1. Introduction: Birth Control, Eugenics and Margaret Sanger


Each web page in this BC (for Birth Control) series provides the historical background for a downloadable set of original source documents for one topic in the early history of birth control and its close ties to eugenics. These documents come from the book The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective.

The Birth Control Controversy

Since 1915, birth control and related issues such as abortion have been a hotly debated topic in America. For the first half-century of that debate, the best known advocate of birth control in American was Margaret Sanger, a political activist who, although she did not coin the term "birth control," was the first to publicize it. She was the founder of the American Birth Control League, which has developed through various stages into today's politically powerful and well-funded Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Sanger described her birth control agenda in her bestselling 1922 book, The Pivot of Civilization. Birth control, she said, was the 'pivot' on which civilization turned. Without it, all would end in disaster. And one indication that the controversy in which Sanger participated remains with us today is the fact that, as I write this, at least six editions of Sanger's now over eighty-year-old book are available in various formats (hardback, paperback and ebook). That does not count free texts available as web pages and Project Gutenberg etext.

Sanger's Coded Language

Unfortunately, most of those sources have a major flaw. Sanger was a controversial figure and, like any such figure, she spoke and wrote for her generation. Many of the particular issues that troubled her and her supporters have long faded from the scene. And because much of what she said was under attack, particularly from religious conservatives, she often spoke in coded language. If you don't understand that code, much of what she says seems strangely contradictory. Understand the code, as well as the agendas of various advocacy groups present in the early twentieth century, and Sanger makes quite a bit of sense.

That difficulty has led to a strange situation. I may disagree with most of what Sanger intended to do, but I would be the first to admit that if you accept what Sanger believed, then her agenda quite logically follows. To put it another way, I believe that Sanger is one of the least appreciated social thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century. Accept her analysis about the fundamental causes of social ills, and what she advocated was far more practical than the more abstract governmental programs being advanced by male colleagues who have gotten far more praise for what they said and did. That is unfair.

Muddling by Sanger Supporters

Ironically, it is Sanger's present day supporters who are trying to muddle our understanding of what Sanger believed and taught. You can see that in the "Biographical Sketch" at New York University's Margaret Sanger Papers Project. In their sketch of her life, they claim (italics added):

"She focused many of her efforts on gaining support from the medical profession, social workers, and the liberal wing of the eugenics movement. She increasingly rationalized birth control as a means of reducing genetically transmitted mental or physical defects, and at times supported sterilization for the mentally incompetent. While she did not advocate efforts to limit population growth solely on the basis of class, ethnicity or race, and refused to encourage positive race-based eugenics, Sanger's reputation was permanently tainted by her association with the reactionary wing of the eugenics movement."

Now ask yourself which group of eugenicists she had contact with--was it the "liberal wing" or the "reactionary wing?" That is the confusing muddle that many of Sanger's present-day supporters, including those in academia, present to the public. As we will see in the original source documents that follow, the two wings of eugenics were one and the same.

Liberal support for eugenics was 'reactionary,' because their support was intimately linked to liberal fears about what the large waves of immigration from then-prolific Catholic countries would do to the nation. Support for eugenics in the early twentieth century was in fact much like support for legalized abortion today. It was a 'scientific' dogma that no one who wanted to be considered a respectable liberal, progressive or socialist dared to criticize. We will see that when we examine how the New York Times, the New Republic, and Nation covered eugenics in Topic 6, "Eugenics and the News Media." The only major debates in the political left were over:

1. The stress that should be placed on birth control and eugenic sterilization as part of a broader agenda of social reform. Although H. G. Wells wrote the "Introduction" to Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization, as you can see from his lead paragraph (Topic 11), he did not attach nearly as much importance to birth control as she did. Read Wells' other writings (Topic 3), and you will see that his primary goal was placing a few of his sort of men in charge of a "Creative and Progressive Civilization" that encompassed the entire world, leaving dissidents with no place to flee. Many liberals and socialists agreed with Wells. Broad political and economic changes were more important to them than birth control. Sanger refers to that point of view in Chapter 1 of Pivot (Topic 11), when she puts her own "feminine insight" in opposition to "the fallacy of the masculine." When today's feminists claim that "men don't get it" about legalized abortion, they echo Sanger's long-ago argument that controlling reproduction lies at the heart of eliminating the world's problems.

2. Whether eugenic-driven control of who was permitted to have children would be put in place before or after a liberal-to-socialist government took power. Most on the left were cautious, quite rightly fearing that, if it became known that their future plans including dictating who could have children, they would lose much of their grassroots support. That is why liberal magazines such as New Republic (Topic 6) wrote so evasively, and why many liberals called Sanger "courageous." Sanger was not being brave in any sense ordinary Americans would understand. She was not a politician, so she had no need to fear an outraged Catholic vote. She was a clever political activist who had married into wealth and was idolized by well-to-do women whose powerful husbands would see that she did not come to any harm. But by bringing up the need to control who had children, she was walking on ground that most liberals feared to tread.

3. Whether any program of eugenics should include positive as well as negative measures. Positive eugenics meant that groups who considered themselves superior encouraged or even demanded more children from those in their own ranks. That issue lies at the heart of the controversy over Race Suicide we will explore in Topics 4 and 5. Negative eugenics meant that 'superior' groups would encourage, pressure or even brutally coerce few or no children from those they considered 'unfit' to be parents. That's why forced sterilization was legalized and why Sanger and other important feminists such as Victoria Woodhull Martin supported it (Topic 5).

