Woman and the New Race | Page 3

asylums with insane, and
institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the
prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for
prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of
human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more
effectively.
Woman's passivity under the burden of her disastrous task was almost
altogether that of ignorant resignation. She knew virtually nothing
about her reproductive nature and less about the consequences of her
excessive child-bearing. It is true that, obeying the inner urge of their
natures, some women revolted. They went even to the extreme of
infanticide and abortion. Usually their revolts were not general enough.
They fought as individuals, not as a mass. In the mass they sank back
into blind and hopeless subjection. They went on breeding with
staggering rapidity those numberless, undesired children who become
the clogs and the destroyers of civilizations.
To-day, however, woman is rising in fundamental revolt. Even her
efforts at mere reform are, as we shall see later, steps in that direction.
Underneath each of them is the feminine urge to complete freedom.
Millions of women are asserting their right to voluntary motherhood.
They are determined to decide for themselves whether they shall
become mothers, under what conditions and when. This is the
fundamental revolt referred to. It is for woman the key to the temple of
liberty.
Even as birth control is the means by which woman attains basic
freedom, so it is the means by which she must and will uproot the evil
she has wrought through her submission. As she has unconsciously and
ignorantly brought about social disaster, so must and will she
consciously and intelligently undo that disaster and create a new and a
better order.

The task is hers. It cannot be avoided by excuses, nor can it be
delegated. It is not enough for woman to point to the self-evident
domination of man. Nor does it avail to plead the guilt of rulers and the
exploiters of labor. It makes no difference that she does not formulate
industrial systems nor that she is an instinctive believer in social justice.
In her submission lies her error and her guilt. By her failure to withhold
the multitudes of children who have made inevitable the most flagrant
of our social evils, she incurred a debt to society. Regardless of her own
wrongs, regardless of her lack of opportunity and regardless of all other
considerations, she must pay that debt.
She must not think to pay this debt in any superficial way. She cannot
pay it with palliatives--with child-labor laws, prohibition, regulation of
prostitution and agitation against war. Political nostrums and social
panaceas are but incidentally and superficially useful. They do not
touch the source of the social disease.
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue
while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits
her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.
Two chief obstacles hinder the discharge of this tremendous obligation.
The first and the lesser is the legal barrier. Dark-Age laws would still
deny to her the knowledge of her reproductive nature. Such knowledge
is indispensable to intelligent motherhood and she must achieve it,
despite absurd statutes and equally absurd moral canons.
The second and more serious barrier is her own ignorance of the extent
and effect of her submission. Until she knows the evil her subjection
has wrought to herself, to her progeny and to the world at large, she
cannot wipe out that evil.
To get rid of these obstacles is to invite attack from the forces of
reaction which are so strongly entrenched in our present-day society. It
means warfare in every phase of her life. Nevertheless, at whatever cost,
she must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility.
She can do this only when she has awakened to a knowledge of herself

and of the consequences of her ignorance. The first step is birth control.
Through birth control she will attain to voluntary motherhood. Having
attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, she will cease to enslave
herself and the mass of humanity. Then, through the understanding of
the intuitive forward urge within her, she will not stop at patching up
the world; she will remake it.

CHAPTER II
WOMAN'S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
Behind all customs of whatever nature; behind all social unrest, behind
all movements, behind all revolutions, are great driving forces, which
in their action and reaction upon conditions, give character to
civilization. If, in seeking to discover the source of a custom, of a
movement or of a revolution, we stop at surface conditions, we shall
never discern more than a superficial aspect of the underlying truth.
This is the error into which