BIRTH CONTROL--A PARENTS' PROBLEM OR WOMAN'S?
The problem of birth control has arisen directly from the effort of
the feminine spirit to free itself from bondage. Woman herself has
wrought that bondage through her reproductive powers and while
enslaving herself has enslaved the world. The physical suffering to be
relieved is chiefly woman's. Hers, too, is the love life that dies
first under the blight of too prolific breeding. Within her is wrapped
up the future of the race--it is hers to make or mar. All of these
considerations point unmistakably to one fact--it is woman's duty as
well as her privilege to lay hold of the means of freedom. Whatever
men may do, she cannot escape the responsibility. For ages she has
been deprived of the opportunity to meet this obligation. She is now
emerging from her helplessness. Even as no one can share the suffering
of the overburdened mother, so no one can do this work for her. Others
may help, but she and she alone can free herself.
The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot
be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a
measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call
herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call
herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will
not be a mother.
It does not greatly alter the case that some women call themselves
free because they earn their own livings, while others profess freedom
because they defy the conventions of sex relationship. She who earns
her own living gains a sort of freedom that is not to be undervalued,
but in quality and in quantity it is of little account beside the
untrammeled choice of mating or not mating, of being a mother or not
being a mother. She gains food and clothing and shelter, at least,
without submitting to the charity of her companion, but the earning of
her own living does not give her the development of her inner sex
urge, far deeper and more powerful in its outworkings than any of
these externals. In order to have that development, she must still
meet and solve the problem of motherhood.
With the so-called "free" woman, who chooses a mate in defiance of
convention, freedom is largely a question of character and audacity.
If she does attain to an unrestricted choice of a mate, she is still
in a position to be enslaved through her reproductive powers. Indeed,
the pressure of law and custom upon the woman not legally married is
likely to make her more of a slave than the woman fortunate enough to
marry the man of her choice.
Look at it from any standpoint you will, suggest any solution you
will, conventional or unconventional, sanctioned by law or in defiance
of law, woman is in the same position, fundamentally, until she is
able to determine for herself whether she will be a mother and to fix
the number of her offspring. This unavoidable situation is alone
enough to make birth control, first of all, a woman's problem. On the
very face of the matter, voluntary motherhood is chiefly the concern
of the woman.
It is persistently urged, however, that since sex expression is the
act of two, the responsibility of controlling the results should not
be placed upon woman alone. Is it fair, it is asked, to give her,
instead of the man, the task of protecting herself when she is,
perhaps, less rugged in physique than her mate, and has, at all
events, the normal, periodic inconveniences of her sex?
We must examine this phase of her problem in two lights--that of the
ideal, and of the conditions working toward the ideal. In an ideal
society, no doubt, birth control would become the concern of the man
as well as the woman. The hard, inescapable fact which we encounter
to-day is that man has not only refused any such responsibility, but
has individually and collectively sought to prevent woman from
obtaining knowledge by which she could assume this responsibility for
herself. She is still in the position of a dependent to-day because
her mate has refused to consider her as an individual apart from his
needs. She is still bound because she has in the past left the
solution of the problem to him. Having left it to him, she finds that
instead of rights, she has only such privileges as she has gained by
petitioning, coaxing and cozening. Having left it to him, she is
exploited, driven and enslaved to his desires.
While it is true that he suffers many evils as the consequence of this
situation, she suffers vastly more. While it is true that he should be
awakened to the cause of these evils, we know that they come home to
her with crushing force every day. It is she who has the long burden
of carrying, bearing and rearing the unwanted children. It is she who
must watch beside the beds of pain where lie the babies who suffer
because they have come into overcrowded homes. It is her heart that
the sight of the deformed, the subnormal, the undernourished, the
overworked child smites first and oftenest and hardest. It is _her_
love life that dies first in the fear of undesired pregnancy. It is
her opportunity for self expression that perishes first and most
hopelessly because of it.
Conditions, rather than theories, facts, rather than dreams, govern
the problem. They place it squarely upon the shoulders of woman. She
has learned that whatever the moral responsibility of the man in this
direction may be, he does not discharge it. She has learned that,
lovable and considerate as the individual husband may be, she has
nothing to expect from men in the mass, when they make laws and decree
customs. She knows that regardless of what ought to be, the brutal,
unavoidable fact is that she will never receive her freedom until she
takes it for herself.
Having learned this much, she has yet something more to learn. Women
are too much inclined to follow in the footsteps of men, to try to
think as men think, to try to solve the general problems of life as
men solve them. If after attaining their freedom, women accept
conditions in the spheres of government, industry, art, morals and
religion as they find them, they will be but taking a leaf out of
man's book. The woman is not needed to do man's work. She is not
needed to think man's thoughts. She need not fear that the masculine
mind, almost universally dominant, will fail to take care of its own.
Her mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the
feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a
human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its
activities.
Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by
that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that
within her which struggles for expression. Her eyes must be less upon
what is and more clearly upon what should be. She must listen only
with a frankly questioning attitude to the dogmatized opinions of
man-made society. When she chooses her new, free course of action, it must
be in the light of her own opinion--of her own intuition. Only so can
she give play to the feminine spirit. Only thus can she free her mate
from the bondage which he wrought for himself when he wrought hers.
Only thus can she restore to him that of which he robbed himself in
restricting her. Only thus can she remake the world.
The world is, indeed, hers to remake, it is hers to build and to
recreate. Even as she has permitted the suppression of her own
feminine element and the consequent impoverishment of industry, art,
letters, science, morals, religions and social intercourse, so it is
hers to enrich all these.
Woman must have her freedom--the fundamental freedom of choosing
whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will
have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers--and
before it can be his, it is hers alone.
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As
it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this
ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That
right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to
knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision.
Birth control is woman's problem. The quicker she accepts it as hers
and hers alone, the quicker will society respect motherhood. The
quicker, too, will the world be made a fit place for her children to
live.