The Pivot of Civilization

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THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION


By Margaret Sanger




To Alice Drysdale Vickery

Whose prophetic vision of liberated womanhood has been an inspiration



"I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger
than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains
modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were
in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with
a loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends
told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world
in the self-sacrificing passion of human service. I have dreamed of that
world ever since I began to dream at all."

--Havelock Ellis




CONTENTS

Introduction By H. G. Wells

Chapter
I A New Truth Emerges
II Conscripted Motherhood
III "Children Troop Down from Heaven"
IV The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded
V The Cruelty of Charity
VI Neglected Factors of the World Problem
VII Is Revolution the Remedy?
VIII Dangers of Cradle Competition
IX A Moral Necessity
X Science the Ally
XI Education and Expression
XII Woman and the Future

Appendix: Principles and Aims of the American Birth Control League




INTRODUCTION

Birth control, Mrs. Sanger claims, and claims rightly, to be a question
of fundamental importance at the present time. I do not know how far
one is justified in calling it the pivot or the corner-stone of a
progressive civilization. These terms involve a criticism of metaphors
that may take us far away from the question in hand. Birth Control is no
new thing in human experience, and it has been practised in societies of
the most various types and fortunes. But there can be little doubt that
at the present time it is a test issue between two widely different
interpretations of the word civilization, and of what is good in life
and conduct. The way in which men and women range themselves in this
controversy is more simply and directly indicative of their general
intellectual quality than any other single indication. I do not wish to
imply by this that the people who oppose are more or less intellectual
than the people who advocate Birth Control, but only that they have
fundamentally contrasted general ideas,--that, mentally, they are
DIFFERENT. Very simple, very complex, very dull and very brilliant
persons may be found in either camp, but all those in either camp have
certain attitudes in common which they share with one another, and do
not share with those in the other camp.

There have been many definitions of civilization. Civilization is a
complexity of count less aspects, and may be validly defined in a great
number of relationships. A reader of James Harvey Robinson's MIND IN THE
MAKING will find it very reasonable to define a civilization as a system
of society-making ideas at issue with reality. Just so far as the system
of ideas meets the needs and conditions of survival or is able to
adapt itself to the needs and conditions of survival of the society
it dominates, so far will that society continue and prosper. We are
beginning to realize that in the past and under different conditions
from our own, societies have existed with systems of ideas and with
methods of thought very widely contrasting with what we should consider
right and sane to-day. The extraordinary neolithic civilizations of the
American continent that flourished before the coming of the Europeans,
seem to have got along with concepts that involved pedantries and
cruelties and a kind of systematic unreason, which find their closest
parallels to-day in the art and writings of certain types of lunatic.
There are collections of drawings from English and American asylums
extraordinarily parallel in their spirit and quality with the Maya
inscriptions of Central America. Yet these neolithic American societies
got along for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, they respected
seed-time and harvest, they bred and they maintained a grotesque and
terrible order. And they produced quite beautiful works of art. Yet
their surplus of population was disposed of by an organization of
sacrificial slaughter unparalleled in the records of mankind. Many of
the institutions that seemed most normal and respectable to them, filled
the invading Europeans with perplexity and horror.

When we realize clearly this possibility of civilizations being based
on very different sets of moral ideas and upon different intellectual
methods, we are better able to appreciate the profound significance of
the schism in our modern community, which gives us side by side, honest
and intelligent people who regard Birth Control as something essentially
sweet, sane, clean, desirable and necessary, and others equally honest
and with as good a claim to intelligence who regard it as not merely
unreasonable and unwholesome, but as intolerable and abominable. We are
living not in a simple and complete civilization, but in a conflict
of at least two civilizations, based on entirely different fundamental
ideas, pursuing different methods and with different aims and ends.

I will call one of these civilizations our Traditional or Authoritative
Civilization. It rests upon the thing that is, and upon the thing that
has been. It insists upon respect for custom and usage; it discourages
criticism and enquiry. It is very ancient and conservative, or, going
beyond conservation, it is reactionary. The vehement hostility of many
Catholic priests and prelates towards new views of human origins, and
new views of moral questions, has led many careless thinkers to
identify this old traditional civilization with Christianity, but that
identification ignores the strongly revolutionary and initiatory
spirit that has always animated Christianity, and is untrue even to the
realities of orthodox Catholic teaching. The vituperation of individual
Catholics must not be confused with the deliberate doctrines of the
Church which have, on the whole, been conspicuously cautious and
balanced and sane in these matters. The ideas and practices of the Old
Civilization are older and more widespread than and not identifiable
with either Christian or Catholic culture, and it will be a great
misfortune if the issues between the Old Civilization and the New are
allowed to slip into the deep ruts of religious controversies that are
only accidentally and intermittently parallel.

