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The Project Gutenberg Etext of 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