Woman and the New Race by Margaret Sanger

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No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy
themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally
defective. No matter how much they desire children, no man and woman
have a right to bring into the world those who are to suffer from
mental or physical affliction. It condemns the child to a life of
misery and places upon the community the burden of caring for it,
probably for its defective descendants for many generations.

Generally speaking, no woman should bear a child before she is twenty-two
years old. It is better still that she wait until she is twenty-five.
High infant mortality rates for mothers under twenty-two attest
this fact. It is highly desirable from the mother's standpoint to
postpone childbearing until she has attained a ripe physical and
mental development, as the bearing and nursing of infants interferes
with such development. It is also all important to the child; the
offspring of a woman who is twenty-five or somewhat older has the best
chance of good physical and mental equipment.

In brief, a woman should avoid having children unless both she and the
father are in such physical and mental condition as to assure the
child a healthy physical and mental being. This is the answer that
must be made to women whose children are fairly sure of good care,
sufficient food, adequate clothing, a fit place to live and at least a
fair education.

A distinctly different and exceedingly important side of the problem
must be considered when the women workers, the wives and the mothers
of workers, wish to know when to avoid having children. Such a woman
must answer her own question. What anyone else may tell her is far
less important than what she herself shall reply to a society that
demands more and more children and which gives them less and less when
they arrive.

What shall this woman say to a society that would make of her body a
reproductive machine only to waste prodigally the fruit of her being?
Does society value her offspring? Does it not let them die by the
hundreds of thousands of want, hunger and preventable disease? Does it
not drive them to the factories, the mills, the mines and the stores
to be stunted physically and mentally? Does it not throw them into the
labor market to be competitors with her and their father? Do we not
find the children of the South filling the mills, working side by side
with their mothers, while the fathers remain at home? Do we not find
the father, mother and child competing with one another for their
daily bread? Does society not herd them in slums? Does it not drive
the girls to prostitution and the boys to crime? Does it educate them
for free-spirited manhood and womanhood? Does it even give them during
their babyhood fit places to live in, fit clothes to wear, fit food to
eat, or a clean place to play? Does it even permit the mother to give
them a mother's care?

The woman of the workers knows what society does with her offspring.
Knowing the bitter truth, learned in unspeakable anguish, what shall
this woman say to society? The power is in her hands. She can bring
forth more children to perpetuate these conditions, or she can
withhold the human grist from these cruel mills which grind only
disaster.

Shall she say to society that she will go on multiplying the misery
that she herself has endured? Shall she go on breeding children who
can only suffer and die? Rather, shall she not say that until society
puts a higher value upon motherhood she will not be a mother? Shall
she not sacrifice her mother instincts for the common good and say
that until children are held as something better than commodities upon
the labor market, she will bear no more? Shall she not give up her
desire for even a small family, and say to society that until the
world is made fit for children to live in, she will have no children
at all?

CHAPTER VIII

BIRTH CONTROL--A PARENTS' PROBLEM OR WOMAN'S?

The problem of birth control has arisen directly from the effort of
the feminine spirit to free itself from bondage. Woman herself has
wrought that bondage through her reproductive powers and while
enslaving herself has enslaved the world. The physical suffering to be
relieved is chiefly woman's. Hers, too, is the love life that dies
first under the blight of too prolific breeding. Within her is wrapped
up the future of the race--it is hers to make or mar. All of these
considerations point unmistakably to one fact--it is woman's duty as
well as her privilege to lay hold of the means of freedom. Whatever
men may do, she cannot escape the responsibility. For ages she has
been deprived of the opportunity to meet this obligation. She is now
emerging from her helplessness. Even as no one can share the suffering
of the overburdened mother, so no one can do this work for her. Others
may help, but she and she alone can free herself.

The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot
be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a
measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call
herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call
herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will
not be a mother.

It does not greatly alter the case that some women call themselves
free because they earn their own livings, while others profess freedom
because they defy the conventions of sex relationship. She who earns
her own living gains a sort of freedom that is not to be undervalued,
but in quality and in quantity it is of little account beside the
untrammeled choice of mating or not mating, of being a mother or not
being a mother. She gains food and clothing and shelter, at least,
without submitting to the charity of her companion, but the earning of
her own living does not give her the development of her inner sex
urge, far deeper and more powerful in its outworkings than any of
these externals. In order to have that development, she must still
meet and solve the problem of motherhood.

With the so-called "free" woman, who chooses a mate in defiance of
convention, freedom is largely a question of character and audacity.
If she does attain to an unrestricted choice of a mate, she is still
in a position to be enslaved through her reproductive powers. Indeed,
the pressure of law and custom upon the woman not legally married is
likely to make her more of a slave than the woman fortunate enough to
marry the man of her choice.

