Although the number of Charleston’s citizens attending the lectures of Mrs. Margaret Sanger, secretary for commission for federal legislation on birth control, were not as large as in a number of other cities, Mrs. Sanger feels that they "made up in quality what they lacked in quantity," she said when interviewed yesterday at the Daniel Boone hotel. The lecturer believes that her attempts to bring practical knowledge of birth control to the public have been fairly successful in Charleston and the outlying vicinity.
Mrs. Sanger gave a lecture at the Thomas Jefferson junior high school building Friday afternoon, one of a series of lectures she is giving throughout the United States in behalf of the commission for federal legislation for birth control. They keynote of Mrs. Sanger’s drive is to bring about the amending of federal laws to conform with state laws so that they will not interfere with the distribution of scientific information in the respective states.
Visits made to outlying mining towns near Charleston have shown that the persons in those districts as well as those living in the city are anxious for scientific knowledge concerning birth control. Mrs. Sanger has made plans to send literature to these persons and do all in her power to bring about the cooperation of county and city health officials in relieving the existing conditions.
The lack of laws adjusted so as to cover the needs of birth control, she said, has brought about many undesirable conditions throughout the United States. Women are being completely broken in health, she said, from too frequent child bearing. Fathers of such large families find themselves unable to bear the burden of support. Instead of being a privilege, as Mrs. Sanger believes parenthood should be, it becomes a curse. If proper information were within reach of the poorer classes their children might be fewer in number, worth more to society, and less of a burden. This information should not be shouted from the street corners or housetops but should be in the hands of well trained clinics and nurses.
Mrs. Sanger first became interested in the birth control movement upon her return from Holland where she spent one year as a student under eminent physicians. Mrs. Sanger opened a clinic in New York city in 1917, within ten days over 800 women of all classes sought instructions and information. This clinic was closed by the New York police. It was reopened in 1918. There are more than one hundred such clinics throughout the United States at this time.
Mrs. Sanger will be presented with a medal by Forty Business and Professional Women’s clubs in New York city this April. This medal is awarded to a woman who has achieved "the most in vision, integrity, and courage."
The lecturer’s latest book is entitled "My Fight for Birth Control."
Handwritten additions and corrctions by Sanger.
]]>Sanger spoke at a Symposium on Birth Control, held at the Hotel Brevoort in New York City, sponsored by the Eastern Medical Society. Other participants were Robert Latou Dickinson, Hannah Mayer Stone, Stuart Mudd, A. J. Romney, A. A. Brill, and S. Adolphus Knopf.
Handwritten additions and corrctions by Sanger.
1929
Dr. Cohen Pres of Eastern Medical Society has honored me by asking me to speak here tonight. He has suggested that I give to give you a brief history of the Birth Control Movement in America. It is an interesting fact, of which few people are aware, that the person who first gave the greatest impetus and the most important contribution to the Birth Control Movement both in England and America was not only an American, but a physician. Dr. Charles Knowlton of Boston, Mass. wrote his “Fruits of Philosophy” in 1832, almost 100 years ago. This booklet circulated the globe English-speaking worldfor 40 years before it challenged conventional thought and puritanical bigotry. Finally, in 1878, in Bristol, England, an arrest was made and the contents of the booklet were decreed obscene. Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh refused to accept the magistrate’s verdict in the case. and In the name of freedom of the press they took the case to a higher court and won a victory that enabled the English Birth Control Movement to advance and expand without legal obstruction until the present day.
When I came upon the horizon of the Birth Control Movement in 1914, I knew nothing of Knowlton or of the fight that Besant and Bradlaugh had made. I thought I had made discovery, childhood influence.
As a trained nurse working for many years in and around this city among all classes of people, I was constantly requested by women to tell them what could be done to avoid further and undesired pregnancies. Although a mother of three children myself, I had the usual negative attitude in this matter, until I was finally brought face to face with the question-- When A woman whom the doctor and I had brought out of the Valley of the Shadow, asked us to tell her what she could do to prevent getting into a pregnant condition again. The doctor joked and ironically suggested that her husband "sleep on the roof". She turned to me and pleaded, "you are a woman, you understand, you will tell me won’t you”? But I too turned away and left her to her fate.
Three months later I was called to take this case again. This feeble and distressed and agonized woman had turned to someone else to help her terminate her pregnancy. It was fatal. I arrived too late.
I saw the three little children bundled off by kindly social workers to an orphan’s home. I saw the husband, bewildered and stunned by this tragic happening, made homeless and helpless in his plight.
The panorama of one social our social life seemed to pass before my eyes. and I saw as never before the vast network of philanthropic institutions erected for the maintenance and upkeep of human beings, whose fate was intimately bound up with ignorance of the knowledge of contraception.
I returned to my home that hot midnight in July and as I looked out over the housetops of this city and watched the dawn come up I knew a new day was dawning for me as well as for all womankind.
I announced to my family that I was through with all palliative work. I would nurse no more--I would never take another case until knowledge to prevent conception was available and accessible to the mothers of the poor. But "fools go where angels fear to read." I had no knowledge of the task I ahd set myself to do. I first started out to invade search the medical libraries for practical information. It was a shock and surprise to find almost nothing available for practical purposes. I went to Boston and then to Washington, D.C., even to the Congressional library. I employed French & German translators to help me, but after an almost fruitless search of several months I decided to go to France and there I got Knowlton's Pamphlets & information sufficiently practical to help me start a challenge to Sec 211 of the Federal law.
name birth control not limitation
It was just about 100 years before this, when that the possibilities of a controlled population first seized the minds and imaginations of the Anglo-Saxon world. that Pioneers like John Stuart Mill and Francis Place scattered millions thousands of leaflets from the housetops of tenements to the tenants below. These leaflets contained information how and why the size of the family could be controlled. The leaflet was known as the “Diabolical Handbill.”
These pioneers, like Besant and Bradlaugh half a century later,believed in the magic of the printed word and thought that all that was necessary was to distribute the printed leaflets to the masses and the results would be achieved.
Experience is a better wise teacher. I too believed that the working men and women should have pamphlets made available for their demand. I decided to challenge the Federal law which had been instigated by Anthony Comstock forty years before. It seemed to me it was entirely a question of the printed word and of freedom of the press. That was during 1912 to 1914-- (unclear). Then I went to Holland in 1915 and studied the technique of contraception under Dr. Rutgers of the Hague. I had spent a year in London in study under the guidance and direction of that wise and venerable man Havelock Ellis.
After Holland--I became convinced that leaflets, pamphlets, books were not the medium through which overburdened mothers could be educated in Birth Control. That only by scientific instruction received from competent physicians and nurses in clinics established for that purpose and for that purpose alone could the best results be achieved. When in 1916 after my involuntary exile I returned to this country after my involuntary exile the idea of clinics was central in my mind. It seemed to me that here at last was the practical solution to the problem viz. contraceptive instruction to be given by the medical profession in their public or private practice and as well as clinics for the poor whose social or economic status would not bring them into the realm of the profession otherwise.
I did not realize the gigantic obstacles to overcome before that idea could be converted into reality. Nevertheless, I plunged into activity. My free speech friends refused to help me further because I had now insisted that the medical profession must give thisadvice-- That we must win their support, ask that they take over the entire responsibilities of woman’s reproductive problems.
I abandoned the Federal fight after my case was dismissed. (having been indicted on nine charges) and established a clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. This was for the purpose of testing the New York State law Section 1142. I knew that Section 1145 existed but no physician could be found who cared to test the validity of the law. In the meantime and before I had reached the decision of opening the Brownsville clinic--I, together with two social workers, took two women, one suffering from tuberculosis, and the other from syphilis, to every hospital in New York and Brooklyn to ask for contraceptive advice. In every instance the most courteous consideration was given us, offers made to treat the ailments of the both women, but in all but one case, every hospital refused to give instruction to prevent conception. That one agreed only because the social worker was known to the doctors in charge. (loose Charter)
The average physician did not interpret Section 1145 as his right to give such advice, especially in his public practice. Because of this confusion refusal by Hospitals, I opened the Brownsville clinic and within ten days no less than 488 mothers crowded into our limited quarters. Then the police descended upon us closed our precious clinic, and called it a “public nuisance.” In Holland it was called a public utility. I was convicted and carried the case to the Court of Appeals. In 1918 a decision was handed down to us, justifying my conviction, but stating that “physicians lawfully practicing are permitted to give contraceptive advice for the cure or prevention of disease.” This was our first technical victory and the first legal interpretation of the law, which cleared the atmosphere for the medical profession and for us all. The first National Conference was held in New York in 1921. It was then t hat the ruits of the preceding years matured, and be it ever to the honor of the scientists, for biologists, economists that they had thecourage and fearlessness to who stand staunchly behind us through all the ordeals from of the Town Hall episode to the present day.
Nevertheless the situation presented itself that while the physicians now had the power to give contraceptive advice they were very confused and skeptical as to the efficiency of such methods as were available and known. No literature, few devices available. Federal law. Europe. It was important to collect and correlate the facts as to methods now in use.
In 1923 a Research Bureau was established in [illegible] with a physician in charge. We have now investigated over 13000 cases and an analysis of their histories is being made. We have seven physicians on our staff, 5 nurses as well as a social worker and an assistant to do follow-up work when necessary.
Dr. Cooper’s book--published & available gone into 10,000 for profession. 26 clinics in U.S.A.
$150,000 lately bequeathed to Los Angeles clinic.
500 physicians visited New York clinic. 10,000 expressed interest & solicited information
Medical Societies and Universities discussing subject.
4 supply houses.
The Birth Control clinic does not aim to compete with other social agencies. It does not act as a substitute, but it must precede almost every social program and must serve it as a base. Birth Control is not merely a medical question. It is a fundamental human need effecting every adult life. It affects also the lives of all children born in America. It affects our and the future of civilization. But perhaps more important of all it is fundamentally affects the a woman especially poor women. And because of the my knowledge of a woman's needds, as a woman & a mother I entered the movement as a representative and protagonist of the overburdened women of this country. It is as a suppliant representative of womanhood as well as of motherhood that I appeal to you, the members of the most understanding and philanthropic profession of the world to aid us in our battle for a conscious and voluntary motherhood and the creation of a new emancipated race of thoroughbred children.
