«Civilization is bound up with the success of that movement. The man who rejoices in it and strives to further it is alive; the man who shudders and raises impotent hands against it is merely dead, even though the grave yet yawns for him in vain. He may make dead laws and preach dead sermons and his sermons may be great and his laws may be rigid. But as the wisest of men saw twenty-five centuries ago, the things that are great and strong and rigid are the things that stay below in the grave. It is the things that are delicate and tender and supple that stay above. At no point is life so tender and delicate and supple as at the point of sex. There is the triumph of life.» --Havelock Ellis
Our approach opens to us a fresh scale of values,
a new and effective method of testing the merits and demerits of current policies
and programs. It redirects our attention to the great source and fountainhead of
human life. It offers us the most strategic point of view from which to observe
and study the unending drama of humanity,-- how the past, the present and the future
of the human race are all organically bound up together. It coordinates heredity
and environment. Most important of all, it frees the mind of sexual prejudice and
taboo, by demanding the frankest and most unflinching reexamination of sex in its
relation to human nature and the bases of human society. In aiding to establish
this mental liberation, quite apart from any of the tangible results that might
please the statistically-minded, the study of Birth Control is performing an invaluable
task. Without complete mental freedom, it is impossible to approach any fundamental
human problem. Failure to face the great central facts of sex in an impartial and
scientific spirit lies at the root of the blind opposition to Birth Control.
Our bitterest opponents must agree that the problem
of Birth Control is one of the most important that humanity to-day has to face.
The interests of the entire world, of humanity, of the future of mankind itself
are more at stake in this than wars, political institutions, or industrial reorganization.
All other projects of reform, of revolution or reconstruction, are of secondary
importance, even trivial, when we compare them to the wholesale regeneration--or
disintegration--that is bound up with the control, the direction and the release
of one of the greatest forces in nature. The great danger at present does not lie
with the bitter opponents of the idea of Birth Control, nor with those who are attempting
to suppress our program of enlightenment and education. Such opposition is always
stimulating. It wins new adherents. It reveals its own weakness and lack of insight.
The greater danger is to be found in the flaccid, undiscriminating interest of «sympathizers»
who are «for it»--as an accessory to their own particular panacea. «It
even seems, sometimes,» wrote the late William Graham Sumner, «as if
the primitive people were working along better lines of effort in this direction
than we are... when our public organs of instruction taboo all that pertains to reproduction
as improper; and when public authority, ready enough to interfere with personal
liberty everywhere else, feels bound to act as if there were no societal interest
at stake in the begetting of the next generation.»[1]
Slowly but surely we are breaking down the taboos
that surround sex; but we are breaking them down out of sheer necessity. The codes
that have surrounded sexual behavior in the so-called Christian communities, the
teachings of the churches concerning chastity and sexual purity, the prohibitions
of the laws, and the hypocritical conventions of society, have all demonstrated
their failure as safeguards against the chaos produced and the havoc wrought by
the failure to recognize sex as a driving force in human nature,--as great as, if
indeed not greater than, hunger. Its dynamic energy is indestructible. It may be
transmuted, refined, directed, even sublimated, but to ignore, to neglect, to refuse
to recognize this great elemental force is nothing less than foolhardy.
Out of the unchallenged policies of continence,
abstinence, «chastity» and «purity,» we have reaped the
harvests of prostitution, venereal scourges and innumerable other evils. Traditional
moralists have failed to recognize that chastity and purity must be the outward
symptoms of awakened intelligence, of satisfied desires, and fulfilled love. They
cannot be taught by «sex education.» They cannot be imposed from without
by a denial of the might and the right of sexual expression. Nevertheless, even
in the contemporary teaching of sex hygiene and social prophylaxis, nothing constructive
is offered to young men and young women who seek aid through the trying period of
adolescence.
At the Lambeth Conference of 1920, the Bishops
of the Church of England stated in their report on their considerations of sexual
morality: «Men should regard all women as they do their mothers, sisters,
and daughters; and women should dress only in such a manner as to command respect
from every man. All right-minded persons should unite in the suppression of pernicious
literature, plays and films...» Could lack of psychological insight and understanding
be more completely indicated? Yet, like these bishops, most of those who are undertaking
the education of the young are as ignorant themselves of psychology and physiology.
Indeed, those who are speaking belatedly of the need of «sexual hygiene»
seem to be unaware that they themselves are most in need of it. «We must give
up the futile attempt to keep young people in the dark,» cries Rev. James
Marchant in «Birth-Rate and Empire,» «and the assumption that
they are ignorant of notorious facts. We cannot, if we would, stop the spread of
sexual knowledge; and if we could do so, we would only make matters infinitely worse.
This is the second decade of the twentieth century, not the early Victorian period...
It is no longer a question of knowing or not knowing. We have to disabuse our middle-aged
minds of that fond delusion. Our young people know more than we did when we began
our married lives, and sometimes as much as we know, ourselves, even now. So that
we need not continue to shake our few remaining hairs in simulating feelings of
surprise or horror. It might have been better for us if we had been more enlightened.
