
practice. Of such bravery and eloquence that it could not be ignored,
this address electrified the entire British public. It aroused a
storm of abuse, and yet succeeded, as no propaganda could, in
mobilizing the forces of progress and intelligence in the support of
the cause.
Just one month later, the First American Birth Control Conference
culminated in a significant and dramatic incident. At the close of
the conference a mass meeting was scheduled in the Town Hall, New York
City, to discuss the morality of Birth Control. Mr. Harold Cox,
editor of the Edinburgh Review, who had come to New York to attend the
conference, was to lead the discussion. It seemed only natural for us
to call together scientists, educators, members of the medical
profession, and theologians of all denominations, to ask their opinion
upon this uncertain and important phase of the controversy. Letters
were sent to eminent men and women in different parts of the world.
In this letter we asked the following questions:—
-
Is over-population a menace to the peace of the world?
-
Would the legal dissemination of scientific Birth Control
information, through the medium of clinics by the medical
profession, be the most logical method of checking the problem
of over-population?
-
Would knowledge of Birth Control change the moral attitude of
men and women toward the marriage bond, or lower the moral
standards of the youth of the country?
-
Do you believe that knowledge which enables parents to limit
their families will make for human happiness, and raise the
moral, social and intellectual standards of population?
We sent this questionnaire not only to those who we thought might
agree with us, but we sent it also to our known opponents.
When I arrived at the Town Hall the entrance was guarded by policemen.
They told me there would be no meeting. Before my arrival r
executives had been greeted by Monsignor Dineen, secretary of
Archbishop Hayes, of the Roman Catholic archdiocese, who informed them
that the meeting would be prohibited on the ground that it was
contrary to public morals. The police had closed the doors. When
they opened them to permit the exit of the large audience which had
gathered, Mr. Cox and I entered. I attempted to exercise my
constitutional right of free speech, but was prohibited and arrested.
Miss Mary Winsor, who protested against this unwarranted arrest, was
likewise dragged off to the police station. The case was dismissed
the following morning. The ecclesiastic instigators of the affair
were conspicuous by their absence from the police court. But the
incident was enough to expose the opponents of Birth Control and the
extreme methods they used to combat our progress. The case was too
flagrant, too gross an affront, to pass unnoticed by the newspapers.
The progress of our movement was indicated in the changed attitude of
the American Press, which had perceived the danger to the public of
the unlawful tactics used by the enemies of Birth Control in
preventing open discussion of a vital question.
No social idea has inspired its advocates with more bravery, tenacity,
and courage than Birth Control. From the early days of Francis Place
and Richard Carlile, to those of the Drysdales and Edward Trulove, of
Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, its advocates have faced imprisonment
and ostracism. In the whole history of the English movement, there
has been no more courageous figure than that of the venerable Alice
Drysdale Vickery, the undaunted torch-bearer who has bridged the
silence of forty-four years—since the Bradlaugh-Besant trial. She
stands head and shoulders above the professional feminists. Serenely
has she withstood jeers and jests. To-day, she continues to point out
to the younger generation which is devoted to newer palliatives the
fundamental relation between Sex and Hunger.
The First American Birth Control Conference, held at the same time as
the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments, marks a
turning-point in our approach to social problems. The Conference made
evident the fact that in every field of scientific and social
endeavour the most penetrating thinkers are now turning to the
consideration of our problem as a fundamental necessity to American
civilization. They are coming to see that a QUALITATIVE factor as
opposed to a QUANTITATIVE one is of primary importance in dealing with
the great masses of humanity.
Certain fundamental convictions should be made clear here. The
programme for Birth. Control is not a charity. It is not aiming to
interfere in the private lives of poor people, to tell them how many
children they should have, nor to sit in judgment upon their fitness
to become parents. It aims, rather, to awaken responsibility, to
answer the demand for a scientific means by which and through which
each human life may be self-directed and self-controlled. The
exponent of Birth Control, in short, is convinced that social
regeneration, no less than individual regeneration, must come from
within. Every potential parent, and especially every potential
mother, must be brought to an acute realization of the primary and
individual responsibility of bringing children into this world. Not
until the parents of this world are given control over their
reproductive faculties will it be possible to improve the quality of
the generations of the future, or even to maintain civilization at its
present level. Only when given intelligent mastery of the procreative
powers can the great mass of humanity be aroused to a realization of
responsibility of parenthood. We have come to the conclusion, based
on widespread investigation and experience, that education for
parenthood must be based upon the needs and demands of the people
themselves. An idealistic code of sexual ethics, imposed from above,
a set of rules devised by high-minded theorists who fail to take into
account the living conditions and desires of the masses, can never be
of the slightest value in effecting change in the customs of the
people. Systems so imposed in the past have revealed their woeful
inability to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world
has drifted.
The universal demand for practical education in Birth Control is one
of the most hopeful signs that the masses themselves to-day possess
the divine spark of regeneration. It remains for the courageous and
the enlightened to answer this demand, to kindle the spark, to direct
a thorough education in sex hygiene based upon this intense interest.
Birth Control is thus the entering wedge for the educator. In
answering the needs of these thousands upon thousands of submerged
mothers, it is possible to use their interest as the foundation for
education in prophylaxis, hygiene and infant welfare. The potential
mother can then be shown that maternity need not be slavery but may be
the most effective avenue to self-development and self-realization.
Upon this basis only may we improve the quality of the race.
The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the "unfit" and the
"fit," admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization,
can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition
between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the
fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and
physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated
and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem to-day is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally
and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be
forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage
the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid,
cruel sentimentalism.
To effect the salvation of the generations of the future—nay, of the
generations of to-day—our greatest need, first of all, is the ability
to face the situation without flinching; to cooperate in the formation
of a code of sexual ethics based upon a thorough biological and
psychological understanding of human nature; and then to answer the
questions and the needs of the people with all the intelligence and
honesty at our command. If we can summon the bravery to do this, we
shall best be serving the pivotal interests of civilization.
To conclude this introduction: my initiation, as I have confessed, was
primarily an emotional one. My interest in Birth Control was awakened
by experience. Research and investigation have followed. Our effort
has been to raise our program from the plane of the emotional to the
plane of the scientific. Any social progress, it is my belief, must
purge itself of sentimentalism and pass through the crucible of
science. We are willing to submit Birth Control to this test. It is
part of the purpose of this book to appeal to the scientist for aid,
to arouse that interest which will result in widespread research and
investigation. I believe that my personal experience with this idea
must be that of the race at large. We must temper our emotion and
enthusiasm with the impersonal determination of science. We must
unite in the task of creating an instrument of steel, strong but
supple, if we are to triumph finally in the war for human
emancipation.