This article was reprinted by the American Birth Control League in a flyer with two other newspaper articles as "Real Facts About Birth Control," ca. April 1923 (Margaret Sanger Papers Microfim,Library of Congress LCM 129:580).
After ten years of incessant agitation and activity the much-discussed question of Birth Control has invaded the legislative halls of Albany. A bill intended to amend existing laws so that New York physicians may be authorized to disseminate contraceptive advice has been introduced. There will be a hearing on the matter in the Assembly Chamber on April 10. If enacted, we may hope for the beginning of a new era of social welfare and racial hygiene. But whatever the outcome, this bill means that Birth Control is no longer looked upon, even in the judicial and legislative field, as a topic "obscene and indecent," worthy only of ribald jest and suggestive leer.
No other great problem affecting the welfare of nation and race has been more misinterpreted and misunderstood, even by Americans who consider themselves well informed. Advocates of this doctrine do not beg for mere assent or approval. They ask for investigation and understanding, as the initial step toward support and adherence to their doctrines.
Much of the opposition to Birth Control has had its source among clergymen and other professional moralists. This ecclesiastic opposition is amazing in view of the fact that the "onlie true begetter" of the whole Birth Control movement, Robert Malthus, was himself a clergyman of the Church of England. He advocated " prudential checks" on the grounds of austere morality. Our clerical opponents also ignore the fact that many of the most noted champions of Birth Control today are clergymen. The most noteworthy example is that of the distinguished Dean of St. Paul's, London, William Ralph Inge.
There is a confusion in the public mind concerning the origin of the present movement, which must be distinguished from the so-called Neo-Malthusian movement of Great Britain and the Continent. The Neo-Malthusian League was the direct outcome of the celebrated trial in London in 1877 of Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant, who had frankly admitted distributing among the English poor thousands upon thousands of copies of the pamphlet of a Boston physician, Dr. Knowlton, entitled "Fruits of Philosophy," originally published in this country in 1833. The Neo-Malthusian League, sponsored by those valiant pioneers, Charles and George Drysdale and Dr. Alice Vickery, soon spread to all countries of the Continent, and its doctrines were put into practice in Holland, where fifty-three Birth Control clinics, approved by the Dutch Government, have been conducted with great success for forty years.
The Birth Control movement, which has now absorbed the earlier Neo-Malthusian movement, originated right here in New York just a decade ago. While the Neo-Malthusians based their propaganda on the broad general basis of Malthus's theory of population, the expression "Birth Control" was devised in my little paper of advance feminism, The Woman Rebel, as one of the fundamental rights of the emancipation of working women. The response to this idea of Birth Control was so immediate and so overwhelming that a league was formed--the first Birth Control league in the world.
With all the flame-like ardor of pioneers we did not at first realize the full scope of this fundamental discovery. At that time I knew nothing of Malthus, nothing of the courageous and desperate battle waged by the Drysdales in England, Rutgers in Holland, of G. Hardy and Paul Robin in France, for this century-old doctrine. I was merely thinking of the poor mothers of congested districts of the East Side who had so poignantly begged me for relief, in order that the children they had already brought into the world might have a chance to grow into strong and stalwart Americans. It was almost impossible to believe that the dissemination of knowledge easily available to the intelligent and thoughtful parents of the well-to-do classes was actually a criminal act, proscribed not only by State laws but by Federal as well.
My paper was suppressed. I was arrested and indicted by the Federal authorities. But owing to the vigorous protests of the public and an appeal sent by a number of distinguished English writers and thinkers, the case against me was finally abandoned. Meanwhile "Birth Control" became the slogan of the idea and not only spread through the American press from coast to coast, but immediately gained currency in Great Britain. Succinctly and with telling brevity and precision "Birth Control" summed up our whole philosophy. Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks--those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.
In our efforts to effect the repeal of the existing laws which declare the use of contraceptive methods indecent and obscene, Birth Control advocates have been forced to battle every inch of the way. To get the matter before the Legislature of New York my path has led completely around the earth. Our effort has been to enlist the support of the best minds of every country, an object we have achieved even beyond our fondest expectations.
The backbone of the Birth Control movement has been from the time Malthus first published his epoch-making "An Essay on the Principle of Population">Principles of Population" essentially Anglo-Saxon. John Stuart Mill, Francis Place, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley and our own Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert G. Ingersoll spoke openly in favor of control of the population. Today such thinkers and writers as H. G. Wells, Harold Cox (editor of The Edinburgh Review), Arnold Bennett, Dean Inge, William Archer, Havelock Ellis, Gilbert Murray, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes (editor of The Nation, and Lord Dawson, one of the King's physicians, and innumerable others in Great Britain speak openly and valiantly for Birth Control.
It is not without significance that since the inauguration of our agitation in 1913 there has been an immense recrudescence of interest in the persistent problem of population; and a number of new efforts, notably that of A. M. Carr-Saunders, to reinterpret the thesis so brilliantly advanced by that obscure clergyman, Malthus.
Most gratifying to the battle-scarred propagandist for Birth Control has been the awakening of the Orient. China and Japan for ages have been the notoriously overpopulated countries of the earth, the high birth rate, as always, accompanied by a high death rate, a high infant mortality rate and even acceptance of the widespread practice of infanticide. Famine, pestilence and flood have been the only checks to overpopulation in China, and these have been regarded even as a blessing by the yellow races. "Yang to meng ping" is a well-known exclamation in China--"Many men, life cheap!"
Following my sojourn in China last year, the Ladies' Journal of China, the most influential women's publication there, devoted a special edition of more than one hundred pages to the problem of Birth Control. In this paper Tzi Sang wrote: " Since Mrs. Sanger's visit, public opinion has been greatly influenced, and I understand that some educators are planning to propagate the doctrine in the interior so that our women will no longer be mere machines for breeding children. When the majority of our people know the benefits of Birth Control and believe that it is the remedy for plague, famine and war in China, then we can adopt the method of asking doctors to pass on their knowledge to women poor in health."
Set Lu, another writer in the same paper, points out that "If we study the actual situation in China we find that unconsciously the Chinese have attempted to practice Birth Control in a different way. Do we not throw away our babies?" frankly asks this writer of his compatriots. His answer is interesting: "Savages practice infanticide, but civilized people use scientific methods of prevention. Herein lies the difference between a barbarous and a civilized people. No wonder that our civilization fails to make any noticeable advance."
Both in Japan and China, as a result of my visit, and especially as the effect of the attempt upon the part of the Imperial Japanese Government to suppress Birth Control and to shut its door in my face, the subject of birth control has aroused the deepest and most widespread interest among all classes. In both these great Oriental empires the roots of a permanent Birth Control movement have struck deep in popular interest, and undoubtedly will exert a great influence toward bringing down the alarmingly high birth rates to the level of those of Western civilization. The importance, the immediate necessity of an autonomous control of the birth rate by the races of the Orient is by no one more emphatically stated than by that eloquent and picturesque writer and traveler, J. O. P. Bland.
Since the first Birth Control clinic established in this country was raided by the New York police in Brownsville some years ago, and its founders sentenced to jail as petty miscreants, the whole current of opinion has advanced, not merely in this country but throughout the world. The results of the intelligence tests, the menace of indiscriminate immigration, the fertility of the unfit and the increasing burden upon the healthful and vigorous members of American society of the delinquent and dependent classes, together with the growing danger of the abnormal fecundity of the feeble-minded, all emphasize the necessity of clear-sightedness and courageously facing the problem and the possibilities of Birth Control as a practical and feasible weapon against national and racial decadence.
With the invasion of the New York Legislature exponents of this challenging doctrine may well congratulate themselves that they have won another victory against their opponents. Whatever the outcome of the hearing on April 10, Birth Control in any event will have compelled serious attention from our legislators. If we can convince the Assemblymen and State Senators that this is a matter which concerns not merely a group of "well-meaning" feminists, but is organically bound up with the biological welfare of the whole community, we shall consider that our efforts have not been entirely in vain.
She had evidently prepared her speech in the conviction that she was to be found guilty yesterday afternoon." Only the portions quoting Sanger have been transcribed here.]]>
Sanger spoke before three thousand at Carnegie Hall on the eve of her sentencing for
opening the Brownsville Clinic. The only version of the speech is was located from
newspaper reports. The New York Times reported that
she departed from the prepared copy of her speech by being was less severe toward the judiciary than she had
intended. Acccording to the Times "She had evidently prepared her speech in the conviction
that she was to be found guilty yesterday afternoon
." Only the portions quoting Sanger have been transcribed here.
"I come to you tonight," she said, "from a crowded courtroom, from a vortex of persecution. I come not from the stake at Salem, where women were burned for blasphemy, but from the shadow of Blackwell's Island, where women are tortured for 'obscenity.'"
"Birth control is the one means by which the working man shall find emancipation. I was one of eleven children. My mother died when I was 17 because she had had too many children and had worked herself to death. I became a nurse to help support my family, and I soon discovered that 75 per cen of the diseases of men and women are due to sex ignorance. I determined that when I was able I would do what I could to solve that problem. I found that the average person was as ignorant of sex matters as our most primitive ancestors. There has been progress in every department of our lives except in the most important--creation. So I cam to the conclusion that the greatest good I could do was to help poor women to have fewer children to be brought up in want and poverty. I threw my nurse's bag away and swore I would take it up no more. I went to Europe and studied the birth control clinics there and came back to America to do what I could.
Colonel Roosevelt goes all about the country telling people to have large families and he is neither arrested nor molested. But can he tell me why I got sixty-three letters in one week from poor mothers in Oyster Bay asking me for birth control information? No woman can call herself free until she can choose the time she will become a monther.
My purpose in life is to arouse sentiment for the repeal of the law, State and Federal. It is we women who have paid for the folly of this law, and it is up to us to repeal it. It is only by birth control that woman can prepare with man, her brother, for the emanicipation of the race.
For a partial draft of Sanger's prepared statement, see "Carnegie Hall Speech Notes, Jan. 29, 1917."
]]>Sanger gave this address, after discarding her prepared statement, at the Mass Meeting for Birth Control, held at Carnegie Hall. Attended by an audience of three thousand, mostly women, the meeting was to support Sanger during her Brownsville Clinic trial. Other speakers included Dr. Mary Hurt and Helen Todd.