And if our discussion of this problem is to be of any real use, we must at the outset
reconcile ourselves to the fact that the birth-rate is voluntarily controlled...
Certain persons who instruct us in these matter, hold up their pious hands and whiten
their frightened faces as they cry out in the public squares against `this vice,'
but they can only make themselves ridiculous.»
Taught upon the basis of conventional and traditional
morality and middle-class respectability, based on current dogma, and handed down
to the populace with benign condescension, sex education is a waste of time and
effort. Such education cannot in any true sense set up as a standard the ideal morality
and behavior of the respectable middle- class and then make the effort to induce
all other members of society, especially the working classes, to conform to their
taboos. Such a method is not only confusing, but, in the creation of strain and
hysteria and an unhealthy concentration upon moral conduct, results in positive
injury. To preach a negative and colorless ideal of chastity to young men and women
is to neglect the primary duty of awakening their intelligence, their responsibility,
their self-reliance and independence. Once this is accomplished, the matter of chastity
will take care of itself. The teaching of «etiquette» must be superseded
by the teaching of hygiene. Hygienic habits are built up upon a sound knowledge
of bodily needs and functions. It is only in the sphere of sex that there remains
an unfounded fear of presenting without the gratuitous introduction of non-essential
taboos and prejudice, unbiased and unvarnished facts.
As an instrument of education, the doctrine of
Birth Control approaches the whole problem in another manner. Instead of laying
down hard and fast laws of sexual conduct, instead of attempting to inculcate rules
and regulations, of pointing out the rewards of virtue and the penalties of «sin»
(as is usually attempted in relation to the venereal diseases), the teacher of Birth
Control seeks to meet the needs of the people. Upon the basis of their interests,
their demands, their problems, Birth Control education attempts to develop their
intelligence and show them how they may help themselves; how to guide and control
this deep-rooted instinct.
The objection has been raised that Birth Control
only reaches the already enlightened, the men and women who have already attained
a degree of self-respect and self-reliance. Such an objection could not be based
on fact. Even in the most unenlightened sections of the community, among mothers
crushed by poverty and economic enslavement, there is the realization of the evils
of the too-large family, of the rapid succession of pregnancy after pregnancy, of
the hopelessness of bringing too many children into the world. Not merely in the
evidence presented in an earlier chapter but in other ways, is this crying need
expressed. The investigators of the Children's Bureau who collected the data of
the infant mortality reports, noted the willingness and the eagerness with which
these down-trodden mothers told the truth about themselves. So great is their hope
of relief from that meaningless and deadening submission to unproductive reproduction,
that only a society pruriently devoted to hypocrisy could refuse to listen to the
voices of these mothers. Respectfully we lend our ears to dithyrambs about the sacredness
of motherhood and the value of «better babies»--but we shut our eyes
and our ears to the unpleasant reality and the cries of pain that come from women
who are to-day dying by the thousands because this power is withheld from them.
This situation is rendered more bitterly ironic
because the self- righteous opponents of Birth Control practise themselves the doctrine
they condemn. The birth-rate among conservative opponents indicates that they restrict
the numbers of their own children by the methods of Birth Control, or are of such
feeble procreative energy as to be thereby unfitted to dictate moral laws for other
people. They prefer that we should think their small number of children is accidental,
rather than publicly admit the successful practice of intelligent foresight. Or
else they hold themselves up as paragons of virtue and self-control, and would have
us believe that they have brought their children into the world solely from a high,
stern sense of public duty--an attitude which is about as convincing as it would
be to declare that they found them under gooseberry bushes. How else can we explain
the widespread tolerance and smug approval of the clerical idea of sex, now reenforced
by floods of crude and vulgar sentiment, which is promulgated by the press, motion-pictures
and popular plays?
Like all other education, that of sex can be rendered
effective and valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands
of the pupil himself. It cannot be imposed from without, handed down from above,
superimposed upon the intelligence of the person taught. It must find a response
within him, give him the power and the instrument wherewith he may exercise his
own growing intelligence, bring into action his own judgment and discrimination
and thus contribute to the growth of his intelligence. The civilized world is coming
to see that education cannot consist merely in the assimilation of external information
and knowledge, but rather in the awakening and development of innate powers of discrimination
and judgment. The great disaster of «sex education» lies in the fact
that it fails to direct the awakened interests of the pupils into the proper channels
of exercise and development. Instead, it blunts them, restricts them, hinders them,
and even attempts to eradicate them.
This has been the great defect of sex education
as it has been practised in recent years. Based on a superficial and shameful view
of the sexual instinct, it has sought the inculcation of negative virtues by pointing
out the sinister penalties of promiscuity, and by advocating strict adherence to
virtue and morality, not on the basis of intelligence or the outcome of experience,
not even for the attainment of rewards, but merely to avoid punishment in the form
of painful and malignant disease. Education so conceived carries with it its own
refutation. True education cannot tolerate the inculcation of fear. Fear is the
soil in which are implanted inhibitions and morbid compulsions. Fear restrains,
restricts, hinders human expression. It strikes at the very roots of joy and happiness.