Contrasted with the ancient civilization, with the Traditional
disposition, which accepts institutions and moral values as though they
were a part of nature, we have what I may call--with an evident bias
in its favour--the civilization of enquiry, of experimental knowledge,
Creative and Progressive Civilization. The first great outbreak of the
spirit of this civilization was in republican Greece; the martyrdom of
Socrates, the fearless Utopianism of Plato, the ambitious encyclopaedism
of Aristotle, mark the dawn of a new courage and a new wilfulness in
human affairs. The fear of set limitations, of punitive and restrictive
laws imposed by Fate upon human life was visibly fading in human minds.
These names mark the first clear realization that to a large extent, and
possibly to an illimitable extent, man's moral and social life and his
general destiny could be seized upon and controlled by man. But--he
must have knowledge. Said the Ancient Civilization--and it says it still
through a multitude of vigorous voices and harsh repressive acts:
"Let man learn his duty and obey." Says the New Civilization, with
ever-increasing confidence: "Let man know, and trust him."

For long ages, the Old Civilization kept the New subordinate, apologetic
and ineffective, but for the last two centuries, the New has fought its
way to a position of contentious equality. The two go on side by side,
jostling upon a thousand issues. The world changes, the conditions of
life change rapidly, through that development of organized science which
is the natural method of the New Civilization. The old tradition demands
that national loyalties and ancient belligerence should continue. The
new has produced means of communication that break down the pens and
separations of human life upon which nationalist emotion depends. The
old tradition insists upon its ancient blood-letting of war; the new
knowledge carries that war to undreamt of levels of destruction. The
ancient system needed an unrestricted breeding to meet the normal
waste of life through war, pestilence, and a multitude of hitherto
unpreventable diseases. The new knowledge sweeps away the venerable
checks of pestilence and disease, and confronts us with the congestions
and explosive dangers of an over-populated world. The old tradition
demands a special prolific class doomed to labor and subservience; the
new points to mechanism and to scientific organization as a means of
escape from this immemorial subjugation. Upon every main issue in life,
there is this quarrel between the method of submission and the method
of knowledge. More and more do men of science and intelligent people
generally realize the hopelessness of pouring new wine into old bottles.
More and more clearly do they grasp the significance of the Great
Teacher's parable.

The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: "We cannot go on making
power for you to spend upon international conflict. You must stop waving
flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of the World;
you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we
cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth,
if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent
of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to
their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the
social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the
ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon
us." And there at the passionate and crucial question, this essential
and fundamental question, whether procreation is still to be a
superstitious and often disastrous mystery, undertaken in fear and
ignorance, reluctantly and under the sway of blind desires, or whether
it is to become a deliberate creative act, the two civilizations join
issue now. It is a conflict from which it is almost impossible to
abstain. Our acts, our way of living, our social tolerance, our very
silences will count in this crucial decision between the old and the
new.

In a plain and lucid style without any emotional appeals, Mrs. Margaret
Sanger sets out the case of the new order against the old. There have
been several able books published recently upon the question of Birth
Control, from the point of view of a woman's personal life, and from the
point of view of married happiness, but I do not think there has been
any book as yet, popularly accessible, which presents this matter from
the point of view of the public good, and as a necessary step to the
further improvement of human life as a whole. I am inclined to think
that there has hitherto been rather too much personal emotion spent upon
this business and far too little attention given to its broader aspects.
Mrs. Sanger with her extraordinary breadth of outlook and the real
scientific quality of her mind, has now redressed the balance. She
has lifted this question from out of the warm atmosphere of troubled
domesticity in which it has hitherto been discussed, to its proper level
of a predominantly important human affair.

H.G. Wells

Easton Glebe, Dunmow,

Essex., England




THE PIVOT OF CIVILIZATION



CHAPTER I: A New Truth Emerges

Be not ashamed, women, 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.

--Walt Whitman

This book aims to be neither the first word on the tangled problems of
human society to-day, nor the last. My aim has been to emphasize, by the
use of concrete and challenging examples and neglected facts, the
need of a new approach to individual and social problems. Its central
challenge is that civilization, in any true sense of the word, is based
upon the control and guidance of the great natural instinct of Sex.
Mastery of this force is possible only through the instrument of Birth
Control.

It may be objected that in the following pages I have rushed in
where academic scholars have feared to tread, and that as an active
propagandist I am lacking in the scholarship and documentary preparation
to undertake such a stupendous task. My only defense is that, from my
point of view at least, too many are already studying and investigating
social problems from without, with a sort of Olympian detachment. And on
the other hand, too few of those who are engaged in this endless war for
human betterment have found the time to give to the world those truths
not always hidden but practically unquarried, which may be secured only
after years of active service.

