Woman and the New Race by Margaret Sanger

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When we come to look into the proverbial infanticide of the Chinese,
we find the same positive indications that it grew out of the
instinctive purpose of woman to free herself from the bondage of too
great reproductivity.

"In the poorest districts of China," says Westermark, "female infants
are often destroyed by their parents immediately after their birth,
chiefly on account of poverty. Though disapproved of by educated
Chinese, the practice is treated with forbearance or indifference by
the man of the people and is acquiesced in by the mandarins."

"When seriously appealed to on the subject," says the Rev. J.
Doolittle in _Social Life of the Chinese_, "though all deprecate it as
contrary to the dictates of reason and the instincts of nature, many
are ready boldly to apologize for it and declare it to be necessary,
especially in the families of the excessively poor."

Here again the wide prevalence of the custom is the first and best
proof that women are driven by some great pressure within themselves
to accede to it. If further proof were necessary, it is afforded by
the testimony of Occidentals who have lived in China, that Chinese
midwives are extremely skillful in producing early abortion. Abortions
are not performed without the consent and usually only at the demand
of the woman.

In China, as in India, the religions of the country condemned, even as
they to-day condemn, infanticide. Both foreign and native governments
have sought to make an end of the custom. But in both countries it
still prevails. Nor are these Eastern countries substantially
different from their Western neighbors.

The record of Western Europe is summarized by Oscar Helmuth Werner,
Ph.D., in his book, _"The Unmarried Mother in German Literature."_
"Infanticide," says Dr. Werner, "was the most common crime in Western
Europe from the Middle Ages down to the end of the Eighteenth
Century." This fact, of course, means that it was even more largely
practiced by the married than the unmarried, the married mothers being
far greater in number.

"Another problem which confronted the church," he says in another
place, "was the practice of exposure and killing of children by legal
parents." A sort of final word from Dr. Werner is this: "Infanticide
by legal parents has practically ceased in civilized countries, but
abortion, its substitute, has not."

How desperately woman desired freedom to develop herself as an
individual, apart from motherhood, is indicated by the fact that
infanticide was "the most common crime of Western Europe," in spite of
the fact that some of the most terrible punishments ever inflicted by
law were meted out to those women who sought this means of escape from
the burden of unwanted children. Dr. Werner shows that in Germany, for
instance, in the year 1532, it was the law that those guilty of
infanticide were "to be buried alive or impaled. In order to prevent
desperation, however, they shall be drowned if it is possible to get
to a stream or river, in which they shall be torn with glowing tongs
beforehand."

Notwithstanding the fact that at one time in Germany, the punishment
was that of drowning in a sack containing a serpent, a cat and a
dog--in order that the utmost agony might be inflicted--one sovereign
alone condemned 20,000 women to death for infanticide, without
noticeably reducing the practice.

To-day, in spite of the huge numbers of abortions and the
multiplication of foundlings' homes and orphans' asylums, infanticide
is still an occasional crime in all countries. As to woman's share in
the practice, let us add this word from Havelock Ellis, taken from the
chapter on "Morbid Psychic Phenomena" in his book, _Man and Woman_:

"Infanticide is the crime in which women stand out in the greatest
contrast to men; in Italy, for example, for every 100 men guilty of
infanticide, there are 477 women." And he remarks later that when a
man commits this crime, "he usually does it at the instance of some
woman."

Infanticide tends to disappear as skill in producing abortions is
developed or knowledge of contraceptives is spread, and only then. One
authority, as will be seen in a later chapter, estimates the number of
abortions performed annually in the United States at 1,000,000, and
another believes that double that number are produced.

"Among the Hindus and Mohammedans, artificial abortion is extremely
common," says Westermark. "In Persia every illegitimate pregnancy ends
with abortion. In Turkey, both among the rich and the poor, even
married women very commonly procure abortion after they have given
birth to two children, one of which is a boy."

The nations mentioned are typical of the world, except those countries
where information concerning contraceptives has enabled women to limit
their families without recourse to operations.

