Constructive Birth Control
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, —
Why have I gathered round me this great multitude? I have in mind many reasons — more reasons than I could make clear to you if I were to speak from now to dawn. But some of the reasons which will perhaps interest you may be classed, like the old-fashioned sermon, under three main heads. The three main reasons why I have brought you together (and may I say how I welcome you and how glad I am that you have responded to my call) are as foll9ws: —
The first is that this meeting should be a welcome to the Clinic, and a voicing of the cry of all that multitude of miserable and unhappy women, each so scattered and isolated that their united cry has never yet been heard by the public.
My second reason is to make it possible for those who really feel with me to know that others are feeling as they do; to offer a centre for the crystallization of ideas and thought upon this subject; to let those myriads of people who feel intensely upon this subject know that they need not be afraid of owning they do feel; to give them the knowledge that there are thousands of others with them, and that therefore they have nothing to fear any longer by letting the world know they feel.
Constructive birth control is the key of all racial progress. It should be one of the planks of the League of Nations platform. It is the only true safeguard of international peace.
My third reason is to express even if only a small part of a wonderful and great hope. The hope of progress toward that beautiful ideal of a humanity living in health, happiness and real vital joy, which is concealed and contained in the message of constructive birth control.
Like the old-fashioned preacher, I will now go back on the three heads and say a word about each.
As regards the formation of the Clinic: I may say that the Clinic has been (as my husband mentioned) the dream of our lives for very long, but before we opened it little did he or I realize the full urgency and the tragic necessity for its foundation. The cases which have come to us have already justified its existence.
Sometimes those who feel intensely with me, yet shrink from doing anything for the oor mothers, because they think that by so helping them young girls and others will learn methods of birth control and may thus be sent downhill on a life they ought not to embark upon. So I want to make it clear once and for all that such an idea must not be allowed to hinder us. One of the very first experiences in the Birth Control Clinic was a strong case to show how misguided that would be. The second person who came to my Clinic when it was first opened came on behalf of a girl of twenty who was pregnant for the sixth time! And every previous time she had had an abortion performed by her own mother! We, of course, had no help for that girl. We cannot deal with such cases. Yet it shows that in that terrible underworld of misery and anguish which we selfish, self-centered, lazy people so seldom visualize and understand, there is already “knowledge” of a kind. “Knowledge” is going round which is utterly detrimental, utterly unwholesome and tragic in its effects. The true knowledge which we are bringing to counteract that is clean and wholesome, and is pure physiological information to replace the miserable half-knowledge which already exists.
Then too another aspect of my Birth Control Clinic is lit up by the fact that by the word “control” [—] I mean CONTROL. It is extraordinary how the words “birth control” have become associated with a negative and repressive movement. Now, in my opinion, control consists in being able to go uphill just as well as to go downhill; to turn to the right as well as to the left. One of the features of our Clinic is our sympathy toward the childless wife who longs for a child. They are many. We gladly help the childless woman with knowledge which may bring, and often has brought, the conception so ardently desired. Let it be made clear that by birth control I mean not merely the repression of lives which ought not to be started, but the bringing into the world of healthy, happy, desired babies. As Nurse Hebbes, sitting here on the platform, who so splendidly helps to run the Clinic, can tell you, we have had many cases already of childless women who come to us for help. I will tell you the story of one woman who came a fortnight ago.
She was one of the type that certain clergymen in their pulpits would refer to us as “those wicked women who refuse maternity.” All through her marriage she had openly declared she did not want children. But to me she came for help and said: “I have been married seventeen years and have not had a child.” I asked whether she wished she had one and she said: “Of course, of course I want a child, but I’ve never told anyone; I pretend that I do not want one because I can’t get it,” and then she cried, and exclaimed: “I could give my life, and suffer any torture to have a child.” We gave her information which I think will help, and I hope that in about nine months there may be a Clinic baby in that home.
