Additional versions of this speech can be found on the Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition, Smith College Collections, S71:445, 460, and 477, and on the Margaret Sanger Papers on the Library of Congress Microfilm, LCM 131:463B and 441. Shortened versions were published in Unity, Nov.27, 1933 (Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition, Smith College Collections, S71:325); in the Proceedings of the International Congress of the World Fellowship of Faiths; and in Charles F. Weller, ed. World Fellowship Addresses and Messages by Leading Spokesmen of All Faith, Races and Countries. New York, 1935, pp.293-304.
Handwritten corrections by Sanger
]]>Margaret Sanger delivered this speech at the International Congress of the World Fellowship of Faiths in Chicago, Illinois.
Additional versions of this speech can be found on the Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition, Smith College Collections, S71:445, 460, and 477, and on the Margaret Sanger Papers on the Library of Congress Microfilm, LCM 131:463B and 441. Shortened versions were published in Unity, Nov.27, 1933 (Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition, Smith College Collections, S71:325); in the Proceedings of the International Congress of the World Fellowship of Faiths; and in Charles F. Weller, ed. World Fellowship Addresses and Messages by Leading Spokesmen of All Faith, Races and Countries. New York, 1935, pp.293-304.
Handwritten corrections by Sanger
Friends:
Humanity today stands at the crossroads.
One way leads down to decay and destruction. It is the way of the shiftless, careless, irresponsible ignorance of the past.
The other is steep and narrow. It points upward demanding of us who inhabit this globe all that we possess in intelligence, knowledge, courage and visionand responsibility.
The steep upward road leads to the fulfillment of human destiny on this planet.
Which road shall we take? There is no time to mince words, to procrastinate, no time for hypocritical evasion. The problem is immediate. As the great French philosopher Bergson expresses it: "Humanity must make up its mind whether it wants to go on living, not only whether it wants, merely to live, as the beasts and insects live, but whether it wants to continue to carry on the Torch of Progress.
Progress! We are gathered here in Chicago from all countries of the world to celebrate a Century of Progress. Nowhere is the advance in the sciences of Humanity more impressively shown than in the exhibits of that remarkable Hall of Science. There we find eloquent evidence of Man's conquest of the Air, of his daring explorations in the realm of the infinitesimally small, his war against microbes and germs; we find there all the miracles of the atom and of Radio-Activity. In brief, in the last one hundred years, Science has taken remarkable steps in the conquest of the external forces of Nature. Man has tamed and harnessed many natural energies and directed them for his own use.
But before we congratulate ourselves too complacently upon all these achievements of modern science, it might be a sign of wisdom to evaluate these achievements in terms of a higher and finer civilization. Unless these and other results of man's creative energies are utilized with vision and foresight they may become not scientific achievements but instruments of human destruction.
For how can we boast of the conquest of the air or of the marvels of chemistry when whole nations of innocent men, women and children are compelled to seek protection against these by wearing gas-masks?
Why should we take pride in the advances of surgery, if its main use is to be the salvaging of the maimed and mutilated?–-or of the art of medicine if the physician makes it his business to preserve evils in order to “tinker at them?”
How can we boast of our philanthropy and great enterprises of charity when countless millions are born in conditions of disease, ignorance and misery-–whose very existence depends upon the continuation of private and public charity?
NATIONAL RECOVERY--the NRA--is the great slogan of today. We hear on all sides of Codes for the producers, codes for the consumers, codes even for the control of PIGS. Here in your Middle West there is to be pig control on a large scale! But do we ever hear of a Biological Code for the race? I propose a Code for Babies, so that each child brought into the world shall be assured of a welcome, so that each child may help toward permanent National Recovery by coming into this complex realm with a heritage of health, a sound body and mind, and with the certainty of a happy home and proper nourishment to arm him for life's unending struggle. Unless this is assured to each and every child born into the United States, real National Recovery can never be realized.
Consider for a moment: the millions, nay the billions of dollars we shovel every yearinto the bottomless pit of so-called charities. Futile extravagance!--this effort to keep alive the delinquent, the defective, the dangerous classes that, in all compassion should never be brought into the world at all!
Science may well pride itself on the conquest of the external forces of Nature–-electricity, radio-activity, atomic energies, hydro-electric power, but despite all the miraculous achievements of the past century, Science has not succeeded in getting Humanity out of the man-made muddle in which we find ourselves today. For strangely enough this great Conquest of External Nature has been accompanied by a gross neglect--a misuse-–a tragic waste of the greatest creative force within human nature itself–-the creative energy, force and power of womankind.
The great prophetic American poet, Walt Whitman, wrote:
“Be not ashamed, Woman, Your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exitof the rest,
"You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.”
Not only the gate of the body and soul, I would add, but Woman is the main portal to the future. Only through the emancipation of Woman's creative energies, her sex force, can Humanity redeem itself. Civilization is marking time: Mankind cannot choose the road upward to the fulfillment of its true destiny until the other half of its self-–Woman–-is released–-freed–-emancipated. Emancipated?-–I can hear you say. Has she not the right to vote?–-to work?–-the right to engage in any activity where man goes? Yes, and she has fought for these activities and their power, for proven an, equal ability in her these undertakings. I do not consider such superficial rights as sufficiently important, however, to be called emancipation.
Because I am not looking upon woman merely as “the Mother of Men” (even great men), let us set aside as a masculine invention the sweet, simpering, clinging imitation of woman and see Woman liberated, Woman awake, Woman conscious of her invincible creative powers, imperiously and autonomously wielding that power with vision and intelligence.
Looking back at the long centuries of woman's bondage to man-made religions, customs, laws and creeds, there might be reason for discouragement, for women have been compelled to be all things to all men. They have been throughout the ages and still are today in nearly every country of the globe beasts of burden, pack animals, slaves, servants, instruments of pleasure. (Now and then they've even been inspirations).
Everything, you see, in terms of masculine psychology; everything in terms of the needs of men.
Age after age has shown woman taken from her lofty heights, where previously she was referred to as a Creative Deity–-Giver of Life–-Divine Mother–-and placed on the level of the nurse-maid, permitted to care for man's offspring, allowed to compete with his animals as pack-horses whose honored destiny it was to suffer and to serve.
With this vast reservoir of racial and spiritual energy, why has woman never challenged the supremacy of the male?-–you may well ask. And in that answer lies the problem which confronts us today and which must be solved if we are to evolve upward and onward in the march of civilization.
Christianity was founded on the suppression and sublimation of the sex instinct. Previous forms of religious worship, from prehistoric times, were founded upon the unfathomable, inevitable mystery of Sex and its creative function. People were and still are as ignorant and confused about sex as they are about God. We must cast the light of science upon the former in order to understand the latter.
While the mental attitude and religious teachings on the basic function of life confuse it with shame and sin, Mankind cannot rise to its highest possibilities. Our ecclesiastical fathers have decreed that there were only two states of respectable womanhood open to women--virginity or motherhood. Sex in any of its manifestations was akin to sin, and for the woman only the bearing of a child sanctioned its expression.
Thus we find that woman's bondage in the past as well as today is based solely on the biological task of child-bearing. Consequently, until that function is under her complete control woman can never hope to rise to the heights of her own spiritual destiny.
Throughout the centuries it has been the Churchmen who have decreed that woman's first and only duty to man and God is child-bearing. Did not Martin Luther assert that women shall bear and bear and bear even though they sacrifice their lives in an endless waste of sacrifice! And today from that great Church with its headquarters across the sea in foreign lands, sits a Celibate Pontifical Dictator (whose office predicates that he has never known the problems of fatherhood) yet whose voice reaches into the lives of 43,000,000 American women of child-bearing age and forbids Congressmen toliberate scientific knowledge whereby children may be wanted, conceived in marital love, born of the parents' conscious desire and given the heritage of healthy bodies and sound minds! Until this voice is stifled, this influence checked, the slavery of futile child-bearing will continue.
Why this clerical glorification of breeding? Why this idolatrous urgence of reproduction, a function in which the human race is surpassed, from the point of view of quantity, by the house fly and the fishes of the sea-–a function which has blindly plunged the worldinto chaos and confusion so grave that the future of the whole world is threatened?
Breeding orders to women in the past were:
While now the pleas are:
For the military strength of the Nation and the Preservation of Peace.
All of it emanates from that classic in Psalms 127:
In this we find the suggestion not of peace, but of war. Men are advised to havesufficient children to hurl at their enemies, just as the militarists of Europe today clamor for an increased population to enlarge their armies. Certainly for people who in spite of world conditions still believe in the possibility of “peace on earth, good will among men,” it would be well to refrain from quoting this war appeal to increase the birth rate.
Against this and other much quoted Biblical texts may well be set the following verses from Ecclesiasticus in the Apocrypha (Chap. 16):--
To the pleas of the militarists, woman must refuse to listen. She must awaken to the responsibility which is hers as a creative force. She shall become an instrument to a World of Peace. Until this consciousness becomes a reality, all the great grandiose schemes for "world improvement" must fail. Birth control is the first sign of an awakening consciousness in Mankind. It signals a new moral responsibility, a higherregard for life, not only after birth, but even before life has been conceived. It is the conscious control of the birth-rate by means that prevent conception.