It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to
the horrors of abortion and infanticide. The Roman Catholic church,
which has fought these practices from the beginning, has been unable
to check them; and no more powerful agency could have been brought
into play. It took that church, even in the days of its unlimited
power, many centuries to come to its present sweeping condemnation of
abortion. The severity of the condemnation depended upon the time at
which the development of the foetus was interfered with. An
illuminating resume of the church's efforts in this direction is given
by Dr. William Burke Ryan in his authoritative and exhaustive study
entitled "_Infanticide; Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History"_.
Dr. Ryan says: "Theologians of the church of Rome made a distinction
between the inanimate and the animate foetus to which the soul is
added by the creation of God, and adopted the opinions of some of the
old philosophers, more particularly those of Aristotle, as to
animation in the male and female, but the canon law altogether
negatived the doctrine of the Stoics, for Innocent II condemned the
following proposition:

"'It seems probable that the foetus does not possess a rational soul
as long as it is in the womb, and only begins to possess it when born,
and consequently in no abortion is homicide committed.' Sextus V
inflicted severe penalties for the crime of abortion at any period;
these were in some degree mitigated by Gregory XIV, who, however,
still held that those producing the abortion of an animated foetus
should be subject to them, viz., and excommunication reserved to the
bishop and also an 'irregularity' reserved to the Pope himself for
absolution."

To-day, the Roman church stands firmly upon the proposition that
"directly intended, artificial abortion must be regarded as wrongful
killing, as murder." [Footnote: Pastoral Medicine] But it required a
long time for it to reach that point, in the face of the demand for
relief from large families.

As it was with the fight of the church against abortion, so it is with
the effort to prevent abortion in the United States to-day. All
efforts to stop the practice are futile. Apparently, the numbers of
these illegal operations are increasing from year to year. From year
to year more women will undergo the humiliation, the danger and the
horror of them, and the terrible record, begun with the infanticide of
the primitive peoples, will go on piling up its volume of human misery
and racial damage, until society awakens to the fact that a
fundamental remedy must be applied.

To apply such a remedy, society must recognize the terrible lesson
taught by the innumerable centuries of infanticide and foeticide. If
these abhorrent practices could have been ended by punishment and
suppression, they would have ceased long ago. But to continue
suppression and punishment, and let the matter rest there, is only to
miss the lesson--only to permit conditions to go from bad to worse.

What is that lesson? It is this: woman's desire for freedom is born of
the feminine spirit, which is the absolute, elemental, inner urge of
womanhood. It is the strongest force in her nature; it cannot be
destroyed; it can merely be diverted from its natural expression into
violent and destructive channels.

The chief obstacles to the normal expression of this force are
undesired pregnancy and the burden of unwanted children. These
obstacles have always been and always will be swept aside by a
considerable proportion of women. Driven by the irresistible force
within them, they will always seek wider freedom and greater
self-development, regardless of the cost. The sole question that society
has to answer is, how shall women be permitted to attain this end?

Are you horrified at the record set down in this chapter? It is well
that you should be. You cannot help society to apply the fundamental
remedy unless you know these facts and are conscious of their fullest
significance.

Society, in dealing with the feminine spirit, has its choice of
clearly defined alternatives. It can continue to resort to violence in
an effort to enslave the elemental urge of womanhood, making of woman
a mere instrument of reproduction and punishing her when she revolts.
Or, it can permit her to choose whether she shall become a mother and
how many children she will have. It can go on trying to crush that
which is uncrushable, or it can recognize woman's claim to freedom,
and cease to impose diverting and destructive barriers. If we choose
the latter course, we must not only remove all restrictions upon the
use of scientific contraceptives, but we must legalize and encourage
their use.

This problem comes home with peculiar force to the people of America.
Do we want the millions of abortions performed annually to be
multiplied? Do we want the precious, tender qualities of womanhood, so
much needed for our racial development, to perish in these sordid,
abnormal experiences? Or, do we wish to permit woman to find her way
to fundamental freedom through safe, unobjectionable, scientific
means? We have our choice. Upon our answer to these questions depends
in a tremendous degree the character and the capabilities of the
future American race.