For a partial draft of Sanger's prepared statement, see "Carnegie Hall Speech Notes, Jan. 29, 1917."
I come to you tonight from a crowded courtroom, from a vortex of persecution. I come not from the stake of Salem, where women were burned for blasphemy, but from the shadow of Blackwell’s Island, where women are tortured for ‘obscenity.’
Birth control is the one means by which the working man shall find emancipation. I was one of eleven children. My mother died when I was 17 because she had had too many children and had worked herself to death. I became a nurse to help support my family, and I soon discovered that 75 per cent. of the diseases of men and women are due to sex ignorance. I determined that the average person was as ignorant of sex matters as our most primitive ancestors. There has been progress in every department of our lives except in the most important--creation. So I came to the conclusion that the greatest good I could do was to help poor women to have fewer children to be brought up in want and poverty. I threw my nurse’s bag away and swore I would take it up no more. I went to Europe and studied the birth control clinics there and came back to America to do what I could.
Colonel Roosevelt goes all about the country telling people to have large families and he is neither arrested nor molested. But can he tell me why I got sixty-three letters in one week from poor mothers in Oyster Bay asking me for birth control information? No woman can call herself free until she can choose the time she will become a mother.
My purpose in life is to arouse sentiment for the repeal of the law, State and Federal. It is we women who have paid for the folly of this law, and it is up to us to repeal it. It is only by birth control that woman can prepare with man, her brother, for the emancipation of the race.
Sanger probably gave this interview on April 6, 1923 in the office of the American Birth Control League in New York City.
New York City
When Margaret Sanger attempted to establish the first Birth Control clinic in America a few years ago, the New York police came down on her with a heavy hand. Mrs. Sanger and her assistants were arrested and lengthy legal battles ensued. Undaunted and undiscouraged, Margaret Sanger set out to change current opinion. From the Brownsville district in Brooklyn she has carried her message of fewer but better babies completely around the world, and finally into the legislative halls of Albany.
Next week, April 10, there will be a hearing in the Assembly Chamber of a bill to amend the laws of the State so that Mrs. Sanger may be enabled to open as many Birth Control clinics as she pleases. It will surely be a triumphant moment for her should this bill be enacted. For Margaret Sanger has challenged Federal and State governments. Her books have been burned in London, barred from the United States mail. The Imperial Japanese Government refused her a passport to the land of the cherry blossoms. The Japanese people protested, and Margaret Sanger made a triumphant entry into Tokiyo."
Her name is a household word in Japan and China, as it is in England and the United States. Sentenced a few years ago to a month's term for distributing Birth Control information, she has eventually won the support of such wealthy and prominent society folks as Mrs. Thomas Lamont, Mr. Thomas L. Chadbourne, and Mrs. , Mrs. Otto H. Kahn and others prominent in the social and financial world."
"When we started our educational campaign ten years ago, advocating fewer but better children," "declared Margaret Sanger the other day in the
offices of the American Birth Control League, No. 104 Fifth Avenue," we were almost childishly naive. We didn't know there
were laws which practically conscripted the poor mothers of the State of New York to the unceasing toll of compulsory maternity."
"Our efforts were all to aid the poor, overburdened mothers of the East Side and the congested districts. To my surprise I discovered that there was the blindest
and most unreasoning prejudice of officialdom against the theory or the practice of Birth Control. Thousands and thousands of women appealed to me for help. Twenty-five
thousand women were dying every year because this knowledge had been refused them. Yet every effort to break down the bars of prejudice and ignorance was hampered.
Birth Control was immoral; it would break up the home. Such were the arguments used against it."
"I found out that I could not reach the poor women who were crying to me for Birth Control information, until the whole current of public opinion had been changed."
Since then, says Margaret Sanger, all her efforts have been to awaken public opinion, not only at home but in Europe and in the Orient as well, to the benefits and the morality of Birth Control. The first step in this gigantic task has been to educate the educators, to mobilize the moulders of public opinion.
"We have discovered that there were four steps to our goal: agitation, education, organization and legislation. In view of the enormity of the work confronting us, a
small band of earnest and disinterested women, our progress has been rapid. Whatever the outcome of the bill that has been introduced at Albany, which comes up for a
hearing early this month, its educational value cannot be underestimated."
"Great and discouraging as the obstacles have been, we have succeeded in enlisting the whole-hearted support of the finest intellects of the English-speaking world.
With such eminent English thinkers as H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis,
Dean Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral, London,
Lord Dawson, the King's physician;
John Maynard Keynes, the distinguished economist, and Bertrand Russell,
throwing the weight of their authority into our cause, enlightened public opinion in Great Britain is with us. England leads the
world in hospitality and fairness to new ideas. I say this despite the fact that an early pamphlet of mine has been ordered burnt by a London Police Magistrate."
"Such efforts at suppression are, however, boomerangs; they are invaluable to our cause as propaganda. Instead of suppressing, they arouse widespread interest and
support."
It was a study of the Birth Control clinics of Holland which have been functioning for many years, that convinced Margaret Sanger that personal, hygienic instruction should be given by physicians to women applying for Birth Control information instead of attempting to teach through the printed word. This conviction led to an investigation of the State laws concerning contraceptives. Mrs. Sanger discovered that even duly registered physicians were forbidden by law to offer contraceptive advice, even parents with inheritable diseases were refused such advice in hospitals and public dispensaries.
"It may be wrong to speak of these as clinics. We would like to establish free and friendly bureaus where the overburdened mothers of the poorer classes might come for
advice and sympathy. Licensed physicians alone would be permitted to take charge of the technical and medical part of the work."
"But that would be but one aspect of the many benefits to be derived from such motherhood centres. We would give these mothers not merely contraceptive advice; we
would show them in terms all could understand that they must take care of the babies they have already brought into the world, so that each child might have a fine
opportunity of developing into a strong, sturdy man or woman, vigorous enough to carry on the torch of our civilization."
"There is a good deal of chatter nowadays about Americanization. We cannot develop a fine race on this great Continent of ours unless we look into the future. We must
think not only of our own children but the children and the grandchildren of our boys and girls."
"As long as we willfully, as a Nation, waste the most precious resources we have--our child life--let us hold our tongues about the dangers of Birth Control. The advocates
of Birth Control place a higher value on the life of a child than do its opponents. We want every child born in this country to bring with it the heritage of health and a fine
vitality. There is the true wealth of our country.
"Let us breed a race of thorough-breds! You cannot measure the greatness of a country by its industrial resources, in dollars and cents, or financial power. You can
measure it only in the fine types of manhood and womanhood you produce, in the beauty and happiness of your children, in the talent and genius of poets, philosophers and
artists."
"Let us Americans give up that lamentable habit of counting our greatness only by the dollar sign, only in the number of billions of dollars, or millions of inhabitants
we have."
The objection was made by the interviewer that perhaps the classes most in need of Birth Control could not be taught to exercise it, due to mental defect, irresponsibility or recklessness.
"Until we have responded to the piteous appeals of thousands upon thousands of normal, intelligent wives who already realize their responsibility and their duty toward their
children born and unborn," replied Margaret Sanger,
"such an objection is, neither immediate nor important. We believe that the feeble-minded and the incurable mental defective
should not be permitted to increase and multiply. Every new instrument invented to further civilization has been opposed as dangerous and inimical to mortality. There are all
sorts of automobile accidents every day--but we do not look upon motor cars as immoral. Airplanes have caused the death of hundreds yet we do not condemn them as
unnatural."
For duplicate, see Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition, Collected Documents, C16:151.
Advocates of Birth Control must possess the power to face facts and to analyze them. Only upon the basis of tested experience and actual scientific knowledge can we overcome the ignorance, the stupidity and the prejudices which are the only formidable forces standing in our way. Our recent legislative campaign at Albany, an account of which may be found on another page of this number, has revealed in striking fashion the antagonistic attitude of the typical American politician to the pivotal problem of society today. To expect aid or even intelligent understanding of Birth Control from the typical Albany politician; to be disappointed because of the ignorance of these so-called "legislators;" to be discouraged because of their failure to remove the coercive and criminally obscene insult to American womanhood from the statute books--this would be to succumb to emotion rather than to profit by the knowledge, the invaluable knowledge, we have gained from our experience at Albany. The great fact is this: we can expect nothing of the politician of today. If we must use the weapon of politics to further the progress of Birth Control, it must be the politics created by ourselves.
When the first Birth Control clinic in America was declared a "public nuisance," by the courts, we were advised by well-meaning friends that the legal way, the political way, the legislative way, was the only safe and sane method of propaganda. This has now been put to the test. And we discover that the successful politician is not only mentally unable to understand the aim of Birth Control, but, moreover, he himself is the very product of those sinister forces we are aiming to eradicate from human society.
As manifested in the United States today, current politics is the very outgrowth of overcrowding and underfeeding: mental and physical. Your successful politician is the demagogue who knows the best tricks to catch the greatest number of votes. He is the hypnotist of great, docile, submissive, sheep-like majorities. He is interested in number, not intelligence. Therefore, to expect such masters who, by hook or crook, ride roughshod into public office or slide into seats of the state legislature to understand or support a program which aims at the creation of self-reliant, self-governing independent men and women, would be to neglect one of the most important factors among the resources of our opponents. But we did at least expect something more among men elected to public office than the embarrassed giggle of the adolescent, the cynical indecency of the gangster, in the consideration of a serious sexual and social problem.
Perhaps, moreover, we failed to take into consideration the vast power wielded today by the politicians in the control and administration of the public charities, hospitals and "correctional" institutions. Politician and office-holder indirectly benefit through these institutions for the support and maintenance of the victims of compulsory motherhood. Impartial statistics make this evident. Exclusive of privately supported industries and charities, New York City alone spends annually approximately sixteen million dollars to maintain its various departments of charities, hospitals and "corrections." In 146 of the largest American cities, the total expenditure for the support of the dependent population amounts annually to no less than fifty millions of dollars.