Not only a health and economic expedient, it is also a moral principle, a spiritual factor in the lives of women upon which the development and advance of the family depend.
It is truly strange and ironical that the Women's Movement in the United States has kept itself apart from any cause connected with sex hygiene or sex reform. It is even stranger that they have been silent on the subject of birth control, knowing, as we do, that only because of its practice among themselves, as the birth-rate among the educated, intelligent, and wealthy indicates, could they have battled for Suffrage orany other social or cultural movement during their child-bearing years.
What woman constantly in the condition of pregnancy or who is submerged in the daily fears of pregnancy can compete with man in social or economic efficiency? Where are the women with large families? In the grave yards or in the kitchen slaving to make an inadequate wage feed too many hungry babies.
Women in all lands of all creeds and nations look to this new freedom as a blessing.
In England, the Women's Cooperative Guild, a league of more than 75,000 married working women, mostly mothers, were the first to endorse this movement. Practically every liberal and labor group of women in England have followed the Women's Cooperative Guild in an overwhelming endorsement of the principles and practice of birth control–-with the result that more than 80 Maternal and Child Welfare Centers are including such advice in their instructions to working-class mothers.
In India in the spring of 1933, the All India Women's Conference passed a resolution in favor of birth control and demanded that the Government should give information to mothers. This Conference represents many millions of enlightened women of India.
In the United States, the first national group of women to endorse this movement was the Jewish Federation of Women.
In other countries, such as Italy, Ireland, Germany, where militarism of either State or Church triumphs, women still count only as breeders.
I want to go on record here and now to the effect that child-bearing and rearing are NOT the end and aim of woman's existence. Nor do I consider the first duty of the young married couple to be “non-stop” perpetuation of their kind. I go even further: in many cases I regard it as man's patriotic duty to refrain from this crime against posterity and world-peace. Let me explain why.
Take the case of Japan and her population policy. According to statistics made public by the Statistical Bureau of the Japanese Cabinet, Japan's population was increased last year by a total of 2,182,743 births--or four babies a minute, twenty-four hours a day, day in and day out. Japan is breaking her own record for population increase. The whole crisis in the Far East-–so menacing for the peace of the world at large–-grows out of this “full-speed-ahead” cradle competition between Asiatic races. Is it not time for the League of Nations or the World Court to turn on the red traffic light? Japan's determination to find an outlet for this surplus population precipitates the so-called “undeclared war” against the Chinese, the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo, the breaking of solemn treaties, the sowing of the seeds of another World War! And yet some people solemnly tell us that Birth Control would not help solve her problems! If this is patriotism, let us have a little less of it.
If this menace of uncontrolled cradle competition screams aloud to us from across the vast Pacific Ocean, the evils of indiscriminate child-bearing are painfully evident to impartial observers at home. While our Federal penal code forbids the dissemination of scientific information on contraception, and the Roman Catholic Church actively campaign against it, many of our states have been compelled to pass sterilization laws to protect themselves against the perpetuation of the feeble-minded, the defective and the moron population which threatens to engulf us. I want to read to you part of a decision given by the venerable Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for the United States Supreme Court, concerning the case of a feebleminded woman who was herself the daughter of a feebleminded inmate and the mother of mentally defective children. This decision so admirably sums up the whole case of civilization and the future of the race that it should be compulsory reading for all Americans.
Listen:
"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives."
"It is better for all the world, if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
If the United States Supreme Court can hand down this decision concerning compulsory sterilization, what possible judicial of moral case against Birth Control could be validly sustained? Only the age-old masculine tradition, entrenched in the powers of darkness, in reactionary ecclesiastical authority hell-bent to perpetuate its tyranny in a world in which the light of science is creating a new day for humanity, dares still to withhold from the masses of women this benevolent, clean, safe and scientific instrument of their liberation.
Sterilization–-a necessary, harmless means of protecting the race from the perpetuation of those whose physical, mental and moral fiber is too weak to apply the knowledge of birth control or contraception.
Another grave problem (long kept in the dark because of the conspiracy of silence) now forces itself upon the attention of the medical world. This is the problem of abortion. An ugly word, I agree, but because the forces of reaction maintain the obstacles in the way of scientific instruction in contraception, this complicated question must be faced sanely and humanely.
Women in all lands of every religion and creed are forced to resign themselves to unlimited pregnancies unless they have proper information in contraception. When this is denied them their only resort is to abortion. Out of fear–-because of their misery, poverty and ill health, they seek to evade a motherhood which would bring with it destitution and possible starvation to an unwanted baby.
Medical men are discovering that if they withhold from the awakened womanhood of the world a proper, safe and dependable means of birth control they are bound to be confronted by the infinitely more complicated problem of abortion.
As this department of medicine has as yet not been legalized (except in Russia), women who refuse to bring miserable, sickly, feebleminded offspring into the world are thrust into the channels of quackery where profit is made out of their ignorance and misery. It is the opinion of competent medical observers during the last twenty-five years that there are more criminal abortions performed in this country than in any other country in the world. The national total of abortions has been estimated to top 2,000,000 per year.
This total does not include the number brought about by drugs or by instruments used by the pregnant woman herself.
All this vast activity is carried on in defiance of laws, penalties, punishments or the possible consequence of death. And this violent and harsh means of freeing herself from undesired pregnancy will continue in the future as it has in the past, for nothing short of contraceptive practice can put an end to the horrors of abortion.
The history of abortion shows that it was opposed by law, by religious canons, by public opinion,–-and the penalties range all the way from ostracism to imprisonment; yet neither threats of hell nor the infliction of physical punishment has availed. The two million abortions annually in this benighted country testify to that. Women will deceive and dare. They will resist and defy the power of Church and State. They will march to the gates of death to gain that liberty, that freedom from unending child-bearing which the awakened woman demands.
Intricate and complex, I admit, is this whole problem of woman's control of her procreative function, but it remains the pivot of a new civilization. A great cosmic mystery lies hidden here: that the union of male and female, a communion that seems to private, so personal, so secret indeed that it can scarcely be spoken of in public–-among Puritans at least-–is actually of the most fundamental and public significance for the whole future of the race as well as for the peace of the whole world! In that intimate relationship lies concealed not only the joy or misery of the individual sharing it, but of their children and the children of their children. Here indeed are the gates of the body and here are the gates of the soul!
Never in the whole history of this planet has Woman's place in the creation of the structure of the Future been so important. Today we seem to stand at the end of an era. We witness the bankruptcy and the collapse of Man's attempt to conquer the universe–-of man's one-sided, womanless battle for supremacy. Man has successfully spanned the oceans, flung railroads and airlines across continents, conquered the air, harnessed the endless torrents of water-power. Thorough the lenses of his telescope he has explored distant universes, through the lenses of his microscope he has waged war against germ and microbe; girdled the globe in the fraction of a second with his radio broadcasting.
Everything has been accomplished in the desire to unite peoples and nations and to bring them closer together. Yet because of the ceaseless hordes of human beings ever multiplying and increasing their numbers, we find mankind goaded on to a frenzy of exploitation and war. Before there was a Capitalist, there were hungry mouths to feed. In going forth to battle, to destroy, to subjugate other nations and races, he has found himself destroyed and mutilated by his victories.
Thanks to our opponents who keep human beings in ignorance regarding contraception, each day reveals about 50,000 extra babies on earth. For every 100,000 who died between dawn and dawn, 150,000 are born. These new inhabitants who survive daily have contributed to the 330,000,000 which have been added to the world's population since 1920, a horde larger than all India's.
In all these ventures woman has been allowed to march beside him–-to serve his physical needs. Man has seemingly succeeded in conquering everything but his own ignorance. My good friend Dean Inge has pointed out that "Nothing fails like success,"and that is the kind of success we witness today. I am not pleading for the substitution of a Woman-made World. For we have had quite enough of exclusively masculine adventure, enough romantic destruction, chaos and confusion. Rather do I look forward to a Future created by the unified, harmonious endeavor of women and men working together as equals.
But before this can be accomplished the pendulum must swing back to get its balance, and in doing that Woman as a creative entity must liberate herself in the constructive work of the world. She must give voice to her female longings, her intuitions, her wishes and desires. She must thrust her energies into the laboratory of experience, just as a scientist goes to find the secrets of the unknown in the mystery of experiment.
Thousands, nay millions of women have in the past sacrificed their lives in devotion to religious creeds. They have abandoned their beauty, interest, education, talents, ambitions, love and motherhood in order to dedicate themselves to their Faith. Is it not time that this same force, idealism and devotion be turned to Science, to the building of a New Civilization? If one thousand women were to offer themselves to Science (as millions have uselessly offered themselves to religion) as to the Laboratory of Life, with their creative and intuitive powers at full speed, we would forge tremendously ahead in Human Progress.
There are three purposes in this Human Laboratory:
The solidarity of Woman is as noble as the brotherhood of man.
In the life of every woman come other women, less fortunate, less enlightened, many of them crushed under the burden of poverty and child-bearing. They are too inarticulate to cry out, too poor to have influence, too weak to demand their liberties. The very fact that they have come into your life gives you a spiritual responsibility toward their emancipation. Sympathy is not enough, palliative emergency help is not enough, philanthropy is not enough–-nothing less can you do than help to set them free. Free that they may help themselves. Free that they may grow in wisdom and enlightenment.
