For other versions see Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm: Smith College Collections, S71:274 and Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm,cLibrary of Congress, LCM 131:0489 LCM:493.
On September 1, 1930, an earnest group of experts--men and women--from various parts of the civilized world gathered quietly together in Zurich, Switzerland.
These men and women were delegates to the Seventh International Birth Control Conference. They came together in the interest of the scientific quest for contraceptive knowledge.
For five days, more than one hundred scientists, physicians and clinicians discussed the technical problems of contraception. They compared notes, reported progress made in research laboratories and birth control clinics, and proved beyond doubt that the much troubled subject now universally known as Birth Control had entered a new phase of development.
All theories, all propaganda, all moral and ethical aspects of the subject were left in abeyance--practically forgotten--in the unanimity of cool, scientific conviction that today contraception as an instrument in racial progress is on the way to be reliable and efficient and may in the very future be perfected.
As the first international conference of its kind ever organized in the history of humanity, the Zurich Conference represents a milestone in the history of modern civilization. For this reason, I believe that it is highly desirable that the record of this conference be preserved in the present pages.
Civilization is being remade, not in parliaments, not in the conferences of international financiers on the Quai d’Orsay, but by obscure scientists in laboratories, by earnest workers in clinics, by the silent victories of modest physicians in preventive therapy. Just as the great spectacular achievements in aviation--the trans-atlantic and round-the-world flight--would never be possible without the vastly increased perfection of design which insures reliability and efficiency, so today contraception as an instrument of individual and racial well-being would not be possible without the efforts of these scientists, the bio-chemists and the clinicians through the agency of whose laboratories new methods, new materials, new processes can be effectively developed and proven.
A milestone and landmark this Conference must remain, because it has lifted the whole problem out of the troubled atmosphere of theory where previously it had been battered by the winds of doctrine and the brutal attacks of prejudice into the current of serene, impersonal, scientific abstraction. That such a gathering, widely international in character, coolly yet compassionately humanitarian in temperament, could become a reality in my own time, instead of a wish hoped for yet hardly to be attained, indicated to one soldier at least in the long battle that a new orientation in race welfare had indeed arrived.
For many years past I had been acutely cognizant of the fact--to me distressing and seeming insurmountable--that many of our most able physicians were absolutely lacking in knowledge of the technique of contraception. Even those who were familiar enough with the methods available recognized that the percentage of efficiency and safety were widely fluctuating. Such was the condition of affairs in the United States which impelled me to call together the men and women actually working on the problem in the various scattered clinics of Europe and Asia.
It was a sad commentary on the progress of medical science, with its recent emphasis on preventive therapy, that while it is roughly estimated that the number of abortions performed annually in this country amounts to no less than one million, the methods of contraception had not been advanced since the days of Mensinga. The medical attitude toward contraception has only recently changed. Its indifference may have been, to a large extent, influenced by the early crusaders for birth control, which until my own advent in the field hid under the name of Neo-Malthusianism. For almost a century they had been fighting in the fields of economic and social doctrine. Implicitly they had assumed that the known methods of contraception were already one-hundred per cent effective, and required only to be disseminated by the written or spoken word.
That this was a fallacy was soon discovered in the controversy of technique and methods by modern students of clinical contraception. But the first necessity was to ascertain what methods were being advised; how the method was applied; what percentage of success or failure attended the various methods. This was demonstrated in the experience with the diaphragm pessary as used in the clinics by Dr. Norman Haire and Dr. Hannah Stone--two different phases of technique by two competent students of gynecology through the means of the same pessary. This and other differences will be noticed as brought out in the papers as well as in the discussion.
It is of interest to note from the Proceedings of the Conference that greater advance in scientific contraception has been made in America and England than in continental countries (not excepting Holland and France where the practice of birth control has long been a part of family life). This is the result of directing the movement along professional lines, where emphasis has been placed on the keeping of records as well as on a greater consideration of contraception, keeping it separate and apart from sex hygiene and abortion.