Our politicians today profit from human misery. They have an interest, direct or indirect, in the production through uncontrolled fecundity, of the unfit, the underfed, the feebleminded and the incurably diseased. Their interest, financially, is in the increase of our institution populations, with their insistent demands for appropriations from the city and state, as well as their unending appeals to public and private sentimental generosity. Most eugenists dub the victims of out legal and social barbarism "the unfit." But as William Bateson has recently shown, we need to revise and re-interpret our definition of the "unfit." The victims are not the "unfit," but these blind leaders of the blind--the politician, the profiteer, the war-making patriot, the criminal moralist who is urging men and women to " increase and multiply." "The crimes of the prison population," declared Professor Bateson in his recent Galton lecture, " are petty offences by comparison, and the significance we attach to them is a survival of other days. Felonies may be great offences locally, but they do not induce catastrophes. The proclivities of the war-makers are infinitely more dangerous than those of the beings whom from time to time the law may dub as criminals. Consistent and portentous selfishness, combined with dullness of imagination are probably just as transmissible as want of self-control, though destitute of the amiable qualities not rarely associated with the genetic composition of persons of unstable mind."
In delegating important powers to near-sighted, unimaginative, politicians and acquisitive office-grabbers, the American public is submitting, with deplorable docility, to every sort of injurious and grossly coercive legislation. Laws are passed as penalties for those who dare to disagree with us. Our passivity in this respect is in effect placing upon the shoulders of the next generation not merely the helpless victims of indiscriminate and uncontrolled breeding, but the political parasites who wax so fat on the public charities and "corrections," who, consciously or unconsciously, aim to foster and uphold this disastrous custom of compulsory motherhood.
How closely bound up with the enfranchisement of the mentally deficient is the deterioration of American politics and politicians is indicated in Alleyne Ireland's recent study of the situation, "Democracy and the Human Equation." Mr. Ireland is inevitably driven to the conclusion that there must be some improvement in the quality of the American voter and the American politician before we can expect anything of political action. The only hope he discovers on the horizon is eugenics. But eugenics is futile and impractical, a vague flapping of wings, unless it is allied and strengthened by Birth Control. Otherwise eugenics can only suggest a cradle competition between the "fit" and the "unfit." In this mad race in over-population, the fit would very soon become the unfit; and we would be on the road to a universal imbecility.
Thus we face the interesting possibility--a vision that should give us new strength and coverage: If politicians cannot and will not help Birth Control, Birth Control must and will improve politics.
The most amazing aspect of the present situation is to be found in the great overwhelming fact that the women of America, especially the mothers of America, are demanding the sex hygiene and education which the practice of Birth Control would bring to them. Letters from the over-burdened mothers reach us in thousands; typical examples are presented in issues of the REVIEW. Superficial critics often remark that it is impossible to carry the message of Birth Control to the women who need it most. This claim is belied in all the heart-rending appeals from the victims of barbarous laws and outworn prejudices. If these indomitable and courageous mothers were finally freed from the bondage of compulsory maternity, we should witness the gradual but certain lifting of the curse of the "unfit" and the subnormal. It is the pressure, the ceaseless constant pressure upon American womanhood that is productive of the subnormal and mentally defective. This cursed section of humanity is not a matter of chance. It is the inevitable result of a pressure upon the normal and healthy, a pressure--or cramping restriction--that must somewhere find its outlet.
What the reactionary politicians fail to recognize is that human society possesses in itself, if it were not impeded by outworn customs and barbarous laws, the power of regeneration, of recreation. More and more evidence is coming to light that the number of enlightened and intelligent women is increasing. American women are realizing that first and foremost the problem of bringing children into this world is a personal and physical one. They are refusing to submit any longer to the self-appointed dictatorship of the politician, who, instead of clearing the way for the great march of civilization, is attempting to impede progress by defending decrepit statute and writing into the laws of the land coercive measures.
When women awaken to the necessity of organizing a political method of their own, instead of relying upon or expecting understanding and help from the man-made brand, the politician as he expresses himself today will no longer be tolerated, and with the even of self-reliance and self-government, the race of politicians will, fortunately for humanity, become as extinct as that of the dinosaur.
With this address, Sanger opened the Middle Western States Birth Control Conference, held in Chicago at the Drake Hotel. Handwritten additions by Sanger.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is my pleasant duty to express a cordial welcome on behalf of the American Birth Control League to you all, and especially to the delegates, the friends and others who have come from the various cities to attend this conference and to assist us by their counsel, wisdom and experience. I also want to take this opportunity to thank the Chairman, Mr. Horace Bridges, and I must say that I have never heard an address given so briefly, so exquisitely, so beautifully, and covering the subject so comprehensively as he has done in his few minutes of introduction. I wish there were more people who could hear him.
Great and significant events have occurred in the world since the first Birth Control League was formed in the United States something less than ten years ago. I have been asked by friends recently coming to the movement, and by some friends who have long been in the movement, to tell you to night something of the vicissitudes, something of the early struggles, something of the barrier, that we have had to fight in order to bring this subject of Birth Control before the American people for discussion, and it seems to me that this might be a fitting occasion to do this, because tomorrow and the next day the various sessions of this conference shall be devoted to the discussion of the subject from various angles. There shall be presentation of papers by some of the most distinguished men and women in the country. So that it seems to me that I might take you with me, if you will bear with me and be tolerant of the pronoun "I", which must be interjected into the details of this evening's discourse.
It is a well-known historical fact that the idea of Birth Control is as old as history itself. Far back through the ages, through the various stages of barbarism, savagery, and even in civilization, there has always been an attempt on the part of man to control the size of his family, to control the number of people in the clan, in his tribe. The methods that were used were not those that we wish to tolerate today. These were the methods of infanticide, the abandonment of children, the killing of babies, and foeticide. Civilization as we know it today does not believe in those methods of controlling the population, and at the same time civilization does not supplant an alternative which makes these conditions and these methods necessary.
The only means that have been used today are agencies that are legislative and ameliorative. These agencies have been established for the purpose of reducing the misery, the unhappiness and the squalor, the disease, that is here with us. But I do not believe that either of these agencies are effective in producing or bringing about the most desired results. I believe that only through birth control, or the knowledge of how to prevent conception, can the most effective measures be brought about. For birth control is the key to the greatest of human problems, the problem of reconciling humanitarianism with greatest improvement.
Today we know that this great, fine impulse of humanitarianism brings about a dysgenic effect, where, with the application of birth control, it could produce a eugenic effect. These measures, both legislative and ameliorative, or rather these agencies, could be brought about and made of great use in the country and in the world, if there was accompanied with them, going hand in hand, information to control birth, and it would make the multiplication of the unfit and of the diseased cease.
When we look out upon the world today, we must recognize that there is already the practice of birth control going on among us. It is as Lord Dawson said in the London conference, birth control is here to stay, and I say the only trouble with it is that it is not practiced far enough. It is only practiced by one group in society, the group that we must call the small family group. The other group, the large family group, has not the benefit of this knowledge.
Up to 1912, when I first came into this work, there had been no group, and to my knowledge no individual, who had attempted to bring this idea of family limitation into the large family group, or to interest or advise its practice there. We know for the last quarter of a century that the small family group has been perpetuating itself, but also in that group we find conditions that we all approve of. We find there health, wealth, comfort, leisure, possibilities of development. We find in that group, while there are only a few children, two, three or four, these are the children that get the best care, that are usually brought through to maturity, and are given the advantages of state and of society. These are the children who eventually fill the universities and the colleges, and it is from this group that every one is clamouring that they should produce more of their children.
And, on the other hand, the large family group has also perpetuated its conditions. It perpetuates from generation unto generation its misery, its ignorance, its poverty, its disease. For there we see all of the problems that we have got today. We see the problem of daily child labor, we see the problem of slums, we see our infant mortality, maternal mortality, we see practically every condition that we are trying to ameliorate, that we are trying to legislate against, there snuggled closely in that group and perpetuating themselves continually.
There is another condition there that to me is very serious, and that is that the women, the mothers, in one group do not wish to have the large families that are forced upon them. I found that they did not want to have more children than they could take care of, any more than the women, the mothers, in the small family group. But because of ignorance, because of the lack of knowledge, they had to resign themselves to either one thing or the other, that is, to having children as fast as nature sends them, or to resort to illegal operations. I found, especially in my work as a trained nurse, that this condition was very prevalent. I found it was so prevalent that it was almost abhorrent, and yet the women would come to me and say "What else can one do?"
I happen to be born of a large family. I happen to be one of that large family group. My own parents had eleven living children, so I knew something from the beginning of all the problems that are constantly there perpetuating themselves with large families. I lived in a small factory town, and there I saw constantly girls and boys who came of my age, sometimes younger, year after year leave school and have to take their place beside their father in the factory. Always behind it was another baby that came into the family to force the older one out to compete with his father for his daily bread.
I had a very peculiar childhood, because I came from parents who were Irish, and sometimes I think it is a very great burden to be given, two Irish parents (Laughter). Someway we are always wanting to change them things. We never are quite satisfied with things as they are. My father was a great philosopher. He was a poet. He had the possibilities of a sculptor. And there was one thing that he taught his children, and that was to be true to themselves, to think their own thoughts, to pray their own prayers to their own God. And last, to give back to society the benefit of your experience as you live in life. He also told us again and again that the object of life was to hold fast to a dream, to get a dream and then make that dream come true. With this peculiar kind of a philosophy, this strange kind of a religion, I was launched out upon the world to compete for my daily experience.
And so, after several years of nursing, after I had finished training, I found myself applying some of my father's philosophy to my life work. It was very difficult for anyone to live among the working people, to see their agony, to see their misery, to see their unhappiness, and not to try to apply something to help them remove it.
I found women in almost every walk of life, I saw them go through agony, needless agony, o bring forth dead children. I saw them go through that agony, and they were glad and said "Thank God" when they were told that their baby was born dead. And when you look about you and use your reason you realize that they were right. This mother instinct knew in the first place that she had no moral right to have children that she could not take care of. Again and again these women said to me "Why should I bring a child into the world when those I have already cannot be fed?" And then sometimes they grew rebellious with me, a social worker, and others who came to them, and they said "If you would tell us what you tell the rich women, we would be much happier." (Applause)
It was impossible to go on, year in and year out, without coming to some conclusion about these conditions. It was impossible for me to keep on going back and seeing these women and finding what they were doing, and not be able to help them. And I shall never forget the case that I had last. Some of you may have heard this before, but I am going to tell it to you again. That was the last case I ever took in the nursing world, and I think the last I ever shall take.