Of late, we have been treated to accounts written by well-meaning ladies
and gentlemen who have assumed clever disguises and have gone out to
work--for a week or a month--among the proletariat. But can we thus
learn anything new of the fundamental problems of working men, working
women, working children? Something, perhaps, but not those great central
problems of Hunger and Sex. We have been told that only those who
themselves have suffered the pangs of starvation can truly understand
Hunger. You might come into the closest contact with a starving man;
yet, if you were yourself well-fed, no amount of sympathy could give you
actual insight into the psychology of his suffering. This suggests an
objective and a subjective approach to all social problems. Whatever the
weakness of the subjective (or, if you prefer, the feminine) approach,
it has at least the virtue that its conclusions are tested by
experience. Observation of facts about you, intimate subjective
reaction to such facts, generate in your mind certain fundamental
convictions,--truths you can ignore no more than you can ignore such
truths as come as the fruit of bitter but valuable personal experience.

Regarding myself, I may say that my experience in the course of the
past twelve or fifteen years has been of a type to force upon me certain
convictions that demand expression. For years I had believed that the
solution of all our troubles was to be found in well-defined programmes
of political and legislative action. At first, I concentrated my whole
attention upon these, only to discover that politicians and law-makers
are just as confused and as much at a loss in solving fundamental
problems as anyone else. And I am speaking here not so much of the
corrupt and ignorant politician as of those idealists and reformers who
think that by the ballot society may be led to an earthly paradise. They
may honestly desire and intend to do great things. They may positively
glow--before election--with enthusiasm at the prospect they imagine
political victory may open to them. Time after time, I was struck by the
change in their attitude after the briefest enjoyment of this illusory
power. Men are elected during some wave of reform, let us say, elected
to legislate into practical working existence some great ideal. They
want to do big things; but a short time in office is enough to show the
political idealist that he can accomplish nothing, that his reform
must be debased and dragged into the dust, so that even if it becomes
enacted, it may be not merely of no benefit, but a positive evil. It
is scarcely necessary to emphasize this point. It is an accepted
commonplace of American politics. So much of life, so large a part of
all our social problems, moreover, remains untouched by political and
legislative action. This is an old truth too often ignored by those who
plan political campaigns upon the most superficial knowledge of human
nature.

My own eyes were opened to the limitations of political action when, as
an organizer for a political group in New York, I attended by chance
a meeting of women laundry-workers who were on strike. We believed
we could help these women with a legislative measure and asked their
support. "Oh! that stuff!" exclaimed one of these women. "Don't you know
that we women might be dead and buried if we waited for politicians and
lawmakers to right our wrongs?" This set me to thinking--not merely of
the immediate problem--but to asking myself how much any male politician
could understand of the wrongs inflicted upon poor working women.

I threw the weight of my study and activity into the economic and
industrial struggle. Here I discovered men and women fired with the
glorious vision of a new world, of a proletarian world emancipated, a
Utopian world,--it glowed in romantic colours for the majority of those
with whom I came in closest contact. The next step, the immediate step,
was another matter, less romantic and too often less encouraging. In
their ardor, some of the labor leaders of that period almost convinced
us that the millennium was just around the corner. Those were the
pre-war days of dramatic strikes. But even when most under the spell
of the new vision, the sight of the overburdened wives of the strikers,
with their puny babies and their broods of under-fed children, made us
stop and think of a neglected factor in the march toward our earthly
paradise. It was well enough to ask the poor men workers to carry on the
battle against economic injustice. But what results could be expected
when they were forced in addition to carry the burden of their
ever-growing families? This question loomed large to those of us who
came into intimate contact with the women and children. We saw that in
the final analysis the real burden of economic and industrial warfare
was thrust upon the frail, all-too-frail shoulders of the children,
the very babies--the coming generation. In their wan faces, in their
undernourished bodies, would be indelibly written the bitter defeat of
their parents.

The eloquence of those who led the underpaid and half-starved workers
could no longer, for me, at least, ring with conviction. Something
more than the purely economic interpretation was involved. The bitter
struggle for bread, for a home and material comfort, was but one phase
of the problem. There was another phase, perhaps even more fundamental,
that had been absolutely neglected by the adherents of the new dogmas.
That other phase was the driving power of instinct, a power uncontrolled
and unnoticed. The great fundamental instinct of sex was expressing
itself in these ever-growing broods, in the prosperity of the slum
midwife and her colleague the slum undertaker. In spite of all my
sympathy with the dream of liberated Labor, I was driven to ask whether
this urging power of sex, this deep instinct, was not at least partially
responsible, along with industrial injustice, for the widespread misery
of the world.