Look at it from any standpoint you will, suggest any solution you
will, conventional or unconventional, sanctioned by law or in defiance
of law, woman is in the same position, fundamentally, until she is
able to determine for herself whether she will be a mother and to fix
the number of her offspring. This unavoidable situation is alone
enough to make birth control, first of all, a woman's problem. On the
very face of the matter, voluntary motherhood is chiefly the concern
of the woman.

It is persistently urged, however, that since sex expression is the
act of two, the responsibility of controlling the results should not
be placed upon woman alone. Is it fair, it is asked, to give her,
instead of the man, the task of protecting herself when she is,
perhaps, less rugged in physique than her mate, and has, at all
events, the normal, periodic inconveniences of her sex?

We must examine this phase of her problem in two lights--that of the
ideal, and of the conditions working toward the ideal. In an ideal
society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the man
as well as the woman. The hard, inescapable fact which we encounter
to-day is that man has not only refused any such responsibility, but
has individually and collectively sought to prevent woman from
obtaining knowledge by which she could assume this responsibility for
herself. She is still in the position of a dependent to-day because
her mate has refused to consider her as an individual apart from his
needs. She is still bound because she has in the past left the
solution of the problem to him. Having left it to him, she finds that
instead of rights, she has only such privileges as she has gained by
petitioning, coaxing and cozening. Having left it to him, she is
exploited, driven and enslaved to his desires.

While it is true that he suffers many evils as the consequence of this
situation, she suffers vastly more. While it is true that he should be
awakened to the cause of these evils, we know that they come home to
her with crushing force every day. It is she who has the long burden
of carrying, bearing and rearing the unwanted children. It is she who
must watch beside the beds of pain where lie the babies who suffer
because they have come into overcrowded homes. It is her heart that
the sight of the deformed, the subnormal, the undernourished, the
overworked child smites first and oftenest and hardest. It is _her_
love life that dies first in the fear of undesired pregnancy. It is
her opportunity for self expression that perishes first and most
hopelessly because of it.

Conditions, rather than theories, facts, rather than dreams, govern
the problem. They place it squarely upon the shoulders of woman. She
has learned that whatever the moral responsibility of the man in this
direction may be, he does not discharge it. She has learned that,
lovable and considerate as the individual husband may be, she has
nothing to expect from men in the mass, when they make laws and decree
customs. She knows that regardless of what ought to be, the brutal,
unavoidable fact is that she will never receive her freedom until she
takes it for herself.

Having learned this much, she has yet something more to learn. Women
are too much inclined to follow in the footsteps of men, to try to
think as men think, to try to solve the general problems of life as
men solve them. If after attaining their freedom, women accept
conditions in the spheres of government, industry, art, morals and
religion as they find them, they will be but taking a leaf out of
man's book. The woman is not needed to do man's work. She is not
needed to think man's thoughts. She need not fear that the masculine
mind, almost universally dominant, will fail to take care of its own.
Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the
feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a
human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its
activities.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by
that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that
within her which struggles for expression. Her eyes must be less upon
what is and more clearly upon what should be. She must listen only
with a frankly questioning attitude to the dogmatized opinions of
man-made society. When she chooses her new, free course of action, it must
be in the light of her own opinion--of her own intuition. Only so can
she give play to the feminine spirit. Only thus can she free her mate
from the bondage which he wrought for himself when he wrought hers.
Only thus can she restore to him that of which he robbed himself in
restricting her. Only thus can she remake the world.

The world is, indeed, hers to remake, it is hers to build and to
recreate. Even as she has permitted the suppression of her own
feminine element and the consequent impoverishment of industry, art,
letters, science, morals, religions and social intercourse, so it is
hers to enrich all these.

Woman must have her freedom--the fundamental freedom of choosing
whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will
have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers--and
before it can be his, it is hers alone.

She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As
it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this
ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That
right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to
knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision.

Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers
and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The
quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to
live.

CHAPTER IX

CONTINENCE--IS IT PRACTICABLE OR DESIRABLE?

Thousands of well-intentioned people who agree that there are times
and conditions under which it is woman's highest duty to avoid having
children advocate continence as the one permissible means of birth
control. Few of these people agree with one another, however, as to
what continence is. Some have in mind absolute continence. Others urge
continence for periods varying from a few weeks to many years. Still
others are thinking of Karezza, or male continence, as it is sometimes
called.