It was the case of a woman, who was a young woman, a little over thirty years old; her husband was thirty-two. They were a kind and loving couple and devoted to the three children, ages five, three, and one and one-half. They lived in the congested quarter of New York, and lived in two small rooms. The father at that time was earning Twelve Dollars and a Half a week, which was a small wage even for those days. And this mother had repeatedly said to her friends, to neighbors and others who had come to her, that it would be impossible for her to get on if she had to have an increase in her family. And so when I was called to her to look after her it was to rescue her out of a death bed. She had attempted to perform an operation upon herself, and when I was called in it was a case of septicemia. We had a very great struggle, the doctor and I, to bring this woman back to life, and again and again neither of us thought it was possible. I remember of going eighty hours without a wink of sleep, until the crisis was past. I slept partly on the floor, near this woman, so that she would not be disturbed, and so I could keep track of her pulse.
And then finally it was over and we had won the victory, and every one was glad. The neighborhood rejoiced, and the day came when both the doctor and myself were dismissed. But when we were going before we went, this woman, sitting there with her children, her face pale and haggard and very much worried, had something on her heart and something on her mind, and she had something to say but did not know how to say it. But finally the Doctor, who was very cheerful, very grateful to himself that he had brought this woman out of the valley of death, said to her "There is one thing you cannot do, and that is to get into this condition again." And she said "Yes, I know it, but Doctor, what am I going to do?" What are you going to tell me so that I will not get that way again?" And then the doctor patted her on the back and tried to make the best of it, but nevertheless he went away without telling her what to do. And then she turned to me and said "Oh, you are a woman, you have children, you know, you understand. Surely you will tell me what to do." And I too, although I had been a trained nurse, I must confess that I was very ignorant, I had no idea what to tell this woman or how to make it understandable. And so I followed the doctor's attitude. I closed the door and left that woman there to her misery and to her fate.
Oh, I wonder if any of you have ever been haunted, haunted by a face, haunted by remorse! And as I went on in my work for the next two or three months, this woman's face would come before me as I sat down quietly to read, or when I was unoccupied by other duties. And then it was only a few months later that I was called again to the telephone, and this anxious husband begged me to come as quickly as possible, that his wife was very ill. And back I went, only to find that we were both too late, this poor little woman had again become pregnant and had again resorted to one of the cheap doctors in her neighborhood, and this time she could not make the fight. This time she lost. And then I came there and I saw what really had happened. I saw a bed, these children being torn away to orphan homes, I saw this poor, frantic young father, who was just as innocent, just as ignorant as she was, and just as helpless. I saw that whole condition, and from that I saw the whole panorama of our social life today, and I went home and I knew then, though that woman had died, that in her death she had given birth to a new idea that was going to free other women from such hardship. (Applause)
Now, it is all very well to have an idea, but the thing is, how to get that idea over to the people. In the first place, there was nothing that you could call it. I hadn't any knowledge that there was such a League, or that this idea had been already formed into League, and that it was being carried on as an educational work in other countries. But it was a most important thing for us or for me to find some [name]or handle that could be used for this instrument to free womanhood womankind from maternal bondage.
Now, I found a little later that this idea in England was called "Neo-Malthusianism." That didn't seem so easy. In France I found it was called "Conscious generation," in Germany and in Holland it was called "New Generation," but none of these seemed to be words or names that would convey to an American headline public an idea rapidly.
So the first thing that it was necessary to do was to get a name, and to get a name that would speak for itself. Now, that is not easy, because here we were, generations before me, and this thought had never been concentrated. For months and months I concentrated on what this should be called, how you could call out to the people and tell them what was happening, how you could convey the idea in an item of a few words to the public. Because I felt that it was absolutely necessary to call out from the housetops to the American people what I knew, what I saw and what I believed. And then one evening I gathered a few people together, just a little group of men and women who were with me, who were interested in doing something to help get this thought over. It was not by any means an easy thing to do, although our friends all agreed that something should be done.
It is not always so easy to do the thing that is before us. But after an evening's conversation, after juggling with words, after taking an inventory of everyone's vocabulary, it came like a flash out of the nowhere into the here, the words "Birth Control." They came like lightening, as a bugler of the dawn, they came as a battle cry.
Now, to me, the idea in the words "birth control" were the best that had been conceived, because as our chairman said, it meant control, not limitation. When you say "limitation" that narrows the idea, but "control" is a far bigger word, and I have never been able to understand what the prejudice is against the word. I often think I would like to have those persons who dislike the word psychoanalyzed and see what is the matter with them.
At any rate it was one thing, and it seemed to me that was victory won one, to get a name that would convey your thought, a victory won. But that was not, oh, half the battle. In the first place, having resolved to give up my work, it was not an easy matter to try to interest others to give money and half help financially and morally to put over an idea that was so new. It was not at all easy to do that. I went to ten of the most prominent women in New York, and asked them if they would go on record with me to write a booklet or a pamphlet giving out this thought, and conveying the idea in simple English to the American public.
Would you believe I could not find one woman in New York City who would do it? The answer came back "Wait until we get the vote." Wait, wait, wait. Nobody said "do," everybody said "don't." Again, I asked different people if they wouldn't give something toward getting out a publication, and again my heart was filled with hope by an attorney who wrote and said he would come to see me. He was very much interested in free speech, and he believed that I had struck at the root of a great many of our social problems, and consequently he and I arranged for a meeting, where I thought, as he had a certain financial backing, it might be possible to make short day of this. When I met him he went over the pros and cons of the matter with me, and he said "Do you understand and realize that there are laws against conveying this idea to the public?"
Well, this was quite new to me. I said "Laws!" He said "Yes, there are laws in practically every state in the Union, as well as Federal laws." He said "Do you know that this means jail, means prosecution?" Well, that didn't sound very well. But before the evening was over I still wanted to go on with this work. And as strongly as he argued, as vivid a picture as was presented, I still felt that something within one that drives you on and makes you go, and it was impossible to give up the idea. So finally the lawyer looked at me, very seriously, and he said "I will back you with the publication if you will do something for me first?" I asked him what it was. He said "If you will stay for six months and by psycho-analyzed, I will stand behind you." My kind old father, who had been so anxious for me, in my youth, to have a dream and make that dream come true, came on a visit to New York, the first in forty years, to take me home to put me in a retreat where I could rest from some shock he was sure I must have had.
So it was that one had to fight every step of the way. There were no friends, there was no one to help, there was no one to say "do." So I sold the little home I had, where my children played, and I sent them on to a small boarding school, and I took the money and I decided to study this subject from every angle before I launched a national campaign. I went to Europe, I went to England, to France, to Holland, to Spain, and I studied in the British Museum from the time the gates opened, which was 9:00 O'clock, until 7:00 O'clock at night, for more than eight hours. I went to Holland and took a course of instruction. I went to Spain to see what they were doing there. I went to France, and studied this subject from away back to the time of Napoleon.
So I came back equipped, not only with information but also with such distinguished men behind me as H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Havelock Ellis, and others. And then I was amused to find that with those names behind one it was not half so difficult to find some American women who would go on record with one you.
My first attempt at a publication was to discuss the theory of the subject. Yet only just to talk about the subject in a theoretical way seemed to offend the government, and with nine small publications, each of them was confiscated and each of them meant an indictment. Now, at the Federal Court it means five years imprisonment with every indictment, if you are convicted, so by the time I was through saying what I had to say in even a small way, 45 years in the penitentiary hung over me.
Then again began a great deal of agitation to get the American public to see what one was trying to do to enlighten them with the facts, and I am glad to say it was only a very short time when the Federal government dismissed the whole nine cases, because as a matter of fact they had nothing that was illegal in those indictments. It was simply that they were afraid of the words and hadn't themselves known the law.
Now, with 45 years of imprisonment wiped off the slate, you would think that one would go back into the your maternal corner and stay there. But having been to Holland I realized now as I had never realized before that all the discussion and talking, and all the pamphleteering and the publications I could get to the people were not going to help the women that I wanted to help. Many of those women could not read a pamphlet or a book, so that no matter what I did to get the Federal law changed, there were those poor weary ignorant women that would not benefit by that change of that law.
Those women wanted someone to talk to. They had to be instructed personally. They had to be taught. And I knew that many of them could not read, thousands of them could not read English, and it takes too high an intelligence to follow printed plans and directions, and I knew that was not the way for me to work while oral instruction is far simpler. So, having found clinics established in Holland, I decided that the thing was to show the government, and especially the government of New York State, and the courts, that the establishment of a clinic was the proper way to disseminate this information, and have give it there privately where women may come for instruction.
And so I established a clinic in the District of Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the midst of a very thickly populated section. It was there where the infant mortality was highest, and it was there where the greatest amount of money was spent for charity. It was only a short time that this little clinic was allowed to stay, about ten days, but within that ten days, 488 women came and applied and were personally instructed in means to prevent conception.
We had to have that interpreted an interpreter , and we also had to have a trained nurse, and yet this did not suffice. There were baby carriages and women in line for nearly two blocks around this little place. We took their records, we took their names, we took record record of the wages that their husbands made, the number of children they had already had, the number of miscarriages.
We had facts and data that, when they came before the court, made a profound impression upon the judges, and one of the judges refused to come up the next day to try the case, he was so impressed. Nevertheless, the law was the law, and that was a distinct challenge to the law. This was done openly and knowingly. One of the judges said "If you will promise not to go on with this work, your case may be dismissed. We want you to obey this law, reply that it was impossible for me, knowing the suffering that I knew of, to respect such a law. It was impossible." (Applause) And so thirty days in jail was not very much for the satisfaction of helping 488 women. And many of those women have come to us since and told how much this has meant in their lives.
In one case there came to us a woman whose husband was about to leave her. She had grown cold and indifferent. She was afraid of him, she was afraid of his caress, afraid of his touch. She felt that something was going to happen to break up that little family. Someone read in the paper that there was such a place as the clinic and sent her there, and she came to us for help. Three years later she returned, her arm locked in that of her husband, on their way to the moving pictures, and they said that they had never been so happy, that their home life was happy, they had had no more children, and they felt that they owed a great deal of their happiness to the establishment of that little clinic.