CHAPTER III

THE MATERIALS OF THE NEW RACE

Each of us has an ideal of what the American of the future should be.
We have been told times without number that out of the mixture of
stocks, the intermingling of ideas and aspirations, there is to come a
race greater than any which has contributed to the population of the
United States. What is the basis for this hope that is so generally
indulged in? If the hope is founded upon realities, how may it be
realized? To understand the difficulties and the obstacles to be
overcome before the dream of a greater race in America can be
attained, is to understand something of the task before the women who
shall give birth to that race.

What material is there for a greater American race? What elements make
up our present millions? Where do they live? How do they live? In what
direction does our national civilization bend their ideals? What is
the effect of the "melting pot" upon the foreigner, once he begins to
"melt"? Are we now producing a freer, juster, more intelligent, more
idealistic, creative people out of the varied ingredients here?

Before we can answer these questions, we must consider briefly the
races which have contributed to American population.

Among our more than 100,000,000 population are Negroes, Indians,
Chinese and other colored people to the number of 11,000,000. There
are also 14,500,000 persons of foreign birth. Besides these there are
14,000,000 children of foreign-born parents and 6,500,000 persons
whose fathers or mothers were born on foreign soil, making a total of
46,000,000 people of foreign stock. Fifty per cent of our population
is of the native white strain.

Of the foreign stock in the United States, the last general census,
compiled in 1910, shows that 25.7 per cent was German, 14 per cent was
Irish, 8.5 per cent was Russian or Finnish, 7.2 was English, 6.5 per
cent Italian and 6.2 per cent Austrian. The Abstract of the same
census points out several significant facts. The Western European
strains in this country are represented by a majority of native-born
children of foreign-born or mixed parentage. This is because the
immigration from those sources has been checked. On the other hand,
immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Russia and
Finland, increased 175.4 per cent from 1900 to 1910. During that
period, the slums of Europe dumped their submerged inhabitants into
America at a rate almost double that of the preceding decade, and the
flow was still increasing at the time the census was taken. So it is
more than likely that when the next census is taken it will be found
that following 1910 there was an even greater flow from Spain, Italy,
Hungary, Austria, Russia, Finland, and other countries where the iron
hand of economic and political tyrannies had crushed great populations
into ignorance and want. These peoples have not been in the United
States long enough to produce great families. The census of 1920 will
in all probability tell a story of a greater and more serious problem
than did the last.

Over one-fourth of all the immigrants over fourteen years of age,
admitted during the two decades preceding 1910, were illiterate. Of
the 8,398,000 who arrived in the 1900-1910 period, 2,238,000 could not
read or write. There were 1,600,000 illiterate foreigners in the
United States when the 1910 census was taken. Do these elements give
promise of a better race? Are we doing anything genuinely constructive
to overcome this situation?

Two-thirds of the white foreign stock in the United States live in
cities. Four-fifths of the populations of Chicago and New York are of
this stock. More than two-thirds of the populations of Boston,
Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Newark, Jersey
City, Providence, Worcester, Scranton, Paterson, Fall River, Lowell,
Cambridge, Bridgeport, St. Paul, Minneapolis and San Francisco are of
other than native white ancestry. Of the fifty principal cities of the
United States there are only fourteen in which fifty per cent of the
population is of unmixed native white parentage.

Only one state in the Union--North Carolina--has less than one per
cent of the white foreign stock. New York, New Jersey, Delaware,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Illinois,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana and Utah have more than
fifty per cent foreign stock. Eleven states, including those on the
Pacific Coast, have from 35 to 50 per cent. Maine, Ohio and Kansas
have from 25 to 35 per cent. Maryland, Indiana, Missouri and Texas
have from 15 to 25 per cent. These proportions are increasing rather
than decreasing, owing to the extraordinarily high birth rate of the
foreign strains.

A special analysis of 1915 vital statistics for certain states, in the
World Almanac for 1918, shows that foreign-born mothers gave birth to
nearly 62 per cent of the children born in Connecticut, nearly 58 per
cent in Massachusetts, nearly 33 per cent in Michigan, nearly 58 per
cent in Rhode Island, more than 43 per cent in New Hampshire, more
than 54 per cent in New York and more than 38 per cent in
Pennsylvania.