The majority of physicians and sex psychologists hold that the
practice of absolute continence is, for the greater part of the human
race, an absurdity. Were such continence to be practiced, there is no
doubt that it would be a most effective check upon the birth rate. It
is seldom practiced, however, and when adhered to under compulsion the
usual result is injury to the nervous system and to the general
health. Among healthy persons, this method is practicable only with
those who have a degree of mentally controlled development as yet
neither often experienced nor even imagined by the mass of humanity.

Absolute continence was the ideal of the early Christian church for
all of its communicants, as shall be seen in another chapter. We shall
also see how the church abandoned this standard and now confines the
doctrine of celibacy to the unmarried, to the priesthood and the nuns.

Celibacy has been practiced in all ages by a few artists,
propagandists and revolutionists in order that their minds may be
single to the work which has claimed their lives and all the forces of
their beings may be bent in one direction. Sometimes, too, such
persons have remained celibate to avoid the burden of caring for a
family.

The Rev. Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798 issued the first of
those works which exemplified what is called the Malthusian doctrine,
also advocated celibacy or absolute continence until middle age.
Malthus propounded the now widely recognized principle that population
tends to increase faster than the food supply and that unlimited
reproduction brings poverty and many other evils upon a nation. His
theological training naturally inclined him to favor continence--not
so much from its practicability, perhaps, as because he believed that
it was the only possible method.

We would be ignoring a vital truth if we failed to recognize the fact
that there are individuals who through absorption in religious zeal,
consecration to a cause, or devotion to creative work are able to live
for years or for a lifetime a celibate existence. It is doubtless true
that the number of those who are thus able to transmute their sex
forces into other creative forms is increasing. It is not with these,
however, that we are concerned. Rather it is with the mass of
humanity, who practice continence under some sort of compulsion.

What is the result of forcing continence upon those who are not fitted
or do not desire to practice it? The majority opinion of medical
science and the evidence of statistics are united on this point.
Enforced continence is injurious--often highly so.

"Physiology," writes Dr. J. Rutgers in _Rassenverbesserung_, "teaches
that every function gains in power and efficiency through a certain
degree of control, but that the too extended suppression of a desire
gives rise to pathological disturbances and in time cripples the
function. Especially in the case of women may the damage entailed by
too long continued sexual abstinence bring about deep disturbances."

All this, be it understood, refers to persons of mature age. For young
men and women under certain ages, statistics and the preponderance of
medical opinion agree that continence is highly advisable, in many
cases seemingly altogether necessary to future happiness. The famous
Dr. Bertillon, of France, inventor of the Bertillon system of
measurements for the human body, has made, perhaps, the most
exhaustive of all studies in this direction. He demonstrates a large
mortality for the boy who marries before his twentieth year. When
single, the mortality of French youths averages only 14 per thousand;
among married youths it rises to 100 per thousand. Which shows that it
is six or eight times more perilous for a youth to be incontinent than
continent up to that age. Dr. Bertillon's conclusions are that men
should marry between their twenty-fifth and thirtieth years, and that
women should marry when they have passed twenty. With the single
exception of young men and women below the ages noted, Dr. Bertillon's
statistics tell a very different story. And where it relates to
celibates, it is a shocking one.

"Dr. Bertillon shows that in France, Belgium and Holland married men
live considerably longer than single ones," writes Dr. Charles R.
Drysdale, in summing up the matter in "_The Population Question_" "and
are much less subject to becoming insane, criminal or vicious." From
the same studies we learn that the conjugal state is also more
favorable to the health of the woman over twenty years of age, in the
three countries covered.

An analysis of criminal records showed that more than twice as many
unmarried men and women had been held for crimes of all kinds than
married persons. Rates based upon 10,000 cases of insanity among men
and women in the same countries showed 3.95 per thousand for male
celibates against 2.17 for married men. For single women the rate was
3.4 against but 1.9 for married women. Insanity was reduced one-half
among women by marriage.

More startling still is the evidence of the mortality statistics.
Bertillon found that the death rates of bachelors and widowers
averaged from nearly two to nearly three times as high as those of
married men of the same ages. Dr. Mayer, in his _Rapports Conjugaux_,
showed that the death rates among the celibate religious orders
studied were nearly twice as high as those of the laity.

Can anyone knowing the facts ask that we recommend continence as a
birth-control measure?

Virtually all of the dangers to health involved in absolute continence
are involved also in the practice of continence broken only when it is
desired to bring a child into the world. In the opinion of some
medical authorities, it is even worse, because of the almost constant
excitation of unsatisfied sex desire by the presence of the mate.
People who think that they believe in this sort of family limitation
have much to say about "self-control." Usually they will admit that to
abstain from all but a single act of sexual intercourse each year is
an indication of high powers of self-restraint. Yet that one act,
performed only once a year, might be sufficient to "keep a woman with
one child in her womb and another at her breast" during her entire
childbearing period. That would mean from eighteen to twenty-four
children for each mother, provided she survived so many births and
lactations. Contraceptives are quite as necessary to these
"self-controlled" ones who do not desire children every year
as to those who lead normal, happy love lives.

