Woman and the New Race by Margaret Sanger

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Every detail of this sordid situation means a problem that must be
solved before we can even clear the way for a greater race in America.
Nor is there any hope of solving any of these problems if we continue
to attack them in the usual way.

Men have sentimentalized about them and legislated upon them. They
have denounced them and they have applied reforms. But it has all been
ridiculously, cruelly futile.

This is the condition of things for which those stand who demand more
and more children. Each child born under such conditions but makes
them worse--each child in its own person suffers the consequence of
the intensified evils.

If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must
keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as
well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our
capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation
into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals
as are the ideal of a democracy.

The intelligence of a people is of slow evolutional development--it
lags far behind the reproductive ability. It is far too slow to cope
with conditions created by an increasing population, unless that
increase is carefully regulated.

We must, therefore, not permit an increase in population that we are
not prepared to care for to the best advantage--that we are not
prepared to do justice to, educationally and economically. We must
popularize birth control thinking. We must not leave it haphazardly to
be the privilege of the already privileged. We must put this means of
freedom and growth into the hands of the masses.

We must set motherhood free. We must give the foreign and submerged
mother knowledge that will enable her to prevent bringing to birth
children she does not want. We know that in each of these submerged
and semisubmerged elements of the population there are rich factors of
racial culture. Motherhood is the channel through which these cultures
flow. Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the
time and the number of children who shall result from the union,
automatically works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth
weaklings; refuses to bring forth slaves; refuses to bear children who
must live under the conditions described. It withholds the unfit,
brings forth the fit; brings few children into homes where there is
not sufficient to provide for them. Instinctively it avoids all those
things which multiply racial handicaps. Under such circumstances we
can hope that the "melting pot" will refine. We shall see that it will
save the precious metals of racial culture, fused into an amalgam of
physical perfection, mental strength and spiritual progress. Such an
American race, containing the best of all racial elements, could give
to the world a vision and a leadership beyond our present imagination.

CHAPTER IV

TWO CLASSES OF WOMEN

Thus far we have been discussing mainly one class in America--the
workers. Most women who belong to the workers' families have no
accurate or reliable knowledge of contraceptives, and are, therefore,
bringing children into the world so rapidly that they, their families
and their class are overwhelmed with numbers. Out of these numbers, as
has been shown, have grown many of the burdens with which society in
general is weighted; out of them have come, also, the want, disease,
hard living conditions and general misery of the workers.

The women of this class are the greatest sufferers of all. Not only do
they bear the material hardships and deprivations in common with the
rest of the family, but in the case of the mother, these are
intensified. It is the man and the child who have first call upon the
insufficient amount of food. It is the man and the child who get the
recreation, if there is any to be had, for the man's hours of labor
are usually limited by law or by his labor union.

It is the woman who suffers first from hunger, the woman whose
clothing is least adequate, the woman who must work all hours, even
though she is not compelled, as in the case of millions, to go into a
factory to add to her husband's scanty income. It is she, too, whose
health breaks first and most hopelessly, under the long hours of work,
the drain of frequent childbearing, and often almost constant nursing
of babies. There are no eight-hour laws to protect the mother against
overwork and toil in the home; no laws to protect her against ill
health and the diseases of pregnancy and reproduction. In fact there
has been almost no thought or consideration given for the protection
of the mother in the home of the workingman.

There are no general health statistics to tell the full story of the
physical ills suffered by women as a result of too great
reproductivity. But we get some light upon conditions through the
statistics on maternal mortality, compiled by Dr. Grace L. Meigs, for
the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of Labor. These
figures do not include the deaths of women suffering from diseases
complicated by pregnancy.

"In 1913, in this country at least 15,000 women, it is estimated, died
from conditions caused by childbirth; about 7,000 of these died from
childbed fever and the remaining 8,000 from diseases now known to be
to a great extent preventable or curable," says Dr. Meigs in her
summary, "Physicians and statisticians agree that these figures are a
_great underestimate_."

Think of it--the needless deaths of 15,000 women a "great
underestimate"! Yet even this number means that virtually every hour
of the day and night two women die as the result of childbirth in the
healthiest and supposedly the most progressive country in the world.