Just as the physical sight developed in the body, so shall our spiritual vision unfold as we move upward and onward into that current of life we call consciousness. When we become conscious of our acts, conscious of our responsibility, we shall be conscious of the greatest of all responsibilities-–that of handing on the precious yet mysterious gift of life.
In this let us at least pass it on in a body as fit and perfect as it can be made. Then will the soul that is summoned have at its command an instrument suitable for its highest development.
Only through Birth Control (I assert with all the vehemence I can summon) will women ever gain control of their bodies or develop their souls. Only through knowledge can they ever unlock the great gates to a Future in which joy and happiness will prevail. Only through a new consciousness of birth can Humanity at large ever extricate itself from the man-made muddle in which it is grounded today.
Instead of a world created by irresponsible hordes in hatred and antagonism, free woman shall guide us into a future created by all-embracing love through the consciousness of birth control.
The following is an excerpt from the hearings. Only Margaret Sanger's testimonyand her answers to committee questions have been included.
Mrs. Sanger. Mr.
The law today is directed entirely to the
Please do not misunderstand us as to our position on the present obscenity law; we want those provisions as to obscenity to remain, and we only have an interest in the present law to the extent that it deals with the prevention of conception.
We believe that this whole subject does not belong in the obscenity clause. It was put there nearly 60 years ago when there was no knowledge of this question, or of its effects or results on the community or on the population, and we are simply taking that out of the law, but not by repeal, but by amendment, and placing it in the hands of persons who are responsible and qualified to disseminate it.
We believe, that this question of receiving contraceptive information should be the woman’s right, that it should be the mother who should have the right to receive information, but we believe in limiting who should get it. That is the difference.
We believe that the doctors who have a knowledge and understanding of anatomy and physiology should be the ones to dispense, to give out that information, but today there is no exemption in that law for anyone, for it says that no one shall give such information. It does not exempt scientific books or medical books, and while there are scientific and medical books sent though the
The law also says that anyone who tells anyone else where such information bay be obtained is also guilty under the law. Now, this condition means that there are 47 States in which a physician may give information as he sees fit, with the exception of the
That is the situation that we are trying to change; and, furthermore, while the mothers in the States have a legal right to obtain information from their physicians if they know where to go for it, they cannot know of it because there is no way of letting them know about this, and yet they may really be next door to a birth-control clinic, what good does it do to those particular women? They will write to me, or their nurses will, or someone, asking where it can be obtained, and we subject ourselves to the law by merely sending the woman the address of a qualified physician or legal clinic, a physician or a clinic that has been qualified in her own State to give her that information.
It seems, and it undoubtedly is, an absurd situation, and we are trying to change the law so that persons, especially those persons who have the right to have such information, may be able to obtain it properly.
There are in the country today, 26,170,756 married women between 15 and 49 years, of the child-bearing age. Now, it seems to me, and I honestly believe, that every adult, normal woman not only wishes to have children, but has a responsibility toward those children, toward bringing them up. Those women that want to have children, often want to have a few children and want to do well by them, and in the last few years I have received over a million letters, since I have been in this work, and nearly every one of those letters the mother says: “Yes, I love children, but I want to give them a better chance than I have had.”
For example, here are just two of the letters, to give you an idea why we feel as we do about this--and I consider that these women are really the forgotten women of this Nation. No one knows much about them. They are ignored. They are not given the consideration that they should have. They may have their children’s teeth taken care of in clinics, or their childrens’ adenoids removed in hospitals, and the children may have free lunches at the schools-–all of these considerations are given to them, but when it comes to this particular question, when a woman say “Doctor, what can I do so that I won’t have any more? I have enough. My husband is out of work, and he is sick, and the last child that I have had is not very well; give me a chance,” there is this peculiar atmosphere created about this, as if it is something horrible that she is asking for, and her request is refused.
Here is one letter:
"I just passed my twenty-first birthday on August 10. I am already the mother of 5 children, the oldest 6 years of age and the baby 3 months. My husband has been out of work for over a year and a half now. We would have starved long ago but for the relatives, who among them gave us $5 a week. It is awfully hard to live like this, and my husband was so blue when he found out I was that way again that he wanted to go to another place."
"My children are well, but I am awfully weak, only weighing 90 pounds. I do all of my work, and if I could get some consideration and not get any more babies, I would be happy and so would my husband."
"Won’t you do all that you can and give me the advice that I need?"
That is the type of letter that I have received nearly a million of--in fact, over a million, because I stopped counting them when we got to a million.
Another letter states, and I would like to analyze this with you:
"I am only 34 years of age, and I have given birth to 12 children, only 3 of these being alive. They died so quickly after they were born that it seems that they did not have much strength to live on. My husband is a good, hard-working man, but the most he made is $1.50. We are poor people, and the coffins of the last three have not been paid for yet. It is hard to see them go like that, but if I did not have any more for a while, I could keep the three that I have got."
That woman is 34 years old. She has not finished with child-bearing yet. She has perhaps 12 years still to be anxious about more children that she cannot take care of.
Now, 12 times that woman has gone down into the shadow of death, to bring forth three living children for the State. When you analyze this, as to what it means, it means that that woman was in pregnancy 9 times for those dead children, and it means 8 consistent years, night and day, in this state of pregnancy for 9 dead children.
It is barbaric. It is not civilized for this woman to ask advice and not be able to get it. It is absolutely unfair that she cannot be told what she wants to know.
If this woman asks me what to do for her pigs to make them fatter, or if she asks me what to do with her cows so as to get more milk, or if she should ask advice about her chickens, so that she could get more eggs, we could sent to the
My position is that I would not want to send through the mails any device, or any information for that woman, but what we do want to do is to tell her where she can go so that she can get proper information in her own community. We do not want to use the mails to give that information; we want the physicians to have a right to give the information and to get the materials from the manufacturers, and they, in turn, can give information wherever they see fit under their own State law.
We have found that all women differ in the advice given. We have a
As I said, we know that women differ in their physical needs, and that there is no particular means or method that will suit everyone. Women who have had a large number of children, and had good care, are in a different physiological and gynecological condition than women who have had no care, and so it is important for these women, if we are going to protect them, not to act in a hit-or-miss fashion on this. If a woman’s life is in jeopardy, we should give her the best scientific information for her protection.
So, for those reasons, we make this information individual, just as individual as having eyeglasses fitted to the individual’s eyes.
So we want this in the hands of the medical profession, where it properly belongs, and I ask you to consider this bill favorably for the sake of these millions of child-bearing women, women who have to consider themselves for the future and who have to consider their children for the future. [Applause.]
Mrs.
The next speaker is Dr.
Mrs. Hepburn. Mr. Chairman nd members of the committee, Mrs. Sanger will make our concluding statment.
Mrs. Sanger. Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Committee, it must be rather confusing to you to hear so many statements, misstatements, overlapping of evidence, as has been given to you in the past 2 days.
We have had the introduction of the amendment, but I want to tell you that in approving this bill about a year ago, I believed that those who opposed it, especially the Catholic organizations, should be interviewed, and that it would be a good thing to submit this bill to them and to see just where we could get together on the bill.
This bill was drafted, gentlemen, with the advice of the physician recommended by the
There was a question asked about the condition in
Then the
Now, there is one other point that seems to me very interesting, and that is that it may seem there has been a great deal of warfare practiced between the people who oppose the bill and we who propose it, and that the people who have come here to oppose this bill are at the north pole, and we are at the south pole; but I beg to inform you that is not true.
There is a book that has recently been published by the
Mr.
Mrs. Sanger. A year ago.
Mr. Healey. Who was that; do you recall his name?
Mrs. Sanger. Colonel
Mr.
Mrs. Sanger. We went to him on that recommendation.
Mr. Healey. What did you do?
Mrs. Sanger. We went to see him and found him very sensible.
The Chairman. You may proceed.
Mrs. Sanger. The particular thing in this bill that seems to be objected by Father
I don’t quite understand what he means, but if Father Coughlin or those opposing this measure want to take that phrase out, “or by his direction or prescription,” I can’t quite understand why, but if they want to take that out, it can be done, but at the same time they are talking about the control of these contraceptives that are flooding the country today. I believe the only way that contraceptives can be controlled is when this dissemination of information and appliances is put in the hands of the medical profession where they rightfully belong.
Mrs.
We have had numerous offers during these many years, and at no time has any of us been associated in any way with any manufacturer of any kind whatever. This is not a commercial concern, we are not interested in that part of it, we are only interested in trying to see, so far as our research is concerned, what can be done, and what can be found to be effective and helpful to the vast millions of women who are seeking advice on how to limit their families and limit them safely.
Here is a copy from a clipping from a paper called the Western Catholic, dated February 17, 1933, published in
We have received many inquiries about the remarkable by Dr.
So the racket is not all on one side. If we are going to have a racket, let us look at it squarely and take our share of the responsibility.
To me it is a very dangerous thing to put out a book like that, when the physicians and the scientists of the country do not by any means agree that there is a safe period for all women, as Dr.
Now it comes down to a safe device or a safe period, and that is just about where both sides are now. I can read to you out of this book, “
That is right from this book. There are many of these questions that should be answered, and they have been answered here in this study of the Rhythm.