From the necessity of contraceptives and from the dangers of this
limited continence certain persons are, of course, relieved. They are
the ones whose mental and spiritual development is so high as to make
this practice natural to them. These individuals are so exceedingly
rare, however, that they need not be discussed here. Moreover, they
are capable of solving their own problems.

Few who advocate the doctrine of absolute continence live up to it
strictly. I met one woman who assured me that she had observed it
faithfully in the thirteen years since her youngest child was born.
She had such a loathing for sexual union, however, that it was
doubtless the easiest and best thing for her to do.

Loathing, disgust or indifference to the sex relationship nearly
always lies behind the advocacy to continence except for the conscious
purpose of creating children. In other words, while one in ten
thousand persons may find full play for a diverted and transmuted sex
force in other creative functions, the rest avoid the sex union from
repression. These are two widely different situations--one may make
for racial progress and the happiness of the few individuals capable
of it; the other poisons the race at its fountain and brings nothing
but the discontent, unhappiness and misery which follow enforced
continence. For all that, an increasing number of persons, mostly
women, are advocating continence within marriage.

Sexual union is nearly always spoken of by such persons as something
in itself repugnant, disgusting, low and lustful. Consciously or
unconsciously, they look upon it as a hardship, to be endured only, to
bring "God's image and likeness" into the world. Their very attitude
precludes any great probability that their progeny will possess an
abundance of such qualities.

Much of the responsibility for this feeling upon the part of many
thousands of women must be laid to two thousand years of Christian
teaching that all sex expression is unclean. Part of it, too, must be
laid to the dominant male's habit of violating the love rights of his
mate.

The habit referred to grows out of the assumed and legalized right of
the husband to have sexual satisfaction at any time he desires,
regardless of the woman's repugnance for it. The law of the state
upholds him in this regard. A husband need not support his wife if she
refuses to comply with his sexual demands.

Of the two groups of women who regard physical union either with
disgust and loathing, or with indifference, the former are the less
numerous. Nevertheless, there are many thousands of them. I have
listened to their stories often, both as a nurse in obstetrical cases
and as a propagandist for birth control. An almost universal cause of
their attitude is a sad lack of understanding of the great beauties of
the normal, idealistic love act. Neither do they understand the
uplifting power of such unions for both men and women. Ignorance of
life, ignorance of all but the sheer reproductive function of mating,
and especially a wrong training, are most largely responsible for this
tragic state of affairs. When this ignorance extends to the man in
such a degree as to permit him to have the all too frequent coarse and
brutal attitude toward sex matters, the tragedy is only deepened.

Truly the church and those "moralists" who have been insisting upon
keeping sex matters in the dark have a huge list of concealed crimes
to answer for. The right kind of a book, a series of clear, scientific
lectures, or a common-sense talk with either the man or woman will
often do away with most of the repugnance to physical union. When the
repugnance is gone, the way is open to that upliftment through sex
idealism which is the birthright of all women and men.

When I have had the confidence of women indifferent to physical union,
I have found the fault usually lay with the husband. His idea of
marriage is too often that of providing a home for a female who would
in turn provide for his physical needs, including sexual satisfaction.
Such a husband usually excludes such satisfaction from the category of
the wife's needs, physical or spiritual.

This man is not concerned with his wife's sex urge, save as it
responds to his own at times of his choosing. Man's code has taught
woman to be quite ashamed of such desires. Usually she speaks of
indifference without regret; often proudly. She seems to regard
herself as more chaste and highly endowed in purity than other women
who confess to feeling physical attraction toward their husbands. She
also secretly considers herself far superior to the husband who makes
no concealment of his desire toward her. Nevertheless, because of this
desire upon the husband's part, she goes on "pretending" to mutual
interest in the relationship.

Only the truth, plainly spoken, can help these people. The woman is
condemned to physical, mental and spiritual misery by the ignorance
which society has fixed upon her. She has her choice between an
enforced continence, with its health-wrecking consequences and its
constant aggravation of domestic discord, and the sort of prostitution
legalized by the marriage ceremony. The man may choose between
enforced continence and its effects, or he may resort to an unmarried
relationship or to prostitution. Neither of these people--the one
schooled directly or indirectly by the church and the other trained in
the sex ethics of the gutter--can hope to lift the other to the
regenerating influences of a pure, clean, happy love life. As long as
we leave sex education to the gutter and houses of prostitution, we
shall have millions of just such miserable marriage failures.

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