All these figures, be it remembered, fail to include foreign stock of
the second generation after landing. If the statistics for children
who have native parents but foreign-born grandparents, or who have one
foreign-born parent, were given, they would doubtless leave but a
small percentage of births from stocks native to the soil for several
generations.

Immigrants or their children constitute the majority of workers
employed in many of our industries. "Seven out of ten of those who
work in our iron and steel industries are drawn from this class," says
the National Geographic Magazine (February, 1917), "seven out of ten
of our bituminous coal miners belong to it. Three out of four who work
in packing towns were born abroad or are children of those who were
born abroad; four out of five of those who make our silk goods, seven
out of eight of those employed in woolen mills, nine out of ten of
those who refine our petroleum, and nineteen out of twenty of those
who manufacture our sugar are immigrants or the children of
immigrants." And it might have shown a similarly high percentage of
those in the ready-made clothing industries, railway and public works
construction of the less skilled sort, and a number of others.

That these foreigners who have come in hordes have brought with them
their ignorance of hygiene and modern ways of living and that they are
handicapped by religious superstitions is only too true. But they also
bring in their hearts a desire for freedom from all the tyrannies that
afflict the earth. They would not be here if they did not bear within
them the hardihood of pioneers, a courage of no mean order. They have
the simple faith that in America they will find equality, liberty and
an opportunity for a decent livelihood. And they have something else.
The cell plasms of these peoples are freighted with the potentialities
of the best in Old World civilization. They come from lands rich in
the traditions of courage, of art, music, letters, science and
philosophy. Americans no longer consider themselves cultured unless
they have journeyed to these lands to find access to the treasures
created by men and women of this same blood. The immigrant brings the
possibilities of all these things to our shores, but where is the
opportunity to reproduce in the New World the cultures of the old?

What opportunities have we given to these peoples to enrich our
civilization? We have greeted them as "a lot of ignorant foreigners,"
we have shouted at, bustled and kicked them.

Our industries have taken advantage of their ignorance of the
country's ways to take their toil in mills and mines and factories at
starvation wages. We have herded them into slums to become diseased,
to become social burdens or to die. We have huddled them together like
rabbits to multiply their numbers and their misery. Instead of saying
that we Americanize them, we should confess that we animalize them.
The only freedom we seem to have given them is the freedom to make
heavier and more secure their chains. What hope is there for racial
progress in this human material, treated more carelessly and brutally
than the cheapest factory product?

Nor are all our social handicaps bound up in the immigrant.

There were in the United States, when the Federal Industrial Relations
Committee finished its work in 1915, several million migratory
workers, most of them white, many of them married but separated from
their families, who were compelled, like themselves, to struggle with
dire want.

There were in 1910 more than 2,353,000 tenant farmers, two-thirds of
whom lived and worked under the terrible conditions which the
Industrial Relations Commission's report showed to prevail in the
South and Southwest. These tenant farmers, as the report showed, were
always in want, and were compelled by the very terms of the prevailing
tenant contracts to produce children who must go to the fields and do
the work of adults. The census proved that this tenancy was on the
increase, the number of tenants in all but the New England and Middle
Atlantic States having increased approximately 30 per cent from 1900
to 1910.

Moreover, there were in the United States in 1910, 5,516,163
illiterates. Of these 1,378,884 were of pure native white stock. In
some states in the South as much as 29 per cent of the population is
illiterate, many of these, of course, being Negroes.

There is still another factor to be considered--a factor which because
of its great scope is more ominous than any yet mentioned. This is the
underpaid mass of workers in the United States--workers whose
low wages are forcing them deeper into want each day. Let Senator
Borah, not a radical nor even a reformer, but a leader of the
Republican party, tell the story. "Fifty-seven per cent of the
families in the United States have incomes of $800 or less," said
he in a speech before the Senate, August 24, 1917, "Seventy per cent
of the families of our country have incomes of $1,000 or less. Tell me
how a man so situated can have shelter for his family; how he can provide
food and clothing. He is an industrial peon. His home is scant and pinched
beyond the power of language to tell. He sees his wife and children on the
ragged edge of hunger from week to week and month to month. If sickness
comes, he faces suicide or crime. He cannot educate his children;
he cannot fit them for citizenship; he cannot even fit them as soldiers
to die for their country.