From 1914 to 1917 were three years of constant agitation. Those of us who sat down to think out this campaign decided that there were four stages through which to pass, four courses to pursue: Agitation, education, organization and legislation. Those were four epois or four periods that we must pursue.
So those first years, with agitation, it meant imprisonment, jail, hunger strikes, it meant meetings being stopped, it meant everything that was disagreeable, most disagreeable. And then we began, from 1917 to 1922, a course of education. We had been able to have some books and pamphlets reprinted. We established a magazine to carry forth this message, and it jumped from 2,000 the first year to 10,000 within two years. This has conveyed the message for our association or our league. We have since that time created practically a literature in the United States. I do not mean that we personally have done it, but I mean the agitation and the thought going out has brought back to us an entirely new literature which was not in existence when we began in 1914.
From 1922 to 1925 is to be a special time for organization. Just a few years ago, after that first little league had broken up on account of the war, we again formed another league, which was is a national league with its headquarters in New York City. From that we have gone out and organized similar leagues all over the world. We have a branch league in Canada, another in Mexico, another in Honolulu, two in Japan, two in China, and there are also similar leagues and organizations in practically every country in Europe, although some of those were in existence before we began this work.
Perhaps the greatest victory that I have been able to see was the invitation to go to Japan and to bring the message of Birth Control to the Japanese people. It seemed to me that that was indeed part of the dream coming true, because those who oppose this idea almost always say "If the white race practices birth control, and the yellow race does not, it is going to mean the wiping out of our civilization." So I was overjoyed when I received an invitation from a group called "Kaizo", which means "Reconstruction" "Group", similar you might say to our New Republic group in America. They asked me to come to Japan and deliver four lectures on the subject of "War and Population."
I of course was delighted to do so. When I heard that I had been preceded by Bertrand Russell, and that I was to be followed by such distinguished persons as Einstein and H. G. Wells, I felt greatly flattered that I was to go into such good company.
Everything seemed to go very well until I got to San Francisco. When I reached San Francisco and applied for a visa to my passport, I was told most courteously by the Japanese Counsel that that morning he had received a cable from his home office saying that if Mrs. Sanger, the birth control advocate, applied for a passage to Japan, that it was to be refused her. So then I asked if it were possible to go without delivering the lectures, and he cabled back, and back again came the word "No." So it seemed for a time as if it were impossible to get into Japan.
I heard, however, that the boat I was going on was sailing also to China, and that on that boat were more than 150 representatives from the Peace Conference at Washington. These were some of the most distinguished men of Japan. It seemed to me that it was absolutely necessary to get into Japan, and at the same time to get onto that boat with these delegates. So I booked my passage, not for Japan, but for China, and I was only on board a few days when the Japanese Group came to me and asked if I would speak to them in the first class passage or saloon. I of course was delighted to do this, and immediately after this address had been given, Mr. Hanohawa, who is now the Japanese representative in this country, cabled to his home office, saying that he had heard this address, and he believed that the Japanese Government would be making a very great mistake if it did not raise the ban over it doors, and also if it did not listen attentively to the message that was to be given. (applause)
I will not attempt to tell you all the pros and cons, and the difficulties that awaited me in Japan, but needless to say, after a great deal of questioning by the authorities who came out to meet me, I was finally allowed to enter Japan, and I was also allowed to give thirteen lectures while I was there. There was only one other person who was better known in Japan, who was an outsider, and that was the Prince of Wales.
Every paper throughout the entire Empire was filled with something about birth control. That does not mean that everyone agreed with the idea. Not at all. But nevertheless there was such a fine, liberal group there--that to me is the hope of Japan--that they insisted upon making it possible for one to say one's say. And also out of the 101 magazines that came out the 1st of April, 88 of these magazines carried a principal article on the population question. So that It is said that while 98 per cent of the population of Japan are literate, nevertheless and 95 per cent of the people know something today about birth control.
We also formed leagues there, and before the disaster the work was going on very beautifully. The same with China, although there was not the same opposition. In China the students from the Government University begged requested me to address them. And the interesting thing to me was the difference in the two languages. In Japan, one had to stand three hours to deliver a one hour address. In China, you stood a half an hour to deliver an hour's address, on account of the difference of languages.
Naturally, I was nearly exhausted and worn out when I left Japan, but in China they gathered together a large student body of 2500 persons, mostly men, as there were very few women students in China Pekin attending the university. Later on in the evening the chancellor of the university held a meeting at his home, where there were some of the distinguished professors of Pekin, and that night before we left an organization was formed, and a little pamphlet, called "Family Limitation", that some of you might have heard of, was written read. Some of them stayed up that night and translated it into Chinese, and the next morning it was on the press, and five thousand of these pamphlets were being distributed among the men and women of China. That shows quick action. It shows how an idea goes, is taken, and quickly act acted upon it so quickly.
From China I went to London to attend the International Conference, and there it was indeed a most inspiring occasion, because there were delegates there from every country in Europe. There were such men as Lord Dawson and Sir William Archer Arbuthnot Lane attended the conference, and H. G. Wells held a reception for the delegates at his home, and we were all inspired and encouraged to go back to our various countries and to carry forth the message in unison with those who were holding the conference in London.
By the way, at that conference we invited the next international conference to assemble in the United States in 1925, and while Portland, Oregon has been chosen as the place, some still believe that San Francisco might be a better place. Already delegates from China, India, Norway, Sweden, and from many other countries are planning and preparing to attend.
Now, in conclusion I want to say that these have been disturbing times. I think, if the war had not been on, that this work would have been far ahead of any other movement in the United States. As it is, we are gaining headway constantly. We had made a tremendous change in public opinion, even in the last three or four years, and we have here at this conference represented many welfare organizations; but I am quite certain that there could be a great improvement among the welfare organizations, as far as this idea is concerned.
Again, we have the medical profession that still must be educated. (Applause) But from the requests that have been sent in to attend the medical conference tomorrow night it sounds encouraging, because there are more than six hundred requests for medical men and women to come and attend the conference tomorrow night, where we will have discussed the methods of contraception. That will be discussed tomorrow night, and our the audience is limited to the medical profession only.
It is, after all, to the medical profession that we must look for the greatest benefit to this work, because when it comes right down to it, it is a question of technique, contraception technique. We cannot really bring about the best results with this idea or with this work until the medical profession are ahead of us, as we have been ahead of them in the past. The idea and the education of the public is far beyond the medical profession's work today. By that I mean we are ready for birth control, and they are not ready to give us what would make birth control practicable.
The only opposition that is left is the religious opposition. That is opposition that we get here and there individually, but really we have broken down the great barriers of opposition, with the exception of official religious bodies. The people themselves are really with us.
Now, it may surprise you to hear me say that, but I want to tell you that at a research clinic that was established in New York, we have a proportion like this: Thirteen Protestant women, Twelve Catholic women, Eleven Jewish women, who come to us constantly for advice. Now, this shows you that that is an idea that is going to stand, in spiteof race, color or creed. (Applause)
And I think what Lord Dawson said is very applicable to the church. He said at this London conference, he asked the church to approach this question of birth control in the light of modern knowledge and the needs of a new world, unhampered by traditions that have outgrown their usefulness. I think that could be applied to practically all opposition today.
Now, friends, why are we here? Why are we holding this conference? We are holding it because we are asking your help, just as women for the past ten years have been appealing to me, so we come out here and appeal to you. I have had from the 1st of January to the 1st of October 58,432 letters addressed to me personally from women asking for information. Think of it! Twenty per cent of those women come from the State of Illinois. Now, to me that is a sign of intelligence, high intelligence, because only a woman who is intelligent and who is rising out of the lowest depths of degradation and poverty and misery, who has the conscious responsibility of controlling her offspring, will inquire.
Shall we not answer that call? Shall we thrust that woman back into degradation when she is asking for help to get out of it? I think not. I think you will agree with me that she should be helped, and that every hand in this state should be reached out to help her help herself, because that is what she wants. These women ask in these letters for health, for just a little time to space their children; they ask for a little time so they can gain, as they say, their real strength.
Some of them say they have never known what it is to have one night's sleep from the night they were married until the present day. Some of them call out and say, "My husband is leaving me, because I cannot endure his presence or the sight of him while this fear of pregnancy hangs over me." Some of them say they have never had a new dress; old clothes, old shoes, old things have been passed on to them from others. Some of them say they have not been to the neighbor's house in five years, that is only a half-mile away. They tell of the drudgery, of the enslavement that they endure, and in reading those letters I am convinced that these women are enduring a slavery that the black race of this country never endured.
You feel, when you finish reading those letters, that you are almost broken. And do you know, it does break us. We have to keep on changing, because of course I cannot possibly read all these letters. No human being could. My desk is piled high, in various groups, some of one thing and some of another.
And do you know that we have had girls in that office who have broken down mentally and physically just from reading those letters? One girl, 26 or 27 years old, came out to Chicago. She couldn't endure it any more. Perhaps she is here tonight. She is working now with the soldiers who have come back from war maimed and broken. She wrote back to one of the co-workers in our office and she said: "As bad as this work is, it is not as bad as you are doing there. Because here we have everyone to help these men, societies, clubs, organizations, churches, everybody is reaching out a hand to give to these men. But it broke my heart to see that no one was helping those poor mothers."
That is the message I have for you here in Illinois. I have come to you to appeal to you to help us. Help us help these women. Let us make a better world. Be the first on record in this state to open clinics, not one but dozens of clinics, where we can tell these women to come and be advised. Give them the hope that they are reaching out for. These women are bent, they are bowed, they are broken, and they want your help.
Now, I believe that by birth control we can remove untold misery. I think that through it we can remove poverty, we can do away with slums. I think we can have children conceived in love and reared through the aid of science for the development of humanity. I believe also that through it we can change not only the quality of the race, but the thinking of the race, and bring about peace on earth, good will to men, (Vociferous applause)
For a similar version see Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm, Library of Congress, LCM 130:226.
]]>Sanger gave this speech at the Community Church, along with James F. Landis and Clarence R. Skinner. The MSPP editors have omitted questions not addressed to Sanger.
For a similar version see Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm, Library of Congress, LCM 130:226.