When those at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project noted that Sanger "refused to encourage positive race-based eugenics," they were referring to her hostility to virtually any measure that would pressure the 'fit' to have children. From their perspective, that is something praiseworthy. Like the feminists of Sanger's day, they don't want to be forced to abandon careers for diaper changing. But the impact of positive eugenics on most mothers was quite different. Eugenics was concerned with the relative difference in birthrates between the 'fit' and 'unfit.' The less that was done to raise the birthrates of elite groups, the more that had to be done to force down the birthrates of alleged inferiors. When Sanger opposed positive eugenics, she was at the same time advocating a more aggressive program of negative eugenics. For non-elite mothers that is bad.

Sanger's Social Agenda

In sketching Sanger's life, the Margaret Sanger Papers Project also conceals the enormous extent of Sanger's agenda. "Genetically transmitted mental or physical defects" leaves the impression that she was targeting the sorts of children who in that era would end up being cared for in poorly funded state institutions. Nothing could be further from the truth. In her day, there were not tests that could predict which parents might have a child with various serious birth defects and thus 'need' birth control. As we will see, the real fears of both birth controllers and their eugenicist allies were directed not at exceptional cases, but at millions of Americans who seemed normal. They held down jobs and reared families just like their neighbors. But hidden within them was a dastardly gene for "feeblemindedness" that would eventually appear in their offspring and that caused them to have larger families than their betters. ('Lack of foresight' was the usual explanation for this.) We will see that reasoning when we study what Sanger wrote in more detail in Topic 10. One example is a 1917 magazine article in which Sanger wrote (italics added):

"The falling birth rate of college students, as demonstrated by the statistics gathered in Harvard and Yale by John C. Phillips, should not be considered alarming. The best thing that the modern American college does for young men or young women is to make them highly sensitized individuals, keenly aware of their responsibility to society. They quickly perceive that they have other duties toward the State than procreation of the kind blindly practiced by the immigrant from Europe. They cannot be deluded into thinking quantity superior to quality."

Sanger's basic rationale for birth control was not muddled. It was quite simple. She felt that, if birth control were used cleverly, society could manipulate "the immigrant from Europe" and equally low-quality native-born counterparts to have fewer children without demanding that superior groups (meaning well-to-do liberal women such as Sanger) include large families among their "duties toward the State." That is Sanger raw and unmuddled. That is the real Sanger of history.

Eugenics, Liberals and Catholics

Those who interested in exploring the clash between liberals and Catholics, particularly over issues such as birth control and eugenics might want to read the writings of a liberal writer, Paul Blanshard, particularly his 1949 American Freedom and Catholic Power (reprinted as recently as 1984). According to the cover of the 1949 edition, the book was "honored as one of '50 books of the Year' by the Division of Public Libraries, American Library Association." Check the index entry for "Eugenics" and you will discover that, at least as late at 1949, liberals were still giving the Catholic church's opposition to eugenics as one of the reasons it was 'reactionary' and hostile to progress as they defined it.

Documentation and Resources

In the web pages that follow, we will examine the ideas and social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This will help you to understand the context of Sanger's birth control classic, The Pivot of Civilization. This university-like course is not only free, it comes with all the textbooks you need at no cost. (Try to get that at any university!) If you read though the web pages and download the attached PDF documents, you will be getting the entire text of the $49.95 hardback edition of The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective except for the "Preface," which is available in this PDF file. (The "Preface" takes the issues Sanger raised up to the present day.)

To read the documents, you will need software that can read PDF files. For that, you can download a free copy of Adobe Reader. from Adobe.

You might also want to get your school or public library to get a copy of the book, so others can read it. That will help to support these web pages. You may also prefer to use a printed copy of the book rather than looking at the book on screen. Copies are available through most bookstores from three large wholesalers--Ingram and Baker & Taylor (US) or Bertrams (UK & Europe). Just give the store the title, The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective and the ISBNs:

Paperback: 1-58742-004-X
Hardback: 1-58742-008-2

You can also get the book online including from:

Amazon.com US Paperback

Amazon in the France, Japan, German and the UK

BarnesandNoble.com US Paperback

BarnesandNoble.com US Hardback

The Importance of Original Source Documents

Like any historical figure, it is easy to sanitize Sanger, making her less intolerant than she was. When that fails, it is also easy to marginalize her prejudices, making her seem less a well-respected and much-praised member of the mainstream liberal-to-socialist movement than she was. But those who do that have to quote selectively and distort issues that were once quite clearly understood. That have to engage in something that resembles advocacy more than scholarship.

You will find none of that here. I have done my best to present a representative series of original source documents from the era to explain what certain segments of American (and to a much lesser extent British) society were thinking in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. I have paid particular attention to documents that impacted Sanger's own thinking. In her 1917 remark quoted above, she refers to "statistics gathered in Harvard and Yale by John C. Phillips." I do not simply tell you what I claim Phillips was saying, I give you his entire 1916 report from Harvard Graduates Magazine. I also give you two other reports describing similar trends of low birth and marriage rates at elite women's colleges. All are in Lesson 5 and all play a critical role in understanding what Sanger intended to do with birth control.

Here is a list of all the topics in this series. You may want to study them one at a time at whatever pace you find convenient. The title page of the documents you can download explains the copyright issues. Essentially, you can copy and use them quite freely for educational purposes as long as to give the source.

Topics in this Study


01. Introduction

02. From Malthus to Darwin

03. H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and the British Fabians

04. The Decline of 'Old Stock' New England and 'Race Suicide' Crisis

05. Education, Race Suicide and Feminism

06. Eugenics and the News Media

07. Liberal, Progressive and Socialist Support of Eugenics

08. Religious Opposition to Eugenics

09. Alarm at Asian Birthrates

10. Margaret Sanger Fights for Birth Control

11. Margaret Sanger and The Pivot of Civilization

____________________

Keywords: Margaret Sanger, birth control, abortion, sterilization American Birth Control League, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, PPFA, eugenics, liberal, liberalism, progressive, progressivism, socialist, socialism, Roman Catholic Church