It is apparent that Dr. Meigs leaves out of consideration the many
thousands of deaths each year of women who become pregnant while
suffering from tuberculosis. Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, addressing the
forty-fourth annual convention of the American Public Health
Association, in Cincinnati in 1916, called attention to the fact that
some authors hold that "65 per cent of the women afflicted with
tuberculosis, even when afflicted only in the relatively early and
curable stages, die as the result of pregnancy which could have been
avoided and their lives saved had they but known some means of
prevention." Nor were syphilis, various kidney and heart disorders and
other diseases, often rendered fatal by pregnancy, taken into account
by Dr. Meigs' survey.

Still, leaving out all the hundreds of thousands of women who die
because pregnancy has complicated serious diseases, Dr. Meigs finds
that "in 1913, the death rate per 100,000 of the population from all
conditions caused by childbirth was little lower than that from
typhoid fever. This rate would be almost quadrupled if only the group
of the population which can be affected, women of child-bearing ages,
were considered. In 1913, childbirth caused more deaths among women 15
to 44 years old than any disease except tuberculosis."

From what sort of homes come these deaths from childbirth? Most of
them occur in overcrowded dwellings, where food, care, sanitation,
nursing and medical attention are inadequate. Where do we find most of
the tuberculosis and much of the other disease which is aggravated by
pregnancy? In the same sort of home.

The deadly chain of misery is all too plain to anyone who takes the
trouble to observe it. A woman of the working class marries and with
her husband lives in a degree of comfort upon his earnings. Her
household duties are not beyond her strength. Then the children begin
to come--one, two, three, four, possibly five or more. The earnings of
the husband do not increase as rapidly as the family does. Food,
clothing and general comfort in the home grow less as the numbers of
the family increase. The woman's work grows heavier, and her strength
is less with each child. Possibly--probably--she has to go into a
factory to add to her husband's earnings. There she toils, doing her
housework at night. Her health goes, and the crowded conditions and
lack of necessities in the home help to bring about disease--especially
tuberculosis. Under the circumstances, the woman's chances of
recovering from each succeeding childbirth grow less. Less too are
the chances of the child's surviving, as shown by tables in another
chapter. Unwanted children, poverty, ill health, misery, death--these
are the links in the chain, and they are common to most of the
families in the class described in the preceding chapter.

Nor is the full story of the woman's sufferings yet told. Grievous as
is her material condition, her spiritual deprivations are still
greater. By the very fact of its existence, mother love demands its
expression toward the child. By that same fact, it becomes a necessary
factor in the child's development. The mother of too many children, in
a crowded home where want, ill health and antagonism are perpetually
created, is deprived of this simplest personal expression. She can
give nothing to her child of herself, of her personality. Training is
impossible and sympathetic guidance equally so. Instead, such a mother
is tired, nervous, irritated and ill-tempered; a determent, often,
instead of a help to her children. Motherhood becomes a disaster and
childhood a tragedy.

It goes without saying that this woman loses also all opportunity of
personal expression outside her home. She has neither a chance to
develop social qualities nor to indulge in social pleasures. The
feminine element in her--that spirit which blossoms forth now and then
in women free from such burdens--cannot assert itself. She can
contribute nothing to the wellbeing of the community. She is a
breeding machine and a drudge--she is not an asset but a liability to
her neighborhood, to her class, to society. She can be nothing as long
as she is denied means of limiting her family.

In sharp contrast with these women who ignorantly bring forth large
families and who thereby enslave themselves, we find a few women who
have one, two or three children or no children at all. These women,
with the exception of the childless ones, live full-rounded lives.
They are found not only in the ranks of the rich and the well-to-do,
but in the ranks of labor as well. They have but one point of basic
difference from their enslaved sisters--they are not burdened with the
rearing of large families.

We have no need to call upon the historian, the sociologist nor the
statistician for our knowledge of this situation. We meet it every day
in the ordinary routine of our lives. The women who are the great
teachers, the great writers, the artists, musicians, physicians, the
leaders of public movements, the great suffragists, reformers, labor
leaders and revolutionaries are those who are not compelled to give
lavishly of their physical and spiritual strength in bearing and
rearing large families. The situation is too familiar for discussion.
Where a woman with a large family is contributing directly to the
progress of her times or the betterment of social conditions, it is
usually because she has sufficient wealth to employ trained nurses,
governesses, and others who perform the duties necessary to child
rearing. She is a rarity and is universally recognized as such.

The women with small families, however, are free to make their choice
of those social pleasures which are the right of every human being and
necessary to each one's full development. They can be and are, each
according to her individual capacity, comrades and companions to their
husbands--a privilege denied to the mother of many children. Theirs is
the opportunity to keep abreast of the times, to make and cultivate a
varied circle of friends, to seek amusements as suits their taste and
means, to know the meaning of real recreation. All these things remain
unrealized desires to the prolific mother.