It was Victor Hugo who said that there is no force in the world so great as that of an idea whose hour has struck. I believe that the hour for birth control has struck, because there is no other question that has so large a practical significance, which, it seems to me, cuts so deeply into the foundations of social evolution. There is no other question of equal importance that has been left so long in obscurity, and yet I think it is safe to say that there is no other question that has so dramatically arisen upon our horizon of national and international interest as this subject has within the past ten years. Ten years ago it was a Federal offense to discuss the merits of birth control, and to write or to print that discussion and to send it through the United States mails.
This battle for free discussion of birth control has had far better success in its being fought out in the courts rather than in the legislatures. George Bernard Shaw says that this idea is the most revolutionary of the twentieth century; H. G. Wells says that it is the most momentous fact of modern life, and he is inclined to believe that birth control is the intelligence test of modern life.
I believe that this is a very fitting place--in a church--to stand for the right to discuss this great subject. I also believe that with the change of opinion, with the education that is constantly going on in this country, we may yet see the same thing happen that happened to me in Los Angeles a few months ago. I went there to speak, and was met at the station by a large group of camera and newspaper and moving picture men, and also accompanying this group was a group of policewomen. This was not altogether new in my experience, but to my great amazement and surprise one of the policewomen stepped forward and said: "We, policewomen of Los Angeles, extend to you a hearty welcome." That was a new experience in this long, interesting battle for the right to discuss the merits of birth control. I was not quite sure whether that welcome was the spirit of California or whether it was the gentle influence of the women in the police department.
But I arrived back in New York and went to work in the Research Bureau pondering over this great manifestation of intelligence and hospitality. Soon my mind was put at rest, because about four weeks ago, while we were quietly attending to the hundreds of poor, wretched, spiritless women who come to our birth control clinic, we were invaded by seven policemen and two policewomen, who came into our clinic and arrested two of our doctors and three of our nurses. I began to realize that it was not the gentle spirit of the policewomen in the department of California. One of the policewomen had come to us as a decoy patient and said that she was the mother of three children. She was given information, she was treated as all patients are treated, kindly, considerately, and went through the usual routine. She came back again to discuss the merits of the subject in its practical aspect in her particular case, and was again given certain consideration, and then on the third visit she brought her friends, the policewomen and seven policemen.
The doctors were herded into the usual Black Maria, taken to the police station, and treated as common, ordinary lawbreakers, and were about to be finger printed when some of us, knowing something about the offense, stopped that process.
A very great piece of good fortune happened at this time. The policewoman who was conducting the raid did not really know the law herself, and she began to go through the files, our medical records, and helped herself right and left to one hundred and fifty cards that seemed to be easiest for her to take and several other very important histories. The Irish say that it is a poor wind that does not blow good for some one, and this certainly was the wind that blew good for us, because she, in taking these records, attacked and invaded the most precious rights of the medical profession, and this aroused the indignation of the medical men and women of New York. A mass meeting was held; the doctors came to testify in our behalf; and I do not know of any time in the past fifteen years when there has been such indignation and such an aroused interest as this police raid aroused in New York City among all sections of the community--in clubs, women's organizations, men's clubs in Wall Street, churches. Medical meetings were held, protest meetings, and without qualification the expressed indignation was sent to the Police Department, with the result that Grover N. Whalen, the Police Commissioner, apologized to the Academy of Medicine, and as a gesture for good behavior in the future, he demoted the policewoman who conducted the raid. But even better than that, doctors of such distinction as Foster Kennedy, the neurologist, and Frederick Haddon, and Ex-Chief Commissioner of Health, Louis Harris, took the witness stand and testified to our right to establish and run this birth control clinic; and not only that, but they testified that a woman had a right to knowledge of birth control, not only for the cure or prevention of disease but also to space the births in her family. By that testimony of these experts we won more in that great decision than we would win fighting in the legislature. Our case was dismissed by the magistrate. It was impossible for them to do otherwise, by the opinion that was so marvelously expressed in every avenue of thought, liberty and freedom in New York City.
Now, the laws in this country are peculiar. In New York State we have two laws, first Section 1142, which, like your law in Massachusetts, states that no one can give to anyone information to prevent conception. But some one in New York was a little wiser in making laws than you in Massachusetts, and they made another law offsetting the severity of Section 1142, and Section 1145 states that any physician lawfully practicing can give such advice to patients for the cure or prevention of disease. That law was put on the books just a little later than Section 1142, but in all my nursing experience I never found any doctor who interpreted it for himself. To test out this law I had two women, one with a severe transmissible disease, taken to every hospital and dispensary in New York and Brooklyn, and with the exception of one hospital, they were refused advice. They were told that they could come back and be treated for their various ailments, and that in case of pregnancy, there might be an interruption to save their lives, but so far as birth control advice was concerned, this was a Sing Sing offense and they could not give it. That was a challenge for me, for some one in the community to test out that law; and I, in 1916, opened a clinic in a very overcrowded section of Brooklyn. I could not get a doctor to help, but got some nurses, and together we announced that we were going to give all married women advice in regard to conception; we were going to challenge the constitutionality of that law.
We were all arrested and spent one month in jail, but we carried that case to the highest courts, and in that conviction and testing out this law we received from the Court of Appeals a decision that the conviction was sustained because I was not a physician, but that any physician lawfully practicing in New York State had a right to give contraceptive advice under Section 1145; and then there was a labored interpretation and definition of the word "disease." In fact, I think instead of going to a medical dictionary the court went to Webster's and they got a definition of disease which was broader.
When we got that decision it was time to act, and we opened another clinic in 1923. We had a physician in charge. We took only cases for the prevention or cure of disease as interpreted by the court, and we went on increasing our nurses and staff until a few weeks ago. We had been investigated by the Academy of Medicine, by the State Board of Charities, and the City Board of Health and found running in good order and according to the laws, so that you can imagine our surprise and dismay to have the police officials come in there to try to break up this work. I refuse to accept that the police department are the authorities to investigate a medical organization that is conducted by the medical profession.
You in Massachusetts have a law even more vicious than that in New York State, because after all there is a little leeway to our law. The physicians in this state cannot give advice even for transmissible disease, even when the woman is suffering from tuberculosis or heart disease, in which we know that a pregnancy endangers and threatens her life. The best the physician can do is to interrupt her pregnancy and send her back home with a death sentence hanging over her head.
That is what you are standing for in Massachusetts today, and the hands of the medical profession are tied. They are not here to challenge laws, they are here to obey the laws. It is for us as citizens to see that the laws are changed so that they shall have full freedom in doing their work.
In respect to this law Massachusetts is the blackest state in the Union. I believe that all it takes in this state is a handful of courageous citizens to stand behind a birth control clinic. Get your doctor, if he wants to be a martyr, to interpret the law from a medical point of view to stand behind this group, and take it to the highest court, not only in this state but of the United States; and I am perfectly positive as I stand here to-day that you will win, because that is the force of a right idea whose hour has struck. You can no longer deny to a doctor his right to save a woman's life, and information to prevent conception will do that.
In our organization of this clinical research bureau we have had over 13,000 women who have come to us within this period of time. We have more women who come to us to-day than we can possibly take care of. We have the charity associations, the social organizations, doctors and nurses who send to us women who should be taken care of and should be instructed and advised, and we take them. In fact, if we had ten clinics in New York City today they would be filled, and to me that is the marvelous part of this movement today. It is not a movement like others in which you must inject the idea into the minds of the public. This is a movement that is far ahead of the organization to administer to it. Women everywhere in the poor walks of life are asking, begging for information to free them from excessive child bearing; they are asking doctors, midwives, nurses, for advice.
In our federal law we also have a law (Section 211) which will not allow anyone, not even a doctor, to send information through the mails, even to another doctor. He cannot send a book, a pamphlet, anything written or printed, or any material or article designed to prevent conception. And worst of all, we cannot tell you in case there was a clinic or a physician in this state where it might be legal to have information, the federal law will make it a crime, with five years' imprisonment to tell you to go to that doctor or give his name. So we have two things to do, first, change your state law, and then clear up this federal law, which also is injurious to the proper functioning of the medical profession.
Not long ago one of our contributors had deducted his contribution from his income tax. It was challenged by the government which claimed that he had supported an illegal organization. As we were incorporated under the laws of New York State, it was rather a surprise to say that we were illegal, and we were shown a letter which I had written to a woman in Baltimore telling her to go to Johns Hopkins Medical Department where we know physicians do give advice on birth control. It was perfectly legal for the doctor of the state of Maryland to give her advice, but it was illegal for me under the federal law to tell her to go to that hospital and doctor.
We have found in our clinic and in the work we are doing there that it is no longer a question of what birth control is going to do. We know what it will do. We know what it has done in the past five years. We know that it is able and that it is reducing infant and maternal mortality. We have thousands of these women who have come to us as a last chance to save their lives, to whom their physicians have said, "One more pregnancy and I cannot be responsible for your life." And these women are living to-day, and their health is improving; they are living to bring up their three or four children better. Homes have been made happier. We have seen the good results of birth control. We proclaim that in the first place, any many or woman suffering from a transmissible disease, such as syphilis, insanity, or feeble-mindedness, such a couple should not have children. We further say that any mother or woman suffering from heart disease, tuberculosis, etc., should not become a mother until her disease is cured. Third, we say that those parents who already have subnormal children should not have more children. We further say that women should have information to prevent conception in order to space the births of the children, that there should be at least two years, and three years is even better in many cases, to give the woman a chance to recuperate, to regain her health and strength after the ordeal of the birth, to give her a chance to enjoy her motherhood and to prepare for the next one.
Further than that we cannot go. But I maintain that we must change our laws and public opinion so that we may go further, and so that any man or woman who is unable to support two children should not be allowed to have nine or ten. We further say that a young couple starting out their life together in marriage with happiness and hopes of adventure, should not take upon themselves the responsibility of parenthood until they have adjusted their married lives first. We want them to have a year or two just to get acquainted, just to know each other, and after all it is not so easy adjusting themselves in this day. It is a great responsibility, and love is one of those tender plants that has to be nurtured, has to be given sunshine and health in order to strengthen it to grow. What chance have we to strengthen the bonds of marriage when a young couple starts out so gayly and joyously in marriage and finds itself in the condition of parenthood before they have adjusted their lives.