Father Coughlin in his statement yesterday gave us to understand he is Irish, and I am Irish myself for many generations back, and I know how charming such a personality can be, and how facetious it can be, too, when it is coupled with a medieval mind. I think Father Coughlin should study up a little bit on
Father Coughlin also said it is our duty to increase and multiply, and he quoted the Bible, and he said that today, “we, believing as Catholics that marriage was invented by
It was brought up about
About the time of the World War Holland had a perfectly open law. I myself learned the technique of contraception at
In our clinic, where many Catholic women come, we have all due respect for them, and all due respect for everyone who has an opinion, whether religious or moral. We know that this bill is not mandatory, it is not asking those opposed to do anything different than they do today. It is permissive legislation we are asking for.
There are twenty or twenty-one million Catholics in the country, and there are about a hundred million other people who are not Catholics. It seems to me there is no reason why any one group should impose their will upon the rest of the country, whether it is their moral or religious or their political ideas.
I think you should know, as we have found, that women who come to our clinics average just about equal. We have had 35,000 women in one clinic in New York City, and there are over 150 clinics throughout the country; and every one of them reports the same thing, that there are about one third Catholic, one third Protestant, and one third Jews, so that they run about even.
I have myself had the most pathetic cases of Catholic women torn by their loyalty to the church and their desires to control the size of the family. They have exactly the same problems every other woman has, except it is a greater hardship on them not to be able to have religious sanction of the thing they feel they should do.
To give you briefly a picture of the thing, we find there are two groups of people, on one side you see the people who practice birth control, and control the size of the family, and then the other group who have not done that, not because they do not want to, but because they cannot get the information, and have to resort to operations. Look down among our own friends and see what you find, you find in one group under average conditions today, if they control the size of the family, you will see the highest percentage of health among the women and the lowest percentage of mortality. There may be only two or three children brought into the world, but more is done for those children. They live longer, they go to schools, and they go through college; then their mothers are able to participate in public life and help bring along the general progress of our civilization, and do not neglect their children either.
I find that those engaged in our welfare and social activities and most of our culture activities come out of that group. It is they who are paying the highest taxes, and paying in philanthropies for the other group.
My experience as a nurse in New York brought me into this. I was a member of a large family, 11 children, and my
In my practice as a trained nurse I found women were trying to find some methods by which they could limit as well as control the size of the family; where should they go? They asked each other. It was a sort of common gossip about this or that. They go to the hospitals, dispensaries, and public agencies, and always they are refused when it comes to asking for this particular kind of information.
One women would ask me what to do; and they say, “You give it to the rich; they get the information; why must we bear the burden? You see what I have got, how many children I have got; my husband is a good man, we are trying to do the best we can for the children; won’t you help me?”
I came to this movement after
We went on, went on our way, irrespective of what happened to her, and within 3 months I was called back to that case. The doctor was there ahead of me, and that woman had not been able to survive, she had gone through another operation and she had no resistance, that woman passed out leaving a frantic husband with two little children.
I went home that night, gentlemen, away back in 1912, and I decided then and there that life was not worth living in this country unless we could give back to society some of the benefit of our experience. Of course, we had no idea what we would get into with such a decision, but we then found the Federal law which had been on the statute book since 1873. We asked the physicians, and they shook their heads.
Mr.
Mrs. Sanger. Today she would get it if her doctor happened to know it.
Mr. Kurtz. Why didn’t she get it then?
Mrs. Sanger. Because in the first place I knew practically nothing about it. I was a mother myself, but I knew nothing about getting the information, and the doctor assumed there was a law against it.
Mr. Kurtz. The New York statute did not prevent him from giving it.
Mrs. Sanger. Quite right, but they didn’t know it. The New York State statute was never construed, and in fact, some of us went to jail to get a decision on it. It is only under that decision we are operating today in New York, in all the clinics.
This law as we find it, affects the United States mail and common carriers. Someone asked about a physician prescribing by mail. No physician would prescribe by mail, but a physician needs to get proper information of newer means and methods, he needs to exchange with other physicians, clinics, laboratories, and so forth, through the United States mails. As it is now, as one of our physicians testified yesterday, the medical publishers do not want to jeopardize their liberty under such conditions of law. This book here, Rhythm, is going through the mails, not by right, but by privilege, and it gives illegal information just as any other book I might write on preventing conception.
Mr. Healey. Can you differentiate somewhat between that? One is an interference with life itself, isn’t it?
Mrs. Sanger. I beg your pardon, not any more than information in this book is.
Mr. Healey. The method you advocate is an interference with life?
Mrs. Sanger. It prevents conception, it is not an interference with life.
Mr. Healey. It does interfere with it.
Mrs. Sanger. So does anyone remaining single; so does continence.
Mr. Healey. You are not opposed to continence?
Mrs. Sanger. No; I am not.
Mr. Healey. That does not in any way oppose the policy you advocate here.
Mrs. Sanger. No; I am not opposed to that, and I am not opposed to this book, if we can find a safe method. We are coming down now, not to a question of principle, but a question of methods. We have no objection whatever to this. We say there are three methods of preventing conception, continence, sterilization, mechanical method, or chemical means of contraception. One group believes in mechanical or chemical and the other group believes in continence, and this book, I feel it will do harm to send it though the mails until there is a study made of it. Possibly, if it were found there was a safe period, it would have to be the physician who advices the patient as to her safe period.
Mr.
Mrs. Sanger. It gives a calendar which shows the date exactly of the variations of the menstrual cycle. Here is one of the little ones with those dates and the concept calendar.
Mr. Celler. Is the language all through the book indicative of absolute assurance to the reader, or are there no qualifications whatsoever in the book?
Mrs. Sanger. No more than we give with our contraceptive. It depends on the individual, I would say, and the doctor to advise her, but if I picked up that book and read it and believed as a Catholic, and saw an ecclesiastical approval, I would follow it to the letter.
Mr. Celler. Insofar as the ecclesiastical feature is concerned, I don’t know whether the people who read it pay any attention to the ecclesiastics in the book; that has nothing to do with the scientific fact.
Mrs. Sanger. No; I am not intimating that.
Mr. Celler. What I am trying to get from you is whether or not the author of that book has made the absolute declaration that there is a period in which there can be no conception.
Mrs. Sanger. Yes.
Mr Celler. Without any qualification?
Mrs. Sanger. Without qualifications, it gives the definite statement. They tell you exactly when your period of sterility starts and when to depend on the period of fertility.
Mr. Healey. There is not anything in the book, no method prescribed, that would interfere with the natural laws.
Mrs. Sanger. Do you want to argue that?
Mr. Healey. I say there is not anything. There is no artificial mens prescribed, and no use of medicines or drugs or any thing that would inrerfere with natural laws.
Mrs. Sanger. If we are going to argue natural law, it is something different. I will say if there is a period of sexual sterility and a day when nature makes a woman sterile, it is most likely that is the time she would repulse the idea of relationship, and so far as any natural law is concerned, I think that is the period to stay away.
Mr. Celler. That is your viewpoint, or medical opinion.
Mrs. Sanger. It is my opinion.
Mr. Celler. You have no medical opinion to back it?
Mrs Sanger. Yes; I have some of the world authorities that claim that is true.
Mr. Celler. That say that period of sterility would be the time when there would be a repulse on the part of the woman?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes; when nature sort of closes the door toward this attraction.
The Chairman. I want to get clear the thing under consideration and discussion. It is you contention that the difference between your position and the position of the opponents is to be found only in the method to be used?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes; we both have the same principle.
The Chairman. In your case, the purpose would be to have the relationship without the possibility of conception. Is that your contention?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes, that is my contention. We are both together on the principles, and we separate the question of methods.
Mr. Celler. Don’t you separate right here, in the case of that book, there is nothing done to interfere with the natural results of sexual functions, but you advocate the introduction of foreign substances by your chemicals or instruments seeking to prevent the natural result of the sexual function?
Mrs. Sanger. Not of the sexual function, but of reproduction.
Mr. Celler. Isn’t that where you and the author of this book, whoever he is, differ?
Mrs. Sanger. There is nothing in the book which gives contraceptive information as to chemicals or devices and they object very strongly to them, but they agree to our contention that children should be spaced and women should not have a large number of children. We say there is not a safe period, and if there was, we would gladly accept it and say blessings on you for advocating it. But we claim that in the meantime we should have the right to use our knowledge as we see it, just the same as in eyeglasses or other things individually advised.
Mr. Celler. Don't you recognize thee is a vast difference between the propagation of the race and the fact that you may have poor eyesight or poor hearing?
Mrs. Sanger. There is quite a difference, but I am talking about the question of the mechanical means toward the preventing of conception.
Mr. Celler. But you must agree you are interfering with a function of the human body.
Mrs. Sanger. You are not interfering with a function, any more than you are by remaining single, if you wish to go into detail.
Mr. Celler. You don’t interfere there, you refrain.
Mrs. Sanger. In this you don’t refrain.
Mr. Celler. In that book there it is said there is no outside interference with the natural result that would come. This physician says there is a period when there is no possibility of conception, but there is no outside interference.
Mrs. Sanger. As far as conception is concerned, in the method we advocate, by the use of the contraceptive, the ovum is not fertilized, it passes out of the body just the same as if she had never used one. We do not believe in interfering after conception has taken place. We do not believe in destroying after conception, but preventing conception. There is where we differ, and that is what I want to make clear. We maintain that prevention is the important thing and not interference afterwards.