Women who have a knowledge of contraceptives are not compelled to make
the choice between a maternal experience and a marred love life; they
are not forced to balance motherhood against social and spiritual
activities. Motherhood is for them to choose, as it should be for
every woman to choose. Choosing to become mothers, they do not thereby
shut themselves away from thorough companionship with their husbands,
from friends, from culture, from all those manifold experiences which
are necessary to the completeness and the joy of life.

Fit mothers of the race are these, the courted comrades of the men
they choose, rather than the "slaves of slaves." For theirs is the
magic power--the power of limiting their families to such numbers as
will permit them to live full-rounded lives. Such lives are the
expression of the feminine spirit which is woman _and all of her_--not
merely art, nor professional skill, nor intellect--but all that woman
is, or may achieve.

CHAPTER V

THE WICKEDNESS OF CREATING LARGE FAMILIES

The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing
into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day
is breeding too many children. These statements may startle those who
have never made a thorough investigation of the problem. They are,
nevertheless, well considered, and the truth of them is abundantly
borne out by an examination of facts and conditions which are part of
everyday experience or observation.

The immorality of large families lies not only in their injury to the
members of those families but in their injury to society. If one were
asked offhand to name the greatest evil of the day one might, in the light
of one's education by the newspapers, or by agitators, make any one of a
number of replies. One might say prostitution, the oppression of labor,
child labor, or war. Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into
prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly
cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her
mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a
prostitute. Labor is oppressed because it is too plentiful; wages go up
and conditions improve when labor is scarce. Large families make plentiful
labor and they also provide the workers for the child-labor factories as
well as the armies of unemployed. That population, swelled by
overbreeding, is a basic cause of war, we shall see in a later chapter.
Without the large family, not one of these evils could exist to any
considerable extent, much less to the extent that they exist to-day. The
large family--especially the family too large to receive adequate care--is
the one thing necessary to the perpetuation of these and other evils and
is therefore a greater evil than any one of them.

First of the manifold immoralities involved in the producing of a
large family is the outrage upon the womanhood of the mother. If no
mother bore children against her will or against her feminine
instinct, there would be few large families. The average mother of a
baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so
far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral
when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the
propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against "race suicide."
The wrong is as great as if the enslaving force were the unbridled
passions of her husband. The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived
of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, is in itself
enough to condemn large families as immoral.

The outrage upon the woman does not end there, however. Excessive
childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the
most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America
hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who
have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering
their children, incapable of enjoying life.

"Every physician," writes Dr. Wm. J. Robinson in _Birth Control or The
Limitation of Offspring_, "knows that too frequent childbirth, nursing
and the sleepless nights that are required in bringing up a child
exhaust the vitality of thousands of mothers, make them prematurely
old, or turn them into chronic invalids."

The effect of the large family upon the father is only less disastrous
than it is upon the mother. The spectacle of the young man, happy in
health, strength and the prospect of a joyful love life, makes us
smile in sympathy. But this same young man ten years later is likely
to present a spectacle as sorry as it is familiar. If he finds that
the children come one after another at short intervals--so fast indeed
that no matter how hard he works, nor how many hours, he cannot keep
pace with their needs--the lover whom all the world loves will have
been converted into a disheartened, threadbare incompetent, whom all
the world pities or despises. Instead of being the happy, competent
father, supporting one or two children as they should be supported, he
is the frantic struggler against the burden of five or six, with the
tragic prospect of several more. The ranks of the physically weakened,
mentally dejected and spiritually hopeless young fathers of large
families attest all too strongly the immorality of the system.

If its effects upon the mother and the wage-earning father were not
enough to condemn the large family as an institution, its effects upon
the child would make the case against it conclusive. In the United
States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve
months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or
indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting
from poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother.

The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner's family
and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by
a number of studies of the infant death rate. One of the clearest of
these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr.
Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress.
[Footnote: Problems in Eugenics, London, 1913.] Taking 26,000 births
from unselected marriages, and omitting families having one and two
children, Geissler got this result:

Deaths During
First Year.
1st born children 23%
2nd " " 20%
3rd " " 21%
4th " " 23%
5th " " 26%
6th " " 29%
7th " " 31%
8th " " 33%
9th " " 36%
10th " " 41%
11th " " 51%
12th " " 60%

Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance
to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and
less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live
twelve months.