It should therefore be the aim of sex education to avoid above all the implanting
of fear in the mind of the pupil.
Restriction means placing in the hands of external
authority the power over behavior. Birth Control, on the contrary, implies voluntary
action, the decision for one's self how many children one shall or shall not bring
into the world. Birth Control is educational in the real sense of the word, in that
it asserts this power of decision, reinstates this power in the people themselves.
We are not seeking to introduce new restrictions
but greater freedom. As far as sex is concerned, the impulse has been more thoroughly
subject to restriction than any other human instinct. «Thou shalt not!»
meets us at every turn. Some of these restrictions are justified; some of them are
not. We may have but one wife or one husband at a time; we must attain a certain
age before we may marry. Children born out of wedlock are deemed «illegitimate»--even
healthy children. The newspapers every day are filled with the scandals of those
who have leaped over the restrictions or limitations society has written in her
sexual code. Yet the voluntary control of the procreative powers, the rational regulation
of the number of children we bring into the world--this is the one type of restriction
frowned upon and prohibited by law!
In a more definite, a much more realistic and concrete
manner, Birth Control reveals itself as the most effective weapon in the spread
of hygienic and prophylactic knowledge among women of the less fortunate classes.
It carries with it a thorough training in bodily cleanliness and physiology, a definite
knowledge of the physiology and function of sex. In refusing to teach both sides
of the subject, in failing to respond to the universal demand among women for such
instruction and information, maternity centers limit their own efforts and fail
to fulfil what should be their true mission. They are concerned merely with pregnancy,
maternity, child-bearing, the problem of keeping the baby alive. But any effective
work in this field must go further back. We have gradually come to see, as Havelock
Ellis has pointed out, that comparatively little can be done by improving merely
the living conditions of adults; that improving conditions for children and babies
is not enough. To combat the evils of infant mortality, natal and pre-natal care
is not sufficient. Even to improve the conditions for the pregnant woman, is insufficient.
Necessarily and inevitably, we are led further and further back, to the point of
procreation; beyond that, into the regulation of sexual selection. The problem becomes
a circle. We cannot solve one part of it without a consideration of the entirety.
But it is especially at the point of creation where all the various forces are concentrated.
Conception must be controlled by reason, by intelligence, by science, or we lose
control of all its consequences.
Birth Control is essentially an education for women.
It is women who, directly and by their very nature, bear the burden of that blindness,
ignorance and lack of foresight concerning sex which is now enforced by law and
custom. Birth Control places in the hands of women the only effective instrument
whereby they may reestablish the balance in society, and assert, not only theoretically
but practically as well, the primary importance of the woman and the child in civilization.
Birth Control is thus the stimulus to education.
Its exercise awakens and develops the sense of self-reliance and responsibility,
and illuminates the relation of the individual to society and to the race in a manner
that otherwise remains vague and academic. It reveals sex not merely as an untamed
and insatiable natural force to which men and women must submit hopelessly and inertly,
as it sweeps through them, and then accept it with abject humility the hopeless
and heavy consequences. Instead, it places in their hands the power to control this
great force; to use it, to direct it into channels in which it becomes the energy
enhancing their lives and increasing self- expression and self-development. It awakens
in women the consciousness of new glories and new possibilities in motherhood. No
longer the prostrate victim of the blind play of instinct but the self-reliant mistress
of her body and her own will, the new mother finds in her child the fulfilment of
her own desires. In free instead of compulsory motherhood she finds the avenue of
her own development and expression. No longer bound by an unending series of pregnancies,
at liberty to safeguard the development of her own children, she may now extend
her beneficent influence beyond her own home. In becoming thus intensified, motherhood
may also broaden and become more extensive as well. The mother sees that the welfare
of her own children is bound up with the welfare of all others. Not upon the basis
of sentimental charity or gratuitous «welfare-work» but upon that of
enlightened self-interest, such a mother may exert her influence among the less
fortunate and less enlightened.
Unless based upon this central knowledge of and
power over her own body and her own instincts, education for woman is valueless.
As long as she remains the plaything of strong, uncontrolled natural forces, as
long as she must docilely and humbly submit to the decisions of others, how can
woman every lay the foundations of self-respect, self- reliance and independence?
How can she make her own choice, exercise her own discrimination, her own foresight?
In the exercise of these powers, in the building
up and integration of her own experience, in mastering her own environment the true
education of woman must be sought. And in the sphere of sex, the great source and
root of all human experience, it is upon the basis of Birth Control--the voluntary
direction of her own sexual expression-- that woman must take her first step in
the assertion of freedom and self-respect.
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chapter
1Folkways, p. 492.