Just as demand and supply are related to all economic questions, so is propaganda a related part of scientific research in the realms of sex psychology. The medical profession will ultimately meet the issue on the demands of public opinion.
The next and most important step in the progress of the movement is to perfect a method of contraception giving a greater security and confidence to those workers in the field.
In the early days Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant had been tried in London for circulating Dr. Charles Knowlton’s "Fruits of Philosophy",” a pamphlet written by the Boston physician about half a century previous and detailing in the sketchiest fashion crude methods upon which it would today be folly to rely.
The following year--1878--Edward Truelove, a London publisher, was sentenced for selling a similar book, Robert Dale Owen’s “Moral Physiology,” which was far more innocuous, from the point of view of contraception, than its advocates supposed. From the first publication of The Malthusian, which began its work in 1879 with the sub-title of "A Crusade against Poverty,” the advocates of birth control at the time unconsciously assumed that methods of contraception were already reliable, effective, and practically perfected. Statistics were unavailable; clinics which might have kept records, were either forbidden by law or unheard of; and the medical profession, as a whole, remained antagonistic or at best indifferent to this vast and complicated problem of human life.
However, it would be unjust to minimize the progress made by the courageous physicians and pioneers of the movement. Dr. Stille, a physician of Hanover, as well as Max Hausmeister and Karl Lotter, who in 1889 founded the Sozial Harmonische Verein in Stuttgart, devoted themselves mainly to theoretical and economic aspects of the small family system. We may read of the enormous decline of the birth rate in certain German towns at the period; but it is impossible to definitely correlate in a precise scientific manner the two phenomena. In France, the birth rate had indeed been declining since 1831, and more sharply since 1871, although the late Paul Robin had not founded his Ligue de la régéneration humaine until 1896.
In 1900 the first International Neo-Malthusian Conference was held in Paris--in the office of M. Robin’s League. Delegates from four countries--England, France, Germany and Holland--took part in what for those days was considered a thorough discussion of technical methods of contraception. Dr. J. Rutgers of Holland in particular, we are informed, presented a discussion of such methods, both historical and contemporaneous. This, it seems, was the second international conference on methods, the first having taken place at an International Medical Congress in 1879 in Amsterdam.
Paul Robin had proposed the formation of an international federation of Neo-Malthusian leagues, and Dr. C. R. Drysdale was elected president of this organization. A second international conference was called in Liége, Belgium, in 1905. Records of this meeting indicate the swing of interest away from technical aspects of contraception to the problems of propaganda and popularization. At the Liége meeting the Neo-Malthusians came into sharp conflict with the Marxians, who were the advocates of larger and larger families as the surest method to precipitate social revolution. This clash of ideas had the effect of propelling public interest away from the technical and hygienic aspects of contraception to the social aspects of population pressure.
Subsequent international conferences followed: in the Hague (July, 1910); participation in the International Congress of Hygiene in Dresden (1911) in which representatives of thirteen countries participated. Two German women pioneers, Dr. Helene Stöcker and Frau Marie Stritt, acted as organizers. It was not until 1922 that the Fifth International Conference was held. In 1914 I had initiated the so-called Birth Control movement in the United States, and this movement, with its emphasis on the personal and racial aspects of contraception, had in less than ten years become a world movement. In 1922 in London, not only Europe, but the Americas, Japan, China and India were represented by delegates. In 1925 the Sixth Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference was held in New York City, and delegates from sixteen countries attended.
Since 1914, in ever increasing numbers we had gradually succeeded in effecting the adherence of economists, sociologists, biologists and geneticists, the effect of which was to convert the intelligent laymen to the principle of birth control. In this field indeed, the battle seemed to be won. Because public opinion supported birth control, it was possible, despite the still strenuous opposition, to open and maintain contraceptive clinics--except in such countries as France and Italy, engulfed in waves of post-war reaction.