We want this bill passed because we know operations are going on at a tremendous rate, and we are trying our best with all the human decency we can command to take care of that problem and to help abolish it.
We know there are very few married women in the United States, that haven’t a conscience toward their children, they are seeking the best way out to protect themselves.
Physicians have gone on record to get the
Mr. Healey. You do contend that because of the physiological differences in women, each woman presents almost a new case?
Mrs. Sanger. That is right.
Mr. Celler. And any information along this line to be imparted should be imparted by a physician or someone in a position to impart knowledge?
Mrs. Sanger. That is right.
Mr. Healey. You say the reason the poorer classes are not getting that is because they can’t afford to get that information from physicians; is that why they are not getting it?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes; partly.
Mr. Healey. If we passed this bill, do you think there will be any reason why they can afford after the passage of this bill to get it any more than they can now?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes.
Mr. Healey. What is the reason?
Mrs. Sanger. In New York City, for instance, or most of the cities, if the woman can go to the private family physician and pay his charges, there is no hesitancy then on the part of the doctor if he has been instructed in methods, but if she goes to the hospital he will not break the law. There are 7,177 hospitals in the United States. In addition, the hospitals have to pay for those articles at their own cost, and they will not do it. I know a woman who was dismissed from a hospital for giving a contraceptive device to a woman who was in there are who had six children already, and was not in a physical condition to have more.
Mr. Healey. As a practical matter, women will not go to a physician if we pass this bill any more than they go now, and won’t this information pass on from person to person, and therefore the information will be abused and will not be used in a manner beneficial to that particular reason?
Mrs. Sanger. It cannot be done that way any more than you can get proper eyeglasses at a 10-cent store.
That is the main thing, when they go to qualified persons at established places where competent instruction is given, they simply cannot pass it on. A woman would be a fool to use it when advised for someone else. She might as well not have anything at all as to try to use something given to someone else.
I am of the opinion that the medical profession will have to do away with all of this scattered broadcasting of chemicals and materials, and have it tied up in a way it will be distributed at the proper place where the women can seek advice, and I believe that is the only possible safeguarding of the whole question we are talking about.
Now, here is a little book that is an introduction to the Rhythm, and gives the contents of the book, and I would like you to see just what is in it.
Now, Mr. Chairman, I believe we are all very much in the same boat and this whole thing is getting beyond us, and I believe it is time for
Mr. Healey. You don’t mean to leave the impression with this committee that the opposition to the passage of this law is confined to Catholics?
Mrs. Sanger. I think the organized opposition is.
Mr. Healey. In view of all the people who testified here from the other religions?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes, there were mostly individuals.
Mr. Healey. There are millions of people throughout the country opposed to birth control, of all religious denominations.
Mrs. Sanger. I doubt it, but if you are going to put in individual letters, I could have brought in trunks of individual letters, if I had an idea you wanted them.
Mr. Healey. There are millions of non-Catholics throughout the country who are opposed to this, and you know that, as a matter of fact.
Mrs. Sanger. No; I don’t--not millions.
Mr. Healey. You ought to know there is considerable opposition to it from every state.
Mrs. Sanger. There is no organized opposition except from the
Mr. Healey. Have you tried to get resolutions from other churches sponsoring your view?
Mrs. Sanger. We have, yes.
Mr. Healey. Have you such resolutions of endorsement?
Mrs. Sanger. They have gone in the record; I think they were put in yesterday. The endorsements of some medical organizations and some religious organizations are in the record.
Mr. Healey. I mean the national bodies representing the churches throughout the country.
Mrs. Sanger. Yes; there are individual churches just like those read here today, individual Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists--there are lots of them.
Mr. Chairman. Are you through, Mrs. Sanger?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes; and if there are any questions I would be glad to answer them.
For Part I see "Impressions of the East Side, Sept. 3, 1911.
To revisit London, after an absence of two years, is nothing less than an inspiration. From an intellectual and spiritual point of view, London to me seems almost like a fountain of youth. One's flagging enthusiasms are rejuvenated in the bracing air of intellectual freedom one breathes in there. London is still faithful to her age-old tradition of hospitality to new ideas. London enjoys, indeed revels in, free discussion. And so to go back to this fountain of eternal youth is necessary for a complete revitalization of interest and enthusiasm. I do not think this is a mere illusion on my part. English faith in the instrument of Birth Control is expressing itself in the splendid progress of the movement, exemplified in the fine organization known as the Walworth Center. This splendid accomplishment has been achieved in no small degree owing to the fact that the doctors and authorities in charge of the Walworth Clinic are not hampered by obsolete and uncivilized statutes of the type that were written into our federal and state laws in the darkest ages of our history–-under the blighting reign of St. Anthony Comstock. At Walworth any woman or man may receive proper instruction upon application to the physicians in charge. No appointment in advance is necessary. The mother may drop into the clinic at any time convenient. She then awaits her turn for advice. Due to the fact that the instruction and ensuing benefits may be shared by all, the physicians in charge are not compelled to undertake a general health examination and to find a special or exceptional cause to undertake the instruction. For this reason, there is no invasion of personal freedom and reason, there is no invasion of personal freedom and the sense of parental responsibility is encouraged instead of discouraged. It is the mother herself, awakened to this need of self-mastery and self-reliance, who makes the decision. The Walworth Clinic, so splendidly organized and carried on, stands ready to serve these mothers and potential parents, to answer their needs, instead of dictating their personal and private behavior. The work is inspiring and suggests manifold possibilities for future development. Their activities not hindered by barbaric obsolete laws, the physicians at Walworth may instruct five women in the time that our physician needs to take care of one.
The report of the work which was sent to me is illuminating. It will be reviewed at length in a later issue.
The English committee are to be congratulated for their exceptional perseverance and courage in pushing through this work. For they have succeeded despite all sorts of discouragement and lack of funds. But with that characteristic and typically British ability to "carry on" most of the obstacles have been overcome and ultimate success is assured. The initial example having proved its value and its practical importance, other clinics are now in the course of being organized. For the success of the Walworth Center, the committee in charge is mainly responsible for its splendid management and organization. This committee consists of Mrs. Fuller, Hon. Mrs. Graham Murray, Lord Gerald Westley and our friend Harold Cox. Mr. Sumner contributes the house, rates and taxes. A small fee is charged to each applicant. This fee, which makes possible the continuance of the work without doubling of expense, also increases the sense of responsibility of those who derive its benefits, since it is a notorious human trait that people never value advice that is gratuitously given.
Perhaps the most inspiring event of the visit of our vice-president, Mrs. Rublee, and myself in London was to find men and women of the highest intellectual attainments in hearty agreement with our fundamental principles. The occasion of this discovery was a brilliant dinner party at the home of Mr. and Mrs H.G. Wells in Whitehall Court. Among the guests were George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Shaw, the eminent Lord Buckmaster, one of the most brilliant jurists of Great Britain; Sir Arbuthnot Lane and Lady Lane; the great scientist and educator, Sir Edwin Ray Lankester; Prof. E. W. MacBride; the eminent novelist, Arnold Bennett; the dramatist and critic, St. John Ervine and Mrs. Ervine; that rising figure of contemporary Irish literature, Mr. Robert Donavan and Mrs. Donavan, and Mr. W. R. Salter of the League of Nations.
To know that the fundamental importance of Birth Control as an instrument of human and social emancipation is recognized by such brilliant minds, as well as by the intellectual leaders in every field of British life, has indeed been inspiration for your delegates to return to the timorous and fear-ridden atmosphere with renewed enthusiasm and fresh courage, ready to "carry on" until our compatriots awaken from their slumber and are ready to go into battle with real problems of American society.
This article was introduced by a short recap of Sanger's trip to England by the editor.
London.
Clinics--Clinics in which women can be given direct and individual instruction in contraceptive methods, are the solution of the problem of getting the Birth Control message to those who most need it. Theories and philosophies are quite all right for the educators. Printed matter will carry the message to those who have been educated. But the woman who has been denied such advantages, and whose toil so thoroughly saps her energies that she cannot absorb what is written in the simplest fashion, needs personal instruction. She must be told by word of mouth and shown by demonstration what to do and how to do it. Otherwise much of our labor, so far as direct results go, is in vain. The answer is clinics.
I had these facts deeply impressed upon me once more, when on May 28th here in London, I delivered one of a series of lectures before a branch of the Woman's Co-operative Guild. This organization is much interested in Birth Control. Its membership is by far the most intelligent and wide-awake of any body of women workers here. Despite the fact that the Malthusian League has distributed many thousands of leaflets carefully setting forth practical information regarding contraceptives, and Marie Carmichael Stopes has distributed other thousands of similar pamphlets from her own pen, these women were not satisfied. They demanded the information from the platform and it was given.
If pamphlets could have met their needs fully, those needs would have been met by the leaflets of the Malthusians and these by Dr. Stopes, herself an advocate of clinics. But, weary from their day's work, these women found even pamphlets unsatisfactory. They wanted to be told by word of mouth. More, they need direct instruction at the hands of persons competent to give such instruction. They need clinics.