This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go
farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a
year die before they reach the age of five.

Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the
immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of
proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find
difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most
merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members
is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant
mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the
ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the
health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes
of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this
condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that
the child who must struggle for health in competition with other
members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to
meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted
for.

The probability of a child handicapped by a weak constitution, an
overcrowded home, inadequate food and care, and possibly a deficient
mental equipment, winding up in prison or an almshouse, is too evident
for comment. Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and
institution for the feebleminded cries out against the evils of too
prolific breeding among wage-workers.

We shall see when we come to consider the relation of voluntary
motherhood to the rights of labor and to the prevention of war that
the large family of the worker makes possible his oppression, and that
it also is the chief cause of such human holocausts as the one just
closed after the four and a half bloodiest years in history. No such
extended consideration is necessary to indicate from what source the
young slaves in the child-labor factories come. They come from large
impoverished families--from families in which the older children must
put their often feeble strength to the task of supporting the younger.

The immorality of bringing large families into the world is recognized
by those who are combatting the child-labor evil. Mary Alden Hopkins,
writing in Harper's Weekly in 1915, quotes Owen R. Lovejoy, general
secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, as follows:

"How many are too many? ... Any more than the mother can look after
and the father make a living for ... Under present conditions as soon
as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go
to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by. In doing
this, they not only injure their tender growing bodies, but
indirectly, they drag down the father's wage ... The home becomes a
mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with
weariness and minds drunk with sleep." And if they survive the
factory, they marry to perpetuate and multiply their ignorance,
weakness and diseases.

What have large families to do with prostitution? Ask anyone who has
studied the problem. The size of the family has a direct bearing on
the lives of thousands of girls who are living in prostitution.
Poverty, lack of care and training during adolescence, overcrowded
housing conditions which accompany large families are universally
recognized causes of "waywardness" in girls. Social workers have cried
out in vain against these conditions, pointing to their inevitable
results.

In the foreword to "Downward Paths," A. Maude Royden says: "Intimately
connected with this aspect of the question is that of home and
housing, especially of the child. The age at which children are first
corrupted is almost incredibly early, until we consider the nature of
the surroundings in which they grow up. Insufficient space, over-crowding,
the herding together of all ages and both sexes--these things break
down the barriers of a natural modesty and reserve. Where decency
is practically impossible, unchastity will follow, and follow
almost as a matter of course." And the child who has no place to play
except in the street, who lacks mother care, whose chief emotional
experience is the longing for the necessities of life? We know too
well the end of the sorry tale. The forlorn figures of the shadows
where lurk the girls who sell themselves that they may eat and be
clothed rise up to damn the moral dogmatists, who mouth their
sickening exhortations to the wives and mothers of the workers to
breed, breed, breed.

The evidence is conclusive as regards the large family of the
wage-worker. Social workers, physicians and reformers cry out to stop the
breeding of these, who must exist in want until they become permanent
members of the ranks of the unfit.

But what of the family of the wealthy or the merely well-to-do? It is
among these classes that we find the women who have attained to
voluntary motherhood. It is to these classes, too, that the "race
suicide" alarmists have from time to time addressed specially
emphasized pleas for more children. The advocates of more prolific
breeding urge that these same women have more intelligence, better
health, more time to care for children and more means to support them.
They therefore declare that it is the duty of such women to populate
the land with strong, healthy, intelligent offspring--to bear children
in great numbers.

It is high time to expose the sheer foolishness of this argument. The
first absurdity is that the women who are in comfortable circumstances
could continue to be cultured and of social value if they were the
mothers of large families. Neither could they maintain their present
standard of health nor impart it to their children.

While it is true that they have resources at their command which ease
the burden of child-bearing and child rearing immeasurably, it is also
true that the wealthy mother, as well as the poverty-stricken mother,
must give from her own system certain elements which it takes time to
replace. Excessive childbearing is harder on the woman who lacks care
than on the one who does not, but both alike must give their bodies
time to recover from the strain of childbearing. If the women in
fortunate circumstances gave ear to the demand of masculine
"race-suicide"[A] fanatics they could within a few years be down to the
condition of their sisters who lack time to cultivate their talents
and intellects. A vigorous, intelligent, fruitfully cultured
motherhood is all but impossible if no restriction is placed by that
motherhood upon the number of children.

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