More and more it became apparent to me that a new direction was necessary. The theories, the ramifications, the racial aspects of birth control had been thoroughly threshed out. It was but a matter of time that these fundamental ideas should percolate to the masses--the masses indeed were already crying aloud for "safe and harmless" methods. But since the opening of the century, Medicine itself has evolved from its dogmatic stage. Prevention indeed was the cry--the prevention of epidemics, the prevention of disease, the conquest of the great scourges like tuberculosis or syphilis, instead of their alleviation. Medicine indeed was fast becoming, as a penetrating observer recently expressed it, the most personal of our sciences, and was advancing from the art of curing to the art of prevention. Science was effecting a veritable revolution in sanitation and general health education. The practical step then to take is to apply scientific knowledge to improve conditions of life.
From the beginning, I had insisted upon the establishment of birth control clinics as the swiftest, most effective, and most scientific method of advancing the cause of contraception.
Yet all of this work going on in various countries, under the most diverse conditions, must be correlated, coordinated, unified into a common human ideal. For this reason, after organizing the first World Population conference, assembled in Geneva in 1927, I began work on the problem of bringing the scientists, the research workers, and the directors of clinics together. The success achieved is recorded in the accompanying pages.
Not without significance, to me, was the quiet earnestness of this unheralded gathering. The press did not intrude upon the deliberation of the men and women assembled in the charming little town in the Alps. No publicity was sought. The most important as well as the most delicate of all human relationships was discussed without shame and without prejudice, and problems most deeply affecting the well-being of every individual man and woman, the health of all future generations, and the stability of nations, were brought closer to satisfactory and permanent solution.
Here indeed, the impartial observer might have discovered the true spirit of internationalism, the fundamental brotherhood of man, rather than in the bickerings and disagreements of the League of Nations at Geneva, or the truce in the warfare of governmental finances.
For these reasons, the record of the Zurich Conference demand permanent place in the annals of human progress.
New York, U.S.A.
Margaret Sanger gave this speech to open the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. For a draft version see Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm, Library of Congress, LCM 128:267.
Mr. President and Delegates:
In the name of the American Birth Control League I welcome you to America and to the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. I am proud of this privilege. For the first time in the history of these United States men and women have come from other countries to these shores to consider the population problem. Such a conference as we now inaugurate is unique in our experience and in our national history. It is, moreover, fitting that it should meet here in the center of our greatest city. For almost a century ago- just ninety- five years, to be exact- Robert Dale Owen published in this city his brief and plain treatise on the population question and birth control, entitled "Moral Physiology." And only two years afterward, in 1832, Dr. Charles Knowlton published in Boston his epoch- making "Fruits of Philosophy." His little book wandered for forty years around the world. It was translated into several languages. It was reprinted again and again. Its circulation was at first unmolested. In 1857, it was edited and revised Mr. President, by your courageous uncle,George R. Drysdale. Its circulation in Great Britain led finally to the historic trial of Mrs. Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh. This was just a little less than half a century ago. This little book, written by a courageous American, republished by courageous Englishmen, became internationally famous, and was instrumental in the founding of the first Neo-Malthusian leagues, by Charles R. Drysdale and Alice Drysdale Vickery, our honorary president, and the illustrious, courageous parents of the president of this conference, whom we welcome here today.
We welcome you to the presidency of this Conference, Dr. Drysdale, fully aware of the honor you confer upon us. You come here as the living representative of a family of indomitable heroes and founders of the Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control movement. Your presence links this gathering with that great historic movement for racial salvation which began with Thomas Malthus himself. Without the unselfish, disinterested courage of your father and mother, and your self-effacing uncle, we would not be gathered here to-night. I wish to thank you for the honor you have conferred upon us, in crossing the Atlantic, to act as president of this Conference. We look upon this act of generosity as a sign that you consider us worthy to keep alive and to carry on the torch of Neo-Malthusian truth, which for three quarters of a century has so nobly been held aloft by the heroic Drysdale family. May we in America show ourselves worthy of the Drysdale tradition!