Another incredible thing is the general lack of knowledge about sex, and all the wonderful and beautiful mysteris of marriage. The extent of this ignorance is extraordinary. Do you know we have had five cases of people married for years, and in each case the husband has not known how to play his part and the wife is still a virgin, and she wonders why she does not have a child!
These few instances will help you to understand that we have a constructive and not merely a repressive policy. We desire to give helpful information on all the aspects of the great problems of sex and marriage which are at present overlooked and yet are the most urgent mattetrs on which help can be given.
A word again about my second heading. This meeting is planned to crystallize and to concentrate public opinion on the subject. In the three years since my first book on this theme, Married Love, was published, I have never had a day without “letters to the author” from all sorts of people all over the world. I remember once reading an essay by Maurice Hewlett in which he mentioned how gratifying it was to an author to receive a letter of appreciation from some unknown person. I have had thousands of such letters. The burden of thousands of lives has been laid upon my shoulders in these letters. I am almost weary of what should be a pleasure. Nevertheless this correspondence has shown me that there are thousands of people who feel as I feel and have expressed in my books about these subjects, but who fear that they stand alone and have no public opinion to support them. They fear that if Mrs. So-and-So were to know of their adherence to these principles they woudl be ostracized, or some social evil come upon them. I am getting increasing evidence, howeveer, that the vast body of thinking people in this country are really with us. Hence I thought it would be a good thing to let the world know that, at any rate, there were enough in London alone to fill the Queen’s Hall for a meeting on this subject.
A little while ago the newspapers were very eager to interview me; at any rate, they chased me round and telephones me up, owing to the fact that America had recently banned my book as “improper.” Why was that? The interesting thing about America is that she is a country of such extraordinary contrasts. She both leads in advanced ideas and dallies behind in the middle ages. In America there was an old man named Anthony Comstock, and about the eighteen-seventies he came to the conclusion that all sound knowledge on sex was indecent. So he got a law passed called the “Comstock Law,” and included as indecent and obscene any books giving physiological knowledge about birth control. Now in Married Love there are a couple of pages devoted to this subject, and, therefore, the book is classed as improper. I might mention taht the two judges who decided that it was improper were Roman Catholics.
Last night I got a letter from America from the great Society which is endeavouring to get this law altered. Mrs. Mary Ware Dennett, one of the direcyors, writes as follows: —
I talk about your Clinic all the time, and I find that many people would like very much to have a copy of the announcement. You may be sure that the work you are doing is having an effect far outside London.
The echoes of this meeting to-night will circle the world.
To-night’s meeting, although composed mostly of London people, is really representative of a much larger body of people who are with us in spirit from not only different parts of England, but from America and distant lands.
To come to my third and chief heading: this ideal that we are trying to place before humanity: what have I to say in regard to that?
In the first place this ideal differs from those widely distant Utopias which are generally presented, in being a really practical and achievable ideal. Now that is a great thing. We are living here and Utopia is so far away. Between the Utopia offered and the present there is always a great abyss, and there is no possibility of getting across. Utopia, therefore, is not much good to us. But we have an ideal, difficult of achievement it is true, but yet an ideal to which it is possible to win. Thus one is stirred to real endeavour, for the ideal we have to present is possible to achieve in my own lifetime. We have already to-day sufficient sound physiological knowledge to, from this moment (if one could only get everyone to know of it), check the birth of every diseased, unhealthy, unprepared-for child. We really can, as Dr. Killick Millard quoted, stem at the source this incessant stream of misery which is always greater than our resources can deal with.
How great this misery, and how great the expense of it is to our race, can be found by reading a few of these Blue-books. You could very advantageously spend a few shillings at Imperial House, Kingsway, buying Reports in regard to prisoins, costs of maintenance of schools of detention for the feeble-minded, asylums for the blind, schools for the defective, &c., &c. Do you realize to-day, you young men who are so taxed that you cannot afford to marry, that we are spending varying sums, up to even so much as £295 per inmate per year, to keep wastrels in these repressive institutions and prisions, in these schools for detention and institutes for wastrel children. Many and many a decent working man and his wife are raising a healthy family on £295 a year, and yet that amount is spent nationally on a single individual of no good to the community. Surely it is far better to spend the money on healthy, happy children who cost us far less per year than the wastrels!