To find an answer to this problem which at that point in my experience
I could not solve, I determined to study conditions in Europe. Perhaps
there I might discover a new approach, a great illumination. Just before
the outbreak of the war, I visited France, Spain, Germany and Great
Britain. Everywhere I found the same dogmas and prejudices among labor
leaders, the same intense but limited vision, the same insistence upon
the purely economic phases of human nature, the same belief that if the
problem of hunger were solved, the question of the women and children
would take care of itself. In this attitude I discovered, then, what
seemed to me to be purely masculine reasoning; and because it was purely
masculine, it could at best be but half true. Feminine insight must be
brought to bear on all questions; and here, it struck me, the fallacy
of the masculine, the all-too-masculine, was brutally exposed. I was
encouraged and strengthened in this attitude by the support of certain
leaders who had studied human nature and who had reached the same
conclusion: that civilization could not solve the problem of Hunger
until it recognized the titanic strength of the sexual instinct. In
Spain, I found that Lorenzo Portet, who was carrying on the work of the
martyred Francisco Ferrer, had reached this same conclusion. In Italy,
Enrico Malatesta, the valiant leader who was after the war to play
so dramatic a role, was likewise combating the current dogma of the
orthodox Socialists. In Berlin, Rudolph Rocker was engaged in the
thankless task of puncturing the articles of faith of the orthodox
Marxian religion. It is quite needless to add that these men who had
probed beneath the surface of the problem and had diagnosed so much more
completely the complex malady of contemporary society were intensely
disliked by the superficial theorists of the neo-Marxian School.

The gospel of Marx had, however, been too long and too thoroughly
inculcated into the minds of millions of workers in Europe, to be
discarded. It is a flattering doctrine, since it teaches the laborer
that all the fault is with someone else, that he is the victim of
circumstances, and not even a partner in the creation of his own and his
child's misery. Not without significance was the additional discovery
that I made. I found that the Marxian influence tended to lead workers
to believe that, irrespective of the health of the poor mothers, the
earning capacity of the wage-earning fathers, or the upbringing of
the children, increase of the proletarian family was a benefit, not
a detriment to the revolutionary movement. The greater the number of
hungry mouths, the emptier the stomachs, the more quickly would the
"Class War" be precipitated. The greater the increase in population
among the proletariat, the greater the incentive to revolution. This
may not be sound Marxian theory; but it is the manner in which it is
popularly accepted. It is the popular belief, wherever the Marxian
influence is strong. This I found especially in England and Scotland. In
speaking to groups of dockworkers on strike in Glasgow, and before the
communist and co-operative guilds throughout England, I discovered
a prevailing opposition to the recognition of sex as a factor in the
perpetuation of poverty. The leaders and theorists were immovable in
their opposition. But when once I succeeded in breaking through the
surface opposition of the rank and file of the workers, I found that
they were willing to recognize the power of this neglected factor in
their lives.

So central, so fundamental in the life of every man and woman is this
problem that they need be taught no elaborate or imposing theory to
explain their troubles. To approach their problems by the avenue of sex
and reproduction is to reveal at once their fundamental relations to the
whole economic and biological structure of society. Their interest is
immediately and completely awakened. But always, as I soon discovered,
the ideas and habits of thought of these submerged masses have been
formed through the Press, the Church, through political institutions,
all of which had built up a conspiracy of silence around a subject
that is of no less vital importance than that of Hunger. A great wall
separates the masses from those imperative truths that must be known
and flung wide if civilization is to be saved. As currently constituted,
Church, Press, Education seem to-day organized to exploit the ignorance
and the prejudices of the masses, rather than to light their way to
self-salvation.

Such was the situation in 1914, when I returned to America, determined,
since the exclusively masculine point of view had dominated too long,
that the other half of the truth should be made known. The Birth
Control movement was launched because it was in this form that the
whole relation of woman and child--eternal emblem of the future of
society--could be more effectively dramatized. The amazing growth
of this movement dates from the moment when in my home a small group
organized the first Birth Control League. Since then we have been
criticized for our choice of the term "Birth Control" to express
the idea of modern scientific contraception. I have yet to hear
any criticism of this term that is not based upon some false and
hypocritical sense of modesty, or that does not arise out of a
semi-prurient misunderstanding of its aim. On the other hand: nothing
better expresses the idea of purposive, responsible, and self-directed
guidance of the reproductive powers.

Those critics who condemn Birth Control as a negative, destructive
idea, concerned only with self-gratification, might profitably open
the nearest dictionary for a definition of "control." There they would
discover that the verb "control" means to exercise a directing, guiding,
or restraining influence;--to direct, to regulate, to counteract.
Control is guidance, direction, foresight. It implies intelligence,
forethought and responsibility. They will find in the Standard
Dictionary a quotation from Lecky to the effect that, "The greatest of
all evils in politics is power without control." In what phase of life
is not "power without control" an evil? Birth Control, therefore, means
not merely the limitation of births, but the application of intelligent
guidance over the reproductive power. It means the substitution of
reason and intelligence for the blind play of instinct.