Clear-sighted individuals in England are quick to see the necessity of Birth Control clinics when the subject is presented to them. When I spoke at the university town of Cambridge, Mr. Noel Porter, a friend of the movement, opened his home for the meeting when it was discovered that there was no hall vacant for the date. This gave him an opportunity to invite specially many persons of influence and importance, including many who had never heard of Birth Control as a solution for social problems. The meeting was highly enthusiastic and successful. When it was suggested that a clinic be opened at once in one of the midland towns where women are killing themselves and their unborn children with poisonous drugs, in order to prevent the birth of unwanted babies, the audience responded eagerly. Contributions amounting to 60 pounds or 300 dollars, were made on the spot, as the nucleus of a fund to establish the first Birth Control clinic in England.
Several factors have operated to prevent the principle of England and especially the working people, who need family limitations most, from getting the full benefit of the efforts of the Malthusian League, and had it not been for the powerful deterring influence of some of these factors, there would not only be plenty of Birth Control clinics in England today, but there would certainly also be a far different state of society. Some of these factors are worth considering for the light they will shed upon problems encountered by the movement elsewhere.
The Malthusian League which was founded in 1879, has definite aims and principles which, if they had been applied, would have long since brought about a better order of society. Its program, however, is in opposition to that of the Labor Movement, and as a consequence, the working people, to whom the League's message is addressed, and who need it most, have been reluctant to accept the Malthusian principles.
The attempt of Marx to refute the theory of Malthus has also interfered with the beneficial effects of the work of the League. There seems to have been a bitter quarrel among the economists, especially in Germany and England, growing out of the attitude of Marx toward the Malthusian principle. Judging the matter now, it seems safe to say that but for the apparent refutation by Marx, the doctrine of family limitation applied to social problems would have ere this produced a new order of society.
Happily, a change is apparent now.
Many of the old Marxians who, ten years ago, believed absolutely that Marx had refuted Malthus and that "supply" was not so important if sufficient attention were given to "distribution," have changed their views. They are cautiously but courageously admitting part, at least, of the Malthusian principles.
The state has not stood in the way of the advance of the Birth Control movement in England as it has in America, but the church has exercised a powerful opposing influence.
There have been no vicious laws in England to brand the communication of information regarding contraceptives as a crime. On the other hand, the influence of the church, which still has its tentacles deeply imbedded in the psychology of the English working people, has been so strong that it is only within the past few years that such information has been given openly.
There is a certain religious attitude of mind among the workers which those in power well understand and make use of. They have taken advantage of it to sway the English worker as they could not have swayed a body of people of like intelligence in any other country in the world. An example of what is happening is afforded by George Lansbury, editor of the London Herald, one of the most powerful of all labor papers. He lectures and debates upon such subjects as "The Church and the Social Crisis," hoping to influence the church to take part in the Labor Movement. Naturally when those of influence in the Labor Movement are anxious for the support of the church, they are not going to antagonize churchmen who oppose Birth Control by pushing that idea forward. This is particularly true since the Labor Movement has not apparently awakened to Birth Control while the church, as a whole, has opposed it.
The suffragists have not yet given the cause of Birth Control the support that they might have given. These women who have created world-wide fame for themselves and their cause are mostly mothers of small families or have no children at all. They have not as yet made it their task to share with their sisters who toil, the information by which they have limited their own families. The men workers, like the suffragists, have fought their own battles, but they have overlooked the basic problems of their wives. Thus, in England as in America, the women workers and wives of workers have been forced to bear children as fast as the children could arrive. Church, state, the Labor Movement and their own more fortunate sisters have alike left them to the doom of enforced and excessive maternity.
It is true that they have been afforded hundreds of palliative measures to help them bear this burden cheerfully. Society must not hear their groans. Most of the working women are figuratively enfolded in these agencies and the guardians in charge have developed the instinct of warding off anything not pleasing to the delicate ears of the upper classes. The result is a "moral protection" that has robbed the working woman of the knowledge that would have given her freedom from poverty and unwilling motherhood.
In spite of all this, the natural intelligence of the English women workers is making itself felt. The economic pressure, is helping to make workmen's wives think. As they begin to think, they begin to ask insistently what they can do to prevent bringing to birth children who are not wanted and who die in infancy.
These women are the hope of England. They want to help themselves. They want to be free to love the children they have. They want to take some part in life other than as slaves. And it is among such women that I have been working.
The English people need a stirring up of interest in fundamentals,--particularly in Birth Control. The church, however, stands porter at the door of light and it is hard to open that door and let the light through without conflict. Moreover, the retrograde report of the Birth Rate Commission and the fact that the war has been over but a short while are made excuses for the plea that this is not the best time to put forward the issue of Birth Control.
The press wails that "only the poor are having children, while the middle classes are remaining stationary in numbers." Recommendations of emigration and other reactionary remedies for overcrowding among the poor have aroused no enthusiasm among the workers, but the subject of Birth Control remains taboo among the workers themselves. The Malthusian League has had as its subject, mainly, the education of the legislative and professional classes, and of the thinkers. Considering these facts, in addition to the opposition of the church, and the indifference and opposition of Socialist and Labor leaders, it is remarkable that the Malthusian movement has attained its present stage.
Every day, however, brings fresh proof to the advocates of Birth Control that they are right. Every day brings evidence that the clearest thinkers are coming to agree with them.
The suffragists are still tinkering with politics or the League of Nations, but could these women, the most courageous and fearless of the earth, be aroused for Birth Control, they would make short work of the obstacles in the path of woman's freedom. They are cautious and slow going, but they, too, are thinking this way, and when once the political habit of thought has been cast off and a fundamental human interest is taken up, there is no doubt that Birth Control is the idea that they will set themselves to put into the social fabric.
Additonal versions of this speech can be found on Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collections, S71:445, 460, and 477, and Margaret Sanger Papers, Microfilm, Library of Congress, LCM 131:463B and 441. Shortened versions were published in Unity, Nov. 27, 1933.
]]>Margaret Sanger delivered this speech at the International Congress of the World Fellowship of Faiths in Chicago, Illinois.
Additonal versions of this speech can be found on Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition: Smith College Collections, S71:445, 460, and 477, and Margaret Sanger Papers, Microfilm, Library of Congress, LCM 131:463B and 441. Shortened versions were published in Unity, Nov. 27, 1933.
Friends:
Humanity today stands at the crossroads.
One way leads down to decay and destruction. It is the way of the shiftless, careless, irresponsible ignorance of the past.
The other is steep and narrow. It points upward demanding of us who inhabit this globe all that we possess in intelligence, knowledge, courage and vision and responsibility.
The steep upward road leads to the fulfillment of human destiny on this planet.
Which road shall we take? There is no time to mince words, to procrastinate, no time for hypocritical evasion. The problem is immediate. As the great French philosopher Bergson expresses it: Humanity must make up its mind whether it wants to go on living, not only whether it wants, merely to live, as the beasts and insects live, but whether it wants to continue to carry on the Torch of Progress.
Progress! We are gathered here in Chicago from all countries of the world to celebrate a Century of Progress. Nowhere is the advance in the sciences of Humanity more impressively shown than in the exhibits of that remarkable Hall of Science. There we find eloquent evidence of Man’s conquest of the Air, of his daring explorations in the realm of the infinitesimally small, his war against microbes and germs; we find there all the miracles of the atom and of Radio-Activity. In brief, in the last one hundred years, Science has taken remarkable steps in the conquest of the external forces of Nature. Man has tamed and harnessed many natural energies and directed them for his own use.
But before we congratulate ourselves too complacently upon all these achievements of modern science, it might be a sign of wisdom to evaluate these achievements in terms of a higher and finer civilization. Unless these and other results of man’s creative energies are utilized with vision and foresight they may become not scientific achievements but instruments of human destruction.
For how can we boast of the conquest of the air or of the marvels of chemistry when whole nations of innocent men, women and children are compelled to seek protection against these by wearing gas-masks?
Why should we take pride in the advances of surgery, if its main use is to be the salvaging of the maimed and mutilated?–-or of the art of medicine if the physician makes it his business to preserve evils in order to “tinker at them?”
How can we boast of our philanthropy and great enterprises of charity when countless millions are born in conditions of disease, ignorance and misery– whose very existence depends upon the continuation of private and public charity?
NATIONAL RECOVERY--the NRA--is the great slogan of today. We hear on all sides of Codes for the producers, codes for the consumers, codes even for the control of PIGS. Here in your Middle West there is to be pig control on a large scale! But do we ever hear of a Biological Code for the race? I propose a Code for Babies, so that each child brought into the world shall be assured of a welcome, so that each child may help toward permanent National Recovery by coming into this complex realm with a heritage of health, a sound body and mind, and with the certainty of a happy home and proper nourishment to arm him for life’s unending struggle. Unless this is assured to each and every chid born into the United States, real national Recovery can never be realized.
Consider for a moment: the millions, nay the billions of dollars we shovel every year into the bottomless pit of so-called charities. Futile extravagance!--this effort to keep alive the delinquent, the defective, the dangerous classes that, in all compassion should never be brought into the world at all!