"It is the tragedy of our whole national life--how these people live
in such times as these. We have not yet gathered the fruits of such an
industrial condition in this country. We have been saved thus far by
reason of the newness of our national life, our vast public lands now
almost exhausted, our great natural resources now fast being seized
and held, but the hour of reckoning will come."

Senator Borah was thinking, doubtless, of open revolution, of
bloodshed and the destruction of property. In a far more terrible
sense, the reckoning which he has referred to is already upon us. The
ills we suffer as the result of the conditions now prevailing in the
United States are appalling in their sum.

It is these conditions that produce the 3,000,000 child laborers of
the United States; child slaves who undergo hardships that blight them
physically and mentally, leaving them fit only to produce human beings
whose deficiencies and misfortunes will exceed their own.

From these same elements, living under these same conditions come the
feebleminded and other defectives. Just how many feebleminded there
are in the United States, no one knows, because no attempt has ever
been made to give public care to all of them, and families are more
inclined to conceal than to reveal the mental defects of their
members. Estimates vary from 350,000 at the present time to nearly
400,000 as early as 1890, Henry H. Goddard, Ph. D., of the Vineland,
N. J., Training School, being authority for the latter statement. Only
34,137 of these unfortunates were under institutional care in the
United States in 1916, the rest being free to propagate their kind--piling
up public burdens for future generations. The feebleminded are
notoriously prolific in reproduction. The close relationship between
poverty and ignorance and the production of feebleminded is shown by
Anne Moore, Ph.D., in a report to the Public Education Association of
New York in 1911. She found that an overwhelming proportion of the
classified feebleminded children in New York schools came from large
families living in overcrowded slum conditions, and that only a small
percentage were born of native parents.

Sixty thousand prostitutes go and come anew each year in the United
States. This army of unfortunates, as social workers and scientists
testify, come from families living under like conditions of want.

In the New York City schools alone in December, 1916, 61 per cent of
the children were suffering from undernourishment and 21 per cent in
immediate danger of it. These facts, also the result of the conditions
outlined, were discovered by the city Bureau of Child Hygiene.

Another item in the sordid list is that of venereal disease. In his
pamphlet entitled "_The Venereal Diseases_," issued in 1918, Dr.
Hermann M. Biggs head of the New York State Department of Health
quoted authorities who gave estimates of the amount of syphilis and
gonorrhea in the United States. One says that 60 per cent of the men
contract one disease or the other at some time. Another said that 40
per cent of the population of New York City had syphilis, one of the
most terrible of all maladies. Poverty, delayed marriage,
prostitution--a brief and terrible chain accounts for this scourge.

Finally, there is tuberculosis, bred by bad housing conditions and
contributed to in frightful measure by poor food and unhealthy
surroundings during the hours of employment. Dr. Frederick L. Hoffman,
director of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of
Tuberculosis and foremost statistical authority upon tuberculosis in
the United States, says: "We know of 2,000,000 tubercular persons in
the United States."

Does this picture horrify the reader? This is not the whole truth. A
few scattered statistics lack the power to reflect the broken lives of
overworked fathers, the ceaseless, increasing pain of overburdened
mothers and the agony of childhood fighting its way against the
handicaps of ill health, insufficient food, inadequate training and
stifling toil.

Can we expect to remedy this situation by dismissing the problem of
the submerged native elements with legislative palliatives or treating
it with careless scorn? Do we better it by driving out of the
immigrant's heart the dream of liberty that brought him to our shores?
Do we solve the problem by giving him, instead of an opportunity to
develop his own culture, low wages, a home in the slums and those
pseudo-patriotic preachments which constitute our machine-made
"Americanization"?

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