To get rid of the wastrels in a Christian way we must see that they are not born.
Beyond this, this ideal which I present is not merely that we shall be simply healthy people and have only healthy children born; it is further that we shall consciously step forward to a greater potentiality of health, beauty, happiness and understanding of life. An old false idea, which early got incorporated into Christianity, is that the enjoyment of beauty and sex life in marriage was a wrong, or at any rate a lesser thing than the ascetic and repressed life. That idea is now doing us infinite harm. It is a lower and baser ideal which was suited to the earlier stages of evolution, but we have now passed through the stages of human evolution when that idea is of any further use. The ideal which humanity to-day needs is the ideal of a full joyous life of real understanding coupled with control, and with the full use of every beautiful aspect of the life of man and woman togetther. This ideal emerged and became active in the early eighteen hundreds to about 1868 in this country and America, but even so recently as that the time for it was not yet ripe. The people had not then sufficient scientific knowledge to back that ideal with the necessary basis of real understanding. Thus, as a result of various activities, that ideal got a set-back. The claim for the control of parenthood becamse associated with atheism and with a denial of God and of the higher powers of the universe. As a result of that many people were afraid to look at any aspect of this racial ideal and the birth control side of it got driven into the charge of people who were less in the habit of caring for spiritual and ideal things. I maintain that it is really only quite recently, even only since 1911, since Professor [Ernest] Starling’s great work on the hormones, and all the recent microscopical, biochemical and physiological discoveries, which have made it possible to present so reasoned and so detailed a scientific basis so as to give a sure foundation of understanding. We now can present a material scientific basis with which to embody spiritual ideals. It is only in the last few years that there has been any chance of this great ideal taking formal shape and embodying itself in the science of the human race. Then came the Great War. It is, in my opinion, one of the after results of the Great War that people are now ready to think seriously of the most serious and most beautiful thing so flife. This deep, real understanding of the beauty, the joy and the physiological aspects of the marriage relation can now gradually spread over the whole world secured by the knowledge which is to-day available.
I absolutely deny that the so-called “self-control” which consists of the ascetic repressing of mutual love between man and woman is a high ideal. It was a temporary ideal suited to a phase of life in which there was no scientific knowledge. I now say quite clearly that the truest and a far higher ideal is for a man and woman to love each other profoundly as a pair of individuals, and to benefit by that love and interchange which each needs from the other. And at the same time but as a separate conscious act, to create only those children for which they have sufficient means, sufficient love and sufficient health. That is to say, that married lovers should play the part of parents only when they can add individuals of value to the race.
I maintain that we here to-night represent just a part of that great multitude outside these halls who are in spirit with us. For the last two or three generations humanity has been hovering on the brink of a new era: AND WE, TO-NIGHT, CONSCIOUSLY AND PUBLICLY STEP INTO THE FIRST DAYS OF A GREAT NEW ERA OF HUMAN EVOLUTION.
The evolution of mankind in the past has been blind and blundering; our race has been recruited by accident, by chance, by misery, by crime; but from to-day we who are here may go forth as missionaries to increase the number of people who realize, and who will then make a feasible and possible thing, this great era of humanity. An era in which the race will be recruited only when love and knowledge combine for the conception, and when man and woman will no longer fear and torture each other but profoundly understand and intensely love, and understanding will bring forth an entirely new type of human creature, stepping into a future so beautiful, so full of the real joy of self-expression and understanding that we here to-day may look upon our grandchildren and think almost that the gods have descended to walk upon the earth.
Source: Queen’s Hall Meeting on Constructive Birth Control: Speeches and Impressions (London: GP Putnam’s Sons, 1921), pp. 22-32.