Science may well pride itself on the conquest of the external forces of Nature–-electricity, radio-activity, atomic energies, hydro-electric power, but despite all the miraculous achievements of the past century, Science has not succeeded in getting Humanity out of the man-made muddle in which we find ourselves today. For strangely enough this great Conquest of External Nature has been accompanied by a gross neglect– a misuse– a tragic waste of the greatest creative force within human nature itself– the creative energy, force and power of womankind.
The great prophetic American poet, Walt Whitman, wrote:
“Be not ashamed, Woman, Your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul. . . .”
Not only the gate of the body and soul, I would add, but Woman is the main portal to the future. Only through the emancipation of Woman’s creative energies, her sex force, can Humanity redeem itself. Civilization is marking time: Mankind cannot choose the road upward to the fulfillment of its true destiny until the other half of its self–Woman–-is released–-freed–-emancipated. Emancipated?--I can hear you say. Has she not the right to vote?–-to work?–the right to engage in any activity where man goes? Yes, and she has fought for these activities and their power proven, for an equal ability in her these undertakings. I do not consider such superficial rights as sufficiently important, however, to be called emancipation.
Because I am not looking upon woman merely as “the Mother of Men” (even great men), let us set aside as a masculine invention the sweet, simpering, clinging imitation of woman and see Woman liberated, Woman awake, Woman conscious of her invincible creative powers, imperiously and autonomously wielding that power with vision and intelligence.
Looking back at the long centuries of woman’s bondage to man-made religions, customs, laws and creeds, there might be reason for discouragement, for women have been compelled to be all things to all men. They have been throughout the ages and still are today in nearly every country of the globe beasts of burden, pack animals, slaves, servants, instruments of pleasure. (Now and then they’ve even been inspirations.)
Everything, you see, in terms of masculine psychology; everything in terms of the needs of men.
Age after age has shown woman taken from her lofty heights, where previously she was referred to as a Creative Deity–Giver of Life–-Divine Mother–and placed on the level of the nurse-maid, permitted to care for man’s offspring, allowed to compete with his animals as pack-horses whose honored destiny it was to suffer and to serve.
With this vast reservoir of racial and spiritual energy, why has woman never challenged the supremacy of the male?–-you may well ask. And in that answer lies the problem which confronts us today and which must be solved if we are to evolve upward and onward in the march of civilization.
Christianity was founded on the suppression and sublimation of the sex in
stinct. Previous forms of religious worship, from prehistoric times, were founded upon the unfathomable, inevitable mystery of Sex and its creative function. People were and still are as ignorant and confused about sex as they are about God. We must cast the light of science upon the former in order to understand the latter.
While the mental attitude and religious teachings on the basic function of life confuse it with shame and sin, Mankind cannot rise to its highest possibilities. Our ecclesiastical fathers have decreed that there were only two states of respectable womanhood open to women- virginity or motherhood. Sex in any of its manifestations was akin to sin, and for the woman only the bearing of a child sanctioned its expression.
Thus we find that woman’s bondage in the past as well as today is based solely on the biological task of child-bearing. Consequently, until that function is under her complete control woman can never hope to rise to the heights of her own spiritual destiny.
Throughout the centuries it has been the Churchmen who have decreed that woman’s first and only--duty to man and God is child-bearing. Did not Martin Luther assert that women shall bear and bear and bear even though they sacrifice their lives in an endless waste of sacrifice! And today from that great Church with its headquarters across the sea in foreign lands, sits a Celibate Pontifical Dictator (whose office predicates that he has never known the problems of fatherhood) yet whose voice reaches into the lives of 43,000,000 American women of child-bearing age and forbids Congressmen to liberate scientific knowledge whereby children may be wanted, conceived in marital love, born of the parents’ conscious desire and given the heritage of healthy bodies and sound minds! Until this voice is stifled, this influence checked, the slavery of futile child-bearing will continue.
Why this clerical glorification of breeding? Why this idolatrous urgence of reproduction, a function in which the human race is surpassed, from the point of view of quantity, by the house fly and the fishes of the sea– a function which has blindly plunged the world into chaos and confusion so grave that the future of the whole world is threatened?
Breeding orders to women in the past were:
For the sake of the Clan.
For the strength of the Tribe.
For the Pride of Man and Family.
For the Glory of God and the Church.
While now the pleas are:
For the military strength of the Nation and the Preservation of Peace.
All of it emanates form that classic in PSALMS 127:
“As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, So are the children of youth, Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; They shall not be ashamed, When they speak with their enemies in the gate.”
In this we find the suggestion not of peace, but of war. Men are advised to have sufficient children to hurl at their enemies, just as the militarists of Europe today clamor for an increased population to enlarge their armies. Certainly for people who in spite of world conditions still believe in the possibility of “peace on earth, good will among men,” it would be well to refrain from quoting this war appeal to increase the birth rate.
Against this and other much quoted Biblical texts may well be set the following verses from Ecclesiasticus in the Apocrypha (Chap. 16):--
“Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children, neither delight in ungodly sons. Though they multiply, rejoice not in them, except the fear of the Lord be with them. Trust not thou in their life, neither respect their multitude, for one that is just is better than a thousand! And better it is to die without children than to have them that are ungodly.”
To the pleas of the militarists, woman must refuse to listen. She must awaken to the responsibility which is hers as a creative force. She shall become an instrument to a World of Peace. Until this consciousness becomes a reality, all the great grandiose schemes for “world improvement” must fail. Birth control is the first sign of an awakening consciousness in Mankind. It signals a new moral responsibility, a higher regard for life, not only after birth, but even before life has been conceived. It is the conscious control of the birth-rate by means that prevent conception.
Not only a health and economic expedient, it is also a moral principle, a spiritual factor in the lives of women upon which the development and advance of the family depend.
It is truly strange and ironical that the Women’s Movement in the United States has kept itself apart from any cause connected with sex hygiene or sex reform. It is even stranger that they have been silent on the subject of birth control, knowing, as we do, that only because of its practice among themselves, as the birth-rate among the educated, intelligent, and wealthy indicates, could they have battled for Suffrage or any other social or cultural movement during their child-bearing years.
What woman constantly in the condition of pregnancy or who is submerged in the daily fears of pregnancy can compete with man in social or economic efficiency? Where are the women with large families? In the grave yards or in the kitchen slaving to make an inadequate wage feed too many hungry babies.
Women in all lands of all creeds and nations look to this new freedom as a blessing.
In England, the Women’s Cooperative Guild, a league of more than 75,000 married working women, mostly mothers, were the first to endorse this movement. Practically every liberal and labor group of women in England have followed the Women’s Cooperative Guild in an overwhelming endorsement of the principles and practice of birth control– with the result that more than 80 Maternal and Child Welfare Centers are including such advice in their instructions to working-class mothers.
In India in the spring of 1933, the All India Women’s Conference passed a resolution in favor of birth control and demanded that the Government should give information to mothers. This Conference represents many millions of enlightened women of India.
In the United States, the first national group of women to endorse this movement was the Jewish Federation of Women.
In other countries, such as Italy, Ireland, Germany, where militarism of either State or Church triumphs, women still count only as breeders.
I want to go on record here and now to the effect that child-bearing and rearing are NOT the end and aim of woman’s existence. Nor do I consider the first duty of the young married couple to be “non-stop” perpetuation of their kind. I go even further: in many cases I regard it as man’s patriotic duty to refrain from this crime against posterity and world-peace. Let me explain why.
Take the case of Japan and her population policy. According to statistics made public by the Statistical Bureau of the Japanese Cabinet, Japan’s population was increased last year by a total of 2,182,743 births-–or four babies a minute, twenty-four hours a day, day in and day out. Japan is breaking her own record for population increase. The whole crisis in the Far East– so menacing for the peace of the world at large– grows out of this “full-speed-ahead” cradle competition between Asiatic races. It is not time for the League of Nations or the World Court to turn on the red traffic light? Japan’s determination to find an outlet for this surplus population precipitates the so-called “undeclared war” against the Chinese, the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo, the breaking of solemn treaties, the sowing of the seeds of another World War! And yet some people solemnly tell us that Birth Control would not help solve her problems! If this is patriotism, let us have a little less of it.
If this menace of uncontrolled cradle competition screams aloud to us from across the vast Pacific Ocean, the evils of indiscriminate child-bearing are painfully evident to impartial observers at home. While our Federal penal code forbids the dissemination of scientific information on contraception, and the Roman Catholic Church actively campaign against it, many of our states have been compelled to pass sterilization laws to protect themselves against the perpetuation of the feeble-minded, the defective and the moron population which threatens to engulf us. I want to read to you part of a decision given by the venerable Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for the United States Supreme Court, concerning the case of a feebleminded woman who was herself the daughter of a feebleminded inmate and the mother of mentally defective children. This decision so admirably sums up the whole case of civilization and the future of the race that it should be compulsory reading for all Americans. Listen:
“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It is better for all the world, if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
If the United States Supreme Court can hand down this decision concerning compulsory sterilization, what possible judicial of moral case against Birth Control could be validly sustained? Only the age-old masculine tradition, entrenched in the powers of darkness, in reactionary ecclesiastical authority hell-bent to perpetuate its tyranny in a world in which the light of science is creating a new day for humanity, dares still to withhold from the masses of women this benevolent, clean, safe and scientific instrument of their liberation.