To delegates from all foreign countries, I wish to extend a welcome no less grateful. I want also to apologize-- if I may do so without any disrespect–- for the obstacles you have had to meet, the obstructions placed in your way by some of the rules and regulations of our American government. Not being familiar with all our customs, perhaps you do not know that the government of the United States has enacted laws aiming to exclude from this country all "undesirable" foreigners. These laws, like all such restrictive legislation, make it difficult for all foreigners to pass unmolested our famous Statue of Liberty. There is a Quota restriction. Only so many foreigners from each country are allowed to enter each month. No: this is not Birth Control, though it is a crude method adopted by the United States to control our population. It is the latest method adopted by our Government to solve the population problem. And so you delegates from foreign countries have been made the innocent victims of an unsuccessful attempt of the American Government to cut down the number of "undesirable" citizens. I am glad that you have overcome these obstacles. As convinced Neo-Malthusians I knew you would. I welcome you to this Conference.
While the United States shuts her gates to foreigners, and is less hospitable than other countries in welcoming visitors to this land no attempt whatever is made to discourage the rapid multiplication of undesirable aliens--and natives--within our own borders. On the contrary: the Government of the United States deliberately encourages and even makes necessary by its laws the breeding--with a breakneck rapidity--of idiots, defectives, diseased, feeble minded and criminal classes.
Billions of dollars are expended by our state and federal governments and by private charities and philanthropies for the care, the maintenance, and the perpetuation of these classes. Year by year their numbers are mounting. Year by year more money is expended. The American public is taxed- heavily taxed- to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundations of our civilization. More than one-quarter of the total incomes of our States is spent upon the maintenance of asylums, prisons and other institutions for the care of the defective, the diseased and the delinquent. Do not conclude, however, that all of our feeble-minded and mentally defective are segregated in institutions. No, indeed! This is a free country, a democratic country, a country of universal suffrage. We can all vote, even the mentally arrested. And so it is no surprise to find the moron's vote as good as the geniuses. The outlook is not a cheerful one.
You, friends from foreign countries who have come here to our greatest city, must have noticed the intricate systems of signals which regulates the crowded traffic in our streets and thoroughfares. By this system, the pedestrian is assured some degree of safety. But while the congestion of population in our American cities has forced upon us a system to regulate traffic in city streets and country roads, America as a nation refuses to open her eyes to the problem of biological traffic and racial roads. Biologically this country is "joy-riding" with reckless carelessness to an inevitable smash-up. Is it too late to prevent national destruction? This question we must face- and answer.
France is making a vain attempt to increase her population by awarding bonuses to those parents who will produce large families. The day is here when the Government of the United States should award bonuses to discourage large families. If the United States were to expand some of its vast appropriations on a system of bonuses to decrease or to restrict the incessant and uninterrupted advent of the hordes of the unfit, we might look forward to the future of this country with less pessimism. If the millions upon millions of dollars which are now expended in the care and maintenance of those who in all kindness should never have been brought into this world were converted to a system of bonuses to unfit parents, paying them to refrain from further parenthood, and continuing to pay them while they controlled their procreative faculties, this would not only be a profitable investment, but the salvation of American civilizations. If we could, by such a system of awards or bribes or whatever you choose to call it, discourage the reproduction of the obviously unfit, we would be lightening the economic and social burden now hindering the progress of the fit, and taking the first sensible step toward the solution of one of the most menacing problems of the American democracy. It is not too late to begin.
From the moment this gathering was planned, it has been my deepest desire that this Sixth International Conference, brief as it must necessarily be, might be made a real turning point in the never ending battle for human emancipation. Let us, all of us from other countries and from other fields, aim to convert these few crowded hours into an assembly of world importance. Let us aim to carry on the great tradition of honesty, courage, and bravery which is so nobly personified for us in the figure of our president,Charles Vickery Drysdale. Let us express our innermost convictions. Let us not fear opposition, nor the sharp clash of opinion. Apathy, not opposition, is the only real enemy of truth. And it is truth that has brought all of us here together. Let none of us be afraid to express his truth, to bring it in to play in this Conference, for we must not forget that it is the truth which is going to set us free. I hope we do arouse opposition. For in arousing opposition, we are killing apathy and lethargy. It is my hope that this Conference will be instrumental in lighting and spreading the fire of truths so illuminating they cannot be extinguished.
