"Women"

Date

1929-00-00

Source

Margaret Sanger Papers Mocrofilm Edition, Sophia Smith Collection, S73:265.

Description

The following are speech fragments likely from the early 1920's.

Identifier

Text

Women

1. Freedom to do any work for which she is fitted. To prove her fitness; to receive instruction, to be given responsibility & initiative in any industrial, administrative or professional capacity.

2. Special protection of the child & child bearing mother--

3. The entire individual responsibilities of women in regard to the acceptance or refusal of motherhood. The fundamental human right of the mother to bear life gladly.

Women should birth control the unfit out of existence a programme to strive for.

Darwinian principle which demands the minimum of interference with competitive struggle which claims it to be the only true test of fitness or unfitness.

I differ with this & claim that we should in a civilization lay our struggles & competitive effort upon other qualities than the maternal needs of competing against our brothers for food as the animals have done & do, let our struggles be for art & science & greater moral qualities of our spiritual nation thus developing in mankind a higher moral than those qualities of cunning, cheating, getting the best of your neighbor or selling him something he does not want etc etc.

2. The maximum of liberty for individual effort maintained at all cost.

Those who fail through disease, accident, or inability to gain a livelihood are the unfit, whose lives may be preserved, but only at the price of renouncing the right to perpetuate their type.

If this system were adopted for one generation universally, there would be such an improvement in the human race that the complete structure of society would automatically be changed. There would then be with out doubt the co-operative system leaving the competitive struggle to be in control only in the higher arts & science & literary developments.