Sterilization–-a necessary, harmless means of protecting the race from the perpetuation of those whose physical, mental and moral fiber is too weak to apply the knowledge of birth control or contraception.
Another grave problem (long kept in the dark because of the conspiracy of silence) now forces itself upon the attention of the medical world. This is the problem of abortion. An ugly word, I agree, but because the forces of reaction maintain the obstacles in the way of scientific instruction in contraception, this complicated question must be faced sanely and humanely.
Women in all lands of every religion and creed are forced to resign themselves to unlimited pregnancies unless they have proper information in contraception. When this is denied them their only resort is to abortion. Out of fear–-because of their misery, poverty and ill health, they seek to evade a motherhood which would bring with it destitution and possible starvation to an unwanted baby.
Medical men are discovering that if they withhold from the awakened womanhood of the world a proper, safe and dependable means of birth control they are bound to be confronted by the infinitely more complicated problem of abortion.
As this department of medicine has as yet not been legalized (except in Russia), women who refuse to bring miserable, sickly, feebleminded offspring into the world are thrust into the channels of quackery where profit is made out of their ignorance and misery. It is the opinion of competent medical observers during the last twenty-five years that there are more criminal abortions performed in this country than in any other country in the world. The national total of abortions has been estimated to top 2,000,000 per year.
This total does not include the number brought about by drugs or by instruments used by the pregnant woman herself.
All this vast activity is carried on in defiance of laws, penalties, punishments or the possible consequence of death. And this violent and harsh means of freeing herself from undesired pregnancy will continue in the future as it has in the past, for nothing short of contraceptive practice can put an end to the horrors of abortion.
The history of abortion shows that it was opposed by law, by religious canons, by public opinion,– and the penalties range all the way from ostracism to imprisonment; yet neither threats of hell nor the infliction of physical punishment has availed. The two million abortions annually in this benighted country testify to that. Women will deceive and dare. They will resist and defy the power of Church and State. They will march to the gates of death to gain that liberty, that freedom from unending child-bearing which the awakened woman demands.
Intricate and complex, I admit, is this whole problem of woman’s control of her procreative function, but it remains the pivot of a new civilization. A great cosmic mystery lies hidden here: that the union of male and female, a communion that seems to private, so personal, so secret indeed that it can scarcely be spoken of in public– among Puritans at least– is actually of the most fundamental and public significance for the whole future of the race as well as for the peace of the whole world! In that intimate relationship lies concealed not only the joy or misery of the individual sharing it, but of their children and the children of their children. Here indeed are the gates of the body and here are the gates of the soul!
Never in the whole history of this planet has Woman’s place in the creation of the structure of the Future been so important. Today we seem to stand at the end of an era. We witness the bankruptcy and the collapse of Man’s attempt to conquer the universe– of man’s one-sided, womanless battle for supremacy. Man has successfully spanned the oceans, flung railroads and airlines across continents, conquered the air, harnessed the endless torrents of water-power. Thorough the lenses of his telescope he has explored distant universes, through the lenses of his microscope he has waged war against germ and microbe; girdled the globe in the fraction of a second with his radio broadcasting.
Everything has been accomplished in the desire to unite peoples and nations and to bring them closer together. Yet because of the ceaseless hordes of human beings ever multiplying and increasing their numbers, we find mankind goaded on to a frenzy of exploitation and war. Before there was a Capitalist, there were hungry mouths to Feed. In going forth to battle, to destroy, to subjugate other nations and races, he has found himself destroyed and mutilated by his victories.
Thanks to our opponents who keep human beings in ignorance regarding contraception, each day reveals about 50,000 extra babies on earth. For every 100,000 who died between dawn and dawn, 150,000 are born. These new inhabitants who survive daily have contributed to the 330,000,000 which have been added to the world’s population since 1920, a horde larger than all India’s.
In all these ventures woman has been allowed to march beside him– to serve his physical needs. Man has seemingly succeeded in conquering everything but his own ignorance. My good friend Dean Inge has pointed out that “Nothing fails like success,” and that is the kind of success we witness today. I am not pleading for the substitution of a Woman-made World. For we have had quite enough of exclusively masculine adventure, enough romantic destruction, chaos and confusion. Rather do I look forward to a Future created by the unified, harmonious endeavor of women and men working together as equals.
But before this can be accomplished the pendulum must swing back to get its balance, and in doing that Woman as a creative entity must liberate herself in the constructive work of the world. She must give voice to her female longings, her intuitions, her wishes and desires. She must thrust her energies into the laboratory of experience, just as a scientist goes to find the secrets of the unknown in the mystery of experiment.
Thousands, nay millions of women have in the past sacrificed their lives in devotion to religious creeds. They have abandoned their beauty, interest, education, talents, ambitions, love and motherhood in order to dedicate themselves to their Faith. Is it not time that this same force, idealism and devotion be turned to Science, to the building of a New Civilization? If one thousand women were to offer themselves to Science (as millions have uselessly offered themselves to religion) as to the Laboratory of Life, with their creative and intuitive powers at full speed, we would forge tremendously ahead in Human Progress.
There are three purposes in this Human Laboratory:
1st, Give themselves, their bodies and intelligences, to Scientific Research.
2nd, Put their own creative faculties to developing Science.
3rd, Become creative instruments to bring a New Race into being.
The solidarity of Woman is as noble as the brotherhood of man.
In the life of every woman come other women, less fortunate, less enlightened, many of them crushed under the burden of poverty and child-bearing. They are too inarticulate to cry out, too poor to have influence, too weak to demand their liberties. The very fact that they have come into your life gives you a spiritual responsibility toward their emancipation. Sympathy is not enough, palliative emergency help is not enough, philanthropy is not enough– nothing less can you do than help to set them free. Free that they may help themselves. Free that they may grow in wisdom and enlightenment.
Just as the physical sight developed in the body, so shall our spiritual vision unfold as we move upward and onward into that current of life we call consciousness. When we become conscious of our acts, conscious of our responsibility, we shall be conscious of the greatest of all responsibilities– that of handing on the precious yet mysterious gift of life.
In this let us at least pass it on in a body as fit and perfect as it can be made. Then will the soul that is summoned have at its command an instrument suitable for its highest development.
Only through Birth Control (I assert with all the vehemence I can summon) will women ever gain control of their bodies or develop their souls. Only through knowledge can they ever unlock the great gates to a Future in which joy and happiness will prevail. Only through a new consciousness of birth can Humanity at large ever extricate itself from the man-made muddle in which it is grounded today.
Instead of a world created by irresponsible hordes in hatred and antagonism, free woman shall guide us into a future created by all-embracing love through the consciousness of birth control.
This article was found in a scrapbook with no identifying information about the newspaper. Portions of the text were obliterated by a hole punch.
Editorial Note--Throughout the world wherever birth control is advocated or considered, Mrs. Sanger is known as the outstanding leader of the Birth Control movement in America and as an indefatigable and fearless advocate in her writings and lectures of conscious and voluntary motherhood.
No less than twelve nations of the Orient and Occident were represented at the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference, recently brought to a successful close in New York. The Conference was held under the auspices of the American Birth Control League and was the first gathering of its kind, made up of delegates from every civilized country of the globe, ever held in the United States to discuss problems of population and racial health.
Perhaps the most important achievement of the conference was to place the movement for a OPTIMUM population all countries, as opposed to population, on a soundly basis. On its scientific, philosophical and humanitarian basis, the conference emphasized the remarkable unanimity of opinion and harmony of thought among the delegates from all countries. This unity of thought has led to the organization of an international league, and plans were made nature to convene in Geneva, Switzerland in August, 1926, immediately before the session of the Assembly of the League of Nations.
The first Neo-Malthusian League was organized in England some fifty years ago. Its activities were based on the celebrated Malthusian theory, and were mainly economic in character. While not discarding the Malthusian law that "everywhere the pressure of population presses against the means of subsistence," the Sixth international conference put greater stress on the problem of contraception (or as it is popularly known Birth Control) in its medical, scientific, eugenic, psychological and ethical aspects.
Ten years ago, when I inaugurated my campaign for conscious and voluntary motherhood among the poor women of America, I was denounced and persecuted. Four years ago, a mass meeting was broken up by the police of New York. The International Conference triumphantly vindicates my campaign, and indicates a remarkable progress in American thought. Not only were all the sessions accurately and fairly reported in the daily press, but the Birth Control movement has enlisted the support of the most eminent authorities in all fields--not only economists, statisticians, biologists, geneticists, physicians and psychologists, but also many pastors of the various Protestant churches. This achievement is the greater in view of the federal and state laws in the United States which forbid, even to doctors, the dissemination of contraceptive information.
France, which was once the nation in which Birth Control was most universally practiced, has since the war, begun an active propaganda for large families. Yet delegates from that country pointed out that the real menace is not a lowering birth rate, but a high infantile mortality rate, and that France was backward in any effort to lower the death rate of the children born, and that the practice of Birth Control continued despite all efforts to encourage larger families.
One of the most interesting features of the conference was the sessions, on methods of contraception, for physicians only, held without interference despite the rigorous statutes of the State against even the discussion of contraception. More than one thousand physicians attended these sessions, held simultaneously in the ball rooms of two great New York hotels.
The Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference marks the initiation of a new era of international thought and the beginning of a closely coordinated movement toward world-peace.