You, Dr. Drysdale, and you--delegates from older and wiser countries than this; you do not wear decorations or medals. But I know that all of you hide the scars of wounds won in our never-ending warfare for the emancipation of the human race. I welcome you. And to all of you, my fellow citizens, who have so generously responded to our call and have co-operated with us in our effort to make this conference of international as well as national significance I extend the warmest welcome of the American Birth Control League. And I know that all of you join me in welcoming to the presidency of the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference our President, Charles Vickery Drysdale.
Nine years ago this spring, at about this time, Margaret Sanger was in prison. She is here tonight."The audience stood and applauded.]]>
Sanger delivered this speech at the Pioneer's Dinner of the Sixth
International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, at the Hotel
McAlpin in New York City. Sanger was
introduced by meeting chairman Heywood Broun who
discussed Catholic opposition to birth control and then said: "Nine years
ago this spring, at about this time, Margaret Sanger was in prison. She is here
tonight."
The audience stood and applauded.
Mr. Chairman: I did not think that you would quite overwhelm me like this.
Ladies and gentlemen, I feel that more than fifty per cent of the people who are here tonight have been pioneers with me in this cause for Birth Control. I think it is right and fitting that we should honor those pioneers who have fought before us for this great Movement. I find that there are two kinds of pioneers. The ones who go out into the firing line and brave perhaps the storms, the stress of public opinion and prejudice and of ignorance, and the other kind who stays back and really prepares the ammunition.
I could tell you of those early pioneers who in this country nearly a century ago fought for the idea which we call today Birth Control– Robert Dale Owen (applause) who wrote the treatise and it was published in this City of New York on “Moral Physiology”; then there was Dr. Charles Knowlton, who in 1832 published his famous book, “The Truths of Philosophy” in Boston; then there was John Humphrey Noyes and his Oneida Colony; then there was that splendid pioneer woman and feminist, Alice Stockum, who was persecuted almost to her death by Anthony Comstock; then there was a fine old hero, Moses Harmon (applause), who at the age of seventy-five years was sent to break stone at Leavenworth, and who, when he came out of jail continued with his work--his educational work--and was again sent back to jail. I could tell you of the splendid inspiring words of Ralph Waldo Emerson; I could tell you of the splendid vision of Robert Ingersoll (applause), and also of Dr. Abraham Jacobi, who at one time was President of the American Medical Association.
There were many, many others almost forgotten tonight. But one especially forgotten hero and pioneer was Dr. Charles Knowlton, whom I have just mentioned. He would be almost entirely forgotten were it not for the famous little book he wrote which really linked up the English Neo-Malthusian Movement with the Movement in the United States. It is almost impossible to find much about his life. I have hunted in the libraries of Boston and the libraries here, and all that I can find about him is that he was sent to jail for publishing his little book, “ The Fruits of Philosophy”. He was not discouraged; he was not dismayed, for the very day that he came out of jail in East Cambridge he crystallized his philosophy and his ideas by forming a society called the “Friend of Mental Liberty”. There is nothing more that we find about Dr. Knowlton except that his book wandered around the world for more than forty years. It got itself translated and reprinted again and again and finally led to the famous case or that famous trial, the Bradlaugh-Besant trial, of which Dr. Drysdale will tell you more of a little later on.
The next that we know was perhaps my own coming into this work in the year of 1914. (Applause) Some people have accused us today of this being an emotional movement. I said that I plead guilty. I had been a nurse for over ten or twelve years here in New York City, mainly, and I was quite impressed by the fact that there were two kinds of people here--those whom we would call of the small family group, and others of the large family group.