We have never given womanhood a chance. We have given motherhood too many burdens; and I claim it is time for us to speak up for womanhood and to make womanhood something lovely and have it precede motherhood. Womanhood has its best possibility for growth and happiness after marriage. You find a young girl going from girlhood into motherhood without any chance to prepare for motherhood by blossoming out to fulfill her destiny as a mother. Birth control is going to make for happier lives, better lives and better marriages, when women have a chance to adjust themselves to the husband, to the man they love; when there is a chance to think, prepare, enjoy, to build up the cultural side of their lives. When children are coming to them by choice, plan, and not by accident, we find that women not only have their first and second child, but their third and fourth child, and enjoy each one of them in the process. That is what we want in the future. We want children to be conceived in love, born of the parents' conscious desire, and given the heritage of sound bodies and minds. We further want the young to look upon their bodies as holy temples and to make these bodies fit and perfect instruments of the soul, to take their part in the mysteries of material being.
Q. (Mrs. Sanger.) "Tell us something about some of the European countries which have sanctioned birth control, and the results, especially in Holland."
A. In Europe to-day there are only two countries, France and Italy, in which information of birth control cannot be given. England is making tremendous strides. There are already twenty-six clinics there, and a fight is going on to have the government allow information to be given at the maternal centers. The House of Lords went on record with a resolution asking the government to have this happen. Holland is perhaps the inspiration of us all in this movement. Up to 1914 there was the lowest infant mortality in the three cities where this was going on, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Hague. There was a decreasing birth rate. There was the highest standard of education for children; there was less prostitution, and especially with the native inhabitants, of any country in Europe. I cannot say what has happened since 1914. Holland is a splendid example of what birth control will do when it is properly organized and directed.
Q. "What has the birth control group done to influence physicians to protect these clinics, and also to bring pressure upon legislators?"
A. The best that we could do was to find a physician who was courageous enough to give us two years of his time to go out into the country to address medical societies. That is the way we have been able to get the medical profession and societies to have some understanding of what we are trying to do, and I think we are succeeding.
Q. "What do you find to be the greatest secret source of opposition to your work?"
A. I should say that ignorance was the greatest secret force, but I should say that the Roman Catholic Church was the greatest outward, open force opposed to the birth control movement.
Q. "Can you tell us the information in the pamphlets which were being sold in New York City in the streets in February?"
A. I do not know about any pamphlets which were sold in February. I know that there is the Birth Control Review which is a magazine which is sold at the Grand Central Station and at Thirty-fourth and Thirty-fifth Street. That is a monthly magazine, perfectly proper, with mailing privileges in the United States post office.
Q. "If the law be not enforced, will not the unmarried mother take advantage of that law?"
A. In our experience we have had some unmarried mothers come to us, but they have come to be placed where they could take care of their babies. So far as unmarried women coming to us, we have had a few, perhaps a very small percentage, when they have had a condition of health which would not justify their marriage or pregnancy after marriage. In all of these cases we ask them to bring a letter from their physicians. In many cases the mothers have come with them, and said, "If you give her this treatment we will sanction the marriage." I believe that if birth control clinics are established and properly run it will do away with a great deal of immorality, because it is going to allow young people to be married earlier and to take their time to have children. It will be a factor for morality and not immorality.
Q. "Do you know the size of the families of legislators and judges who oppose this law?"
A. At one time we did take a poll of their families and we found there was a certain percentage of them who were bachelors, and that not over two had more than five children, the others had small families.
Q. "Why can't the state take charge of the larger families in the case of poorer people?"
A. The state is already doing that, as well as private charities and philanthropic societies. That is what we do not want.
Q. "If birth control was practiced many years ago, might not society have been deprived of great individuals, such as Lincoln, Washington, and others?"
A. It is difficult to say, but assuming that we might have been deprived of these great individuals, I think we might also have been deprived of a large group of imbeciles, feeble-minded, and general mental incompetents, and we probably would have more great individuals because they would have had a chance to develop their individuality.
Q. "How much cooperation do you receive from the Protestant clergy?"
A. As individuals, I think a great deal. Beginning with Dean Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral, they have never ceased to stand behind and with us. In the Episcopal Church there has been a fine support, not officially, but from individuals, and also from the Methodists and various others. So far as the Unitarians are concerned, we have had it from the beginning.
Q. "Does not the Catholic Church confuse abortion with conception?"
A. I was under that impression for a long time, but I had it from Cardinal Hayes that they did not. I had a statement which was printed in the New York Times that Cardinal Hayes said that the Catholic Church did not confuse abortion with conception, that it understood well what the birth control movement was trying to do, and that it preferred abortion to birth control, because the soul that is aborted has started its journey to life and is sent back, while the prevention of conception denies that soul the right to start life and is a mortal sin; and it is the right and duty of all of us to make it possible for souls to have the glory of God in Heaven, etc. I asked Cardinal Hayes the question: why then he was living a celibate life and was not doing his duty.
Q. "Don't you think that the hidden hand that instigated the raid on your clinic will not lie quiet but will continue trying to break up your work?"
A. It is very possible they will try it, but we are going to be very alert.
Q. "Will you tell us the physician of Massachusetts who was courageous enough to go about talking on birth control?"
A. Dr. James F. Cooper.
Q. "In your program, would you place restrictions on the productivity of men and women who were perfectly normal and where there was no handicap to the woman having as many children as she pleased?"
A. In regard to a perfectly healthy couple that has adequate means, I would certainly place no restrictions on them. It is a question of what the individuals desire. There is no compulsion on our part where people are able to maintain the children they bring into the world.
"Q. (Professor Landis) " Would it not be better democracy if the ultimate say about a law should rest with the people instead of the legislature>"
A. That is rather hard to answer. Our experience has shown that it is not; we are too large. Our theory is one of representation, but in order for that to be effective it must be real representation and responsibility on the part of those people who represent us, and our responsibility that demands we shall be informed about what happens in our country.
Q.(Mrs. Sanger.) "Doesn't our government know that birth control has been practiced for centuries, and if physicians would wake up couldn't they control the laws better in regard to it?"
A. I had not known that it had been practiced for centuries. There have been infanticide, abortion, etc., but I had not known that the same kind of birth control that we practice has been practiced for centuries.
Q. (Mrs. Sanger.) "Is it true that Dr. Cooper gave birth control information in Boston?"
A. (By Mr. Skinner.) "He said the other night that he had brought some fifteen hundred children of the North End into the world, and that it was there that he gained interest in the question of birth control. I do not know whether he has given definite information in clinics or in his private practice. I can not answer that personally."
(By Mrs. Sanger.) I know he did in his private practice, because in one of the medical societies in Chicago he brought some one hundred or one hundred and fifty cases he had followed.
Margaret Sanger gave this speech in London as part of the 1922 Fifth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. For other speeches and statements given at this meeting, see Individual and Family Aspects of Birth Control,", July 11, 1922 and "Press Statement at the Fifth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference," July 11, 1922.
Margaret Sanger is conducting the first birth control clinic ever operated in the United States and a day in the clinic from the time you first view the scrim covered windows, about which strange to say, no curious crowd clusters, to your departure at night, after you have heard the tale of each visitor, is one surprise after another.
"It is the feministic note, again," said Mrs. Sanger to The Eagle reporter as she pointed out the eager women who were coming in groups to see her at 46 Amboy street, in the Brownsville section of this borough.
And the reporter interviewed these "feminists" and heard again the cry of the women who are craving for the things that have been denied them--only these were not pining for the privilege of expressing their individuality through the medium of a profession, neither were they asking to be relieved from the burdens of a household. The plea of these rebels was a very simple one.
"Perhaps, if I don't have any more children I can give out the washing," said one.
The reporter had talked to Mrs. Sanger of the social significance of her work and for a moment the conversation had dwelt on the possible effect on population that might be incurred by teaching the foreigners birth control.
But the women were unconscious of the fact that a problem might center around their coming, each had brought her individual burden, that was all. As one explained it in answer to a question, "It is so much easier to talk to a woman than to a man, that is why I never tell my doctor." And another whom the tired lines on her face made look like 40, although she could hardly have been more than 30, said:
"This is the kind of place that we have been wanting all the time. I have had seven children, two are dead, and my husband is a sick man. Do you know how I got bread for them? By getting down on my knees and scrubbing floors for the baker; that's what I did when we couldn't pay the bill. Seven children," she repeated, "that's enough for any woman."
And so it went on. Most of the women are foreigners. They leave their baby carriages outside, some enter timidly, not a few smilingly, and the others, well, as they themselves say, "it is easy to talk to a woman," and they certainly do.
"They tell me of hungry children of neglected and deceased ones," said Mrs. Sanger. "They, too, long to be companions to their youngsters in the way that we are always advising the American mother, they want to enjoy their sons and daughters. But how can they? They see educational ideals fostered all about them, and then see their own children cheated out of these wonderful American opportunities that we talk so much about. You have heard the foreign mother prophesy about her baby: 'He'll be a professor when he grows up,' but they see the fallacy of dreaming, as they watch them go into the factories instead of the High Schools. It is the first signs of the awakening intelligence of a woman, when she insists that she have fewer children so that she can have better ones and give them more advantages."
But let's go back to our foreigners, asked the reporter. How about reducing the number of American citizens which they give us each year?
"The quality of its citizens and not the quantity is the new keynote of civilization. Do you remember when the newspapers in France editorially pointed out the fact that the population of their country was being drained and exhausted. The European women will never again have sons just to be slaughtered."
"Women should hold motherhood in their hands," she continued, "and the women here are beginning to feel it."
Just then the postman interrupted, by poking his head in and throwing some letters on the table. "Margaret Sanger, Birth Control Clinic, Brooklyn, New York," was the way in which they were addressed. "And they got here," said the recipient with a laugh.
Side by side, with the letter in which the professor informed Mrs. Sanger that "I am interested in your clinic from a sociological point of view and I know that your pioneer movement is to be a mighty force in solving a great social problem," is the following typical little note from a woman: "I saw by the newspapers that you have a clinic. We have four children and it seems wrong for me to have any more as we can just about get along on what we have." Another which states "that we are poor as the general run," adds that "my husband is earning $11 a week and I have five children," and invites Mrs. Sanger out to a town in Ohio from which the letter was sent.
An unusual request which reads, "I am a trained nurse, most of my work is maternity cases, often the poor delicate mothers ask me for information and I do not know what to tell them."