I investigated both groups again and again. I found in the small family group there were all the nice things that we like in this world–-health, happiness, comfort, intelligence and all the things that we almost all aspire to. But in the large family group I found quite the opposite. There was all the disease, the misery and the ignorance, and the poverty. There we had our slums. There we had all the things that we did not like, and yet I found it was perfectly moral and patriotic to go up and down from one end of the country to another and talk about having large families, when it was considered quite immoral, and a jail sentence was almost given to you if you talked about having small families.
It was moral, in other words, for one group, while it was quite the other for the other group. This seemed a peculiar condition, a peculiar situation. And after having many, many experiences with women who were practically enslaved, who were practically awaiting death sentences, year in and year out because they were told if they bore another child that they would face the grave. After living with this group, after living with this idea for more than two or three years consciously, I decided that it was time for someone to do something other than talking about these conditions. And I tried to get people to listen, tried to see if there could not be something done about the conditions that I saw. I was told by some of the most advanced women in the country at that time, to wait until we got the vote. But I could not wait.
Susan B. Anthony started nearly fifty years ago and I felt it was not fair to keep the women of this country enslaved, bound to the chains of maternal slavery-–because that is really where they are--for another fifty years. Something had to be done to break those chains. I won’t go into detail telling you what happened, but I always want it to be understood that the sentence that was imposed upon me of going to jail was not an accident. I challenged the law, definitely and deliberately. (Applause)
There was no other way to crystallize and focus public opinion upon the conditions that I saw, except by – as Annie Besant said-–going to the “dock” to do it.
I don’t know how far we would have been today had it not been for those other pioneers; the silent kind; those who stood behind me and who have helped me from the very beginning. Those splendid courageous women like Mrs. Lewis G. Delafield, Mrs. C. Young, Mrs. Frances Ackerman, and like Mrs. Juliet Barrett Rublee have been the women who have taken the subject of Birth Control out of the police court, out of the “dock” and have established it in the dining room and in the drawing room. They have made it respectable. It is those women who have really broadcasted the idea and the ideals of Birth Control. They are the real pioneers today.
After all, pioneering still continues. When you look out and see what we have had to do for the past ten years, there are many. I began to count up and I found that the landlord where we have our office was really a pioneer. No other landlord for some distance around would allow us to have our office in their building. (Laughter) When we had a book to publish we walked the streets of New York and visited all the publishers before we could find a publisher, so our publisher became a pioneer. When you have something to say you have got to have a hall; when you have got a magazine to publish, you have got to have a printer, so your printer becomes a pioneer, especially when he is the kind of printer who will wait from month to month to get his money. (Applause) And even the management of the Hotel McAlpin is a pioneer (applause) because they came and invited us to have our International Conference here. (Applause)
Then, ladies and gentlemen, I want to say also that our Toastmaster, Mr. Haywood Broun is also a pioneer. (Applause) If he is not a pioneer in the Birth Control Movement, he certainly is a pioneer in journalism. He is pioneering for truth in journalism. (Applause)
And last, but not least, the United States Government has become a pioneer by its immigration laws. It is really putting into effect today in its immigration laws, exactly what most Birth Controllers want. The only thing is, while it applies its laws in keeping out of this country the mentally defective and the physically weak and defective, the paupers and the other kind of so-called undesirables, we only wish it would extend its laws a little bit more and stop the multiplication of the same undesirable type within. (Applause)
I also want to pay tribute to those scientists in the United States who have been courageously with us almost from the beginning of our organized movement. If you will just look at our program and see our “Who’s Who”, I think you will agree with me that we can well be proud of the courage that the scientists of this country have had in coming in with us and giving us a splendid boost. We know they have been far more courageous in helping us and in guiding us than the medical profession has been. And what we ask tonight is that this same group of scientists just steer us and guide us a little further on for the next few years, pilot us, in other words, through the stormy waters, and I believe we will really be through our journey. I think if they have the courage to continue with us that they will find that courage, like virtue, brings with it its own reward. (Applause)